Silver Coin Wreck

Conosciuto anche come: coin ship · Great Basses Wreck

This is the most famous wreck of the Basses and the subject of Arthur C. Clarke's book The Treasure of the Great Reef. On 22 March 1961 Clarke, Mike Wilson and Rodney Jonklaas located it and found anchors, cannons and concreted lumps of silver rupees struck in Surat under the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. The coins had travelled in bags of roughly a thousand each; once the bags decayed, the coins stayed stuck together, and part of the find went to the Smithsonian. Who owned the ship is still open: dive sources describe a Mughal vessel, while a 1964 Expedition Magazine report by Peter Throckmorton discussed the Dutch fluyt Overness, recorded as lost on the Basses in 1704, and noted doubts about that identification. The site is protected, and visiting divers go down under Sri Lanka Coast Guard supervision.