The two divers were not expecting to encounter a cannon buried in the sand on the sea floor during a spear-fishing expedition at a familiar reef, but there it was. In shallow water a little farther on, the men discovered another cannon, and then an anchor.

Lionel Bonsang and Christopher Richard often dove on the La Natiere reefs near their home in the French walled city of St. Malo, but on this trip they had trouble finding their usual marks after winter storms had transformed the underwater landscape. It seemed those storms had also uncovered long-buried treasure.

"We knew it was a privateer," said [Chevelu?]. "There were cannons and we thought, 'We're going to find daggers and cutlasses,' and we did."

The men went back to the site again and again that winter, each time uncovering more artifacts: musket balls, cutlery, silver, china, bottles. The quantity and condition of the items convinced them that the site was most likely undiscovered.

"We were like kids in an attic who discover a chest and it's full of great stuff," said [Chevelu?].

The men's discovery didn't remain a secret for long. Rumors about silver dishware from the late 17th century at a site near St. Malo drew the attention of the French Department of Underwater Archaeological Research.

Merchant or Corsair?

When underwater archaeologists Elisabeth Veyrat and Michel L'Hour examined the wreck site for the first time, they were astonished to find an extraordinarily preserved ship. Ropes were still coiled on the deck, and the dishware was fossilized in the state in which it was left.

If the ship was truly a privateer, it would be an incredible find. Aside from a few fragments of the Alcide, a privateering frigate discovered off the coast of France in 1985, no shipwreck of this kind had ever been uncovered.

The wreck site was huge, nearly 11,000 square feet. Archaeologists quickly determined that the ship was from the end of the 17th century or beginning of the 18th century. Wood samples made it clear that the wreck was not a French navy vessel, but it could have been a merchant ship, heavily armed with cannons to defend itself against attack.

It also occurred to Veyrat and L'Hour that the ship could have been a corsair, many of which operated out of St. Malo during wartime in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

St. Malo: Privateer Haven

St. Malo revels in its historic reputation as home to famed privateers who roamed the seas during the reign of Louis XIV. The medieval ramparts, towers and forts that line the coast add to the town's mystique and bolster the legends of the corsairs. Although the mythic exploits of captains such as Danyan, Alain Poree, Duguay Trouin and Surcouf are celebrated, hard evidence of their lives, ships and exploits is thin.

Historians know that the city's economy during the 17th and 18th centuries was based on trade and fishing. Many ships were outfitted for fishing and would switch to privateering in times of war, of which there were many in the 17th and 18th centuries.

According to experts, privateers were not lawless pirates or buccaneers. A privateer is defined as an armed private ship licensed to attack enemy shipping. In France under Louis XIV, private ship-owners were required to obtain a letter of marque, or war commission, before undertaking an expedition.

Once they had their legal papers, privateers took to the oceans to chase unescorted merchant vessels, sometimes for months or years, fishing or trading in their off-time. If they were captured by enemies, they were treated as prisoners of war, not criminals. If they made it home, they shared their loot with the crown.

Shallow reefs lining the entrance to the bay made St. Malo a safe haven for privateers. It also made the city impregnable, prompting the British to dub it the "hornet's nest." The English would watch the privateers enter the bay, but were incapable of pursuing them. Only the captains of St. Malo, who knew the topography of the channel, could risk the perilous passage. But even they sometimes miscalculated the tricky navigation, and now only records are left to tell the tales of their shipwrecks.

Excavation

The wreck site at the La Natiere reef was extremely challenging to excavate. Working underwater already presents obstacles not found on land, but this particular site was especially rough.

Visibility was extremely poor — 10 feet at best — so it was impossible to see the site as a whole. The archaeologists were forced to gradually sketch every object in place, positioning each item in relation to the others they found. Very slowly, the structure of the wreck formed on paper, allowing the divers to identify zones to be excavated and studied.

Safety was also a concern in the waters off St. Malo. The currents here are among the most violent in the world. Water flowing through the channel can reach avalanche force at certain points during each tidal cycle. Diving is only possible in good weather and for only one hour at each low tide.

Finally, thousands of tons of sand needed to be dredged with underwater suction tubes in order to reveal the wreck. Time and corrosion had compressed all of the pieces into fine layers — a mass of objects and fragments mixed with seaweed. The archaeologists needed to be patient as they broke objects free from the mass to avoid sacrificing one piece to get to another.

Once the site was mapped, the team divided the wreck into two excavation zones — east and west. The western zone consisted of a large compressed mass mixed with ballast and pieces of iron. In the east lay cannons collapsed on their carriages. The ship was well preserved because beneath the sand it was locked in a layer of mud that flowed into the sea from the nearby Rance River.

A Heavily Armed Ship

Once the site was mapped, the research team embarked on several expeditions to retrieve and analyze artifacts from the ship, hoping to learn about its crew and their way of life. As the clues came up from the sea floor, the team hoped to learn the name of the ship, its origin and, if they were lucky, the names of some of the crew members.

The cannons, musket balls, pistol parts and cutlass handles all painted a picture of a heavily armed ship. But both merchants and privateers could have carried such an armory. It was the wooden shovels that positively identified the wreck as a corsair.

The shovels were not fitted with metal because they were used to shovel tons of salt, which would have rusted metal parts. When privateers were not boarding enemy ships, they were cod fishing off the shoals of Newfoundland. Salt was the only means of preserving fish at the time. This evidence convinced the archaeologists that the vessel had once practiced wartime privateering, so the next step was to identify the ship.

The dates of the objects discovered in the wreck ranged from 1690 to 1740. This finding puzzled the team, because they knew that fittings on a ship of that period would have been replaced frequently.

Archives revealed that at least 30 shipwrecks were reported in the bay of St. Malo during that period. But none of the ships in the archive seemed to match. They were either sunk in the wrong place, armed with too few cannons or were the wrong size.

Veyrat and L'Hour finally settled on a possible identity for the shipwreck — the frigate Saint Jean Baptiste — which had sunk in the bay in 1713 after returning from Newfoundland.

One Ship or Two?

As the team worked to prove their hypothesis, they made a discovery that would collapse the theory. Buried in the sand in a zone identified as the ship's galley, they uncovered a puzzling group of small bones. They often found bones of rats, chickens or pigs in shipwrecks — remains of meals or stowaway animals — but these were different.

The bones were identified as those of a 6-month-old Barbary macaque, a monkey found only on the island of Gibraltar. It was impossible for a 6-month-old macaque from Gibraltar to have been living on a boat that had been in Newfoundland for seven months, as had the Saint Jean Baptiste . This was the first solid evidence that the site might consist of two wrecks instead of one.

The team used analysis of wood collected from 20 different parts of the wreck to test their new theory. Ring succession in wood is a signature that can be read like a bar code through dendrochronology, a highly precise dating technique. The wood samples confirmed that there was not just one vessel, but two. The first ship, located on the eastern side of the site, dated from 1678, the western ship from 1736.

As they continued to clear out the site, they could finally see how the two wrecks were arranged on the sea floor, each ship lying on its side.

Positive Identification

The team found two possible candidates for the identity of the older wreck — the Soleil, lost in 1692, and the Saint Esprit, lost in 1693. But there was only one ship on record that seemed to match the other ship. In the 1740s, a ship named the Sainte Famille wrecked in the bay as it was returning from Dominica.

Veyrat and L'Hour found information in the archives that positively identified the older ship. On Dec. 15, 1692, Pierre Gris, the captain of the frigate Saint Esprit, armed for privateering with 26 cannons, reported that his vessel ran onto a reef at 2 in the afternoon the day before, where it split and filled with water.

As the team worked to identify the second of the two ships, they discovered an enormous mass of metal bars. The mass yielded nearly a thousand 2 1/2-foot cast-iron ingots, weighing 110 pounds each. The bars, used as ballast, appeared to bear inscriptions. Many marks were illegible, but two were not. They read: Step 'n Onion 1746 and Potuxent 1747.

These dates ruled out the Sainte Famille as a candidate. But no other shipwrecks seemed to match up with the evidence and dates found on the western wreckage.

Finally, the archaeologists found a record that matched. On April 23, 1750, Jean-Pierre Lamer testified that he was captain of the ship L'Aimable Grenot when it hit stone, fell onto its starboard side and upset the ballast, making the ship impossible to right.

Finally the years of hard, dangerous work paid off. With their meticulous recovery and study of this one-of-a-kind shipwreck, Elisabeth Veyrat and Michel L'Hour not only solved a mystery, they provided evidence to the people of St. Malo that their legends are based in reality.