Loaded with thousands of mint condition, pure gold coins from Spain and Portugal, historians are able to date the ship to between 15, whilst the cargo matches that on The Bom Jesus, as detailed in a rare 16th-century book “Memorias Das Armadas,” which lists the vessel as lost.įrom evidence at the site, Noli and his team have pieced together what happened to The Bom Jesus. Though they are unable to unequivocally prove it, overwhelming evidence suggests the vessel is The Bom Jesus (“The Good Jesus”), a Portuguese ship on its way to India that never made its way beyond the Southern Atlantic. The discovery of this stone set off the diamond rush and Van Niekerk. “I thought ‘Oh, no no, this is definitely a shipwreck.’”Īfter scrutinizing the find, archaeologists now think it might be one of the most significant shipwrecks ever found. The history of diamonds is South Africa has its root in the Northern Cape and. He uncovered a 500-year-old musket and elephant tusks. More than 130 years after South Africas first diamond rush, hundreds of prospectors are hoping to strike it rich on the booming. More than 1,000 people went to the village of KwaHlathi in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province in search of what they believed to be diamonds, the New York Post reported. South Africa experienced a transformation between 1870, when the diamond rush to Kimberley began, and 1902, when the South African War ended. “It just looked like a disturbed beach, but lying on it were bits and pieces,” he recalls. At a loss, they called in an archaeologist.ĭieter Noli remembers first surveying the scene: The miners themselves did not know what they had hit on when they discovered pieces of metal, wood and pipes while they were bulldozing. A diamond rush is on in South Africa where fortune seekers are flocking to a village hoping to to turn into millionaires overnight. When rumors of a diamond find hit social media, thousands of jobless South Africans rushed to a sleepy village. What was found that day had not been seen since the 15th century.
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