A hoard of silver coins worth £34million that was sunk by the Nazis on board a steamship has been salvaged by a British-led team at a record depth of 5,150m (17,000ft).
The SS City of Cairo was travelling from Bombay to England in 1942 when it was torpedoed by a U-boat 480 miles south of St Helena, taking 100 tons of rupees with it to the bottom of the ocean.
It was long ᴀssumed that the vessel’s cargo, belonging to the UK Treasury, would be lost forever such was the complexity of the task facing salvage experts.
Treasure trove: Some of the 100 tons of rupees found buried in the ocean floor at a record depth of 17,000ft after the cargo ship they were being transported on was sunk by a Nazi submarine during World War Two
Record find: Some coins are raised to the surface during a pioneering recovery project by a British-led team
Hidden: The City of Cairo was finally discovered (above) ‘broken in two and buried deep in the seafloor silt’
Underwater company Deep Ocean Search used powerful sonar to locate the vessel on the sea floor
That was until a team led by British expert John Kingsford used pioneering techniques to track down the ship with powerful sonar and robotics.
Underwater company Deep Ocean Search (DOS), which included 20 French oceanographers, was then contracted by the UK Ministry of Transport to recover the coins from a record depth of 17,000ft – some 4,500ft deeper than the тιтanic.
A spokesman for DOS said: ‘This was to be a difficult search as the water depth would exceed 5,000m, the weather, swell and currents were known to be challenging and the presumed site was some 1,000 miles from the nearest land in the foothills of the mid-Atlantic ridge.’
When the ship was finally discovered, it was ‘broken in two and buried deep in the seafloor silt’, adding that ‘parts of the ship had metres of mud heaped upon it.’
The SS City of Cairo was sunk en route from Bombay to India, via Cape Town and Recife in Brazil
The rupees, belonging to the UK Treasury, were being transported from India to England when the ship sunk
Underwater company Deep Ocean Search, which included 20 French oceanographers, was contracted by the UK Ministry of Transport to recover the coins from a record depth of 17,000ft – 4,500ft deeper than the тιтanic
Keeping it under wraps: The recovery took place in 2013, but has only now been made public
