The search for untold treasures
Suspended in 190ft of murky water in the Java Sea above an enormous pile of cups, plates and jars, Luc Heymans had an eerie feeling. “I felt like I’d had one too many drinks,” he says.
He wasn’t intoxicated. What made him dizzy, aside from the depth he was no longer accustomed to, was the realization that he was looking at a treasure of unimaginable value. What lay beneath him that day in February 2004 was the sunken wreck of a 10th century open deck cargo ship and a half a million artifacts piled on a tumulus more than 98ft high and spread over an area of nearly 18,000 square feet. “I knew I was in front of something phenomenal,” he says. The unidentified wreck was later called Cirebon, after a village 90 miles away on the coast of the island of Java.
Heymans spent 20 years as a world-class sailor before embarking on new adventures on board a converted Russian trawler that he chartered to various organizations. One of his clients was renowned underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio, who has brought to light civilizations that vanished in cataclysms and ships lost on ancient trade routes.
Heymans worked with Goddio in the Philippines before he decided to go it alone. “In the Philippines, you get a lot of information but very little of it turns out to be real,” he
