Why is there a "graveyard of ships" near Naples?

In 2008, the Aurora Trust began a survey around an island named Ventotone, off the coast of Naples. They found an astonishing group of Roman shipwrecks, and they also found a mystery. How did all these ships sink so close together? Tune in to find out.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm depleted druk reboarding, and I
really like shipwrecks. I don't know if I mentioned this
to you before. I have not. I know I mentioned

(00:23):
it at Dragon Con and people kind of laughed because
it's a weird thing to say that you really like.
But they're just so interesting. I mean, there's so much
to discover. They are fascinating. I mean window into the past,
and things are preserved that might not be otherwise, things
that definitely would not have made it if they had
been above the surface this whole time. So people like

(00:45):
me who really like shipwrecks got pretty excited back in
the summer of two thousand nine when there was all
this news about archaeologists finding the untouched remains of five
Roman ships, and then there was a PBS show Secrets
of the Dead recently profiling this expedition, So, I mean,
pretty interesting stuff. Five untouched remain definitely back in two

(01:08):
thousand nine, the lead archaeologist on this expedition, Timmy Gambon.
He described the area as a graveyard of ships, which
sounds very menacing, spooky. Yeah. Yeah, so it makes us
wonder what is in these ships and where were they going,
why did they all wreck so close together, and why

(01:29):
did they think in the first place. These are some
of the questions, some of the many questions we will
be answering in today's podcast. Yep, But this whole thing
started in two thousand eight, right, Yeah, the news broken
two thousand nine, but the whole research project really started
in two thousand eight. Yep. At that time, a group
of marine archaeologists and ocean scientists that make up the

(01:51):
Aurora Trust, they began a survey of the area around
vent To Tene and the Tyrannean Sea off of Naples. Yeah,
and then to TenneT is a pretty interesting island itself.
I mean, it's definitely worth discussing its history a little
bit before we get into the shipwrecks. But it's this
volcanic tiny island and today it's a tourist spot. I

(02:13):
sent to Bilina a picture. It looked pretty picture fu Um.
It only has five permanent residents. But back in ancient
Roman times it was this grand Emperor's retreat and it
was called Pantataria, and it also conveniently was a pretty
nice place to exile nobles and imperial family members. But

(02:34):
we're gonna be talking about that on a later podcast,
so listen up. Then, So Augustus he transformed to this island.
He built a villa in a complex system of cisterns
there to collect rainwater since there were no natural springs
to get water from. And more importantly, he had this
harbor built basically dug out of the rock instead of

(02:56):
building out of sea walls, and somehow it all still worked. Yeah,
that's pretty amazing to me. Um, But the island didn't
remain this bustling, uh stop on trade routes for that long.
The emperors eventually abandoned it and hermits were the only
people who remained. And eventually it became a pirate's den
because it was convenient enough to the mainland that you

(03:19):
could go raid um, raid other ships, raid port towns,
and then come back to your den with all your loot.
And by the eighteenth century, the Bourbon kings decided that
they wanted to start redeveloping the area a little bit,
redeveloping then to Tenne, and partly that was to support
this prison that they had built on an even tinier

(03:41):
island that's right next to vent to Tenney Santo Stefano.
And interesting, this, this whole island's history is just so weird.
But this Tinier island is where Mussolini kept a lot
of his political prisoners, so this has always been a
good spot for exiling people you never want to hear
from again. Pretty grim, sort of eerie place. So there

(04:03):
are basically two takeaways here. Vent Atenne was remote enough
to be perfect retreat for a perfect prison depending on
who you are, depending on who you are and who
you're dealing with. And it's also convenient enough to be
a halfway point, a kind of rest stop or a
layer when traveling through the often treacherous and bustling Mediterranean.
Whether you're a Roman merchant or a Barbary pirate, it's

(04:26):
a good place to stop. So due to this geographical
importance and um it's proximity to all these ancient shipping
lines that are of course racing back and forth across
the Mediterranean, it makes sense that there would have been
a few shipwrecks in the area. It would be the
last port of call for more than one ship but

(04:48):
a graveyard. I think that was a little bit of
a surprise. But in two thousand eight, the Aurora Trust
started to survey the seabed around vent Atenna and Santa
Santo Stefano and they use their client system side skin sonars.
So cool to me, and I mean it is. I
just imagine it's so neat and clean on paper. But

(05:10):
they essentially established a grid surrounding the island, like a
triangular grid, and then trailed the sonar behind a boat
to make sure that they got an absolutely complete picture
of the sea bed. It is really cool. Yeah, they
were basically creating underwater map so they could check for
any abnormalities and that's what they call them, to abnormalities.

(05:33):
So it could be anything from an ancient shipwreck or
presumably just some junk on the bottom of the ocean.
I guess it depends on when it's from whether you
consider it junk or something worth checking out. Um. And
it's a surprisingly fruitful mapping effort. I mean, I guess
they thought they would find something, but um, they find

(05:53):
quite a lot. They find piles of what looked like
in four I, which are ancient Roman shipping vessels and
we're going to talk a little bit more about them
later because they're pretty interesting. And a few other just
abnormal blips on the c floor maybe Rex, maybe not,
just things worth checking out later. And then this isn't
terribly related to this episode, but they find the wreck

(06:13):
of a famous sunken ship from World War Two. Um,
but there's more work to be done, yea. The sonar
isn't quite gonna cut it, So the team plans to
to return to the area in the summer of two
thousand nine for a closer look at things. Yeah, so
they come back in two thousand nine. The two thousand
eight scan head showed three potential ancient shipwrecks, and in

(06:36):
two thousand nine they extend the range of that scan
a little bit more and they find two more wrecks
that they decide are definitely worth checking out with. There
are the camera because sonar just lets you know there's
an abnormality, it doesn't really let you know exactly what
it is. So we're gonna give you a rundown a profile,
if you will. Of these five ancient recks they find. Yeah,

(07:01):
the first one is well preserved and it's from the
first century a d. It's filled with cargo of Spanish
amphoe from Batica. And yeah, the this is probably the
best time to tell you what the and for I
want to know. Um, if you've ever seen just like
a statue of a pedestal with this surn type of

(07:22):
thing on top, very well might have been a dedication
to an amphora or two mphor e the plural um.
And they're these ancient Roman shipping containers. And usually they're
really pointy on the bottom and they look um almost
like if you've ever seen handmade lace. They look kind
of like Bobbin's, those big wooden bobbins to compare it to. Yeah,

(07:47):
and so they can't stand up on their own because
they're pointy. But when you line them all up in
a row, you can also stack them. The points fit
in exactly um between the other ones, so you can
a cargo hold of a ship to make the best
available use of your space. And when they all fit
together like that, they kind of form just a lock

(08:08):
like a puzzle. I'll put together. Yep. And these M
four I would have held garum right, which is a
type of fermented fish sauce that you could literally douse
on any meal yeah, I think the Romans were pretty
fond of it too, which I know, fermented fish sauce
sounds like kind of something that wouldn't be very good,
but I mean, if you've ever had Thai food, it's

(08:31):
good as long as you balance it out with other things. Um. So.
The second rack is also really well preserved. It also
carries M. Four I. It's from the first century BC,
so a bit older. And uh, these M four I
carried wine from Campania. And you'll find a lot of
these ships carried wine. It just gives you a little

(08:53):
taste of how how important the trade in wine was
in the Roman Empire. The third wreck is from the
first century a D. And it broke into two at
some point, so it may have had a more violent
wreck than some of the other ships that were involved. Here.
They carried more taria, which is basically the mortar part

(09:14):
of a mortar, and pestle and Italian wine am for
I from Campania. Again they've gotta have their their wine.
The fourth reck is from the first century a D.
And it's not quite as well preserved, but in some
ways it has the most interesting cargo. So it's got
those wine and four I again but it also has
glass frit which I had to look up what this

(09:36):
was UM from the Aurora Trust site, which actually I
should mention this now you can find pictures of all
of these wrecks at the site, should I definitely recommend.
But you can use this glass to make real glass
like what you would think of, or to make pigments
or just all sorts of things. And the ship also
carried metal bars which may have been UM destined to

(09:59):
be part of some step at you or some kind
of weapons. And then it carried these huge, incredibly heavy
metal cylinders and the archaeologist still aren't quite sure what
those may have been used for. The fifth reck was
from a little bit later. It was from the fifth
century a d. And it carried more of this fish

(10:19):
sauce and um, and the fish slauce was in North
African MP. I. Yeah, so again kind of showing how
why this trading range was UM. But it would be
really bad to lose your shipment of garam. I mean
you might think that the wine would be the most
precious shipment. We mentioned here that garam, if it was

(10:40):
high quality, garam could go for the Roman equivalent of
one dollars for two pints, so having a whole ship
of it go down would be pretty bad news. Yeah. Um,
So the Aurora Trust decided that the r o V
pictures were nice, you know, they kind of give them
a good idea of what's on there, but the human

(11:03):
eye is better, and so they picked a few sites
to send divers to, just three of them. And the
issue here is that the sites are really really deep,
and they're deeper than three feet and that's part of
the reason why these wrecks are still preserved, because if
they were shallower depths, recreational divers would have found them

(11:24):
long ago and presumably pilfered them mess them up. Um.
It's because they're out of range for most fos that
they're still so pristine. Yep. Even the research divers could
only spend a few minutes down there before they had
to start the lengthy decompression process and come back up.
So they pick their most highly trained divers to go

(11:45):
on these expeditions, and they send them in not just
to kind of look at what's there, but also to
bring stuff back up whatever they can bring with them
to analyze later. Yeah, hopefully get some museum specimens out
of it. Um. So at the second wreck, which is
that one from the first century BC, the divers find
these stacks of perfect and for it. I mean, it

(12:07):
looks like the day they were loaded. And of course
these don't look like shipwrecks that I mean you probably
you're probably used to pictures of the Titanic or something
like that, where clearly there is a ship underwater, of course,
being two thousand years old, in this case more than
two thousand years old. The ship is gone, all the

(12:28):
wooden parts are gone. It's just the cargo that remains. Um.
But they're able to bring up one and Phora from
that wreck. And uh, if you check out the Secrets
of the Dead video on this one, it's it's funny.
They bring it up and put it into a little
on deck pool to you know, keep it. It's been
underwater for so many years. If it's up in the air,

(12:49):
it's not going to weather well. Um. And then they
use a database to help them match the shape of
it to a like Emphora from the same period. It
kind reminded me of C. S I or bones or
something for and for because it's just blipping past all
the silhouettes until finally they have a match which helps

(13:10):
identify the age, which is the first century BC, and
the contents which we're probably wine and for forensics exactly.
So then the divers are able to also obtain samples
from rexite number three and that one was the one
that was split in half. From there they can carry
off four mortaria and these are all identical. So it's

(13:33):
like an example of Roman mass production. Yeah, everybody had
to get their mortaria and France or Spain or wherever
they were because it was the best Roman tool available.
And from the fourth sight, the one that has that
mysterious metal cargo there, unfortunately not able to bring any
samples to the surface, but they take a lot of

(13:55):
photos um. That one is deeper than the others even
it's at four hundred and eighty feet UM. So that's
two thousand nine, definitely accomplishing a few more goals with
this project. And then in two thousand and ten, just
this past summer, they went back for another look. Yeah. Again,
they extend the scan range and they sent down the

(14:18):
r o V for more Hira's images of the area,
and they were focusing mainly on places that didn't get
documented in two thousand nine, and they also recover another amphora. Yeah,
and I think a National geographic crew may have accompanied
them that year. So maybe we'll get another documentary with
cool underwater photography next year. Um. But okay, we still

(14:39):
have our our questions that we raised in the introduction,
which was why is this a graveyard? Why are there
so many ships here? And there are a few reasons why,
and one of them is just volume. I mean, Rome
is a huge global exporter and importer during this time,
and that's at the on the land by all the

(15:01):
roads they build to you know, to transport merchants and
goods and the army of course, um, but there were
also lots of shipping lines and it was very important
for the Empire for these shipping lines to be relatively safe,
as safe as they could be, so that merchants could
trade goods with a certain amount of confidence. And they

(15:23):
just criss crossed across the Mediterranean between Greece and North
Africa and France and Spain. They go across the Black
Sea between the Channel you know, in England and France,
so I mean just everywhere you can imagine there are
Roman ships trading goods, high traffic area, right, So do
another reason behind this was that due to volume and markup,

(15:45):
the Empire could afford to lose the ship or two
now and then yeah, definitely, I mean it's kind of
sad but true, yep, especially since some things like wine,
which Rome had a lock on. I mean, we talked
about all the wine that we saw, but they were
the ones mainly response well for distributing this. Provinces like
Spain and France that we're perfectly capable of growing their

(16:06):
own and making their own line had to buy from
Roman merchants out the mark of course, oh of course,
and in some other cases items were mass produced on
the cheap and exported. So yeah, if you want to
do is the Romans do have to buy now you
have to pay a little bit. And then, I mean

(16:26):
the other main reason aside from volume here is location.
So Ventatenne, as we mentioned, is a really great stopping point.
It's very convenient and it has that nice harbor that
was built by Augustus and so it makes a nice
place for an outbound ship to rest for a day,
to get new supplies and to take shelter from bad weather.

(16:49):
But unfortunately, what you know, the same reasons that make
it such a convenient rest stop also make it potentially
very dangerous. And that's because despite that nice sloping harbor,
most of the island has these very steep sea walls,
high rock cliffs, And if you're in a storm and

(17:10):
it hits when you're pretty near the island, you're not
just going to be getting the waves from the wind
and the storm. You're gonna be getting the waves that
are bouncing off of the rock walls, and they're pitching
you back and forth. So this could basically toss the
ship around. And then the stacked and four eye that
they found that could have shifted, and if those shift,

(17:33):
then the ship kind of lists to one side. Yeah,
the the and four I will shift, and a few
that are supporting the way it'll start to break. And
then suddenly you're nice interlocking puzzle that fits the hold
so perfectly doesn't fit right anymore, and they all kind
of lean to one side. And with a listing ship,
it's pretty easy for a wave to take it down.

(17:54):
I mean, it's notable that the majority of these wrecks
look like they sung intact. Yeah, most of the M
four I were still intact, right, Yeah, And and they're
just in a in a ship shape. Sorry she used
out an way that I mean they're They don't look
like they were torn to pieces and broken up on

(18:14):
the waves. They look like they just souncle all of
a sudden. So it's still a bit of a mystery too.
So I guess that's all we know from now on
these five room and shipwrecks, although it definitely looks like
we'll be finding out more in the near future, hopefully
so there may be another podcast on a different aspect
of this soon. Perfect Fall Up, And we actually do
have another podcast coming now. As we mentioned this one

(18:37):
is going to be more focused on Bent to Chenne
in that exiled prisoner reputation that it has um But
first we're gonna do some listener mail. So this email
is from Hannah and she was writing in response to
an episode Candice and I recorded a few weeks ago
on five famous historical weddings, and Kid and I were

(19:00):
a little skeptical of this rumor that wild horses on
Cumberland Island came up to Caroline Bassette Kennedy and nibbled
on her Lily of the Valley bouquet. We were just
like we've both been to Cumberland, and know that those
horses are very much wild. I've never seen one come
up to a person and snack on. Yeah, and so,

(19:21):
Hannah wrote, You're absolutely right in your skepticism. It's very
unlikely that a wild horse would approach her, and in
the off chance that it did, it certainly wouldn't chomp
on her bouquet. Like fox glove, lily of the Valley
contains opponents and other toxic substances. These toxins are there
to discourage animals like horses from grazing on the sweet
smelling plant. All part of the Lily of the valley

(19:44):
plant are quite poisonous and should be handled with care.
Wild horses may nibble on many things, but they certainly
won't dine on the lily of the valley. Let's hope,
for the horse of sake, that this story, while sweet,
is just a rumor. So what a cute letter. It's
really cute, and I I think it's good to know.
I meanly the best formative for poisonous. It seems like

(20:07):
maybe not the best flower to put in your bouquet.
I don't know. I don't not if you have animals
at your wedding, for having a barn yard themed wedding
boyd Lily the Valley. Um So, I guess that's our
advice for the day. And if you have any more
I don't know stories from shipwrecks to horses, feel free

(20:28):
to email us where at History podcast at how stuff Works.
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(20:50):
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