Over 70 years after a British steampship from Bombay carrying tons of Indian 1 rupee silver coins to help fund Britain in World War II was torpedoed by a German submarine, its wreck has been discovered in a record deep-dive operation.
The SS City of Cairo (Captain William Rogerson) was a mixed cargo and passenger ship belonging to Ellerman Lines and was on a voyage from Bombay to England, via Cape Town and Recife, Brazil, unescorted, in late 1942, in the middle of World War II.
The ship carried 296 people of which 136 were passengers and a mixed cargo including some 100 tons of silver coins belonging to the UK Treasury. It was spotted by U-68 on the 6th of November 1942 and torpedoed near St Helena in the south Atlantic at 2030 hrs.
The company gets to keep an unspecified amount of the coins under the contract with the Ministry of Transport.Deep Ocean Search (DOS), a company specialising in such operationssaid it recovered several tens of tons of silver coins from a depth of 5150m – a world depth record. The haul is expected to be worth millions of pounds.
Divers founds that the ship was broken in two and buried deep in the seafloor silt. Parts of the ship had meters of mud heaped upon it.