Lost Gold Rush Ship Discovered in South Australia

Bright Side

Australia is full of mysteries - both above and below the surface. Let's explore two shocking discoveries: a Gold Rush-era shipwreck finally found after 170 years in South Australia, and a terrifying hidden discovery that scientists uncovered in Australia. What was lost for centuries… is now coming back to the surface.  Animation is created by Bright Side.  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Music from TheSoul Sound: https://thesoul-sound.com/   Check our Bright Side podcast on Spotify and leave a positive review! https://open.spotify.com/show/0hUkPxD34jRLrMrJux4VxV  Subscribe to Bright Side: https://goo.gl/rQTJZz  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Our Social Media:  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brightplanet/  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brightside.official  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@brightside.official?lang=en   Stock materials (photos, footages and other):  https://www.depositphotos.com  https://www.shutterstock.com  https://www.eastnews.ru  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  For more videos and articles visit: http://www.brightside.me  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  This video is made for entertainment purposes. We do not make any warranties about the completeness, safety and reliability. Any action you take upon the information in this video is strictly at your own risk, and we will not be liable for any damages or losses. It is the viewer's responsibility to use judgement, care and precaution if you plan to replicate.

Transcript

00:00It's June of 1857. A fierce storm slams into Giechen Bay, Australia, and rips apart a Dutch ship weighing 800 tons.

00:10Part of the crew tries to escape in a small boat, but only 9 of the 25 men on board survive.

00:17Now, many years later, researchers believe they've found this long-lost gold rush shipwreck.

00:24Yep, this ship is tied to one of the most dramatic high-stakes chapters in Australia's history.

00:30We're talking about the shipwreck of Koning Willem de Twyta, a vessel built back in 1840.

00:37This historic ship discovery is a big deal since it's now considered a real treasure in the world of underwater archaeology in Australia.

00:45Let me tell you why.

00:47By the middle of the 19th century, Dutch ships were carrying not just goods, but also people from Asia who were hoping to start a new life in Australia.

00:57And they were all chasing one thing, gold.

01:01Yep, the precious metal was discovered in Australia in 1851.

01:06Well, officially at least.

01:09It was actually found a few years earlier, but let's just say the authorities decided to keep that little detail away from the newspapers.

01:17Anyway, the big public discovery happened in 1851 when an Australian gold prospector named Edward Hammond Hargraves led an expedition in the New South Wales region.

01:29And he chose to tell everyone about his find.

01:32And just like that, the gold rush began.

01:35News spreads fast, so people start arriving from everywhere, Britain, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, and also from China.

01:44It's estimated by that time, around 20,000 Chinese had made their way to the gold fields in Victoria.

01:52By 1861, about 3% of the Australian population had been born in the Asian country.

01:59Most of them came from the southern region of Guangdong, which was going through a really tough time back then.

02:06They'd been through it all.

02:08Foreign invasions, massive floods, serious food shortages, you name it.

02:13Many people had lost everything.

02:16Their money was gone, their homes destroyed.

02:19They couldn't even afford a bite to eat.

02:22There was no clear way out of the poverty they were stuck in.

02:25But then, word started to spread.

02:28There was a gold field somewhere in a distant British territory.

02:32They heard stories from people all over the world going there.

02:36That it was peaceful, full of opportunity.

02:39And that the land itself had everything you could need.

02:42It sounded like a dream.

02:44Before long, they began calling it Xinjin Shan, or New Gold Mountain.

02:50So, many scraped together what little they had left to reach Australia, and start over.

02:57It was a shot at a better life.

02:59A chance to lift entire families out of poverty.

03:02But getting there wasn't cheap.

03:04Or easy.

03:05They had to travel in huge ships, and the average trip from Guangdong province took about three months to reach Sydney or Melbourne.

03:13At some point, Australian authorities decided to impose a tax on Chinese arrivals.

03:19Every passenger who disembarked at Victorian ports had to pay a £10 poll tax.

03:25So, what do you think happened?

03:27The routes changed, of course.

03:29Instead of docking directly in Victoria, ships began stopping in Rope, a town in the southeastern part of South Australia.

03:37From there, people would walk about 250 miles, all the way to the gold fields, just to avoid paying the tax.

03:46And this area is exactly where the Koning Willem de Tweede was discovered.

03:51Yep, our Dutch ship was found off the Rope coast.

03:55And it was one of many vessels that carried Chinese passengers to Australia.

04:00Now you can see why it's historically important, right?

04:03On the 16th of June, 1857, it brought around 400 people safely to shore so they could start their lives over.

04:12The ship itself didn't get a happy ending, though.

04:15After dropping them off, it was supposed to continue its journey.

04:18But then, a storm rolled in.

04:20So, the ship had to drop anchor and wait it out in Gichen Bay.

04:25The weather kept getting worse.

04:28The anchor began to drag, and by the 13th of June, it was completely lost.

04:33The captain, called Hendrik Geisen, had to act fast.

04:37He made the call to beach the ship in hopes of saving both the vessel and his crew.

04:42But there was a problem.

04:44The ship ran aground on Long Beach, about three miles east of Rope, and it started breaking apart quickly in the rough seas.

04:52The rest of the story is tragic.

04:54Sixteen sailors drowned when one of the ship's small boats turned upside down.

04:59Only nine men made it out alive.

05:02Captain Geisen stayed aboard the wreck.

05:05He eventually reached the shore by clinging to a cask.

05:08Thankfully, people who were on the beach managed to pull him out of the sea using a rope.

05:13A few months later, things from the wreck were sold to a local man in Rope named Jacob Chambers for 225 pounds, which was a pretty big amount of money back then.

05:27And that's because people were able to save a good amount of stuff from the wreck, like the bell, sook doors, and wooden planks from the hull.

05:35Those doors and some of the timbers were later used to build the Caledonian Inn, a historic two-story stone hotel that went up in 1859.

05:46As for the bell, it was supposedly used at Rope Primary School for over 100 years, but researchers aren't so sure about that part.

05:55What we do know is that most of the ship's remains were still missing, until now.

06:01After three years of hard work, a team affiliated with the Australian National Maritime Museum believes they have finally found the Koning Willem de Tueda.

06:12The project kicked off in April of 2022, and its main goal has been to search for, locate, and carry out an archaeological survey of the shipwreck's remains.

06:23To do that, they mainly used two tools, underwater metal detectors, and a marine magnetometer, a device that detects changes in the magnetic field of the seafloor.

06:35Soon, this technology started picking up a bunch of anomalies in the area where the shipwreck was believed to be.

06:42And by anomalies, I mean weird signals, clues that something might be buried under the seabed, probably hidden under layers of sand or mud.

06:52They believe those signals were coming from the iron parts of the ship's windlass.

06:58That's a big winch at the front of the ship, used to pull up the anchors.

07:02Some of those pieces were sticking up slightly from the seabed, along with a partially exposed iron frame.

07:09They also spotted a well-preserved wooden plank underneath the windlass, which suggests that more of the ship's hull is still down there, just buried under the sand.

07:19So why do they feel confident that this wreck is the Koning Willem de Tweede?

07:24Well, basically for three reasons.

07:27First, the location.

07:30The spot where they picked up those signals lines up with historical accounts of where the ship went down.

07:36And it just so happens to be the only known shipwreck in that part of Long Beach.

07:41Second, the size.

07:43The cluster of magnetic signals roughly matches the ship's documented length, which is about 140 feet.

07:50Third and last reason.

07:52They found pieces of Chinese pottery from the 1800s right on the beach next to the site.

07:57When you put all those facts together, it basically screams Koning Willem de Tweede.

08:03That's why the team feels so confident they've finally discovered this historic ship.

08:08But even though they have good reasons to believe it, more research still needs to be done.

08:13So they're planning future visits to the site to keep monitoring things.

08:17The goal is to check the ship's condition and look for more parts of the hull or artifacts that might get uncovered as the seabed shifts over time.

08:26Let's hope they get lucky next time around.

08:30So many asteroids pass through our solar system and we don't even know about it.

08:36Those are rocky pieces of material left over from the time when our solar system was forming, about 4.6 billion years ago.

08:44They move around the sun, but not in the way planets do.

08:48We're talking about true rebels that prefer to follow some pretty strange paths.

08:53Plus, they spin in different ways as they travel between planets and other space objects.

08:59And the majority of them come from the main asteroid belt that's located between Jupiter and Mars.

09:05Most stay there, but Jupiter has quite a strong gravity so it can push some of those flying rocks in different directions and towards us too.

09:14They're sometimes round and sometimes they have odd shapes with pits and holes from all that crashing into other space rocks.

09:23As we currently know, there are more than a million of them in the main asteroid belt.

09:28And that's all good until some of them move in our direction.

09:32NASA keeps an eye on them, so we know everything's fine, at least for now.

09:37But that wasn't always the case with our beloved home planet.

09:40If Earth could talk, it would probably share so many crazy asteroid stories.

09:46We're talking about those space rocks that left impact craters we call domes.

09:51They have a specific shape with a raised center, similar to when you throw a pebble in a pond and see some water splashing upward.

09:59But we'll never be able to learn about many others.

10:03I know this raised center sounds like something you're supposed to see right away, especially if an asteroid that once slammed into the surface was big.

10:12But we're talking about millions and millions of years of erosion.

10:15So wind, water and even gravity do what they do best and erase traces.

10:21They wear down impact domes.

10:24And some sites even end up hidden under layers of rock and dirt.

10:28Or they disappear forever because Earth's tectonic plates keep moving around.

10:33Check out the moon.

10:34It's experienced many collisions too.

10:37But over there, there's no ocean or tectonic plates moving around.

10:41Or even wind to slowly, through millions of years, erase craters from its face.

10:46Basically, its entire history is written on its surface.

10:50But Earth has its own forces that can erase such places as the Vetterfort impact structure and the Chicxulub crater.

10:57You know, the famous one that wiped out the dinosaurs?

11:00Luckily, scientists have new methods to find ancient craters.

11:04They often focus on the mess impacts made, which means the materials they threw around.

11:10And the Australian continent is especially interesting since we're talking about a playground for asteroid hits.

11:17By that, I mean ancient supercontinent Gondwana that dominated the south hundreds of millions of years ago.

11:24Experts know about 38 impacts.

11:27Plus, they speculate about 43 more.

11:30Some structures are relatively small, while others are big and completely hidden.

11:35And recently, a scientist named Tony Yates has discovered strange underground magnetic patterns in New South Wales, Australia.

11:43Yay! New clues of a giant asteroid impact!

11:46And when I say giant, I really mean it.

11:49It's a structure 323 miles in diameter.

11:53This might be the largest impact site ever found.

11:57This spot is called the deniliquin structure.

12:01Its magnetic patterns show characteristic ripples around the center, like when a rock hits the water.

12:07There are also fractures that go outward from the center.

12:10And it seems rocks from inside Earth ended up pushed into these fractures.

12:15That's a typical story for big asteroid impacts.

12:19This structure was probably located in eastern Gondwana hundreds of millions of years ago, way before it split into several continents, including Australia.

12:29At the moment, all we know about this crater is what we see on the surface.

12:34To find more information about this collision and get some proof, we'll have to drill into the ground.

12:40An asteroid this big is definitely not a joke.

12:44It could have caused a massive ice age and maybe even wiped out around 85% of species.

12:50Even more than the asteroid that ended dinosaurs.

12:53In 4.5 billion years, which is how long our planet has existed, it's been punched by hundreds of big asteroids.

13:01But that doesn't mean every space rock that enters our atmosphere really makes it all the way to the ground.

13:06Most of those that manage to pass the atmosphere are relatively small, for instance, 3 feet across.

13:13That's good for us because any space rock that's less than 82 feet in diameter most likely won't make it past our planet's atmosphere.

13:22Since these space rocks come towards us very fast, they heat up the gases in the atmosphere, which burns them away.

13:29By the way, once cosmic intruders enter our atmosphere, they turn into meteors.

13:35And in most cases, they don't cause much damage, if any, as they fall down.

13:40But we used to have way larger things flying around and crashing into Earth.

13:45At least 190 of them have left scars you can still see today.

13:49One of the really, really big ones is in South Africa.

13:53It's 99 miles wide.

13:55It's actually the largest.

13:57At least that's what scientists think at the moment because they still need to check as many details as possible about this new crater in Australia.

14:04This one in South Africa formed about 2 billion years ago.

14:09And an asteroid that created it was probably larger than the one that had wiped dinosaurs away.

14:14And when an asteroid is bigger than 0.6 miles, it can have really big effects across the world.

14:21This impact was so strong that it could have caused fires everywhere and thrown lots of dust into the air.

14:28And when you have so much dust in the atmosphere, the climate on the planet can change for months or even years.

14:36Then we also have the most popular asteroid that made a giant hole we today call the Chicxulub Crater.

14:43You know the story.

14:44It crashed into our planet 66 million years ago when dinosaurs were wandering around, catching food, falling in love.

14:51Basically, just doing their thing.

14:53The crash itself didn't erase them right away.

14:56It threw a lot of debris into space.

14:59And when it fell back to Earth, fires and flames were everywhere.

15:03The hit also produced a big cloud of dust that covered the planet for years.

15:07This cloud blocked the sunlight, which harmed plants and entire food chains.

15:12Even those dinosaurs that survived the crash and such difficult conditions had a hard time finding food.

15:18So they didn't make it.

15:20At least they left us many fossils and turned into the inspiration for movies and stories.

15:25A long time ago in Canada, something big crashed into our planet and left a big hole we today know as the Sudbury Basin.

15:34People used to think it was an asteroid.

15:36But now, some experts think it might have been a giant comet made up of a mix of ice and rocks.

15:42The hole is almost gone now because of weather conditions though.

15:46Yet, people still get to mine iron and nickel there.

15:49And at the same time, find the leftovers of whatever space object fell there.

15:54If you move deep in southern India, you'll find a big hole called Loner Crater.

16:00Locals stumbled upon it 200 years ago and believed it might be from a volcano.

16:05But now we know it's a trace from a meteor that crashed into the ground about 35 to 50,000 years ago.

16:13What's so special about this crater is that it's the only one known to have formed in a type of rock called basalt.

16:19Around the crater, there are hills covered in trees and animals like peafowls and gazelles live there.

16:25Birds also like to visit the lake near the crater during the winter.

16:28And the lake itself is quite interesting too.

16:31It can turn pink because of all those tiny organisms that live there.

16:35But this color change doesn't last long.

16:38That's it for today.

16:41So hey, if you pacified your curiosity, then give the video a like and share it with your friends.

16:46Or if you want more, just click on these videos and stay on the Bright Side.

16:50And just click this again.

16:51It's a candy from the river.

16:52Can you see the nice place?

16:53Your point is on the river and I don't know the water and I'm not sure what to do.

16:54So it just depends on how you put the water and get the water and you can apply it.

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