The Baltictech diving group from Poland benefits from exploring northern seas that preserve their secrets in excellent condition, and now the divers have made another exciting discovery – a 19th-century Baltic shipwreck brimming with intact champagne, wine and ceramic mineral-water bottles.
As yet unidentified, the wreck is thought to be a mid-19th-century merchant sailing vessel. When it showed up unexpectedly on the group’s sonar 37km south of the island of Öland off Sweden, however, it was at first suspected to be a fishing-boat.
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“We had already done one dive that day and at the beginning there were doubts whether there would be anyone willing to go down,” said the group’s leader Tomasz Stachura. The deep-wreck photographer is also founder, owner and CEO of dive-suit manufacturer Santi Diving, and a member of the Explorers Club New York.
Two of the other divers, Marek Cacaj and Paweł Truszyński, volunteered to go down for a “quick look” that turned out to last some two hours. They found the bottles and china lying “from wall to wall” in the hold.
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They were unable to see it all but reckoned there were at least 100 bottles of champagne there, along with a cargo of porcelain items.
There were also at least another 100 bottles of mineral water packed into baskets and these caught the divers’ imagination even more, because they say it was such a valuable commodity in the 19th century.
The brand name Selters, a German company that still exists, was stamped onto the bottles, in a style that later research indicated would have dated from between 1850 and 1867. The ceramics factory that made the bottles also remains in business.
One theory is that the ship was travelling between Stockholm and St Petersburg in Russia. Tsar Nicholas I was reported to have lost one of his ships in the area in 1852.
“Mineral water was treated almost like medicine and was available only on royal tables,” says Stachura. “On our wreck, we found about 100 sealed bottles of Selters water… its products are still considered exquisite.”
The scale of the overall find amazed Stachura. “I have been diving for 40 years and it often happens that there is one bottle or two,” he says. “To discover a wreck with so much cargo, it’s a first for me.” He believes both the fizzy wine and water could still be drinkable.
The Swedish regional authorities have been notified about the wreck-site and Stachura says that Baltictech intends to mount an expedition to recover the bottles next year. The group has been in contact with experts at Södertörn University in Sweden for guidelines on how to proceed.
Tomasz Stachura also organises the biennial Baltictech Conference for technical and recreational divers in Gdynia, Poland. The next event, which will include a presentation about the champagne wreck, takes place over the weekend of 23-24 November this year.
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