612
Views

Archaeologists Find Historic Dutch Shipwreck off Australia

Koning Willem de Tweede, courtesy Rotterdam Maritime Museum (Jacob Spin, 1806-1875)
Koning Willem de Tweede, courtesy Rotterdam Maritime Museum (Jacob Spin, 1806-1875)

Published May 13, 2025 8:10 PM by The Maritime Executive

 

Researchers in Australia have rediscovered the wreck of a Dutch cargo ship that went down south of Adelaide.

The vessel is believed to be the Koning Willem de Tweede, a 140-foot sailing ship that was lost in 1857. The vessel departed Hong Kong that June with a work party of more than 400 Chinese gold mining laborers on board. The miners were headed to the gold fields of Victoria, which were home to a booming enterprise at the time. 

After the vessel delivered the miners to shore at the town of Robe, South Australia, the weather conditions deteriorated. On June 30, the ship's anchor windlass tore off and the anchor went with it. In heavy seas, the Koning Willem de Tweede grounded offshore and began to break up. Only nine out of 25 crewmembers survived. 

Shortly before the pandemic, the Dutch government agreed to fund a new search for the wreck site of the Koning Willem de Tweede. The hunt was led by the Australian National Maritime Museum, and after some initial field research, the team began a magnetometer survey in late 2022. The search revealed a location on the bottom with a very substantial magnetic signature - but diving the site proved difficult because of persistent poor surface conditions in the unsheltered bay. Followup trip in March 2023 encountered the same bad weather, as well as poor visibility. 

It would be two more years before the researchers got the conditions they needed to examine the site. The fine sand of the bay made visibility a persistent challenge, but in March 2025, they got a weather window that was calm enough to see the bottom in detail. Lead scientist James Hunter discovered the ship's windlass, among other items, and found enough information to draw a formal conclusion. In May, the partners confirmed that they had found the wreck of the Koning Willem de Tweede at a position just 1,300 feet off the beach at Robe. 

Hunter says that the site has excellent archaeological potential because of the rapid timeline of the casualty. 

"The wrecking event was catastrophic and very sudden, so we’re very likely to find a lot of artefacts. No one had time to grab anything. Pretty much everything was lost – and is all probably still in the wreck, which can tell us so much about the ship’s crew and its passengers," he told Cosmos Magazine in 2023.