The cause of the sinking of the ship is obvious. It apparently hit an underwater reef.
It is a reef that protrudes about 10 meters from the sea. There are many reefs in the waters near the reef.
In this environment, as long as there is a storm, many ships will surely sink here.
No one knows this better than the locals, so as long as the locals have nothing to do, they will salvage the bulk of the cargo found in the sunken ship.
"Huh? It's really not that simple. It's actually well preserved?"
After Gao Qijing went into the water himself, Chen Wenzhe was able to clearly see the sunken ship through the underwater camera he stayed in.
Through analysis, Chen Wenzhe discovered that this was actually an ancient ship with six layers of hull components.
This shipwreck site is located on the inner side of the reef atoll.
They discovered it by accident, because they first found a piece of porcelain nearby.
This is a blue and white glazed bowl. With this glaze color, Chen Wenzhe looked like it was a work from the Tang and Song dynasties.
Because porcelain for export in the future rarely sells this kind of blue and white glazed porcelain bowls. Besides, the quality of this kind of blue and white glazed porcelain bowls is really not as beautiful as blue and white, multicolored, pastel and so on.
However, this is a perfect piece of porcelain after all, and it is a real antique. After all, it has a history of thousands of years.
Besides, as long as one is found, it means that there must be more under the surrounding Haiti.
Therefore, everyone was very happy when they discovered a porcelain bowl with blue and white glaze, because it meant that there must be a sunken ship under the water that had not been salvaged.
Once a discovery is made, it is natural to immediately increase the search scope.
Soon, more blue and white glazed porcelain was discovered in the nearby mud and sand.
Under the sea, on a flat beach, there are densely packed porcelains on display.
Some are half-buried in the sand, and some are completely exposed on the seabed. They look really spectacular.
Unfortunately, these porcelains do not have any protection, so they are not well preserved.
The most obvious thing is the glaze. After a long period of erosion and corrosion by sea water, the glaze is matte and dull.
This kind of Hailao porcelain is a standard style of Hailao porcelain.
The glaze erosion of these porcelains starts from the glaze joint on the mouth rim and erodes towards the feet. There are often white spots on the mouth rim.
Only porcelain with these characteristics is the real porcelain from the sea.
It is not a fake placed artificially, which proves that there is really a sunken ship from the Tang and Song Dynasties here.
Soon, underwater salvage crews made another major harvest.
Among the porcelain they found, there was a blue and white glazed bowl engraved with the words "Made by Pan Sanlang in Renwu Zai" in regular script.
Together with some other artifacts, through research, Chen Wenzhe concluded that the sunken transport ship should be a ship from the mid-Southern Song Dynasty.
"My Iceberg Beauty Wife"
Sure enough, through the blue and white glazed porcelain scattered around, they soon discovered this huge sunken ship.
This should be a trading ship that set sail from Hu Jianquan Port, passed through Hainan, passed through Southeast Asia, and was preparing to sail to Europe.
And looking at the shape of the ship, it is obviously not a foreign sailboat, but a giant wooden sailboat made in my country.
By studying the overall structure of this sunken ship, Chen Wenzhe compared the knowledge he had learned in the past and found that this should be the first ancient ship with six-layer hull components discovered in my country.
You must know that this is a wooden boat made in the middle of the Song Dynasty, or in the early stages.
This sunken ship demonstrates the exquisite skills of ancient Chinese shipbuilding craftsmen.
In particular, the watertight compartment is very distinctive in design. It can be said that it adds a new example to the traditional technology of watertight bulkhead ships in my country.
Such a ship is certainly of great significance to the evaluation of my country's ancient shipbuilding technology and its contribution to the development of world navigation.
Also, an ancient Chinese shipwreck was discovered near Malacca. This can explain too many things.
This is enough to show that the footsteps of our ancestors have gone further than outsiders imagined.
It can be said that the shipwrecks and relics found at this site are important historical relics of my country's overseas trade during the Southern Song Dynasty.
However, looking at the external condition of this ship, it must have been illegally excavated many times, because the wreck site was severely damaged.
However, the condition of this ship is obviously better than the one Chen Wenzhe and his team excavated before.
After preliminary trial excavation work, they easily unearthed nearly 1,800 cultural relics.
Chen Wenzhe really didn't expect that there would be so much porcelain on this ship.
Since it is valuable, then go all out to salvage it quickly.
Therefore, he asked Gao Qijing to mobilize all professional divers to go all out to excavate and salvage the ruins of the Southern Song Dynasty shipwreck.
This is Chen Wenzhe's first large-scale underwater archaeological excavation in the open sea. Because there is no need to excavate in a large area around the sunken ship or clean up a large amount of sediment, it is only necessary to enter the ship to search, so the excavation speed is very fast.
It took them less than a month to unearth a total of 10,000 ancient porcelain pieces.
After the ancient shipwreck's unearthed cultural relics were unearthed, we must remember to carry out protection work such as mold removal, desalination, dehydration, reinforcement, shaping, and sealing.
Restoration work will be carried out later if necessary.
Of course, the subsequent recovery and repair time will be relatively long.
If you want to complete all the work, you will inevitably consume a lot of manpower, and even so, it will take an estimated 3 to 5 years to complete the repair.
It will then be opened to the public, allowing people to have a glimpse of the ancient shipwrecks of the Southern Song Dynasty.
Of course, it is still difficult to repair this sunken ship.
But Chen Wenzhe wanted to salvage this ancient sunken ship from the water.
Because this ship is not a sunken ship from the Song Dynasty of my country, and it is also a very rare six-story sealed cabin ancient sailing ship.
Such a ship is very memorable.
However, it is definitely impossible to salvage the sunken ship as a whole.
Because the excavation found that on the largest underwater reef, only the lower structure of the sunken ship was found, and there was no trace of the upper deck.
Based on this, it is inferred that when the cargo ship was sailing close to this reef, due to steering or control errors, the ship was lifted up by wind and waves, and was carried into the shallow water corals in the reef plate and ran aground, causing the hull to be broken.
Therefore, the excavation project of the Southern Song Dynasty shipwreck site will be carried out in two stages.
The first stage mainly completes the excavation of the cargo inside the shipwreck site and comprehensive surveying and mapping of the ship's hull;
The second stage is to complete the excavation of the hull. First, the hull components must be numbered and mapped.
It should be noted here that after the water is salvaged from the hull, decomposed, extracted and transported back to the museum, it also needs to be desalted, dehydrated and protected to finally complete the restoration of the hull.
It is definitely in the first stage of salvage excavation now, and this is an important rescue excavation work.
In order to avoid the situation like the previous shipwreck, this time the excavation was carried out at multiple levels and using multiple methods to detect underwater cultural relics to avoid missing porcelain that may have been trapped in the mud.