A trove of elephant tusks found in the cargo hold of an old Portuguese shipwreck is yielding new insights into the 16th-century ivory trade and lost African elephants.
In 2008, workers with a diamond mining company, while bulldozing a beach in Namibia, accidentally discovered the Bom Jesus, a Portuguese merchant vessel that disappeared in 1533. The ship, filled with gold, silver, tin, ivory, and 44,000 pounds of copper ingots, sank while en route to India.
For centuries, those heavy copper ingots pushed the ship downward and into the soft seafloor, creating ideal conditions for preservation. The cold waters along the coast of southwest Africa did the same. This resulted in the exquisite preservation of over 100 elephant tusks pulled from the ship’s cargo hold, in what is the largest archaeological discovery of African ivory ever found.
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