CFE researcher believes he has found a Vasco da Gama galleon

03 april, 2024≈ 3 min read

© Caesar Bita

Filipe Castro, nautical archaeologist and researcher in the CFE's History, Territories and Communities (HTC) group, believes he has found a galleon from Vasco da Gama's third armada, off Kenya.

From 1518, Portugal began to build ships designed for war, with the autonomy to sail to the Indian and Pacific oceans. Inspired by Mediterranean typologies, this new type of ship was called a galleon. It was probably a sailing ship with three or four masts, mounting artillery that covered 360º of its surroundings and allowed effective defence against gale attacks. Portuguese ships were quickly adopted by other nations and continued to evolve during the 16th century. It can be said that they changed the history of European expansion in the world that was then opening up to Europe.

One of these ships, S. Jorge, captain D. Fernando de Monroy, was lost in Malindi precisely 500 years ago, in 1524, on the way to India, in Vasco da Gama's third armada, and appears to be the ship that was found in the waters of that city, on the Ngomeni reef, in 2003.

In 2013, Caesar Bita, a maritime archaeologist at Kenya Museums, promoted an archaeological campaign at the site, excavating a trench that established the Portuguese origin of this ship and invited Filipe Castro. This collaboration gave rise to this invitation to a team of archaeologists from the HTC Maritime Archeology Laboratory, coordinated by Caesar Bita and Filipe Castro, with José Virgílio Pissarra, Tânia Casimiro, Alexandre Monteiro and Paulo Costa, who is investigating this archaeological site and to evaluate its potential for studying the history of shipbuilding in Portugal and the world.

Lying at shallow depths off the coast of Kenya, this ship is protected by the local population, who are part of this community archaeology project and who we intend to train so that they can monitor the finds and participate in their recording and analysis.

Although the identification of this ship is not definitive, we believe that Ngomeni's ship may be one of two Portuguese ships lost in the waters of Malindi, the galleon S. Jorge (1524) and the ship Nossa Senhora da Graça (1544). Although there is a list of eight Portuguese shipwrecks in Malindi waters, the provisional dates of the artefacts point to a shipwreck on the outward journey to India and a shipwreck date in the first quarter of the 16th century.

In addition to the apparent scientific interest associated with the remains of any 16th-century ship, this wreck may also have a significant historical and symbolic value as physical testimony to the presence of Vasco da Gama's third armada in Kenyan waters.