Marine archaeologists say they've found the earliest ship from Europe's Age of Discovery ever uncovered — the wreck of a vessel from Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama's brutal second armada to India in 1502.
Experts called it a find of major importance that could change how historians view trade and warfare during a critical period in the development of Western civilization.
The ship is believed to be the Esmeralda, which sank in a storm off the Omani island of Al Hallaniyah in May 1503, researchers said in a paper published in this week's edition of the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology (PDF). By more than 50 years, it's the earliest ship ever recovered from the era when Portuguese explorers opened the Western Hemisphere and dominated the Indian subcontinent.
"If you consider that that pre-colonial period started on a major basis with Columbus, in 1492, this is just a decade after that," David Mearns, director of Blue Water Recoveries of Britain, which led the expedition, told the British newspaper The Guardian.
The wreckage itself was discovered in 1998, but excavation didn't begin until 2013, and since then, researchers have recovered more than 2,800 artifacts that helped establish that it's the Esmeralda, including the stunning discovery of an Indio silver coin commissioned by King Manuel I of Portugal for trade with India — a piece so rare that historians have dubbed it the "ghost coin."
