The search for untold treasures
Suspended in 57 metres 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 realisation that he was looking at a treasure of unimaginable value. What lay beneath him that day in February 2004 was the wreck of a 10th century open deck cargo ship and a half a million artefacts piled on a tumulus more than 30 metres high and spread over an area of nearly 1,600 square metres. “I knew I was in front of something phenomenal,” he says. The unidentified wreck was later called Cirebon, after a village 145 kilometres 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 organisations. One of his clients was renowned underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio, who has brought to light civilisations 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 says. “We wasted a lot of time, but it was fun.”
Then he got
