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This Ship Sank in the Baltic Sea With Presents Bound for a Romanov Czar. Its Cargo Included Champagne, Luxury Mineral Water and Rare Meteorites
New research suggests that a shipwreck discovered off the coast of Sweden in 2024 may have been transporting gifts from the German Duchy of Nassau to Alexander II of Russia in the immediate aftermath of the Crimean War
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In the summer of 2024, a pair of Polish divers surveying a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea stumbled upon a clay bottle bearing a stamp with the word “Nassau.”
At first, Pawel Truszynski and Marek Cacaj theorized that their find was a jug of rum linked to the infamous Caribbean pirates who had dominated Nassau (now the capital of the Bahamas) some 300 years ago. After consulting a ceramics expert, however, the men learned that the Nassau in question was actually the city in western Germany. As for the jug’s contents, the bottle held luxury mineral water, not rum.
Over the past two years, Truszynski’s quest to uncover the shipwreck’s story has taken him to archives across Europe, a Champagne house in France and back to the bottom of the Baltic Sea. His research suggests that the vessel sank in 1856 or 1857, soon after the end of the Crimean War, traveling from the German city of Hamburg to the Russian capital of St. Petersburg.
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The ship’s cargo—including hundreds of Champagne and mineral water bottles, state-of-the-art scientific instruments, and rare meteorites—may have been a gift from the German Duchy of Nassau. Had the vessel not sunk under unknown circumstances, its greatest treasures probably would have ended up with the Romanov czar Alexander II. Other luxury items might have reached the Russian elite, who’d been deprived of Western European goods during the war.
“This cargo was intended to be a physical bridge of goodwill celebrating the return of peace to Europe, reopening blocked commercial channels and cementing Nassau’s strategic alliance with the Russian Empire,” Truszynski tells Smithsonian magazine in an email. “This wreck is an absolute, untouched monument to 19th-century diplomacy and elite international relations in Europe.”
Truszynski and Cacaj discovered the wreck during a 2024 expedition sponsored by Baltictech, the organizer of one of the largest technical diving conferences in the world. Late one evening, as the divers prepared to return to shore, an unexpected sight popped up on their sonar screen.
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“It looked like absolutely nothing special—just a minor anomaly barely visible against the silt,” Truszynski recalls. At a depth of 190 feet, he and Cacaj spotted a fully exposed cargo hold packed with rows of bottles and collapsed barrels. As Tomasz Stachura, leader of the Baltictech team, told the Washington Post in 2024, “I have been diving for 40 years, and it often happens that there is one bottle or two … but to discover a wreck with so much cargo, it’s a first for me.”
When the divers returned to the site the following day, they found crates containing porcelain dishes buried in the silt. To help identify the wreck, they brought one clay water jug, one Champagne bottle and several dishes to the surface, leaving the rest of the site undisturbed in accordance with legal protocols. (Baltictech has yet to submit its findings to a peer-reviewed scientific journal, but Truszynski, the lead historical researcher for the project, says the group plans to do so upon securing “definitive physical proof” of the ship’s identity from the cargo hold in future dives.)
“The greatest and most frustrating hurdle was the total absence of any direct markings on the vessel,” Truszynski says. “Underwater, we found no ship’s bell, no nameplate and no lettering on the hull. We were dealing with a completely anonymous entity.”
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The investigation’s first big break came courtesy of Matylda Gierszewska-Noszczynska, an archaeologist who specializes in historic pottery. When the divers sent her photos of the stamp affixed to the clay bottle, she explained that it was the emblem of the German Duchy of Nassau. Selters, a high-end brand of naturally carbonated mineral water sourced from a spring in Nassau, used this label between 1836 and 1866, significantly narrowing down the timeframe of the doomed ship’s final voyage. (The term “seltzer” comes from Niederselters, the village that houses the spring.)
Selters water was prized in the 19th century for its purported medicinal properties. According to an 1828 history of seltzer, the company manufactured its bottles “with great care, of a clay peculiar to certain parts of the Duchy of Nassau.” The clay formed a “flawless insulation barrier,” keeping out light and air, Truszynski explains. This design enabled the water to survive long “sea voyages and arrive at the other side of Europe without losing its unique taste or carbonation.”
Like the Selters jugs, the Champagne transported by the Russia-bound ship turned out to be a luxury good. About two weeks after the initial dive, Stachura opened the bottle taken from the wreck to assess the condition of the liquid preserved within. His son soon noticed that the cork bore a very faint embossed inscription in French. When Truszynski took a closer look, he managed to make out the name of a Reims-based Champagne house, Louis Roederer, and one of its signature offerings, Carte Blanche.
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Established in 1776, Louis Roederer boasted close ties to Alexander, who asked the house “to set aside every year the very best of their wines” for him, author Don Philpott writes in The Champagne Almanac. The company even manufactured an exclusive wine for the czar in 1876. Dubbed Cristal, the beverage came in a custom bottle that was “clear and flat-bottomed to guard against poison within or bombs hidden in the base,” the London Times noted in 2017. (Despite taking such precautions, Alexander died just five years later, when an assassin threw a bomb at his carriage.)
Did you know? Alexander II, the “czar liberator”
Alexander is perhaps best known for abolishing Russian serfdom in 1861—an act that earned him the nickname “czar liberator.”Russia was a major market for Louis Roederer during Alexander’s reign. According to Truszynski, handwritten ledgers housed in the company’s archives indicate that its annual exports to Russia reached nearly 600,000 bottles in 1857, with Champagne-loving aristocrats eager to enjoy their favorite libations once again. Laboratory testing conducted by Louis Roederer identified the bottle recovered from the wreck as an 1857 vintage with a high sugar content.
In 2025, Truszynski and diver Michał Iwicki returned to the wreck site to search for additional clues. The area of the Baltic Sea where the wreck was found “holds a vast number of sunken wrecks of near-identical dimensions from a similar period,” making it difficult to identify a corresponding record in the archives, Truszynski says. Luckily, this second expedition yielded the smoking gun that would enable the Baltictech team to propose an exact match.
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During the dive, the pair “focused exclusively on exploratory excavation within the sediments,” Truszynski recalls. Iwicki “began methodically digging his hands deep into the thick layer of silt resting directly on the deck.” Soon, he unearthed a ceramic plate stamped with a factory mark and the number 56, suggesting that the now-defunct Davenport company manufactured the plate in 1856.
Experts at the Stoke-on-Trent City Archives in England, which houses many of the business’s records, confirmed the dish’s origins. They also told Truszynski that workers loaded Davenport earthenware onto ships for export to buyers in continental Europe immediately after the ceramics exited the kiln. Completed goods weren’t stored in company warehouses long-term, suggesting that the vessel transporting the plate set out in late 1856 or early 1857.
Back at his desk, Truszynski came up with a list of parameters for his search. “Under this ship’s deck, commodities from three distinct corners of Europe had converged,” he explains. “The porcelain had to sail from England, the Champagne traveled overland or via rivers, and the stoneware water bottles were barged or carted from the interior of the continent.”
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These criteria pointed the researcher to the bustling trading hub of Hamburg. In the records of an Amsterdam archive, Truszynski identified a vessel that matched the wreck’s technical specifications, mast count, geographic coordinates and cargo manifest. In addition to the objects already found in the wreck, the manifest suggested that the ship carried Villeroy & Boch ceramics; measuring instruments; and rare mineral and meteorite specimens sent from Adolf, Duke of Nassau, to Alexander.
Adolf had deep ties to the Romanov dynasty: His first wife, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Mikhailovna, was Alexander’s cousin. Elizabeth had died in 1845, but goodwill between Nassau and Russia remained. Truszynski argues that this shared family history led the Duchy of Nassau to maintain “strict neutrality during the Crimean War, quietly favoring St. Petersburg.”
The Crimean War began in October 1853, when the Ottomans declared war on Russia. Tensions between the two empires had been growing for years: The world powers clashed over Russia’s expansionist ambitions and access to Christian religious sites in the Holy Land, which was then under Ottoman control. Britain and France joined the fight in 1854, hoping to bolster the faltering Ottoman Empire and prevent Russia from gaining dominance in the region.
Alexander came to power in March 1855, after his father, Nicholas I, died of pneumonia. The new czar “was not about to give up on his father’s policies,” historian Orlando Figes writes in The Crimean War: A History. He “had been the heir apparent for 30 years and remained firmly in the shadow of his father in the first year of his rule.” Ultimately, Russia suffered a humiliating defeat, agreeing to a treaty that ended the war on unfavorable terms in March 1856.
How does the newly discovered shipwreck fit into the story of the Crimean War? According to Truszynski, his research indicates that after the British lifted their blockade of the Baltic, allowing trade to resume, Adolf “resolved to immediately renew official diplomatic relations and personally congratulate” Alexander on his accession. Truszynski explains that the duke commissioned a commercial sailing ship to depart from Hamburg with cargo “designed for two distinct missions: to feed the starved private market of St. Petersburg with luxury (hides, wine in barrels and mass-market porcelain) and to deliver an incredibly valuable, official state gift.”
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For now, Truszynski is keeping the ship’s name to himself. Although the Amsterdam archival records closely align with the available information about the wreck, the researcher cautions that Baltictech’s investigation remains ongoing.
The team is currently awaiting permission from the Swedish government to launch a third expedition to the wreck site. Once the divers receive the green light, they plan to split into two specialized units. The first group will look for the ship’s bell, which may have been moved by currents, around the wreck’s perimeter. The second will excavate the cargo hold, digging down to the lowest levels of the ship in search of items mentioned in the manifest that have yet to be found.
Truszynski remains hopeful that the telltale meteorites survive. As he points out, this “precious and heavy cargo” would have been packed into “specialized, small, lead-lined or heavily reinforced wooden crates.” Tucked beneath the bottles of Selters water and Louis Roederer Champagne, these crates would have been protected from the initial impact of the ship’s descent to the seafloor.
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Discoveries of this kind would “grant us a 100 percent scientific identification of the vessel,” Truszynski says, “allowing us to unlock the insurance registers in London” and uncover more information about the circumstances under which the ship sank—and whether someone received an insurance payment “for the loss of this monumental cargo.”
Truszynski has always been captivated by underwater shipwrecks. But with time, he has realized that “the real adventure begins on land, when these silent objects suddenly come alive,” he says. “It is a spectacular feeling when a clay jar ceases to be just a piece of debris from the seafloor and becomes a key that unlocks the cabinets of emperors [and] czars.”
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