Chapter 424 Can’t Let Go

Although Jiu Wenlong is the nominal commander of the salvage fleet, he is not actually responsible for specific matters. Instead, he is responsible for the security of the fleet, including the safety of the ship itself, the crew, and the salvaged objects.

Therefore, the fleet consisted of three 150-ton salvage and rescue ships, with more than Blackwater International bodyguards, fully armed, dispatched and commanded by their captain and Jiuwenlong.

In addition to basic salary, these bodyguards who go out to sea to carry out missions also receive a host of additional subsidies and insurance, which basically ensures that they can return alive to enjoy wealth and luxury, and their entire family will be protected if they die.

During this month, in addition to enjoying reunions with his family, Jiu Wenlong also frequently went to the Yuen Long Training Center to eat, live and train with the 150 bodyguards, thus establishing basic trust and tacit understanding.

For the fleet's first mission, Fang Hexuan did not assign them any heavy tasks, so they did not need to travel far into the ocean, let alone explore the deep sea.

As a newly established marine salvage company, although we recruited many experienced crew members and professional salvage and lifesaving experts, after all, we were just starting to cooperate and the degree of tacit understanding was limited.

In order to set up this company, Fang Hexuan spent more than 8 million Hong Kong dollars, and he also spent a lot of money to equip himself with underwater lifeboats, robots and other high-precision equipment.

When salvaging at sea, the problems and risks faced are far beyond what can be imagined on land. It requires a high degree of coordination, a low tolerance for error, and years of accumulation and exploration of practical experience.

Therefore, for the first mission, they were not required to bring back any treasures, but even if they could find the specific location of the ancient shipwreck, it would be a great gain.

In order to reduce the difficulty of the fleet's mission, Fang Hexuan even hinted to Jiu Wenlong the approximate location, which was the Yangjiang waters of Guangdong Province, under the pretext of collecting information from overseas.

That’s right, Jiu Wenlong and his team are going this time to explore the location of the shipwreck of “South China Sea No. 1” in later generations.

Speaking of this shipwreck, it has become a household name in later generations.

Anyone who is interested in collecting and archaeology must know this.

"Nanhai No. 1" is an ancient wooden shipwreck that sank while transporting porcelain on the Maritime Silk Road in the early Southern Song Dynasty. It sailed out of Quanzhou Port and sank in the waters of Taishan City, Guangdong Province, China.

More than 800 years have passed, and the position of this ancient shipwreck has continued to change with the ocean currents.

In 1986, the British Maritime Exploration and Salvage Company discovered a shipwreck called "Rhineburg" in the South China Sea.

British experts found a lot of information about the shipwreck in the Maritime Museum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and conducted a detailed investigation into the cause and time of the ship's sinking, and how many people survived.

So the British people signed an investigation agreement with the Guangzhou Salvage Bureau based on the information, hoping to find the "Rhineburg".

They used the side-by-side sonar system to search the waters of Shangxiachuan Island in Taishan, Guangdong, where the shipwreck was located. Once they found anything suspicious, they would use a grab to grab it into the sea.

After nearly a year, a breakthrough was finally made in 1987.

One day, a grab bucket pulled up 247 artifacts, including 142 complete pieces of porcelain and tinware, and a 1.72-meter-long gold belt.

Seeing this, Yin Ganhong, the Chinese leader at the time, said: "This is definitely not the Rheinburg that the British are looking for. This is a Chinese shipwreck."

After guessing the possible situation under the sea, the salvage fleet immediately stopped using the grab bucket to retrieve objects. The original plan was to salvage a foreign shipwreck, but in the end it helped China find a national treasure-level shipwreck, the "South China Sea No. 1".

In his previous life, Fang Hexuan not only heard introductions from friends in the collecting circle, but also watched many related documentaries and even visited the Yangjiang Maritime Silk Road Museum.

It is hard to describe the shock I felt when I saw the appearance of the shipwreck and the salvaged items on display.

Although the mainland discovered the specific seabed location of "Nanhai No. 1987" in 2001, salvage operations did not begin until 2007, and the entire ship was not salvaged until the end of .

From this we can see that even if Fang Hexuan told the mainland this news, whether they believed it or not is another matter. Even if they believed it, they would not be able to carry out basic detection.

But if he does it himself, it will be different.

He has no shortage of money, and he has even less shortage of technology, equipment, and personnel.

Fang Hexuan admits that collecting antiques and cultural relics is addictive. It’s not necessarily because of their value, but the feeling of continuous gains is very pleasant.

With the hundreds of thousands of cultural relics on board the "Nanhai No. 1", even if he eventually donates most of them to the mainland, it would be a great sense of accomplishment for him to keep hundreds or thousands of pieces for himself.

In addition to wanting to collect it, he had another reason to sell it.

As we all know, Western civilization is a history of maritime civilization, and there is a saying in Mahan's "The Principles of Sea Power": "Whoever controls the oceans rules the world," which is also very reasonable.

The ocean covers 71% of the Earth's surface area. It can be said that it is much easier to discover the resources and treasures it contains than to obtain resources from extraterrestrial civilizations.

The reason why Fang Hexuan established the global salvage company was to lay the foundation for the future development of the marine industry, because he knew very well that when the natural resources on land gradually dried up, the ocean would be a new treasure trove.

Of course, there are many people who think the same as him. At least Western countries’ understanding of the ocean is definitely much more profound than that of China today.

Among them, there is a profession in European and American countries that relies on the sea for a living, that is, "professional treasure hunters at sea". Some people praise them as "sea explorers", and many people ridicule them as "sea tomb robbers".

Mike Hatcher is a British treasure hunter at sea. The reason why he is mentioned is not only because he is very famous and has salvaged more than 80 World War II warships and ancient shipwrecks, but also because he has salvaged ancient Chinese shipwrecks many times and deliberately damaged a large number of cultural relics on the shipwrecks, which aroused strong indignation among the Chinese people.

In 1970, 30-year-old Hatcher fled from Britain to Australia and established a commercial marine salvage company to salvage merchant ships and warships sunk during World War II and recover tin, rubber and scrap metal carried on merchant ships.

In 1980, by chance, Hatcher encountered the first ancient ship in his life - a South China Sea shipwreck carrying 2.2 pieces of Chinese Ming Dynasty porcelain.

He tried selling the porcelain to collectors, but was surprised by the result: millions of dollars, more than his income from the previous three years!

From then on, Hatcher decided to change the direction of his business - looking for ancient shipwrecks in the South China Sea.

He became "studious" again, visiting libraries and universities around the world and hiring college students to collect old nautical charts and shipping information.

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(End of this chapter)