

However scores extra sunken vessels stay on the ocean ground, awaiting rediscovery.
Listed here are a number of the world’s most infamously elusive shipwrecks, plus a couple of you may see for your self (some with out even getting moist).
Santa Maria, Haiti
That is one idea, anyway. Nonetheless the Italian explorer’s ship met its destiny, pleasure bubbled over in Could 2014, when archaeologist Barry Clifford claimed he’d chanced upon its long-lost wreck.
The Santa Maria continues to be down there, someplace.
Flor de la Mar, Sumatra

A reproduction of the Flor de la Mar stands in entrance of the Maritime Museum in Malacca, Malaysia.
Tim Wimborne/Reuters
Maybe it was solely a matter of time earlier than the Flor de la Mar went down, which it did in a heavy storm off Sumatra, Indonesia in 1511.
Many of the crew perished, and its booty — stated to incorporate the complete private fortune of a Portuguese governor, value a cool $2.6 billion in at the moment’s cash — was misplaced.
SS Waratah, Durban (South Africa)
It might not have its personal theme music sung by Celine Dion, however the SS Waratah is named “Australia’s Titanic” — and for good motive.
A passenger cargo ship constructed to journey between Europe and Australia with a stopover in Africa, the Waratah disappeared shortly after steaming off from town of Durban in present-day South Africa in 1909 — simply three years earlier than the Titanic tragedy. As for the trigger, theories abound.
Your complete liner, full with eight staterooms, music lounge and all 211 passengers and crew, was by no means discovered. Ninety years after the Waratah went down, the Nationwide Underwater and Marine Company thought they’d lastly discovered it, but it surely was a false alarm.
Stated the late thriller author Clive Cussler, who spent a lot of his life trying to find the wreck, “I assume she goes to proceed to be elusive some time longer.”
USS Indianapolis, Philippine Sea
Rotten Tomatoes’ “Tomatometer” would possibly rack up a rancid 17% for the 2016 Nicolas Cage film, “USS Indianapolis: Males of Braveness,” however in actual life, the ship performed a game-ending function in World Conflict II.
The drop-off of the lethal cargo went with no hitch, however on its return journey, the Indianapolis was hit by a Japanese sub, with many crew members perishing from shark assaults and salt poisoning.
Slave ships, North Atlantic Ocean

A person takes an image of a pulley block, certainly one of a number of recovered artefacts introduced up from sunken São José.
Rodger Bosch/AFP/Getty Photos
Not only one shipwreck, however a complete ghastly style of them.
It is estimated some 1,000 ships now on the underside of the ocean had been complicit within the depraved “triangular commerce” throughout the Atlantic that noticed some 12-13 million Africans compelled into slavery.
Others, just like the Clotilda, had been purposefully scuttled by their homeowners, to cowl up proof of slave buying and selling, lengthy after the 1807 Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves.
It is unattainable to retrieve such objects with out additionally dredging up tales of human struggling, though DWP’s aim is to doc slavery’s nefarious legacy, utilizing it to coach and enlighten.
Nonetheless, such ships are notoriously elusive, and plenty of might by no means see the sunshine of day once more.
Shipwrecks you may go to
Uluburun, Bodrum
Mehmed Çakir was diving for sponges off the coast of Yalıkavak, Turkey in 1982, when he occurred upon the stays of a buying and selling ship that had sunk right here some 3,000 years earlier.
The Vasa, Stockholm

The Vasa is now on show at a museum in Stockholm.
Anders Wiklund/AFP/Getty Photos
Eerily intact, the seventeenth century warship Vasa appears to be like extra like a prop from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, than a ship that first (and final) set sail in 1628.
The Swedish behemoth made it about 1,300 meters out of port earlier than it went down, and was solely pulled from its silty grave some 333 years later.
Since a devoted museum opened in Stockholm in 1990, the Vasa has change into one of many world’s least elusive shipwrecks, ogled to date by some 25 million guests.
MV Captayannis, River Clyde
Spied from the banks of the River Clyde at Greenock in Scotland, you would possibly mistake the wreck of the MV Captayannis for a just lately demised whale.
The black hull of this Greek sugar-carrying boat, rolled onto its facet, is a favourite perch for feathered residents of a close-by chicken sanctuary — and has been, because the ship went down in a squall in January 1974.
It is stated nobody took accountability for the so-called “sugar boat,” therefore why it is nonetheless wedged right into a sandbank — a gauche reminder of the ocean’s capriciousness.
Chuuk Lagoon, Micronesia
If scuba diving is what floats your boat, likelihood is you have heard of Chuuk Lagoon.
On this sprinkling of islands 1,000 miles northeast of Papua New Guinea, the Japanese arrange their most formidable World Conflict II naval base — that’s, till Operation Hailstone was launched in 1944, with Allied forces sending some 60 Japanese ships and plane to a watery grave.
MS World Discoverer, Solomon Islands
“Open 24 hours” declares Google Maps optimistically concerning the shipwreck of the MS World Discoverer.
For the reason that cruise ship MS World Discoverer struck one thing laborious, and half-sank off the shores of Roderick Bay within the Solomon Islands in 2000, it is change into a vacationer attraction for passing ships (all passengers, it must be identified, had been helped to security).
Gently rusting away, at a 46-degree record, the ship appears to be like prefer it turned on its facet, and went to sleep. If nothing else, it’s going to have you ever counting the lifeboats by yourself vessel as you sail by.