7 May 2013 Hundred tons of coins on sunken steamer

A pile of silver coins worth £34 million was discovered eight years ago by treasure hunters in the wreck of the British steamship SS City of Cairo, which was sunk by the Nazis. It happened in 1942, when the passenger liner was travelling from Bombay to England.

The steamer was torpedoed by a U-68 submarine south of St Helena while carrying 100 tons of rupees. It was long assumed that the vessel's cargo, which belonged to the British Treasury, was lost forever. However, the wreck was besieged in 2013 by a team led by British expert John Kingsford, who had state-of-the-art technology at his disposal.

The captain of the steamer was Karl Friedrich Merten. It took only one torpedo to sink it. All the crew and passengers made it to lifeboats, but it took three days for help to arrive. Over 100 people did not survive. The British government knew that the steamer had sunk with a huge amount of silver coins.

So they commissioned the services of Deep Ocean Search (DOS), who assembled a team led by the aforementioned Kingsford. He was in charge of twenty French oceanographers. "It was going to be a difficult search because the depth of the water was somewhere in excess of 5,000 metres. To this you must add the unpredictable weather, the strong currents here and the great distance from land," the company said at the time.

When the steamer was discovered, it was broken in two and buried in a thick layer of mud. Some parts of the wreck were up to more than a metre thick. Oceanographer Maeva Onda reported that they were already successful during the first dive. "After two hours of underwater descent, the robot sent the first images of the wreck. It was incredible," she stated.

The robot also retrieved the first coins from the wreck. However, the team had to deal with major problems, with their systems repeatedly failing. But in the end, they pulled it off.

"It was because of a combination of weather, pressure and repeated dives. We had to deal with multiple system failures, the likes of which we have never experienced before at depths of 3,000 to 4,000 metres," said the company, which commissioned a plaque commemorating their discovery on the seabed.

The treasure went to the UK, which initially kept the coin find a secret. It only reported the discovery two years later, when the treasure was recovered from the wreck.

Sources: www.dailymail.co.uk, www.deepoceansearch.com