ROBE, AUSTRALIA—Australian National Maritime Museum announced that a team of archaeological divers believe they have located the wreck of Koning Willem de Tweede. The 800-ton Dutch merchant sailing vessel was lost in Guichen Bay off South Australia in 1857. The team used marine magnetometry and underwater metal detectors in an area where the ship reportedly went down and were able to identify the ruins of a large ship measuring 460 feet long by 140 feet wide, which match the Dutch vessel’s documented dimensions. Components from what appears to be the ship’s windlass were also seen protruding from the seafloor and fragments of nineteenth-century Chinese coarse earthenware ceramic were located on the beach immediately adjacent to the wreck site. These finds further bolster the researchers' belief that the ship is indeed the Koning Willem de Tweede. Sixteen of the boat’s 25 crewmen drowned and were later buried in the nearby dunes. Only days prior to the vessel's loss, more than 400 Chinese miners bound for the gold fields at Bendigo and Ballarat in Victoria had disembarked from the vessel. To read about a seventeenth-century Dutch merchant ship that wrecked off the west coast of Australia, go to "Letter from Australia: Murder Islands."
