What exactly did Gu Kun discover with the help of the seabed terrain detector?
Regarding this question, the Chinese surveying technicians represented by Du Guowei are of course temporarily confused and can only wait for the answer to be revealed after the diving detection.
Maybe Du Guowei would think that Gu Kun was making a fuss out of a molehill: It was obviously just a submarine coral reef, so why was it necessary to make such a fuss? The survey ship must have encountered hundreds of coral reefs in a day, and it was hard to be exhausted even after diving and making visual confirmation like this.
However, Gu Kun was already sure in his heart.
Who makes his hearing so bad?
He could tell that the structure of the underwater obstacle should be hollow. Under the illumination of active sonar, its echo was completely different from that of ordinary coral reefs.
After a while, Gu Kun put on the diving equipment himself, and during the preparation process, he did not forget to make a bet with Du Guowei.
"I think there is a high probability that it is a sunken ship. It is not far from the ancient waterway from southern Vietnam to Borneo. Maybe we can find a civilian ship from the Ming and Qing Dynasties - the founding of Zanlanfang was from the Han people in the late Ming Dynasty.
Came to flee."
After hearing this, Du Guowei couldn't help curling his lips: "This is too mysterious. Our equipment cannot have such an accurate echo."
Gu Kun smiled confidently: "Fortunately, the water depth here is less than 100 meters, so I can hear it so accurately. Otherwise, I wouldn't be sure. I won't tell you anymore. I'll see if I take a look right away."
Gu Kun was carrying an oxygen tank on his back and a cable wrapped around his waist. An empty metal bucket with a counterweight was attached to the cable. The other end of the rope was hung on the winch on the ship. Then he jumped into the sea with a leap.
As soon as he entered the water, the familiar and friendly smell of the sea made him feel peaceful again.
This time, because he had to work for a long time and carefully survey the situation, he chose to descend quickly and ascend slowly to prevent oxygen poisoning.
Within ten minutes, he slowly sank to the bottom of the sea about 100 meters deep. There was no sunlight at all, so Gu Kun could only rely on the diving light worn on his helmet.
However, his underwater low-light vision is different from ordinary people, and he can only see a few dozen meters away at most.
It was a wooden shipwreck that had been cut into two parts and completely disintegrated from side to side. If you didn't look carefully, you would have mistaken it for a coral reef - because after hundreds of years of growth, ten-thick layers of coral had already been attached to the wood.
A few centimeters of calcareous coral.
If the sunlight here was not too weak and the animals and plants were much rarer than in shallower waters, maybe a dozen centimeters would not be enough. Instead, the whole thing might be filled with coral. In that case, even Gu Kun's hearing would not be able to identify it.
Find out whether it is a sunken ship or not.
Perhaps, in the past few days, there had been more than one unknown fifth-generation shipwreck in shallower waters along the way. Gu Kun missed it because it was completely integrated with the coral reef.
"The ship is in such a state of ruin that it is impossible to salvage it as a whole. We can only see if there is any cargo in the ship, and then find a way to drag it up by trawling in sections."
Gu Kun thought in his mind, and searched back and forth for a while. He saw a small number of boxes arranged in the bottom cabin, and the rest were worthless bits and pieces. Some bones were also found.
Gu Kun estimated that this was not an ancient merchant ship, but more likely a ship transporting immigrants.
"It's better not to disturb them. Let's go back and check some things."
Gu Kun still maintained a sense of awe, so he turned on the video recorder on his back with an IP68 diving shell, and shot a video with the dim light of the diving light.
Then he put away the video recorder, randomly picked up some bottles, cans, and a few bones, and piled them back into the empty metal cylinder that was put down with him. Then he knocked on the wall of the cylinder and confirmed the password three times.
Then, the ship's winch began to slowly lift.
…
Three hours later, Gu Kun returned to the boat, immediately changed out of his diving equipment, took a hot bath first, and then worried about the harvest.
"Can you tell the origin of those porcelains? Is there anyone on your ship who knows this?" Gu Kun returned to the captain's cabin and asked directly.
Du Guowei handed him a cup of ginger tea: "Lao Zhang has read it and said that it should be from the late Ming Dynasty. Most of them have no color, only a small part of blue and white. The painting skills are not that good. They should be ordinary folk kilns. You have
Once the bones are retrieved, they will be sent for carbon-14 isotope testing, which will make it more accurate."
The "Old Zhang" he called was nominally an ordinary surveyor on this ship, a rough-handed and elegant scholar in his forties. When Gu Kun first met him, he felt that something was wrong with him, but as long as
There was no threat, so he didn't bother to expose it.
Now it seems that there are indeed people from the domestic cultural and archaeological department on board.
As we all know, the archaeologists who are really working on the front line all have the faces of scholars and the hands of farmers, which are the traces of years left by field surveys. As for the kind of cool-looking thin skin and tender meat filmed in tomb robbing idol dramas
Yeah...just take a look.
Gu Kun smiled proudly: "Old Zhang still understands this?"
Du Guowei was a little embarrassed. He was rather bookish, so he said bluntly: "Lao Zhang worked at the East China Maritime Archeology Institute, but now he is indeed from our design institute..."
Gu Kun: "Then call him over and I'll talk to him personally."
After a while, the guy whose full name was Zhang Baihui, who everyone used to call Lao Zhang, was brought to Gu Kun.
I don’t know how this person got his name, maybe it’s because the five elements in his life are severely lacking in wood.
Gu Kun's title was quite polite: "Teacher Zhang, based on your experience, can you deduce the nature of the ship?"
Zhang Baihui scratched his head and pushed up his glasses: "According to my judgment, this should be an immigration ship, not a merchant ship. I also watched the video clip you just shot.
According to the structure of the ship's hull, you have just sneaked into the cargo hold of the ship, and the cargo hold is relatively complete, but there is only so much cargo there, so you can basically make a judgment. Those boxes should be taken casually as ballast.
This is not a professional sale.
What you did is right. Take out a few bones in small quantities for scientific research and identification, and let them rest in peace. I suggest not to salvage the entire ship."
When Gu Kun was diving just now, he found that there was less porcelain. That was only relatively small compared to professional merchant ships, and it did not mean that the porcelain was not transported. Because in those days, porcelain was transported as ballast on light-carrying ships, and if it was not transported, it would be in vain.
Transport some stones, otherwise the center of gravity of the ship will be unstable.
However, a professional ancient maritime trade ship may have thousands of boxes of porcelain, while an immigration ship may have dozens or hundreds of boxes, which is an order of magnitude or two different.
Gu Kun nodded and asked without high expectations: "These porcelains are not very valuable, are they?"
Zhang Baihui thought for a while: "They must be worthless domestically. Internationally... The price of complete large pieces of folk blue and white in the late Ming Dynasty has increased to several thousand dollars each in recent years, and small items such as dishes
piece, maybe only a few hundred dollars.
As for the plain porcelain that doesn’t even have a design or color, it can only cost one hundred and eighty U.S. dollars for private use. You can deal with it casually. In recent years, the price of ancient products has increased. Before the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the cultural relics in the world were more expensive than they are now.
At least several times cheaper.”
Cultural relics from prosperous times, gold from troubled times.
This truth cannot be wrong.
Anyone who has watched the historical market conditions of the international antique market over the past few decades knows how much the disintegration of the Soviet Union played a role in the overall increase in global cultural relics, because those wealthy people no longer worry about world wars and chaos that will destroy the world.
If it had been left to the late 1980s, these gadgets would not have been sold at a good price.
Gu Kun figured out all the cause and effect, and announced a decision in front of Zhang Baihui and Du Guowei:
"Everyone, although this batch of goods was found by our ship, everyone has worked hard. However, this is still Lanfang's exclusive economic zone, and the former owner of this ship is most likely an immigrant.
It comes from Lanzhou, so there should be no objection to the property rights of the ship."
Zhang Baihui was more knowledgeable and nodded resignedly: "Indeed, this is Lan Fang's ship."
Their current coordinates are about 50 nautical miles west-southwest of Lanzhou. This place is already beyond the 12-nautical-mile territorial sea line of any country, but the Indonesian’s nearest archipelago, the Temeilan Islands, is 70 or 80 nautical miles away from here (Natuna
The islands are further away)
Therefore, if divided according to the equidistant center line, this must be Lanfang's exclusive economic zone.
No matter how much the Chinese people want to extend their hands, they will not reach out to the Java Sea. They might as well admit it openly.
Seeing that the other party was on the road, Gu Kun threw out a bait: "However, this boat can be regarded as witnessing the pioneering history of the Chinese ancestors in the late Ming Dynasty, and has cultural and historical research value. Out of goodwill and good-neighborliness, I,
After salvaging boxes of porcelain here, I am willing to donate a few boxes to museums in Hujiang, Donghai, Hujian and other provinces, as well as specialized maritime museums, for cultural exhibitions."
When he donated, he was sure that each provincial museum would only give a few pieces of late Ming folk blue and white, and the rest would be worthless bisques to make up a box. Anyway, for cultural exhibitions, the economic value of porcelain is not
What matters is the historical background, era, and story.
In this way, Gu Kun didn't spend much money and still gained a good reputation.
After hearing this, everyone was indeed very motivated. They worked hard for another half day, putting down the tubes to fish out the dozens of complete boxes of ballast, leaving everything else intact, especially the scattered belongings of the ancients, and then
Precise coordinates were recorded.
After doing all this, a small boat was put down from the big ship to carry the goods back to Lanfang Island. The big ship itself continued its journey of surveying the seabed topography.
This time, Gu Kun didn't plan to make much money. He just hoped to find a reasonable excuse for him to embark on this road under the witness of everyone.
In the future, it is not that he only wanted to retrieve the relics of the ancients, but that he embarked on this path after being sailed by a Chinese scientific research ship. This is very reasonable.