Why We Can't Name the Ships We Found 4,300 Feet Down

Three wooden sailing ships are lying on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, about 170 miles off the coast of Texas, 4,300 feet down. They are almost whole. Their cargo is still lying exactly where it fell, in the sediment around the hulls: ceramic jugs, glass bottles, coiled rope, stacked cowhides, muskets, cannon, a pair of eyeglasses, books in leather bindings. A remotely operated vehicle has filmed all of it in close detail. We still cannot tell you what a single one of those ships was called. Nobody went looking for them. In 2011 an oil company was running a sonar survey across that part of the seabed and the sonar came back with a shape on it. Two years later the survey of the ground around it turned up a second ship, and then a third, all within five miles. The researchers who have worked on them believe all three went down at the same moment. CHAPTERS 0:00 The shape on the sonar 1:19 The least interesting square mile in the Gulf 2:45 What we do not know 3:09 Named after a lease block 3:45 A machine on a cable 4:39 Monterrey A 5:14 The cargo, lying where it fell 6:23 The books and the eyeglasses 7:16 Four ways to name a wreck 8:20 Monterrey A fails all four 9:45 The copper 9:57 The shipworm 11:36 Then they found two more 12:17 What the researchers actually say 13:01 Proximity is not cause 13:48 A single bad night 14:19 Things went there to be deleted 15:43 Why any of it is still there 16:30 No waves, no light, no people 17:43 Arrangement is the information 18:54 Not an incident, a sample 19:41 A pair of eyeglasses SOURCES NOAA Ocean Exploration, Gulf of Mexico 2014 expedition, Monterrey Shipwreck Site https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/okeanos/exp... Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Monterrey Shipwreck project https://www.boem.gov/environment/environme... Three 19th-Century Shipwrecks Found in Gulf of Mexico, Archaeology Magazine https://www.archaeology.org/news NOAA Ocean Exploration video archive, National Centers for Environmental Information https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/ocean-e... ABOUT THIS VIDEO An educational documentary, assembled from the sources above. One thing in it is contested and we say so in the video. The researchers believe the three ships were sailing in company and were lost in a single event. That is a real position based on real evidence, but it is a hypothesis. Three ships lying within five miles of each other, dated to the same few decades, are three ships lying within five miles of each other. Proximity is not cause. We think the convoy reading is probably right. We are not going to tell you it is proven. Depth is given as 4,300 feet or about 1,300 metres depending on the source. Monterrey A is roughly 84 feet, and calling it a two-masted schooner of around 200 tons is a reading of the hull, not a certainty. Found an error? Comment with a source and the correction gets pinned. FOOTAGE Everything here is real footage. Nothing is generated, drawn or simulated. Most of what you are watching IS the wreck this episode is about. NOAA Ocean Exploration released the 2014 dive video into the public domain, so the jugs, the glass, the coiled rope, the helm and the shipworm damage are the actual site, 1,300 metres down. That footage is public only as a compressed 640x360 file, so it has been upscaled and is softer than the rest. We would rather show you the real wreck slightly soft than a different wreck in high definition. The rest is wreck diving filmed elsewhere, used where the narration is about wrecks in general. Treat those shots as illustration, not as this site. The narration uses an AI voice. The research, script and edit are human work. Public domain video from NOAA Ocean Exploration, plus four Wikimedia Commons clips under CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ - every file, author and licence is in the pinned comment. Music is original. THE LAST FATHOM Documentaries about what is under the water. Shipwrecks, sealed caves, deep sea discoveries and the people who went looking. New episode every week. Subscribe so you do not miss the next one. Business and corrections: cjrduopaklnctutgdk12@gmail.com