With the recent reveal that Adolf Hitler reportedly enjoyed being defecated on, some things are better left in the past. However, historians and enthusiasts alike can cheer about a new discovery offering a greater insight into the Age of Discovery, a time when European explorers set out to find spices in India but ended up colonizing the Americas and Africa instead.
Marine archeologists claim to have found Esmeralda, the ship from Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama's second trip to India in 1502, NBC Newsreports. The vessel sank during a storm near the Omani island of Al Hallaniyah, located in the Arabian peninsula, in May 1503. Researchers made the big reveal in a paper in the International Journal of Nautical Archeology this week.
"If you consider that that pre-colonial period started on a major basis with Columbus, in 1492, this is just a decade after that," director of Blue Water Recoveries of Britain David Mearns, who led the expedition, told the Guardian.
The wreckage was actually discovered in 1998 but archeologists didn’t start excavating until 2013. More than 2,800 artifacts have been recovered since then, leading to the belief that this ship is indeed the Esmeralda. It seems that now, more than ever, they’re sure they have found the lost vessel.
