The Hunt For The Spanish Armada | FULL EPISODE | Time Team

[Music] about a mile from here some 20 meters down are some amazing archaeological finds five huge iron cannon two anchors and a great spread of smashed spanish pottery dating from the late 16th century it's tempting to think they might be part of a spanish armada galleon sunk after the famous naval battle but if so how why and when did they get here to kinloch berevi which is right on the north western corner of scotland time team have got just three days to dive these treacherous waters and find out [Music] [Applause] [Music] nearer to reykjavik than london kinloft bervy is now a quiet fishing port and a storm-lashed and inhospitable coastline the wreck site was originally discovered three years ago by the divers of raf rossignol led by corporal roy heming who found a group of anchors and cannon lying at the bottom of an underwater cliff over 20 meters down the seabed was covered with broken pottery more importantly they found this an intact myolica wine euro this highly decorated jug has been dated from the last quarter of the 16th century the time of the spanish oman in an attempt to prove whether the wreck's one of the fighting ships of philip ii's ill-fated invasion fleet or perhaps a lost mediterranean trading vessel a team of marine archaeologists will be searching the seabed for more accurate dating evidence as well as more pottery they'll be looking for small metal fines and personal artifacts we've been invited here by the archaeological diving unit the adu who are responsible for investigating and excavating the historic shipwrecks around the coastline with only a few days to dive on the site the adu's team of divers led by director martin dean have also enlisted the raf to help with what's become due to the unstable conditions on the seabed a classic case of rescue archaeology one of the reasons we're here is to recover pottery which is being damaged by the movement of water during storms there is archaeological evidence to indicate that every now and then another piece gets broken another piece gets broken and through time the whole assemblage would be ground into dust so our time team visit here is actually really important because if the potter is not recovered in time any information from it we're completely lost that's right we're in a classic situation where we've got to work fast to recover material and information before it disappears before we can set sail for the site phil has to meet a new but essential member of the archaeological team good lord graham that's a big old box you've got there earth you got in it that's eric our pet eric the rov yes remotely operated vehicle oh it's like a like a mini submarine then yeah what does it do then we've got a camera on the front two lights and propellers at the side on the top we fly it and take the pictures under water so you can operate it from on board the ship yep and you can actually see the pictures in a monitor yeah whatever eric sees we see when we're flying about so he's imminently mobile yep he can go down as deep as you like you can stay down there for virtually forever yeah as long as you've got power it'll stay down there so safe you don't actually have to have somebody in the water yeah you don't get wet at all but i still had to get wet in order to pass a tough refresher course in diving safety here in the harbour phil set off without me it takes him half an hour to get to the side onboard the ad and specially equipped vessel scimitar while the raf take the speedier option i always thought i was quite an experienced scuba diver until i came here but getting used to bulky dry suits um it's fine because you're so buoyant but as soon as you get back under the surface you've got all this flipping weight ah and you feel like a fish out of water [Music] eventually i managed to get out of the water and the harbour in the only transport available an old trawl it's hard to understand how we can have an armada wreck in this part of scotland but then again there's lots of things about the great spanish invasion fleet that aren't what they seem especially the role played by one of our supposed national heroes sir francis drake drake played very little part in the armada campaign he spent most of it gathering around looking for prizes and feathering his own nest and left most of the fighting to his fellow commanders and his role in the armada campaign was negligible the english fleet was commanded by lord howard of effingham and in fact all they did was pursue the spanish armada up towards uh the shoals of the of the netherlands and expended every single shot in the english locker to try and sync it and batter it into submission and how many did they sink felipe they sank one shirt one ship that's it so the armada wasn't in ruins um the fleet was here our shipwreck is right up on the north of scotland is there any way that it could be related to the armada oh it surely could be ah because you've got to remember that in naval warfare in the age of sail everything is determined by the wind in our historical accounts like there's robin's implicitly sneered at there's a lot of hot air but there isn't enough wind that's what decides everything in the age of sail and what happened to the eye from other was that it was blown by the wind uh up the north sea from the 9th of august onwards where you're standing more or less karensa was blown in your direction um but it wasn't your lure that drew them there was a following when driven and on the 13th that wind began on the 9th on the 13th it turned into a terrible storm which scattered the english fleet so much say that people all over europe thought that the spaniards must have won a tremendous victory that bin didn't scatter the alarm rather the our mother endured that wind and kept coming but by that time they decided they couldn't possibly ever get back to the channel and start the fight against the english again so they planned to sail back to spain through here between the aucklanders and shetlands and out here on the standard trade route from scandinavia to spain which would involve coming way out into the atlantic so that you avoid any possibility of getting blown onto these rocks by the powerful westerly winds you have to come out against the wind and eventually when you're quite safe well past ireland you can head towards spain and that's what their sailing instructions said but at that point this remorsely bad weather takes an even worse turn and they are lashed by the tail end of one of those hurricanes which periodically reaches right across the atlantic towards these um islands and that is when the most laggardly ships are blown way back way back over the course that they've already struggled through this is when we you one famous wreck is going all the way back to the chatrooms the fair isle um there's another famous uh wreck which um reached uh mull and actually managed to um anchor safely for a while and it's in that context that you can imagine a ship like ours perhaps being blown back as far as where we are now and being dashed on those rocks out there i'm beginning to get an idea of what it must have been like for the spanish sailors lost and at the mercy of the atlantic storms still you've got two big havens here one there and one there why didn't our spanish galleon find them you've got a very detailed modern chart there tone it compiled with lots of soundings over a long period of time you've got to remember the 16th century charts were very much in their infancy and this is the sort of thing that they might have carried at the time basically just they of scotland yes but you'd have been able to see these bays assuming that it was their lives well i mean look look out here now tony we've only been out half an hour where did we come from come on straight to it i think it's that one but i'm not sure it's very easy to get lost isn't it remember in the 16th century the the the fleet had been driven back by the winds a lot of them were trying to find shelter and other records of some that did beat themselves for shelter it might have been night the storms were raging this might have been covered in form all they knew from their charts that there was a big inlet which is that one right down there now the possibility is that they've been trying to head to that and with the westerly wind from behind us would have been driving them that way and there are all these rocks out here these are fairly much uncharted rocks at that period so actually it was really between the two harbours that the vessel was wrecked situated in a small bay below 100 foot high cliffs the dive site today is sheltered from an easterly wind it's like a mill pond so mooring safely above the sites no problem and the raf team diving on traditional scuba air tanks waste no time in getting into the water on board the scimitar though the adu as professional divers are using a surface supply system okay we're ready to fit the helmet their divers are fed a nitrogen rich gas mixture from tanks on board their air supply umbilical also carries a communication system and more importantly for us their diving helmet has a video camera attached so we can see what the diver [Music] sees [Music] it takes the divers several minutes to descend the 25 meters to the bottom of the sea cliff but once down it's very calm and tranquil and yet this coastline is lashed every winter by hurricanes and 150 mile an hour winds what i don't understand is if you're having all this weather which presumably turns this water into a turmoil how come down here we've got these most fantastic finds and anchors still in place and cannons still in place why aren't they all swept away topographically we've got a shallow area here that we're sitting on now and then it just dives away very very very steeply like a big step yeah a big step it just goes straight down to 30 40 meters i think what's happening is we're getting a little bit of shelter from the rock ahead of us but also the waves are not building up they're just bypassing this deep bit of water and going straight onto the shell so because there's a step there yes it's like they're protected in that little triangle there i think so yes i think it's the only only explanation for it normally at that depth even in sheltered waters it's like every winter someone's gone down with a jcb and re-landscape the area whereas my experience down there was just to see stuff there that was still intact after all those years in this environment is really quite extraordinary with all the divers in the water the rov is launched useful for searching the wreck site eric also acts as an underwater safety backup his all-seeing video eye makes sure none of the divers are in trouble much like a scheduled site on land the team's restricted by the terms of the license for this site we've got a surface recovery license which means the retrieval of small fines from the sea bed which would be lost or damaged by being left there so phil's not going to be needing his mata or shovel oh that's the uh the rov picture yeah that is actually the diver yeah even though he's an experienced amateur diver phil needs to get to grips with all this high-tech kit before he can safely dive roger that's not too far from daytona he's got to get his underwater bearings and here you can see the um diver's position acoustically being shot oh he's moving yeah it's moving very slowly so he's going along and he's picking up fines and then each one he finds he puts a number of tags as you can actually plot its position okay he's now going to look at a piece of uh myolica okay steve can you put your helmet light on and look at that myolica so that oh good lord it's not a gourd it's gorgeous with that blue pattern blue painting oh that's quite a big pic oh and it's got yellow on it as well yeah you can see see an interlaced inner lace pattern without that yellow that yellow yeah okay steve that's great and if you could search um just generally for more diagnostic pieces you can see that there's a lot of jumble of rocks right very little thin sediment but it's quite extraordinary that the ceramics are in actually quite good condition they're broken but it's not a huge amount of abrasion so it's difficult to understand because this must be quite a dynamic environment [Music] the raf's team of divers working in strict rotation have scoured the seabed and have come up with some amazing finds this round pottery shirt looks like it has a wasp or insect pattern on it [Music] and this thing whatever it is seems to have three legs all these fines need to be carefully recorded before being lifted the distribution and spread is critical to our understanding of the wreck site so it's your turn to get wet then yeah but what's the plan for the dove what you're reckoning to do well today i'm hoping to establish some tapes onto the datums that have been fixed already on the seabed so we can start measuring in the distribution of the pottery that have been tagged by the divers but the surveying of fines underwater is far more complicated than on land to start off with we have to go and attach tapes to datums which may take up to sort of five minutes right once you've got all the tapes in place and you're pulling them tight so you're gonna how many divers do you need um well you can do it with one but that means you have to tie one end of the tape onto a data right and then you go to the net then you go to the next statement that takes then you swim with one driver it's a lot of swimming up and down and so as whereas on land we would take just the coordinates of two tapes yeah under water you're taking measurements from three tapes that's right and ideally four because the idea is to is to within those measurements is to derive depth as well because it's a three-dimensional survey with tapes is it likely that we could survey in five objects or 20 objects in half an hour 10 to 15 perhaps once the system's up and running and the point is it is a very slow process oh yes much slower than on land and we're constrained by the amount of time we can spend on the seabed because of these debts about half an hour is our maximum bottom time the raf are assisting in the surveying with typical military efficiency they're field testing a sonar dyne acoustic system which fires a signal from the find to beacons attached to the datum points these coordinates are recorded and mapped the underwater map now shows over 50 pottery pines in three dimensions which means they're ready to be brought to the surface [Music] in recent years over 200 underwater man hours have been expended in finding the pottery fragments alone getting them to the surface will take four people one whole dive to achieve it's worth it [Music] the artifacts are carefully carried to the fines tray and placed inside [Music] the entire tray is then sealed before it's raised 25 metres by a road to the surface the plan is to lift some of the more diagnostic pieces pottery that will hopefully enable our experts to accurately date and geographically place our red in the 16th century [Music] i just hadn't realized just how big the pieces were oh oh my goodness this is incredibly lavish stuff in it that's really top quality incredibly lavish late 16th century material by the look of it i suspect this stuff has been buried until quite recently in the last few years and some change in the sea bed deposits have exposed [Music] there's an impressed mark on there the manufacturers or emergence mark impressed in there well is that the sort of thing that is traceable i have no idea i i'm this is the first time i've ever held olive jars i've only ever seen them in archaeological publications before and in photographs and i've from memory i don't recall that sort of thing i mean you know you get it in the roman period on ampere is this some indication of its if you like if it's rarity i mean you've been doing nautical archaeology for a fair number of years and yet this is the first time you've actually held stuff like this yes it is is that an indication of it's rare it's very exotic for the for uk waters end of day one it's been an incredibly exhausting day getting to grips with diving in these conditions and the rain tipping down all the time but you can't really moan in this place can you and the finds have been fantastic and even now gone seven o'clock this has just come up this is a galley brick which they would have used to make a stone fire on board the ship and they would have been heating something in this on it it's a a tripod and this is the thing that they were heating some kind of residue resin which we'll have to look at in the future hopefully plenty more fines tomorrow and i'll be down there to look for them join us after the break [Music] beginning of day two and yesterday we came up with some really fantastic finds but apparently the weather's on the turn and by tomorrow conditions could be really horrible so we've got to do as much as we can today still things are looking good we got even more fines last night after we finished filming including this sounding weight which the spanish sailors would have used to swing lead under the water so they could work out how deep or shallow they were which may well have been the last act any spanish sailor undertook before the galleon finally hit the rocks that's assuming we can prove it's a spanish galleon yesterday's pottery finds may hold the vital clue duncan we've got the first finds off the site in here now i haven't seen these yet oh look at that look at the colors are incredibly bright aren't they they get in there that's amazing i mean you wouldn't think they spent 400 years in the sea would you well that looks like it has brilliant brilliantly preserved wow now what what is that that's all that orange and yellow design there can you see here uh in orange we've got a roofscape possible it's a building yes possibly a view of a town or a monastery and presumably was huge we've got a fluting here so we're talking about the rim at least out this far it is a large vessel what's this mark on the the rim of this jar here that's an oil jar an olive jar for olive oil for olive oil or some of them held pitch preserved fruit to a variety of substances this mark is a stamp which would have um possibly some equivalent of an excise mark i suppose so it either gives you the volume of the contents of how much it would have held or it's possibly a maker's mark or a consignment mark which tells you what's inside what date do you think this assemblage is the crucial question of course um let's go through it there's nothing here we essentially got an assemblage of italian there's more italian there let's the mediterranean 16th century is fine right so they've come from the right part of the world they're roughly the right sort of date to be part of the army that's what i'm saying the other thing which occurs to me looking at it i mean it's such beautiful stuff is it the sort of pottery that a warship would have had on it or is it more like to be a merchant trader well the armada was made up of more than just warships there were supply ships it was an invasion fleet not a battle fleet in that sense so there are two elements that we have to consider one is that there were ships carrying goods for the consumption of the invading army and there's also the possibility of of a captain of a vessel having sufficient opinion of himself to want to carry reasonable high quality material so what we really need to do is establish whether we're talking about a cargo or shipboard consumption what more do you need to be more certain i think we need more pottery well one thing is certain there is more of this type of pottery there are one or two more olive jars including one intact one and there is certainly more tableware and a lot more variety of forms of earthenware as the potter is carefully cleaned of 400 years worth of encrustation and marine growth we still need to prove whether the myolica was the personal property of a wealthy spanish sea captain or perhaps the cargo of a mediterranean trading vessel that coincidentally sank at the same time as the armada a piece of twisted lead sheeting has also been recovered could it be from our wreck that's the only bit of the ship that we've recovered so far and it was a patch that was used to repair some home were they able to make running repairs i mean they didn't have professional divers in those days did they every ship had you know it's a little core of divers and if for example you were holed below the water line and some ships were in combat with the english the english that was the english tactic to aim low and try and sink the enemy's vessels the divers would go down and they'd nail a bit of lead plate over the opening and that's why our divers here have come up with that tortured bit of old lead plate that they brought up if you allow your imagination to be stimulated by this you can imagine the ship persevering through all the storms and eventually being washed up here where the vengeful sea crashes it and contorts it and brutalizes that horrible twisted shape that the bit of lead has now i mean that almost to me is the most vivid piece of evidence we've come up with even more you know sort of heart searing than all the wonderful pottery cannonball holes and spanish divers may be stretching the facts but the lack of metal pies is available all very well but where are the basics the ship's nails the musket shot the small metal finds that you'd expect to find and an armada ship would have been armed to the teeth we've got iron guns on the sea bed but where are the bronze cannon that all ships of this period carried um i've inflated dry suits through there i also have the aim of phil's first diver the raf has ever come well equipped their metal detectors should be able to fit into the crevices between the boulders our surface recovery license means that we can't dig for fines only retrieved from the surface phil begins by examining the two anchors and cannon we can only guess at how and why these huge iron objects have come together in such a strange formation hundreds of years worth of encrustation covers any surface detail on the cannon that may give an accurate clue to its date the anchors though less corroded unfortunately are of a type and size that we use throughout europe over a period of 300 years phil finds no sign of any other metal [Music] work the detector sweep also ends in failure one four-man dive used up and precisely zero metal fines what is going on here answer may be that the wreck broke into several pieces and outside represents just part of the vessel the rest lying undiscovered somewhere else along this coast after everything they'd been through the spanish sailors who were shipwrecked on the british coast deserved a chance of survival surely but what happened to them do we know in many cases yes particularly in ireland where most of the ships founded they'd struggle up the beach and what would they face if they were lucky a local irish chieftain that hated the english but in most cases they met the english militia effectively some two thousand soldiers trying to control the entire west coast of ireland but thinly spread precisely considering that there might have been as many as a thousand souls on board one spanish ship that went down the english were terrified that the spanish would invade and conquer ireland and deprive them of one of their great possessions scotland though scotland's a different case because in scotland you've got a neutral country in which there are many people that are friendly to the spaniards and hostile to the english so if you struggled ashore on a beach like this these situations are entirely different so what happened to the people who landed somewhere like this they got robbed by the locals they got stripped naked in many cases but they weren't physically harmed and usually they were taken in by catholic gentry and taken care of and it took ages for these spaniards finally to make their way back to spain we've got records of them gradually trickling in over the following nine years it's finally my turn to get wet or is that wetter katie and i have been asked to try and solve a bit of on the shallow part of the site in the kelp forest where there's rumor of a lost cannon you're pretty sure that there's another cannon down here that no one else has identified aren't you well we found a cannon about two years ago and i'm not convinced that the one we found this time is the same kind of one because the last one we found was half buried in the seabed and this one's clear i'm standing clearly to see that unbox and what makes you think it's around here or not over there well this is the idea that we were diving at the time but that was in the winter and there was no kelp and now it's summer you can't get through the culture search so what are we going to do about that well the plan is to go down and cut our way through the kelp and clear it out of the way and see if we can find it that way never done any kelp harvesting before i've never done any kelp harvesting it's the first time for everything should we get it [Music] very comfortable clearing seaweed in search of a lost cannon sounds like good fun little did i know how difficult it would be the nautical equivalent of mata king and shoveling hacking our way through the kelp expended so much of our energy that we used up most of our air in just 15 minutes [Music] bagging the kelp to prevent it falling back and covering the site used up the rest and no sign of the mysterious cannon we're going to have to resort to a high tech solution if we want to find this cannon john this thing here is actually a magnetometer isn't it that's right but it's nothing like the ones that you use on land well it's actually very similar what's the principle well i mean we're still looking at magnetic changes and we're on land we're looking for things like ditches and pottery kilns and foundations and they give us sort of smooth anomalies um here we're looking for canon and they'll give us sharp iron spikes and so that's what we wanted to detect so what's the difference between the way that john does mag on land and the way that you do it under the water well the physics uh exactly the same it's just the way in which we deploy the magnetometer itself the sensing unit uh in this case we have a a torpedo shape thing which is towed behind the boat and you call it a fish we call it a fish yeah and it operates out this way yeah that's right it will fly through the water just like a torpedo and you go up and down and up and down in the water just like john does online exactly the same yeah and henry whatever can we do with gps in the middle of the ocean what we already have is mark and his team have got a um a map of the subsurface uh the actual topography down there they've got to position the site and then if we find anything with this we can bring that to the same same mapping so it's all important just bring all that data together if this mystery cannon really is down here do you reckon we're going to find it it should do yeah it should make a big loud peepee noise which is what we're after big loud peepee noise listen out for that before launching the fish we'd have to get everyone out of the water because we don't want the magnetometer to detect any of the metal carried by our divers i mean basically this is just looking at the earth's magnetic field with nothing in it the sort of seabed no sort of sign of any iron cannon or anchors the problem is we're fighting we're flying the fish very high because it's shallow water and we're not sure about what's happening in terms of depth so we're gradually getting deeper and deeper as we're going off here which means we're getting further and further away from any cannon that's lying on the seabed endless trolls later and no pp noise an error in our steering of just a couple of meters would have meant we passed close by but not close enough so just because we didn't find it doesn't mean it's not there it's almost the end of the day and the weather's taken a turn for the worse the raf boys are still game but feels a bit worried about his next underwater excursion so martin what actually is the purpose of this dive well there are two things we're going to do we're going to take you down to the deeper part of the site down to about 25 meters and there we're going to recover the one complete pottery vessel uh that's lying there it's an olive jar and we have a construct a specially constructed container on the seabed placed there by the rf guys at the shot and we're going to put the pot in the container put the container in the lifting basket and then the raf guys will gently lift it to the sides for an hour how long is that going to take you well we've got a maximum time of about 28 minutes um we can't go into decompression times because in this weather with a brisk wind if the boat starts to move we have to be in a position to recover the divers almost instantaneously so you can't stop to decompress on the way out because on dry land once a fine is ready to be lifted it's a sort of two-minute job to just get it in the finest tray but underwater it's much more difficult everything underwater is in slow motion essentially i mean it's taking us one whole diving operation to recover one whole pot i mean it doesn't compare with the shortness of time okay martin it's korenza can you hear me now okay so are you down at the olive jar now yes we're at the olive jar i can see it yeah [Music] [Music] okay [Music] the padding's just it doesn't get knocked around and broken coming up to the surface yeah okay now okay just put it down here [Music] [Music] hello everyone and we have eight minutes to get you to the first stop safe to stop six meters did you copy that diver too on his way back up martin spots a tagged piece of pottery unlike anything so far recovered that's exactly what we want from duncan we're saying he needs diagnostic pieces try and work out where the ship came from that's fantastic back on the surface the intact olive jar looks like it may still contain remnants of its original contents only a long period of conservation and analysis will tell and this find turns out to be far more diagnostic than we could ever hope for but you'll have to take martin's oil lamp opinion with a pinch of salt it's the end of day two we've all been in now the visibility is fantastic and the fines are getting better and better but will the weather hold out tomorrow keep your fingers crossed for us and join us after the break [Music] beginning of day three and it looks as though our worst fears are about to be realised it may look pretty nice out there now but the weather forecast says heavy rain and 30 knot winds we've already sent our professional divers out there let's hope they can do some work before the weather starts to break because every new find seems to be even higher status than the last unfortunately the sea conditions are far too severe for safe diving and the raf reluctantly returned i know you've all been in and out of the water non-stop for the last few days but at last here's a chance for you to see what we've actually pulled out what do you reckon on this lad i'm astounded this is the best collection of italian renaissance pottery excavated from an archaeological context in this country i think i can say that now it's astonishing we've got a full range of italian tin glazed pottery here myolica it's called generally when you say italian is it the sort of stuff that a spanish nobleman might count oh yes certainly this material here especially was favored by the spanish nobility what about this uh yeah that's the piece we were looking at yesterday it's been cleaned up even more and ray sands working on his reconstruction those colours are actually quite uh diagnostic they're a clue as to the origins of the piece it's a monteluko crespina what's that a bowl a fluted bowl made an imitation of silver plate at a place called montelupo east of florence the parallel i've found for this piece has been dated 1575. when was the spanish armada anyone 1588. thank you but here this is really the creme de la creme this is the best collection of this material ever excavated in this country and it represents high status we're talking dukes and princes luxury tableware made to order by a family based in urbino on the eastern side of italy called the patanazi family and who would they have been making this kind of stuff for well this is a star piece this is a salt cellar it's boat shaped so the same at both ends with the salt held in the dish in the middle and would have been a centerpiece of the table the parallel i found for this piece was made by the patanatsi family for a service presented at the wedding of the duke of ferrara why would an invading army be carrying a dinner set well it may be an indication of the confidence of the spanish nobility in their success and perhaps they were intending to use it for a damn good meal when they got to the other end martin did all this stuff come from one small area yes it did it comes from about four square meters of the seabed and is there likely to be more down there still undoubtedly because the nature of the seabed is such that small pieces could be tucked under rocks and in crevices so is this an area that you're going to target as a priority for this afternoon if the weather holds out of course we decide to have one last attempt of diving inside in extremely marginal weather conditions a westerly gail knowing that all the pottery collected so far is dated before 1588 tips the balance in favor of this being an armada red but if we can collect more pottery giving us a bigger sample for analysis this must mean more accurate dating and if that dating still prior to 1588 then we can be confident that this is a lost armada ship if this is an armada vessel it would have got here during a period of very strong very heavy westerly winds and probably you know after the mother had been lashed by the tail end of an atlantic hurricane well one thing i'm quite keen to establish uh if whatever period the vessel belongs to is if anybody survived the wreck and may have established themselves as a small community settlement shelters on this ship on this headland here and i think that's one of the things that we're going to have to do is actually go and look along here and see what the topography is like if just that very remote chance that somebody did make it ashore stewart's plan is to trek from kinloch bayervi to the cliffs above the wreck site in search of 16th century archaeology three kilometers as the crow flies the nearer 10 when you take into account the mountainous terrain with a shortage of willing volunteers steward press gangs our unit manager jamie into coming with him i tell you what it's a hard character to keep up with this stuart i don't have set some pace like a trust up chicken in this life jacket i've just landed in a lock about two kilometers away from the wreck because we can't land the sea states too rough but it's been a good place to start because immediately you've come across the remains of a a small farmstead effectively it's ruined now but there are at least two three buildings here this is typical of the sort of farmsteads that were likely to be here in the 16th 17th and 18th centuries they're difficult to date but there's no reason something like this might not have been a small family farm at the time of the armada wreck onwards and upwards if that is a vessel from the armada is there any way of us working out which one it is if it's in our mother vessel it's got to be one of the laggedly wobbly ones which couldn't make much headway and was easily blown back by the terrific storm it's got to be on the base of what the divers have found so far it looks as if it's probably a relatively modest ship and one which is very lightly armed and there is a ship that we don't yet know the whereabouts final whereabouts of which fits the bill it was the san gabriel and it was a supply vessel maybe a a horse carrier and if our ship is on our mothership where i don't want to allow my imagination to run away with me and historian's imagination has to be disciplined by respect to the evidence and respect for the sources we don't yet have enough evidence to be certain about this at all but i'd be prepared to wage a small stake at the moment that it might be the san gabriel laggedly and wobbly out on site the first priority is to get the team safely into the water the diet plan is to find tag bag record then lift as much highly decorated and patent pieces of pottery as they can but the weather seems to be worsening stuart's search for any traces of wreck survivors has petered out up here there are no signs of human habitation well come about another kilometer over the hills i can see a lot i can often see the sea and this is one of the locks they might have hopefully tried to get a long boat into to get some provisions and down below me here have a fresh water stream so this is the sort of thing that would have been very appealing after months at sea to get some fresh water replenish and then carry on the journey so we're going let's see send evidence of anything around here at 26 meters the effects of the storm are still apparent the visibility is poor the sand and the weed from the sea bed are now flying around everywhere making the location of new finds very difficult katy has managed to find a new piece of pot but it's difficult for her to see if it's patented [Music] the divers are working as fast as they can but the swell of the storm even at this depth is starting to affect the stability and safety of the dive reluctantly the team cut short what they know is their final dive on the side this year [Music] disappointed they returned to the surface with little to show for such a dangerously exhausting exercise now trent almost 10 kilometers from kinloch berli to the cliffs above the wreck site well finally got here it's pretty easy to see how anybody who ship right down here would have found it incredibly difficult to get up these cliffs you can also see just how tortuous those rocks out there and they could have easily brought a ship to its demise on these rocks it's starting to feel a bit desolate out here now the weather's closing in the boats have gone you can see the boys where the wreck is a feeling of some sadness that potentially quite a few hundred people might have drowned down there but uh that's history and that's the armada i think i'm going to find my way back now the weather's finally beaten us all just as it did the wreck that still lies in the relative tranquility below the treacherous rocks of kinloch bervi it's been a real struggle working in such a hostile environment and being constrained by the limited working time at these depths but the evidence we've managed to accumulate does point to an armada wreck and quite possibly the san gabriel who knows if all these boulders were to be moved away in a major marine excavation what might still be down here after three days and an incredible amount of work from the raf and the adu it does seem as though our shipwreck was part of the great armada but what we could never have expected was the treasure trove of renaissance pottery which was possibly owned by some spanish prince or duke convinced of victory and the conquest of england but which it seems ended for him and his men with death smashed on the rocks and cliffs of the scottish coastline [Music] you

Channel: Time Team Classics

Views: 103,566

Rating: 4.8809757 out of 5

Keywords: Team Team, Archaeology, History, Education, Educational, British TV, British History, Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, John Gater, Stewart Ainsworth, Mick Aston, archeological dig, Channel 4, Time Team Full Episodes, Full Episode, Duke of Medina Sidonia, Queen Elizabeth I, Spanish Netherlands, Privateering, 16th Century, European History, Anglo-Spanish War, English Armada, Galleon, Sir Francis Drake, Duke of Parma, Scotland, Ireland

Id: OLhc7xtY3LM

Length: 48min 41sec (2921 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 03 2020