For this blog we are going to do something a little different: a conversation between Serena Cant, Maritime Research Specialist at Historic England, and Ian Friel, maritime historian and consultant, who has recently identified the designated Salcombe Cannon wreck as the Dom van Keulen, lost in 1633. He is one of the contributors to the British Museum’s 2026 publication From Morocco to the Coast of England: The Story of the Dom van Keulen and its Remarkable Cargo, available as a free download from the British Museum.

Serena: Ian, congratulations on identifying the Salcombe Cannon wreck, now known as the Dom van Keulen. Before we start, I’d just like to introduce you a little bit to our readers and talk about some of the things we have both been involved in. You have been instrumental in making a number of wreck identifications over the years.

Our paths have regularly crossed over designated wreck sites, we’ve been involved in some of the same cases, and share many of the same interests – medieval and 17^th century wrecks, so I thought this would be great! I’d just like to say I come at this with an art history and forensic linguistic background, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves . . . but instead look at some of the things you have done.

For example, you identified a ‘ship-shape’ in the mud in the River Hamble as the Holigost, lying next to the Grace Dieu – making this stretch of the River Hamble a 15^th century ship graveyard. This work resulted in the Holigost being incorporated into the existing designation for the Grace Dieu site in 2016, in which I played a part.

We were also both involved with the Swash Channel Wreck. When its rudder was raised in 2013, I was asked to look at the figure on the carving. I wrote a paper dating it to the 1630s stylistically, while you identified the wreck through your documentary research as the Fame of Hoorn, lost in 1631. We came to pretty much the same conclusion from different points of view, but of course you went one further and identified it!

Summarise why the Salcombe Cannon wreck site has posed such an intriguing mystery since it was discovered?

Ian: The wreck was investigated in 1995 by volunteer divers from the South West Maritime Archaeological Group, following up the discovery of a group of cannon and anchors on the seabed in Salcombe Bay, by another group of divers. SWMAG’s initial dive located a small gold ingot and some gold coins, which were duly reported to the Receiver of Wreck. SWMAG went on to survey the site in detail, eventually uncovering a remarkable collection of over 400 Moroccan gold coins and other gold items. The site was given statutory protection under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973 and in 1999 the British Museum acquired the items, thanks to a grant from the Art Fund. The SWMAG divers and their archaeological advisers deserve enormous credit for their careful work recovering finds that – in a literal sense – have become national treasures.

What came to be known as the ‘Salcombe Cannon Site’ was covered in a BBC ‘Timewatch’ film (2003) called White Slaves, Pirate Gold, which made the not-unreasonable suggestion that the site represented a 17^th-century ‘Barbary Corsair’, a pirate vessel from North Africa. Barbary vessels were intermittently active in North European waters from the late 1500s to the 1700s. They were notorious for kidnapping European seafarers and coastal inhabitants and taking them back to Africa as slaves. Recent research suggests that about 20,000 people were abducted in this way from the British Isles and Ireland over that period. The pirates posed a real danger in English waters in the 1630s, the date of the latest of the Moroccan coins from Salcombe.

Serena: It really illustrates the international dimension of shipwrecks, doesn’t it? The original ‘Barbary corsair’ theory was plausible, given that we also have accounts of corsairs wrecked on the Cornish coast as late as 1760 when ‘an Algerine Chebeck (xebec) of 20 guns . . . was entirely lost’. [1]

So this identification places the wreck in a very different context, at exactly the same period as the Barbary corsairs? The Barbary coast of North Africa was at one and the same time a place to be feared, but also somewhere Europeans came to trade as well?

Ian: Trade in this period offered real dangers, but some of the goods available in North Africa were so valuable – such as gold and saltpetre, a key ingredient of gunpowder – that merchants and seafarers took the risks. The Dutch, in particular, had established contacts with Morocco, and traded items such as weaponry in return for Moroccan gold and other products.

Serena: It was clearly a lucrative trade, with the Barbary ‘ducketts’ or ducats that were originally on board, and you explain that the gap between the surviving written record and the numbers of ducats discovered through archaeological excavation leaves 8,100 ducats unaccounted for. What do you think became of them?

Ian: The English sources for the wreck are quite limited, consisting of the initial commission to investigate the loss from the High Court of Admiralty (HCA, the legal body concerned with maritime affairs), the testimonies of two young Dutch merchants who were on the ship, and two arrest warrants. The lack of material rather surprised me, because in previous research I had come across HCA records of Dutch wrecks that had generated a lot of paperwork. The reason for the dearth of English sources here appears to come down to the HCA’s problems in Devon: its local Devon vice-admiralty seems to have lost control of maritime jurisdiction to various towns and individuals. The aristocratic Courtenay family claimed this kind of jurisdiction in the Salcombe area, which included ‘the right of wreck’.

The legal concept of the right of wreck went back to the Middle Ages: originally, if someone owned the right of wreck on a particular stretch of coastline, then they had a right to take whatever washed up there, shipwrecks included. (See our recent blogs on Edward III and the Paston Wrecks for medieval right to wreck.) Shipowners and merchants were given some legal protection in the 13^th century, with a law that decreed if a person or an animal survived a shipwreck, it was not legally ‘wreck’, and the owners had a limited time-period in which to recover their property. Material still unclaimed after that period expired could be taken by the local owner of the right of wreck.

Alongside the legal situation, of course, there was also a huge amount of wreck looting by coast dwellers, and those further afield. Ships could contain huge concentrations of valuable items, and a shipwreck could dump such a prize almost on the doorsteps of people who had little or nothing.

The law remained pretty much unchanged for centuries, and still applied in the 1600s, leading to numerous disputes, which form one of our principal sources of written evidence for shipwrecks in the period before a widespread press.

The two Dutch witnesses who appeared before the HCA recounted the last voyage of the ship, which they revealed to have been the Dom van Keulen, lost while en route from Saffia (Safi) in Morocco to Amsterdam, commanded by a man named Dirrick Peterson. The goods on board included approximately 9,000 Moroccan gold coins, which the English called ‘Barbary ducketts’ [Barbary ducats]. The two witnesses’ testimonies were virtually identical, and the senior of the two survivors was Jacob Israel de Port, aged about 29, who said that the ship put into a foggy Salcombe Bay because it was leaking so badly, having encountered storms, and the master feared that it would sink. The crew and the two young men all got to shore safely (so the wrecked vessels and its contents were not legally ‘wreck’).

The master had taken 500 gold coins from the chest on board to provide his crew with enough cash to get them home, but had not told his men just how much gold was on board, for fear that they might cut his throat in order to get it. Neither witness saw the ship sink, but the assumption was clearly that the rest of the gold had gone to the bottom with the Dom van Keulen.

One of the arrest warrants names the owners of the cargo as two Amsterdam men called Joao de Pas and Andrea de Azevedo. This opens up some very unexpected connections with the Dom van Keulen story – both were Portuguese Jews, part of a sizeable community of Iberian Jews in the Netherlands who had fled Spain and Portugal in order to escape the Inquisition. For the time, the Dutch Republic showed a remarkable degree of tolerance for these refugees, who were also of course opponents of the Republic’s arch-enemy, the Spanish Empire. Jacob Israel de Port and his colleague, Samuel de Pas, were also evidently Jewish.

I do not read Dutch, though was able to find out something more about Joao de Pas and Andrea de Azevedo and their contemporaries from a large number of documents about the 17^th-century Jewish community in the Netherlands that have been published in English.

It’s an extraordinary story in many ways and shows how items found off a Devon bay can open up connections with places very far away from Salcombe in both time and space.

Serena: For me it is interesting because we have a record for the Greyhound, which stranded in another Devon bay, Bigbury Bay, in 1782 while bound for London with a very similar cargo of gum, almonds and Barbary ducats. [2] There were rumblings over ducats that subsequently went missing. Salvage of an illicit kind by what they would at the time have called ‘the country people’ i.e. local inhabitants! Is that plausible?

Ian: The English sources say nothing about what happened. With the 400 or so coins found on site, and 500 that Peterson is said to have shared with his crew, we are still left with about 8,100 coins that cannot be accounted for. One possibility is that the coin chests were salvaged from the wreck soon after the sinking. There was a Dutch salvor called Jacob Johnson or ‘Jacob the Diver’ was very active in Britain and Ireland at this period, and is known to have raised some cannon from a wreck at nearby Dartmouth in 1629. We don’t know what kind of diving equipment he used but it is very clear that he was the ‘go-to’ man for marine salvage in England at this time. However, Dutch sources (below) give a different account of what took place.

Serena: In the book you allude to the fact that the records fizzle out to an extent: we don’t really know why that is?

Ian: The lack of records is probably down to two things, the HCA’s problems in enforcing its writ in Devon, and – if, as seems likely, the gold was stolen – the need of the perpetrators to keep things quiet.

Serena: For me, it is one of the frustrations of shipwreck research: documentation is often extensive, but only up to a point! For example, I know of a Portuguese merchant who insisted on recompense for theft from a wreck over nearly two decades in the early 14^th century, but the records then die out and we don’t know the outcome. [3] I rather suspect that the case fizzled out because most of the people involved had died after that length of time!

Ian: My research on the Salcombe finds was just a part of the work on the project. The British Museum commissioned extensive researches by a group of expert archaeologists, numismatists, jewellery specialists and others, and this was published by British Museum Press this year, as you say in the introduction.

I remarked in my chapter that more information might well be available in the Dutch archives, which has proven to be the case. The publicity about the identification of the Salcombe wreck reached the Dutch media, leading to a response from the Stichting Maritieme Historische Databank (Marhisdata) in the Netherlands. Their project focuses on systematically researching historical shipwrecks through archival sources, transcribing and translating original documents using specialised software. They have information on the Dom van Keulen from Dutch sources, which contradicted what the two young men said to the HCA, and accused one of them of a crime.

I haven’t had a chance yet to examine this information in detail, but the upshot is that the insurers of the voyage accused Peterson, his crew and Jacob Israel de Port of deliberately scuttling the ship by boring holes in the bottom. It was they who initiated the arrest warrants in England.

However, this dramatic allegation seems to be no more than that – an allegation, without actual evidence of a crime. None of the timbers or planks of the Dom van Keulen survive on the seabed, so there is no way of looking for forensic evidence in the way of hull boards with holes where there should not have been holes.

It is not impossible that the ship was scuttled – there was no shortage of seagoing criminals in the 17^th century – but one cannot help but think that it was easy for the merchants and insurers to put the blame on those who were on the ship for the loss and to cast them in the worst light possible.

There does not seem to be any evidence of what happened to Peterson or Israel de Port. The HCA issued warrants for the arrest of Peterson and the ship’s pilot (navigator) Jacob Clausen, but neither man seems to have been apprehended, and no sign has been found of a warrant for arresting Jacob Israel de Port. The HCA had officials or semi-official ‘commissioners’ it could instruct to carry out tasks, but no actual police force of any kind, and it was probably quite easy for fugitives to disappear, especially if they were sailors who could sign aboard another ship with few questions asked. We will probably never know the full truth of what happened in the Dom van Keulen case, though I hope that more documents might emerge in British or Dutch archives to shed light on the story.

Serena: It’s one of the joys and frustrations of documentary research, isn’t it? What sources did you use, and how easy are they to access and use?

Ian: The main cache of High Court of Admiralty records is at The National Archives in Kew. Researching there is open to anyone who can prove their identity and address, so it’s open to a much wider range of people than just academic researchers, and many people go there to pursue family history or some other kind of personal research.

In order to tackle the 17^th-century HCA records firsthand, though, you need to be able to read the handwriting and to understand both Latin and the English of the period. It’s possible that in the future AI will be able to transcribe and translate it, as is being done in the Netherlands, but I’m not aware of a programme of this kind at the moment in the UK. That said, volunteer researchers contributing to the Marine Lives project have put a lot of transcriptions and studies of 17^th-century HCA material online.

The documents vary a lot in physical terms. Some consist of individual documents, others are in leather-bound volumes, while yet others consist of groups of documents attached to each other, like big 17^th-century jotters. Some of the HCA records are indexed, but there is often no substitute for ploughing through a vast amount of material in a search for relevant evidence. It took me a long time to find anything about the Dom van Keulen, and I was greatly relieved when I spotted the word ‘Salcombe’ in a document!

One general thing I will say about researching the identities of wrecked ships is that it can be a case of trying to balance probabilities. You need the best possible archaeological evidence and the best possible written evidence: in the case of the Dom van Keulen, the upshot of the testimony was that the ship sank near Salcombe in 1633 while carrying a large number of Moroccan coins. The Salcombe Cannon Site was clearly the wreck of a ship from the age of sail that contained hundreds of Moroccan coins, the latest of them minted in 1632. The probability that the Dom van Keulen and the Salcombe Cannon Site were one and the same was so high as to be, essentially, a ‘no-brainer’ once the HCA evidence emerged.

This is far from the case with all wrecksites discovered by archaeologists and others. The number of shipping casualties was horrifyingly high in the 19^th century, when we get the first systematic government statistics about marine losses. There are no absolutely certain statistics before that date (except, for naval shipwrecks, which recorded because they were stated property. The further one goes back into the past, broadly speaking, the amount of written evidence declines. This means that anyone researching the identity of a ship has to take an absolutely forensic approach to the evidence, and accept that, in many cases, it may not be possible to conclusively identify a vessel. It can be a frustrating process, but it is also intensely interesting.

Serena: As you rightly say in the book, the name and affiliations of the ship form something of a mystery. Keulen is the Dutch spelling for Köln, Cologne in English. Why would a Dutch ship be named after the Dom of Cologne, i.e. Cologne Cathedral? Do you think it is a German vessel in origin? It’s so different from other Dutch ship names of the era.

Ian: The origin of the ship is still uncertain. The Dutch sources show that is was a vessel of around 200-240 tons, but don’t say anything about where the ship was built. Cologne Cathedral was a Catholic institution, and to name a Dutch ship after it was unusual in the largely Protestant Netherlands. In a 1631 list of 91 Dutch warships, only six had overtly religious names, so the Dutch may not have been keen on the practice in any case.

One thing I would say about this is that it was not at all unusual for ships of this period to have more than one name during their service careers. Names could change on new ownership, or to disguise a vessel that had been used for piracy, and sometimes ships were recorded with their aliases, like the English ship Swan of 1653, alias the Bunch of Blackberries.

Serena: I agree with these observations: Dutch names such as Eendracht (Unity) were common and popular, reflecting general virtues, rather than saints or holy places. For me the name of the ship is almost the most fascinating thing about it. Ship names might not tell us about the wreck process, but they yield so much other contextual information.

I’ve never come across a name like the Dom van Keulen in the 17th century in over 30 years‘ maritime research: the nearest I can think of in contemporary Dutch sources are names such as Wapen van Edam (Arms of Edam), which reference civic pride in Dutch cities, but never a feature belonging to another political entity. Wapen van Edam was anglicised when captured by the English to Black Bull (the main feature of the arms of Edam), as it was meaningless in English otherwise, and wrecked in the Anglo-Dutch Wars in 1666, so that ties in with what you’ve said about the changes in ship names.

Dom van Keulen seems to me to be a very modern concept somehow – the sort of name that would be bestowed on ships by the great 19th and 20th century shipping lines, named after the places they enabled passengers to reach. It’s really intriguing!

So adding the identification of the Dom van Keulen has closed one chapter – a concrete identification for a wreck that has long puzzled specialists – but opens up another fascinating trail.

Will further research on the wreck continue?

Ian: I have no personal plans for further research on this, but there may be more to be learned from Dutch and English sources, if anyone would like to pursue it. It also strikes me that, in the right hands, this open-ended story could become the basis for a good historical novel!

With many thanks to Ian for participating in this interview and sharing with us the latest instalment in a mystery nearly 4 centuries old!

Footnotes:

[1] Newcastle Courant, 11 October 1760, No.4,385, p1

[2] Sherborne Mercury, 22 April 1782

[3] Navis de Jehsu Christi: Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward II, Vol.3, 1317-21, and Edward III, Vol. 3, 1334-38; Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, Edward II, October 1320 (British History Online)

[4] For a view of Cologne Cathedral by Lambert Doomer, and the background to cultural connections between Cologne and the Netherlands, see Stefes, A 2025 ‘Expedition Zeichnung: Research on Netherlandish Drawings in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud’ Codart online See also the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum’s 17th century gallery of Netherlandish art, with a view of Cologne on the Rhine by Doomer (1 of 10 views in the rotating online gallery)