How Researchers Discovered a 168-Year-Old Dutch Shipwreck Off the Coast of Australia in Underwater ‘Blizzard’ Conditions
The Dutch merchant ship ‘Koning Willem de Tweede’ sank off the coast of South Australia in a violent storm in June 1857
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/SarahKuta.png)
Nearly 170 years ago, a Dutch merchant ship called the Koning Willem de Tweede sank off the coast of South Australia. Now, after years of searching, researchers have finally located the shipwreck, according to an announcement from the Australian National Maritime Museum.
A team found the vessel’s winch and several other components protruding from the seafloor in Guichen Bay, a large inlet on South Australia’s southeast coast, reports the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Josh Brine. Researchers studied historical records to narrow down the search area, then used a marine magnetometer—a type of underwater metal detector—to search for iron beneath the waves.
The 140-foot vessel sank during a violent storm in June 1857, killing 16 of the 25 crew members onboard. The captain, Hindrik Remmelt Giezen, only survived by tying himself to a cask and letting the waves drag it to shore, per TVNZ’s 1News.
Days earlier, the ship had dropped off more than 400 Chinese miners in the town of Robe. At that time, the neighboring colony of Victoria (now a state) was in the midst of a gold rush, which attracted fortune-seekers from around the world.
But when Chinese miners began arriving around 1854, they were often met with “suspicion and racism because of their different language, dress, food and customs,” according to the State Library of New South Wales. And though the Chinese prospectors only searched for gold in areas that had already been picked over, they were often accused of stealing European, Australian and American men’s claims.
In the ensuing years, xenophobia and racism against Chinese miners only worsened. Europeans, Australians and Americans organized violent, racially motivated riots and lawmakers began enacting anti-Chinese immigration legislation, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Officials also set a £10 ($13) entry tax for each Chinese prospector who arrived in Victoria. To get around the fee, many entered the country through South Australia instead. From there, many walked upwards of 250 miles to reach their intended destinations, per Divernet’s Steve Weinman.
“We saw a lot of Chinese immigrants coming into Robe, landing there and then walking all the way to the Goldfields to bypass a tax on immigrants coming into Victoria,” says Mark Polzer, maritime heritage officer for South Australia’s Department for Environment and Water, to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “It's an important wreck for the local area, but it tells this broader story … of immigration.”
Efforts to find the Koning Willem de Tweede began several years ago. The project was a collaboration between the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cultural Heritage Agency, the Australian National Maritime Museum, the nonprofit Silentworld Foundation, Flinders University and the South Australia government.
Researchers initially thought they’d identified the wreckage in 2022. But poor visibility in the bay made it difficult to verify their findings. The area has fine sand, which is easily disturbed and creates conditions similar to a “blizzard underwater,” says James Hunter, a maritime archaeologist with the Australian National Maritime Museum, to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
When researchers first dived on the site in 2023, they couldn’t see anything. When they returned to the same location earlier this year, they again faced “terrible visibility,” but they got lucky and encountered some of the wreckage, Hunter tells Cosmos magazine’s Lauren Fuge.
Researchers are “pretty confident” the vessel is the Koning Willem de Tweede, Hunter tells the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. But, he adds, “it would be great if we found a bell with the name on it.”
The team hopes to dive the site again in the future to see what else they can find.
“The wrecking event was catastrophic and very sudden, so we’re very likely to find a lot of artifacts,” Hunter told Cosmos magazine’s Drew Rooke in 2023. “No one had time to grab anything. Pretty much everything was lost—and is all probably still in the wreck, which can tell us so much about the ship’s crew and its passengers.”
