The Sinking Of The Dmitrii Donskoi
US NavyThe Russian warship, Dmitrii Donskoi, at New York Harbor in 1893.
Finding a Russian warship thousands of feet below sea level is remarkable enough, but discovering 200 tons of gold worth an estimated $130 billion in its hull is another matter entirely.
But this is exactly what an international team of experts said they’d found in a sunken ship off the coast of a South Korean island in July 2018, where the remains of the Dmitrii Donskoi were untouched and waiting.
According to The Telegraph, the vessel sunk in 1905 during the Battle of Tsushima, which was the final defeat of the Russian Navy in the Russo-Japanese War.
It’s believed that the captain intentionally hastened the sinking of the warship after it was fatally hit so that the Japanese wouldn’t get their hands on its rumored treasure.
Shinil GroupDivers identified the ship by its name inscribed in Cyrillic characters on the stern.
The Donskoi was initially designed as a commerce raider. When war erupted, however, it was deployed as a protector of transport ships in the Far East. The day it sank, 60 of the total 591 crew members were killed and 120 were injured. The captain allegedly anchored the ship and ordered his men to abandon it before he intentionally sank it the next morning.
Shinil GroupPhotos of the Dmitrii Donskoi’s wreckage.
Footage of the vessel was captured 113 years later by the South Korean maritime salvage company, the Shinil Group, and its submersibles. The footage clearly showed the ship’s cannons, deck guns, anchor, and wheel encrusted in over a century of marine growth — but no treasure.
Though the Shinil Group said it planned to give Russia half of any of the gold it managed to recover, it wound up getting up caught in a scam. According to the BBC, the ship apparently had no such gold aboard and South Korean police found several members guilty of fraud for falsely claiming they had found it in the first place.
The Donskoi, meanwhile, remains in the ocean.
