By Annabel Venning
In an echo of Whisky Galore, deep-sea hunters have found a trove of Bordeaux wine in the wreck of a WWI ship off Cornwall. It could be worth millions. The problem? Red tape threatens to block a daring salvage bid...
STEAMING through the deep waters off Cornwall’s Lizard Peninsula on September 29, 1918 — six weeks before the end of World War I — the crew of merchant navy vessel the Libourne were on high alert.
They may have been just ten miles off the coast, but the threat from German U-boats did not diminish in home waters. If anything, it increased.
Within months of the declaration of war, Germany had announced an exclusion zone around Britain, within which merchant ships were sunk without warning. By 1917, an average of 15 British vessels were being sunk every day as U-boat captains hunted their prey remorselessly through the coastal waters, most notably the English Channel.
The Admiralty responded by escorting merchant convoys and so, when the Libourne set out from Bordeaux that morning, she was one of a group of five steamships. They were on the return leg of a mission to deliver coal to Britain’s French allies.
And when the Libourne departed Bordeaux for Liverpool, via Penzance, its hold was full of wine, champagne, brandy and Benedictine — a liquor favoured by monks — along with £425 worth of gherkins.
But whoever was eagerly awaiting the delivery of this valuable cargo — very wealthy individuals, no doubt — would be sorely disappointed.
For this liquid treasure never reached its destination. And now it is the subject of a heated battle between a group of marine explorers who discovered the wreck and its cargo, and bureaucrats from Historic England and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS).
The treasure-hunters include Daniel Jayson, an expert in underwater operations, naval historian Ian Hudson and Belgian sea captain and salvage expert Luc Heymans, who in 2004 discovered the wreck of a 10th-century treasure ship off Indonesia, laden with gold, crystals and pearls.
They decided to hunt for wrecks off the British coast because, unlike many marine jurisdictions, the UK permits treasure hunting.
While it is illegal to disturb war graves — wrecks which contain dead bodies — Britain has not signed the 2001 Unesco treaty that forbids the exploitation of underwater wrecks for commercial gain.
After scouring shipping archives, the treasure-hunters shortlisted 50 potential wrecks for exploration, among them the Libourne.
While it was not marked on any charts, they succeeded in locating it and, in 2015, sent in specialists who could dive down 100m to search it.
The ship’s manifest mentioned the gherkins, and ‘champagne and brandy — 1900’, but the explorers were in for a pleasant surprise.
Photographs and video footage taken by the divers revealed that lying within the rotting remnants of the Libourne, and scattered on the seabed beside it, were far more than the 1,900 bottles mentioned in the manifest.
There were tens of thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of bottles, and not only brandy and champagne. Writing on the corks revealed that they included red and white wine, too, as well as Benedictine.
The treasure-hunters duly applied for permission to salvage the bottles, an expensive and difficult operation involving highly specialised divers who would live underwater in a pressurised capsule for 18 days while they carried out the recovery operation.
But the mission was sunk before it could even be launched. The Government refused to grant them permission to mount a salvage operation, despite the fact that the group pledged to donate some of the profits to the Lizard Lifeboat Station, which is in sore need of funds, and a maritime history research non-profit called the 1421 Foundation.
As Daniel Jayson ruefully remarks: ‘I thought this government was meant to be in favour of business.
‘We have invested a lot of money and went ahead with the exploratory dive knowing that the law allowed it. But we were subsequently told that the Government, despite not signing the Unesco treaty, applies its policy.
‘They have told us that we can bring up a few bottles to evaluate them — but that’s financially impossible, you can’t get investment for just a few bottles.’
Meanwhile, the wreck is being damaged by trawlers, which drag their weighted nets and anchors along the seabed, scattering the bottles far and wide as they do so.
As time goes on, more will be lost, and some may degrade if their corks become damaged.
‘There is no common sense,’ says Jayson. ‘We’ve tried to have grownup conversations with Historic England, but we have got nowhere. If they don’t let us salvage it, the cargo will simply be lost. It’s bureaucratic nonsense.’
But is the cargo likely to be valuable after 100 years at the bottom of the sea? Wine experts believe it is. Similar vintages of fine wines found in Swedish waters recently fetched up to £9,000 apiece, and wine connoisseurs are, says Jayson, ‘falling over themselves’ to get their hands on it.
Ian Hudson adds: ‘The deep ocean is the perfect cellar; it’s dark and the temperature is cool and constant. Many wine houses are storing wine underwater now. I’ve spoken to experts who sampled wines previously salvaged from wrecks and the flavour is amazing. It can sell for 25,000 euros a bottle.’
What’s more, he says, it’s an important scientific project: ‘There has never been anything of this age or quantity found off the coast in UK waters. We could learn how wine is affected at depth, whether corks are pushed in from the pressure, or get bacteria in them. We know that the corks on the brandy have lead sheathing over the top so they will be in pristine condition.’
The corks on the champagne remain firmly in place as the wire cages — or ‘muselets’ — are intact, so it is thought the drink will still be fizzy.
The team can only guess at the quality of the wine because no details of their vintages were mentioned in the manifest. But as the consignment was sent from Bordeaux, possibly to keep it out of German hands — and only the rich drank wine in England in those days — it is likely that it was highly valuable.
After all, who would bother to ship cheap plonk during a war?
Neglecting to mention the vast quantities of wine and Benedictine on the ship’s inventory might have been a measure to avoid tax.
But if the captain, John Richard Green, was aware of this omission, being caught smuggling was about to become the least of his worries.
For as the Libourne steamed towards Penzance in heavy weather, a German U-boat, the U-54, lay in wait off Land’s End.
Worse, the U-54 was commanded by one of the most ruthless and ambitious submarine captains in the Kriegsmarine, 28-year-old Hellmuth von Ruckteschell.
He had been lurking off the coast, but the convoys had so far evaded him. Then, at last, as he gleefully reported, ‘a steamer comes into view, offering the first attack opportunity after 11 days’.
It was 4pm and in rough seas, so none of the ships in the convoy spotted the U-boat before it dived
‘Connoisseurs are falling over themselves to get their hands on it’
below the surface. After stalking the convoy for an hour, at 4.55pm, von Ruckteschell surfaced and gave the order to fire a torpedo at its lead ship, the Libourne. It struck her port side with such force that she nearly split in two. She immediately began sinking.
Von Ruckteschell fired at a second ship before diving again and slipping away, climbing briefly to periscope depth to survey the devastation, before submerging once more.
Other ships in the convoy hurried to help the crew. Miraculously, 30 men survived the explosion, taking to lifeboats and leaping into the raging waves before being hauled aboard a trawler.
In less than half an hour, the Libourne had disappeared. Three men lost their lives that day, John William Cleater, 19, Alexander
John Thomson, 22, and Bartholomew Morgan, 30. Their bodies were never found, like many of the 15,000 merchant seamen who perished in World War I.
Von Ruckteschell went on to command U-boats in World War II and became so infamous for his ruthlessness that he was put on trial for war crimes by a British military court in 1946. He was accused of ‘at least one clear case of mass murder and several equally clear cases of the sinking of vessels whose crew were on the vessels when they were fired on, and were not picked up subsequently when on boats, rafts and in the water.’
He was found guilty on three charges, sentenced to ten years and died in prison in 1948.
Meanwhile the Libourne remained on the seabed.
Mention of a consignment of hard liquor aboard a sunken ship inevitably invites parallels with Compton Mackenzie’s novel Whisky Galore. It was based on the true story of the SS Politician, which sank off Eriskay, in the Outer Hebrides, in bad weather, containing 250,000 bottles of whisky.
On that occasion the ship was pillaged by islanders, but the Libourne’s alcoholic cargo remains untouched.
No one is more frustrated by this state of affairs than Ian Hudson, for he is the grandson of Audrey Warren Pearl, who — when she died in 2011 at the age of 95 — was the last remaining survivor of the Lusitania, an ocean liner sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland three years before the Libourne went down.
It was torpedoed as it neared the end of its journey from New York to Liverpool, with the loss of 1,198 civilians out of 1,959 on board, including 128 Americans.
Audrey, who was a six-month-old baby at the time, was rescued along with her American parents, who lost two of their children that day and their nanny.
The incident provoked such outrage that Germany abandoned unrestricted submarine warfare for a time. Audrey’s remarkable story inspired Hudson to became a maritime historian.
There would be a certain satisfying symmetry if he and his colleagues could succeed in profiting from the cargo of the Libourne, another U-boat victim.
His grandmother, who went on to become a glamorous debutante and marry an Englishman, would certainly approve.
But it depends on whether the Government can be persuaded to reverse its decision and let the salvage go ahead.
Until then, these buccaneering treasure-hunters can only hope that more trawlers do not smash through the wreck, and that vintage wine galore is not lost for ever to the ocean.
‘The deep ocean is the perfect cellar — it’s dark and stays cool’