The hunt for the world's most elusive shipwrecks

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Editor’s Note – Monthly ticket is a CNN Travel series that highlights some of the most fascinating topics in the world of travel. In October, we shift our focus to the unusual, highlighting everything from (allegedly) haunted spaces to abandoned places.

(CNN) — In March 2022, the world heaved a collective sigh when the remarkably well-preserved Ernest Shackleton’s shipwreck HMS Endurance was discovered nearly two miles below the icy Antarctic seas.

But dozens of sunken ships remain on the ocean floor, awaiting rediscovery.

Here are some of the world’s most infamously elusive shipwrecks, plus a few you can see for yourself (some without even getting wet).

Table of Contents

Santa Maria, Haiti

A humble cabin boy was blamed for the sinking of Christopher Columbus’ flagship Santa Maria off the coast of Haiti on Christmas Eve 1492. The inexperienced sailor is said to have taken the wheel after Columbus took a nap, and soon after wrote the dispatch by crashing into a coral reef.

That’s at least one theory. But the Italian explorer’s ship met its fate, excitement bubbling up in May 2014, when archaeologist Barry Clifford claimed he happened upon the long-lost wreckage.

The hearts of maritime history lovers sank UNESCO poured cold water to the claim, saying that the ship found was of a much later period.

The Santa Maria is still there, somewhere.

Flower of the Sea, Sumatra

A replica of the Flor de la Mar stands in front of the Maritime Museum in Malacca, Malaysia.

Tim Wimborne/Reuters

This 16th-century merchant ship — or “karak” — shuttled between India and its home in Portugal. But given its gigantic size — 118 feet long and 111 feet high — it was an unmanageable beast for the captain.

Perhaps it was only a matter of time before the Flor de la Mar would go down, which it did during a severe storm off Sumatra, Indonesia in 1511.

Most of the crew perished and the loot – reportedly the entire personal fortune of a Portuguese governor, worth a staggering $2.6 billion in current money – was lost.

SS Waratah, Durban (South Africa)

It may not have its own theme song sung by Celine Dion, but the SS Waratah is known as “Australia’s Titanic” – and for good reason.

The Waratah, a passenger freighter built to travel between Europe and Australia with a stopover in Africa, disappeared shortly after steaming up from the city of Durban in present-day South Africa in 1909 – just three years before the Titanic tragedy. As for the cause, theories abound.

The entire ship, complete with eight staterooms, a music lounge, and all 211 passengers and crew, was never found. Ninety years after the Waratah crashed, the National Underwater and Marine Agency thought they had finally found it, but it was a false alarm.

Said the late thriller writer Clive Cussler, who spent much of his life searching for the wreckage, “I think she’ll remain elusive for a while.”

USS Indianapolis, Philippine Sea

Rotten Tomatoes’ “Tomatometer” might yield a raunchy 17% for the 2016 Nicolas Cage film, “USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage,” but in real life, the ship played a decisive role in World War II.

The Indianapolis was chosen to transport the uranium core of the “Little Boy” atomic bomb to Tinian Islandwhere the weapon was assembled shortly before being used to devastating effect on Hiroshima.

Dropping off the deadly cargo went without a hitch, but on the return voyage, Indianapolis was hit by a Japanese submarine, killing many crew members from shark attacks and salt poisoning.

The exact whereabouts of the warship remained a mystery for decades, but was finally located by a team led by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, in 2017 – 18,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

Slave Ships, North Atlantic

A man snaps a photo of a pulley block, one of many recovered artifacts unearthed from the sunken São José.

Rodger Bosch/AFP/Getty Images

Not just one shipwreck, but a very gruesome genre of it.

It is estimated that some 1,000 ships now lying at the bottom of the ocean were complicit in the evil “triangle trade” across the Atlantic, which forced some 12-13 million Africans into slavery.

Many of these ships sank in stormy weather, such as the San Josewhich sank off the coast of South Africa in 1794.

Others, such as the Clotilda, were deliberately sunk by their owners to cover up evidence of slave trade, long after the 1807 law banning the importation of slaves.

The wrecks of both ships have now been located — the São José thanks to the work of Diving with a purpose (DWP), a group of mostly black divers who dive the sites of sunken slave ships and include rusted handcuffs and iron ballasts to the surface.

It is impossible to retrieve such objects without also bringing up stories of human suffering, although the aim of DWP is to document the nefarious legacy of slavery and use it to educate and enlighten.

Yet such ships are notoriously elusive, and many may never see the light of day again.

Shipwrecks you can visit

Uluburun, Bodrum

Mehmed Çakir was diving for sponges off the coast of Yalıkavak, Turkey, in 1982 when he found the remains of a trading ship that sank here some 3,000 years earlier.

He was the first of many dives – more than 22,400 in fact – to retrieve the long-lost treasures of the Uluburun, and what a trip it was; 10 tons of copper ingots; 70,000 beads of glass and faience; olive oil and pomegranates stored in Cypriot pottery pots.

Part of the horde can now be seen on the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeologyand while not much of the Bronze Age wreckage survives, there is a cross-sectional reconstruction, which gives an idea of how it would have been stacked with all that goods, all those centuries ago.

De Vasa, Stockholm

The Vasa is now on display in a museum in Stockholm.

Anders Wiklund/AFP/Getty Images

Eerily intact, the 17th-century warship Vasa looks more like a prop from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, than a ship that first (and last) set sail in 1628.

The Swedish colossus made it about 1,300 meters from the harbor before sinking, only to be lifted from its silty grave some 333 years later.

A crew of archaeologists (who took typhoid and tetanus shots to protect themselves from various bacteria) discovered a hull full of 700 sculptures and decorations of mermaids, lions and biblical figures – what has been essentially described as a “giant billboard for Sweden and Gustav II Adolf”, the country’s fearsome king of the time.

Since the opening of a special museum in Stockholm in 1990, the Vasa has become one of the world’s least elusive shipwrecks, viewed by some 25 million visitors to date.

MV Captayannis, River Clyde

Spyed on from the banks of the River Clyde at Greenock in Scotland, you might mistake the wreck of the MV Captayannis for a recently deceased whale.

The black hull of this Greek sugar-carrying boat, rolled on its side, is a favorite haunt for feathered residents of a nearby bird sanctuary — and has been since the ship sank in a squall in January 1974.

It is said that no one took responsibility for the so-called ‘sugar boat’, hence it is still stuck in a sandbar – an opaque reminder of the capriciousness of the sea.

Still, it’s a boon for local boat charters like Wreck tripswho takes maritime rubberneckers up close, while they pour a hot chocolate.

Chuuk Lagoon, Micronesia

If your boat floats by diving, chances are you’ve heard of Chuuk Lagoon.

On this sprinkling of islands, 1,000 miles northeast of Papua New Guinea, the Japanese established their most formidable World War II naval base—that is, until Operation Hailstone was launched in 1944, which killed allied forces with some 60 Japanese troops. ships and planes to a seaman’s grave.

With most of them still there, Chuuk Lagoon has become a wacky underwater museum for divers to gaze at the sea’s barnacles. Saint Francis Mary or the long-abandoned compass and motor telegraphs of the Nippon Maru.

MS World Discoverer, Solomon Islands

“Open 24 hours” declares Google Maps optimistic about the shipwreck of the MS World Discoverer.

Since the cruise ship MS World Discoverer collided with and half sank off the coast of Roderick Bay in the Solomon Islands in 2000, it has become a tourist attraction for passing ships (all passengers, it must be said, were helped to get to safety). ).

Rusting gently, on a 46-degree frame, the ship appears to have turned on its side and gone to sleep. If nothing else, count the lifeboats on your own ship as you sail past.

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