A ‘Wreckless’ Trip

In 1773 a ship set sail from England to India. As the Suez Canal wasn’t yet built, she had a long passage of ten thousand miles, via the Verde islands off the West Coast of Africa, thence around the Cape of Good Hope to head straight up north-east to Calicut, India.

Navigation was a tricky task those days. No GPS. No Loran or Decca. Though Mr. Harrison had just brought out the chronometer, it hadn’t yet being made a standard accessory on all ships. Without a chronometer to keep accurate time at sea, ascertaining the longitude was grossly imprecise.

After rounding the cape the ship was cruising to the north in the Indian Ocean, waiting to reach the right latitude before altering course eastwards towards the Indian coast. She was in a hurry to make landfall before the monsoon arrived. All of a sudden in the early hours the ship was rudely woken up to the dreadful sound of its running aground onto a reef. She thus became instantly famous by lending her name to the yet uncharted reef in the Laccadive Islands. This reef came to be known as the Byramgore reef.

From the Horsburgh records we know Byramgore was carrying a treasure on board. We still don’t know what kind of treasure it was. But it was important enough for the ship to leave behind two of its crew while the rest left for Calicut on a cutter, two hundred miles to the East. A rescue to recover the men and the treasure, soon thereafter, had to be postponed due to bad weather. The team could only return after two weeks. By then the two men had perished and the attempt to recover the treasure failed because the monsoon had set in.

The next year a fresh attempt was made to recover the treasure. But the wreck was decimated in the monsoon and had disappeared into the deeps. For the next two centuries the world forgot about it.

In 1989 I was on a hydrographic ship as the senior hydrographer under a dynamic captain who had just taken over command. We were tasked to locate the wreck of Byramgore and perhaps recover the unknown treasure. From the records we knew she had iron cannons fitted on board. They were meant to fight against piracy. The Somali pirates were a scourge even in those days.

We reckoned that the iron cannons were most likely to survive the passage of time and expected our sonars to find them.

Dr. S.R.Rao, an eminent marine archaeologist was on board. Rao had gained fame after discovering the undersea city off Dwarka in Gujarat. This was the fabled abode of Lord Krishna in Hindu mythology.

Besides our regular survey equipment which included side scan sonars, we carried naval divers equipped with underwater cameras,

Byramgore reef uncovers only during the low tide. Ground control proved to be a difficult task. We placed a trisponder (microwave ranger) on top of a lighthouse on the islet Bitra Pār, 25 miles away, to obtain one position line. Two more trisponders were rigged up on the Byramgore reef itself on raised poles. The three position lines gave us the required fix. It wasn’t a perfect arrangement but it would meet our need.

We were there for three days. All the four survey boats along with the ship carried out a typically high density survey to search for the wreck. Our team of divers and surveyors went on the reef during high water to physically search for evidences of the wreck. We did find a few interesting artifacts but it was disappointing that we couldn’t find any major remains of the wreck, cannons or treasure.

We noticed a rich colony of submerged corals. There were fishes galore. Away from the destructive human interference the natural fauna thrived.

The undersea terrain of this reef was typical of a coral atoll. It rose straight up from depths of 1000 metres. The gradient of the seabed was extremely steep. Our team analysed that the wreck could had rolled down on this steep gradient deep into the abyss.

Later on our way back to Bombay as I was poring through the echo-rolls and other data in the survey chart-room I got a message from the ward-room.

‘The bar is open.”

Opening the bar at sea was a bit of a surprise. The PMC, short for President of the Mess Committee, was a jolly old fellow and enjoyed his tipple. In the wardroom they were all there – scientists, divers, surveyors, except the Captain who is generally kept out of such gatherings to make the atmosphere informal. So that people can let go of their inhibitions.

Accompanied by loud laughter, the PMC raised a toast to ‘a wreck-less trip’. The term wreck-less was actually aimed towards the Captain who was quite reckless in his approach. I doubt whether his records would pass the safety audit of a commercial management.

Fallout of the Byramgore tragedy was that the region around Laccadive islands came to be perceived as unsafe. Even today the Admiralty manual Ocean Passages of the World recommend ships coming from Dondra head, south of Sri Lanka and bound for the Persian Gulf to first sail north to a point Lat. 13deg N, Long. 73deg E; before striking out westwards to the Strait of Hormuz. Thus bypassing this group of islands.