Ngomeni Shipwreck

FCT Grant: https://doi.org/10.54499/2021.00259.CEECIND/CP1656/CT0032 

 

Muhtasari wa karatasi

Jarida hili ni tathmini ya meli ya Ngomeni, historia yake, na uwezekano wa maslahi yake kama mfano mzuri wa utafiti wa historia ya meli za kitambo za Ureno, hususan galoni, ikiwa kitambulisho chake cha kugunduliwa kiwe galleon São Jorge, mojawapo ya Armada ya tatu ya Vasco da Gama, na iliyopotea Malindi mnamo 1524.Waandishi wanachambua matokeo haya ya kugunduliwa kwa hii meli kwa kuzingatia historia ya galoni za awali, njia ya India na aina za biashara, na muktadha wa upotevu wake katika kipindi cha kilele cha Wareno kwenye bahari ya Hindi na katika biashara changamfu na ya kimataifa ya pwani ya Waswahili.

 

Introduction

Beneath the waters of Ras Ngomeni lies a crossroads of civilizations. Along the Swahili Coast, African, Arab, and Asian worlds have met for over a thousand years, joined by Europeans more than 500 years ago during the early age of global exploration.

Our team — affiliated with the National Museums of Kenya, the Work Group Historia, Territórios e Comunidades of the Center for Functional Ecology of the University of Coimbra, and the Bergen Maritime Museum in Norway — is excavating a shipwreck dating to the early 16th century, possibly linked to the third voyage of Vasco da Gama in 1524.

Yet this project is about far more than a single vessel. The coastline holds multiple shipwrecks from a long and cosmopolitan maritime history, each telling stories of encounter and exchange across the Indian Ocean. Without proper conservation and local protection, these fragile remains risk irreversible loss.

This initiative goes beyond archaeology. In partnership with the Rotary project “End Plastic Soup,” we have organized coastal clean-up campaigns at Ras Ngomeni, where mangrove ecosystems and a fossil coral reef support rich marine biodiversity that sustains the local community.

Education is central to our mission. We work closely with local schools, sharing knowledge about the region’s history, environment, and cultural heritage. Through youth engagement and diver training, we aim to empower the community as active custodians of their submerged cultural landscape.

We are raising support from many different sources to rehabilitate conservation spaces at the Malindi Museum, build a modest interpretation centre in Ras Ngomeni, and train local divers as protectors of underwater cultural heritage.

Our ultimate goal is the long-term protection of the endangered Swahili coastal heritage — combining heritage preservation, youth training, environmental stewardship, and sustainable community development.

 

Historical Background

Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India (1497–1499) opened Asian markets to European ships, offering faster and cheaper alternatives to overland caravan routes. The India Route—a maritime corridor connecting Portugal with the Indian subcontinent and wider Asia—became a transformative development in world commerce, enabling regular exchanges of goods, people, and ideas while bypassing political barriers. During King Manuel I’s reign (1495–1521), this route linked Europe and Asia through sustained maritime networks.

The Portuguese sought to dominate the lucrative spice trade and other commodities, such as gold and ivory, challenging the established control of Arab and Indian Ocean traders along the Swahili coast. Superior naval technology and strategic outposts allowed them to disrupt traditional trade networks. Key city-states, including Kilwa, Mombasa, and Zanzibar, faced Portuguese assaults, with Mombasa captured in 1505 under Francisco de Almeida. Fortifications, such as Fort Jesus (1593), institutionalized tribute and control, though resistance persisted, leaving a legacy of disrupted trade and weakened Swahili polities (Pissarra 2016).

European oceanic expansion in the 15th and 16th centuries intensified cross-cultural exchanges and expanded the cosmopolitan Indian Ocean trade. Large ocean-going ships enabled sustained contact across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, yet records remain limited regarding their design, construction, navigation, and onboard logistics, including cargo management during long voyages.

This study examines the technological and scientific expertise required to construct 16th-century ships and conduct voyages to India. The cultural and economic transformations initiated by Portuguese expeditions were grounded in practical solutions developed by a cosmopolitan scientific community. Portuguese innovators addressed challenges in shipbuilding, logistics, navigation, cartography, and naval warfare within a remarkably short period (Moreno Madrid and Leitão 2025). Portuguese ships exemplify the synthesis of Northern European and Mediterranean design principles, reflecting the broader influence of cross-cultural maritime knowledge (Castro 2008).

In the 1490s, Columbus reached the Americas while Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and arrived on the west coast of India. These voyages inaugurated a new era of open-ocean navigation. The ships that sailed from Portugal to India evolved significantly throughout the 16th century; however, no technical treatises survive from the early part of the century, and both archaeological and iconographic evidence remain scarce and not always reliable (Castro 2008; 2012a; 2012b).

In the final quarter of the 16th century, several technical texts began to address the theoretical foundations of Portuguese shipbuilding. Around 1600, João Baptista Lavanha employed the term “naval architecture” in the title of his manuscript describing the design of a 600-ton vessel intended for the India route (Lavanha 1996). Although these works (Schwindinger et al. 2022) provide valuable insight into the general design principles of ocean-going ships at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, they offer limited information regarding hull structure, construction sequences, or the operational processes required to design and build an Indiaman.

In the absence of a plausible structural model, calculating hull weight and assessing intact stability becomes problematic; performing simulations to evaluate the feasibility of proposed reconstructions is even more challenging (Santos et al. 2007; 2012; Fonseca et al. 2005; Castro and Fonseca 2006).

Portuguese ships engaged in the Asian trade routes are better documented through iconography than through archaeology or technical documentation. Their impact on Western history was considerable, forming part of a broader technological transformation that drastically reshaped Europe. The 15^th and 16^th centuries were plagued by wars allover Europe, but remain a period of incredible creativity, innovation, and scientific and technological development (Almeida 2018; Moreno Madrid and Leitão 2025). Long-distance navigation profoundly altered European worldviews, while technological innovation extended the range and duration of voyages, intensifying trade and facilitating the circulation of people and ideas.

Reconstructing the naus, caravels, and galleons of the India route remains a complex undertaking. Variations among shipyards, differences in construction methods and units of measurement, the availability of materials, aesthetic preferences, ongoing innovation, and cross-cultural influences within a cosmopolitan maritime environment all complicate efforts to trace the development of early 16th-century ocean-going ships. Surviving texts are few and appear relatively late, archaeological remains are even rarer, and only a limited number of cases have been systematically studied and published. Consequently, iconographic sources remain the primary basis for reconstructing the evolution of ocean-going vessels in the 16th and 17th centuries.

This discovery invited us to retake the study of Portuguese ships initiated with the Pepper Wreck project (Castro 2005). It is possible that the ship found at Ngomeni is the São Jorge, from Vasco da Gama's third armada, lost in 1524 on the way to India, and likely one of the earliest examples of a Portuguese galleon, a type of warship introduced by the Portuguese state from 1518 onwards (Pissarra 2002; 2016).

 

The Shipwreck

The Ngomeni shipwreck is located off the coast of Malindi, in Kenya, near Ras Ngomeni, lying at a 4 to 7 m depth (Figure 1). It was declared in 2007 by local fishermen. The site was probably continuously salvaged since its loss, and certainly looted in recent times. Two shipwrecks occurred in this area, making the identification difficult, at least for the time being. The first was the ship São Jorge, from the third Armada of Vasco da Gama, lost on its way to India, in 1524, and the second was the nau Santa Maria da Graça, lost in the same area in 1544.

 

Figure 1. Location of the Ngomeni Shipwreck (Filipe Castro).

 

A survey and trenching of the site were conducted by the Kenyan Government in collaboration with the Chinese government in 2013/2014, under the direction of Caesar Bita, and showed that the site occupies an area of at least 40 x 20 m (Bita 2013, 2014, 2015, 2018).

The 2013 trench covered a 5 x 5 m area, which revealed a relatively well preserved hull structure and a number of diagnostic artifacts. The absence of large amounts of artifacts is also consistent with a loss that was not catastrophic nor at a high energy surf zone. The ship was salvaged after running aground, and probably salvaged in the following years by the local population, as it broke down during the natural site formation process. The timbers exposed in 2013 were important enough to justify that we started the excavation in this area, which include a section of the ship's structure with floor timbers approximately 25 cm on a side. Lead strips were also found in the planking seams, attesting to the hull caulking method typical of Portuguese ships of this period. A block, likely a halyard block, was found nearly intact (Figure 2).

 

Figure 2. The 2013 sheave block (Caesar Bita).

 

Significant portions of the hull were preserved, both under the ballast pile and buried in the sediment. Artifacts recovered include the typical half-moon-shaped copper ingots (Figure 3), some with a mark of the German Fugger banker, ivory tusks (Figure 4), cinnabar, milling stones, remains of a pair of dividers, a pewter plate, a wooden bucket, some animal bones and one horn, fire wood, and small copper alloy objects. A Chinese porcelain shard (Figure 5) dating to the Hongzhi (1488-1505) or Zhengde (1506-1521) reigns, which suggests an early date for this shipwreck (pers. comm. Teresa Canepa).

 

Figure 3 – Copper ingot, the diameter is about 19 cm (Photo: Caesar Bita, 2013).

 

Figure 4 – Ivory tusks (Photo: Caesar Bita, 2013).

 

Figure 5. Chinese Shard from the Hongzhi (1488-1505) or Zhengde (1506-1521) reigns (Photo: Caesar Bita, 2013).

 

Ceramics show that this ship is undoubtably a Portuguese vessel from the first half of the 16^th century, and an historical research by José Virgilio Pissarra shows that in can be either São Jorge, possibly a galleon from 1524 Vasco da Gama’s third fleet lost at Malindi, or the nau Santa Maria da Graça of 1544, lost at Baía Formosa. Of eight ships lost by the Portuguese in the Malindi area, these are the only plausible options.

Caesar Bite invited Filipe Castro to excavate the site in 2013, visited the Nautical Archaeology Program at Texas A&M University in 2014, but it was not possible to start the project for several reasons until 2024. The ship condition was assessed in March 2024 (Castro et al. 2024), and an exploratory field season was planned for the following November. Then, around 300 underwater hours were spent cleaning, tagging, trenching, and recording the site, which consists of a ballast mound oriented roughly NE-SW and covering an area of about 40 x 20 m. A new field season was carried out in November 2025 (Figure 6), and a third one took place in February 2026.

The wooden portion of the hull that was found still preserved was partially excavated in November and in February we excavated an inspection trench across the ballast pile, which is formed by round stones with diameters between 15 and 30 cm, and is lodged between several large boulders, forming a rich ecosystem that is a popular fishing ground for the local fishermen. Because this site is a fishing spot, there are several large stone anchors apparent. There are also some millstones, and at this stage of the work it is not always easy to tell the difference between round anchors and millstones because there are corals and other forms of life attached to them.

 

Figure 6. Site map after the November 2025 excavation season (Beatrice Frabetti 2026).

 

A number of large concretions is also apparent, and their study should provide insightful information for the interpretation of the site, although for the time being we do not have a functioning conservation laboratory that can store, x-ray, and identify them all.

A German shard, which does not exclude the 1524 hypothesis but does not appear in shipwrecks until the 1540s was found near the hull, and complicated the dating process of this site.

The hull remains studied in 2025 encompass the timbers partially exposed in 2013 and 2014. The place consists of a series of frames and planking that is difficult to interpret at this point.  The area initially covered with ballast measured 43 x 18 m. Trenches opened outside the ballast mound showed to have considerable amounts of pottery and other artifacts. The ballast mound was salvaged perhaps during centuries and it is very thin in certain areas, with almost no artifacts. The ballast barely covers the remains of the hull planking and the concretions formed around the places where the fasteners that connected the planking to the frames, now eroded, once stood.

The planking is 11.5 cm thick and is calked with the typical lead straps used in the caulking arrangement in Portuguese ships. In some places, over the traditional 4 cm wide lead straps that cover the seams, sometimes there was a second strap, around 12 cm wide, covering the narrower one.

The surviving frames recorded on the site have larger sections than those of the Pepper Wreck, sometimes 27 cm wide, but the area excavated is not yet identified. Since march 2024 the authors started the excavation of a series of trenches, trying to understand the original position of the bow and stern of the ship, and searching for artifacts that might allow a precise dating of the shipwreck.

The site was cleaned of nets and any other intrusive materials, and part of the ballast was removed to evaluate the possibility of excavating a larger portion of the shipwreck. We want this project to be an example of a community archaeology project, done by and for the local population. We have organized this excavation as a project of the local community, whom we considered the owners of this and other shipwrecks for all practical purposes.

A 3D photogrammetric model of the area was developed by Beatrice Frabetti. The plans consist of a set of high resolution partial maps, and a large plan of the entire ballast area. From these models she has extracted sections and detailed plans, which are the basis for the interpretation of the site (Castro et al. 2026). The hull remains exposed in 2025 are shown below (Figure 7).

 

 

Figure 7. Hull remains after the November 2025 excavation season (Beatrice Frabetti 2026).

 

The site is roughly oriented east-west and the timber remains exposed consist of around 180 structural timbers, mostly frames and planks. A perplexing singularity was uncovered on the south side of the vessel and seems to constitute the ship’s railing, or an aperture in the ship’s hull, possibly a hatch opened in the side of the outer hull to load large objects, in Portugal designated as sisbordo (Figure 8).

 

Figure 8. Area where the framing ends, tucked beneath a longitudinal timber (Beatrice Frabetti 2026).

 

In 2026 we excavated a trench through the ballast, to the west of the preserved in order to assess the preservation of the hull and found the timbers highly degraded. A number of artifacts was found on the borders of the ballast pile, comprising elephant tusks, copper ingots, and the usual ceramics, including the large green glazed alguidares that abound on the east side of the ballast pile (Figure 9).

 

Figure 9. Trench excavated in February 2026 (Beatrice Frabetti 2026).

 

We identified around 30 frame timbers, mostly irregularly fashioned, located in an area where perhaps floor timbers and first futtocks overlap. We fear that the keel has eroded away.  Fasteners are square shanked with around 18 mm on the side. There are a few concretions from bolts, around 2 cm in diameter, one with 3 cm of diameter.  We have not found any scarves, other than a dovetail scarf on timber 88, which was lying between frame timbers 11 and 12, but not connected. A number of firewood sticks were found lodged between the frames, presumably to use the space.  At this point it is difficult to reconstruct the hull section excavated and recorded. Sections were taken and are presented below.

An archaeological site is an organized archive and we are acting as facilitators that guide and help the community to understand and interpret the site, and reconstruct the possible narratives that led this its existence. The Kenyan government is planning to make an interpretation center at Ngomeni and to use the Malindi Museum as a backup institution, providing guidance and means to carry on the conservation of the artifact collection, under the professional guidance of the Mombasa staff of scientifically trained conservators. Caesar Bita and the Kenyan Navy are training a group of local community – which we called Team Caesar – to dive and participate in the excavation. We are operating under the principle that archaeological tourism can create opportunities for Kenya, to expand its touristic resources and allow more people to experience the beauty, the history, the culture, and the magic of Kenya.

 

Conclusion

We want to make this project as public and transparent as possible, fighting the traditional secrecy and shy reporting that characterize maritime archaeology since its inception, in 1960. We want to share our questions and doubts during the excavation, and the things we don’t know with the public and with our peers. We want to share the project with the public through a stream of publications and, where possible, to share the primary data in a website.

We have created a team with computer graphics capabilities, and we want to use the Heritage Lab of the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon (FBAUL) to establish standards for the representation and divulgation of nautical archaeology in entertaining and interesting ways.

The maritime landscape where this shipwreck occurred has an old culture that sometimes is overlooked in European history narratives. By sailing between Europe and the Swahili coast during the 16^th century, the Portuguese became part of a rich and diverse cultural network of traders, an environment where the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Indian Oceans met, and where peoples from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, traded goods and ideas.

 

Conclusion

As the world is getting more diverse, mostly due to an increase in migration between continents, the social value of the cultural heritage is changing, together with our relationship with the environment, its inhabitants, features, cultures, and artifacts. This century will be marked by migrations, making the planet’s population mixed and diverse almost everywhere. In the cosmopolitan world where we are going to live the significance of narratives, monuments, landscapes, traditions, and artifacts is going to vary from inhabitant to inhabitant, and archaeology will become a kaleidoscopic activity, involving as many narratives and participants as it can.

We expect to have more news after the planned November 2026 full month excavation season. The main organizational axis of this project are the empowerment of the local population, and the public nature of the project. We would like to have a group of interested scholars and other interested persons follow our work, our discoveries, our failures, and help with opinions.

As mentioned above, the 15^th and 16^th centuries were an amazing period of discovery and scientific advance. Europeans discovered other lands, peoples, scents, flavors, sounds, and ideas. They joined the cosmopolitan world of the Indian Ocean and reported what they saw, and what they could understand. The study of this period and the contact between Europeans and other cultures is a vast subject and an exciting source of knowledge and wisdom. In our opinion, cosmopolitan archaeology needs a wider base of contributions, from literature and philosophy, to allow us to contextualize the information extracted from these shipwrecks.

The Ngomeni ship has a interesting story to tell, from its planning and contracting the construction to its realization, the chain of operations it engaged, its manning, the knowledge necessary to sail it around Africa and into the Indian Ocean, its loss, its salvage operations, its use by the local population after the Portuguese left, and the creation of the shipwreck site, as the hull covered and killed a coral reef and life grew over it again, to its finding and excavation, its future musealization, and the historical studies it will hopefully encourage.

We expect to contribute to share this story slowly, unfolding the mysteries, glories, and miseries of this ship, be it Sao Jorge, possibly a galleon from 1524 Vasco da Gama’s third fleet, or the nau Santa Maria da Graça of 1544.