Black Prince sunken ship. Pavel norov

The Black Prince is a British Navy ship. It was sent to the shores of the Black Sea during the Crimean War. According to historians, a large amount of gold was transported on board, intended to pay salaries to English soldiers and for other needs. In 1854, after a storm hit Balaklava Bay (where the aforementioned ship was moored), a dozen ships were lost, including the Black Prince.

By the way, the name of the ship was simply “Prince”. The adjective “black” was added to it later. There were several reasons for this, each version will be correct. These could be British sailors who never received their money, or they could be scuba divers, whose ranks were thinned due to the death of some of them during the search for riches at the bottom of the Black Sea.

There were many people who wanted to find the ghost ship. Entire expeditions were organized, sponsored by various countries, including the Soviet Union. Over time, all the distinctive signs of ships are lost under water, so it is difficult to accurately answer the question of what kind of ship was found. After lengthy research work, information about their results was classified by the KGB services. Rumor has it that all members of the expedition were sent to different parts of the country. Why, no one knows.

Shrouded in mystery, the Black Prince ship, which disappeared more than a century and a half ago, still attracts both amateurs and professionals. Perhaps the Black Sea is in no hurry to part with its secrets?!

"Izvestia Central Election Commission" With report: IN continuation 1923 - 24 Epron (a special-purpose underwater expedition in the Black and Azov Seas), despite the large amounts of money and energy spent, was unable to locate the site of the sinking of the English steamship "Black Prince", which perished along with many other English and French ships during the assault on November 2 (14) 1854 near Balaklava. Epron, using a specially designed diving apparatus, examined an area of ​​3- 4 square kilometers with depths up to 100 meters. Many wrecks of wooden ships were found, but the iron hull of the Black Prince was not found. To the right of the exit from Balaklava, a teak mast was found in the sea, the belonging of which to the “Prince” was more or less accurately established.

The expansion of Epron's work program in 1925 did not allow sufficient attention to be paid to further searches for this ship. However, by late autumn it was possible to allocate a small diving party, which was tasked with inspecting the coastal strip on both sides of the exit from the bay, where the depths made it possible to carry out work in ordinary diving suits.

On October 17, 1925, completely unexpectedly, to the left of the exit from the bay, almost under the Don Tower itself, which is clearly visible from steamships going to the southern shore, at a depth of 17 meters old steam boilers and parts of an iron hull set were discovered protruding from the ground . After a short excavation, the diving party was convinced that this place was the grave of the legendary steamship: there could be no doubt, since the “Black Prince” is the only steam ship with an iron hull from the entire lost squadron and there are no other similar ships at the entrance to Balaklava there have been no deaths since then.

Investigation of the place of death "Black Prince" indicated that the hull of the steamer, probably broken very thoroughly, was buried under sand and fragments of rocks, which often fell into the sea during fresh weather. The plan for further work on unloading and raising the ship consisted of significant excavation work and liberation of parts of the ship from under the stone blocks. This work required significant funds - several hundred thousand rubles.

Although the work on raising the “Black Prince” did not present any difficulties from a technical point of view and was quite simple and easy for our divers, the expedition until recently did not consider it advisable to begin them due to the lack of any documents or accurate information about the actual location there is a large amount of gold on this ship.

Epron did not have excess funds for this risky operation, and Narkomfin, quite reasonably, did not express a desire to throw away several hundred thousand rubles without any firm certainty of getting gold.

June 20 p.m. G. Epron entered into an agreement with the Japanese diving company Shinkai Kogyoshio Limited, giving it the right to carry out further work on lifting and unloading the ship. Black Prince." On June 28, the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR allowed the Japanese company to begin operations stipulated by the concluded agreement.

Before concluding the agreement, the Japanese company was given the opportunity to examine with its divers the site of the sinking of the ship indicated by Epron, and therefore Epron does not take any responsibility for the success of the operation undertaken by the Japanese company.

Epron considers it especially valuable to have the opportunity to become thoroughly familiar with the procedures and methods of underwater work practiced by the Japanese. It should be noted that the Japanese underwater technology has significant achievements that are completely unknown in the West. While in Western Europe the conquest of the sea depths proceeds through the creation of rigid diving suits and their improvement, the Japanese managed, by creating a system of special training for turtlenecks, to limit themselves to very simple but extremely original devices, making it possible to carry out work at great depths with incomparably greater success than we see in the West. Two years ago, Mr. Katbaka, the director of the mentioned diving company, managed to perform a record-breaking job of rescuing valuables amounting to up to 12 million rubles from an English steamer sunk by a German submarine during the imperialist war in the Mediterranean Sea, at a depth of about 85 meters.

Despite the short period of time that had passed since the entry into force of the agreement, lifting work, under the leadership of 15 Japanese specialists, began in early August. Technical equipment ordered from abroad has arrived.

We can therefore assume that the next two to three months will bring us a complete solution "Black Prince".

The following is a story by Pavel Norov, written specifically for "World Pathfinder", responds to the great interest that the mystery arouses "Black Prince." The story develops the theme of one of the many cases of "hunting" for these semi-legendary treasures...

I. In Balaklava Bay

On a sultry June afternoon, when the sun hits with sheer, dazzling rays, Balaklava Bay looks like a blue lake. Mountain terraces dotted with white houses rise around the lake in a sharply defined semicircle.

And from below it seems that these houses hang above each other and cling to the rocky spurs, like bizarre bird nests.

There is silence in the town. Everyone hid from the hot southern sun. Only tireless Greek fishermen fiddle around with the boats. They recently returned from fishing and are now unloading fish from deep holds.

When the sun approaches sunset, Balaclava housewives will come to the embankment to buy fish. And then it will be noisy here: the fishermen will ask until exhaustion, the housewives will bargain until they sweat, screaming, squealing and cursing. Hot southern people! But now there is silence.

Balaklava Bay cut deeply into the mainland in the shape of an elongated oval. It is securely closed on all sides, and only in the southern part of it is the narrow exit to the outer roadstead visible, like the neck of a bottle.

Excellent bay! For small ships, the port couldn’t be better imagined: quiet, deep-water. But the passage is treacherous, as if lying in wait for ships with careless pilots. One wrong movement of the steering wheel - and a disaster in a fresh wind is inevitable.

In the language of the Black Sea sailors, “fresh wind” is a very special concept. When the nor'easter breaks through and, turning the dark green waves of the Black Sea white, makes the water boil around the ship like boiling water in a cauldron, then the friendly Balaklava Bay turns into a dangerous trap. And woe to the ships that try to seek salvation in its waters. The treacherous exit from the bay is bordered by high, rocky shores hanging over the sea, as if deliberately built for shipwrecks.

It is not for nothing that the Balaklava seaside has been the site of classic shipwrecks since ancient times. At the bottom of its rocky roadstead lie hundreds of ships. The Phoenicians, Greeks, Genoese, Romans, Turks and, later, the British, French, Italians - all these peoples left their ships here.

This is an ancient sea burial vault, which among the world’s sea cemeteries is second only to the famous Sargasso Sea and the shores of Novaya Zemlya, where the skeletons of lost ships are carried away by the underwater current...

The shadow of the legendary “Black Prince” has appeared more than once from the pages of Russian literature. A.I. wrote about the “Black Prince”. Kuprin, S.N. Sergeev; Tsensky, M. Zoshchenko, E.V. Tarle, T. Bobritsky and many other writers.

...By the beginning of the Crimean War, the British government chartered more than two hundred merchant ships belonging to private companies to transport troops and ammunition to the Crimea. Among them was the screw-sail frigate Prince. On November 8, 1854, together with other English ships, he arrived at the outer Balaklava roadstead. Five days later, a southeastern hurricane of unprecedented force swept over the Crimean peninsula. Thirty-four ships perished on the coastal rocks of Balaklava Bay. This fate befell the Prince.

What was on board? The Illustrated London News wrote on December 16, 1854: “Among the cargo accepted by the Prince were: 36,700 pairs of woolen socks, 53,000 woolen shirts, 2,500 guard sheepskin coats, 16,000 sheets, 3,750 blankets. In addition, one can also name the number of sleeping bags - 150,000 pieces, woolen shirts - 100,000, flannel underpants - 90,000 pairs, about 40,000 blankets and 40,000 waterproof hats, 40,000 fur coats and 120,000 pairs of boots."

The war has not yet ended, and rumors have already spread throughout the world that the English steam frigate “Black Prince” with a cargo of gold intended to pay salaries to the troops was lost off the coast of Crimea. The ship in question was never called the Black Prince. The name of this vessel from the time she was launched on the River Thames at Blackwall in 1853 was "Prince". It is difficult to say why the ship began to be called the “Black Prince”. Perhaps the tireless hunters for his gold or the English soldiers who did not receive their next allowance are to blame for the romantic epithet “black”?

Almost immediately after the conclusion of peace, the search for the remains of the “Black Prince” began. The ship was searched for equally unsuccessfully by Italians, Americans, Norwegians, and Germans. The primitive diving technology of those times did not allow diving deep enough.

In 1875, when the diving suit had already been created, a large joint stock company with large capital was established in France. French divers searched the bottom of Balaklava Bay and all approaches to it. More than ten sunken ships were found, but the Black Prince was not among them. The work was carried out at a depth that was enormous for the end of the last century - almost 40 fathoms. But even the strongest and most resilient divers could only stay under water for a few minutes...

Gradually, legends began to spread about the “Black Prince”. The value of the gold sunk with the ship increased to sixty million francs.

Our Shipping wrote in 1897: The Prince Regent, a huge ship of the English fleet, was carrying from England a significant amount of silver coin and 200,000 pounds sterling in gold to pay the salaries of the English troops in the Crimea... The money sent on this ship was packed in barrels, which is why they should be preserved intact..."

In 1896, the Russian inventor Plastunov began searching. But he was also unlucky.

The Italians turned out to be the most patient. The inventor of the deep-sea suit, Giuseppe Rastucci, led the expedition in 1901. A few weeks after the start of work, he managed to find the iron hull of a large ship. Italian divers recovered from the bottom a metal box with lead bullets, a telescope, a rifle, an anchor, pieces of iron and wood. But... not a single coin. In the spring of 1903, the Italians left Balaklava, only to return to the search site two years later. This time, in a completely different place, they discovered another iron ship. No one still knows whether it was the Black Prince or some other ship. Again no gold was found.

However, the thought of a fabulous treasure haunted many inventors, divers, and engineers. The Russian Minister of Trade and Industry was inundated with letters with proposals to raise the Black Prince’s gold. And again Italian divers dived at the Balaklava roadstead, and again to no avail. In the end, the government of Tsarist Russia began to refuse both its own and foreign gold miners, formally citing the fact that work near the bay hampered the activities of the Black Sea squadron in the Sevastopol area. Soon the First World War ended the excitement around the “Black Prince”.

In 1922, an amateur diver from Balaklava retrieved several gold coins from the bottom of the sea at the entrance to the bay. So the world became interested in the “Black Prince” again. Offers, one more fantastic than the other, poured in. One inventor from Feodosia claimed that the “Black Prince” probably lies at the bottom in the bay itself. And if so, you just need to block the entrance to the bay with a dam, pump out the water and take the gold from the ship.

In 1923, naval engineer V.S. Yazykov came to the OGPU and reported that since 1908 he had been studying in detail the circumstances of the death of the English squadron in a storm on November 14, 1854, and that he was ready to immediately begin work on raising the jewelry. He backed up his enthusiasm with a thick folder of documents on The Black Prince. In March of the same year, it was decided to organize an expedition. It was called EPRON - Special Purpose Underwater Expedition. A few weeks later, EPRON began preparatory work. Soviet engineer E.G. Danilenko created a deep-sea apparatus that made it possible to inspect the seabed at a depth of 80 fathoms. The device had a “mechanical arm” and was equipped with a spotlight, a telephone and an emergency lifting system in case of a cable break. The crew of the device consisted of three people, air was supplied through a rubber flexible hose.

While the deep-sea vehicle E.G. was being built. Danilenko, EPRON specialists found and carefully interviewed old-timers of Balaklava - eyewitnesses of the storm on November 14, 1854. But none of them could indicate the exact place of the death of the “Prince”. As usual, their testimony turned out to be extremely contradictory.

Finally, the minesweepers took depth measurements, and the entire supposed area of ​​the Prince’s death was divided into squares by milestones. In early September 1923, we began to examine the underwater rocks to the west of the entrance to the bay. Every day, a small bolinder-type boat lowered Danilenko’s apparatus to examine the next square. Many fragments of wooden ships were discovered: masts, yards, pieces of frames, beams and sides, heavily worn away by a sea worm, overgrown with shells. They thought that it would not be particularly difficult to find the “Prince” among these wreckages: in the study of engineer Yazykov it was indicated that the “Prince” was the only iron ship among the dead.

The spring, summer and autumn of 1924 passed. But "Prince" was never found.

On the morning of October 17, one of Pavlovsky’s students discovered an iron box of a strange shape sticking out of the ground on the seabed not far from the shore. He tried to put a sling under it, but to no avail. Interested in the find, Pavlovsky invited experienced divers. Soon they raised the box to the surface: it was an antediluvian steam boiler, all corroded by rust, of a cubic shape with cast-iron doors and necks. The unusual find forced the Epron team to carefully examine the area. Under the rubble of rocks that fell from the coastal cliffs, divers found the remains of a large iron ship, half covered with sand, scattered throughout the bottom.

Over two months of work, divers recovered from the bottom dozens of pieces of iron of various shapes and sizes, part of the side plating with three portholes, a hand grenade, a medical mortar made of white porcelain, several unexploded bombs, copper hoops from barrels, an iron washstand, parts of a steam engine, almost rotten a pack of hospital shoes, lead bullets. And again - not a hint of gold...

Before the New Year, severe storms began in the Balaklava area, and work had to be stopped.

By this time, the search for the “elusive ship” had cost EPRON almost 100 thousand rubles. What to do next: is it worth continuing work? Experts' opinions were divided. EPRON could not find reliable documents confirming the presence of gold on the Prince. They asked for the Soviet embassy in London. However, the British Admiralty, citing the remoteness of the event, as well as laws restricting the access of foreigners to archives, was unable to report anything concrete. EPRON recognized further work as inappropriate.

It was at this time that the Soviet government received an offer from the Japanese diving company Shinkai Kogyossio Limited to recover gold from the Prince. In those years, this company was considered one of the most famous and successful. The last thing on her “track record” was one English ship that sank in the Mediterranean Sea. Then Japanese divers managed to retrieve treasures worth two million rubles from a depth of forty meters.

Shinkai Kogiossio Limited offered EPRON 110,000 rubles for preliminary work on the search and examination of the Prince, and also assumed all further expenses. We signed an agreement. The raised gold was to be divided between EPRON and the company in a ratio of 60 and 40 percent. In addition, the Japanese were supposed to familiarize Soviet divers with their deep-sea equipment and, after completing the work, hand over one copy of the technical equipment to EPRON.

In the summer of 1927, the Japanese (they expected to receive 800,000 rubles in gold without much difficulty!) began work. Every day, Japanese divers lifted at least twenty stone blocks weighing 500 pounds. Thousand-pound pieces of rock were pulled to the side using steam winches mounted on barges. Every day, 7 divers and 5 divers worked in shifts.

On September 5, diver Yamomato found a gold coin stuck to the stone - an English sovereign minted in 1821. After that, after two months of daily grueling work, divers discovered only four gold coins: English, French and two Turkish.

Since by mid-November 1927 the wrecked ship had been completely “washed up” and examined, the company stopped work in Balaklava. The results of her underwater work on the Prince were as follows: two forks and a spoon of white metal, a piece of an engineer's shovel, a wheel hub, horseshoes, horse bones, an officer's saber, a cake spatula, a castle, a galosh with the date 1848, several leather soles, a huge number of lead bullets, etc.

Before leaving Balaklava, representatives of the company stated that the ship on which they carried out work, in their opinion, was the Prince. However, despite the most careful searches, they were unable to find the middle part of the ship. The remaining parts of the hull were severely destroyed, and the destruction was clearly artificial. This circumstance led them to the belief that the British, who remained in Balaclava for eight months after the shipwreck, had recovered the barrels of gold before the end of the Crimean War.

In conclusion, the failed treasure hunters repeated the version of V.S. Yazykov, according to which the Prince is the only iron ship of all the ships that fell victim to the hurricane of 1854.

But is this true? Let's turn to the primary sources.

This is what the English historian Woods reports in his book “The Last Campaign” (London, 1860):

“The Prince,” a steam ship, arrived in Balaklava on the morning of November 8th. He gave away one anchor, which, together with the rope, went completely into the water. When the other anchor was released, this one also left; both anchors with ropes were lost at a depth of 35 fathoms in the water, it is obvious that none of the ropes was properly secured... After this, the “Prince” stood at sea at a considerable distance and, returning, was held behind the stern of the ship “Jason” on the mooring line, until another anchor and rope were prepared.”

What kind of ship is this "Jason"? In the English journal Practical Mackenix Journal for 1854 we find something that was unknown to neither Yazykov, nor the Epronites, nor the Japanese:

"...at Blackwall...three ships of the same type were built, respectively named 'Golden Fleece', 'Jason' and 'Prince'."

From this we can draw the following conclusions. Firstly, before the storm, there were two steamships of the same type in the Balaklava roadstead - the Prince and the Jason. Secondly, if the Practical Mechanics Journal had caught the eye of Epron or the Japanese at the time of lifting parts of the hull, then from the exact specifications given by the magazine, it would have been easy to determine whether the vessel being examined was the Prince or not. Unfortunately, no one did this.

I.S.’s opinion on this matter is interesting. Isakov, admiral of the fleet of the Soviet Union: “Prince”, “Prince Regent”, “Black Prince”, 200 thousand, 500 thousand francs, 1 million pounds sterling, 60 million francs, millions of rubles in gold... Different names of the ship, different amounts, different places of his death..."

Yes, indeed, the sunken ship found by the Epron team could be the Prince, Jason, Hope, and Resolute. There is still no reliable information that the five gold coins raised by the Japanese were from those barrels that the “Prince” was carrying to pay the soldiers’ salaries.

Was there any gold at all on board the Prince when it arrived at the Balaklava raid?

Historians and would-be historians like V.S. Yazykova from among the EPRON employees and representatives of the Japanese company Shinkai Kogyossio, who were trying to restore the true picture of the Prince disaster, forgot or did not consider one remarkable fact worthy of attention.

Not a single overcoat, padded jacket, pair of boots, not a single sovereign could get into Balaclava without the permission of the superintendent of the British expeditionary forces operating in the Crimea. The Superintendent was subordinate directly to the financial authorities of Westminster in London, and his office was in Constantinople during the Crimean War.

The uniforms, ammunition, food supplies and gold delivered by the “Prince” to the port of Istanbul were to be sent to Balaklava according to the payroll provided from the Crimea by the commander-in-chief. Lists of people who died in battles, from diseases and epidemics, with diabolical consistency, every day, diverged from the actual losses, and the “difference” remained in the hands of defeated clerks (of course, not without the knowledge of their direct boss - the superintendent).

It is obvious that the manipulation of gold and equipment brought profit to the subordinates of the British superintendent in Constantinople. That is why the most reliable version should be considered the one that claims that the barrels of gold were reloaded in the Istanbul port onto some other ship, and after that the “Prince” left for Balaklava.

Here is another piece of strong evidence that there was no gold on the Prince. In the epic of The Prince, many countries except England suffered severely. Thus, France spent half a million searching for the treasure, Italy - two hundred thousand, Japan - almost a quarter of a million rubles in gold, while England never even attempted to obtain a license to work to retrieve the lost ship of His Majesty's fleet.

Another important fact is striking. Almost all historical materials relating to the period of the Crimean War do not mention that there was gold on board the Prince by the time it arrived at the Balaklava roadstead. Barrels of gold coins are spoken of by sources from a later time, when widespread rumors made the “Prince” “Black.”

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No one knows where the treasure from the ship is and why it has not yet been found. Photo: akwamir.uol.ua

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Our peninsula is rich in legends, and one of the most beautiful is about the treasures of the “Black Prince”. There are 2,500 ships sunk in the Black Sea on the state register in Ukraine, and until last year, the valuable cargo of this British ship was officially listed among other treasures and treasures in the register of underwater archeology. More than 150 years have passed since his death, but even today, from May to September, almost every day, diving boats leave the Balaklava piers, divers look for the shine of yellow metal in the depths of the sea. And each of the local residents will swear on anything that the gold of the “Black Prince” is still there and waiting for its discoverer.

The Legend of the Black Prince

Among the ships of the Anglo-French squadron that perished in 1854 during the Balaklava storm was the English three-masted screw steamship Prince, which became England's most costly loss in this storm. For the mid-19th century, the ship was a very large vessel with a displacement of 2,710 tons. The frigate's main dimensions are 300 feet long and 43 feet wide—about three football fields. The ship was quite fast, the speed under sail reached 13–14 knots. The crew was 150 people, the frigate could accommodate 200 passengers. The ship had comfortable first and second class cabins with bedrooms and bathrooms!

In fact, the famous ship was simply called Prince (“Prince”), and the definition of “black” with which it went down in history was later received through the efforts of journalists and writers.

In the cold November of 1854, the loaded Prince entered the Black Sea. In the holds of the ship they carried ammunition, military equipment, a supply of warm clothing for the army, and medicines for hospitals in Balaklava. An electric telegraph and a secret underwater weapon to blow up Russian ships were also loaded onto the ship. And most importantly, the ship carried money in gold - salaries for the British army. On the morning of November 8, the frigate arrived at the outer roadstead of Balaklava Bay. During an attempt to anchor (the anchorage depth was 55 meters), one after the other, both anchors sank to the bottom along with their chains. The Prince was tied to the stern of the Jason, which was lying nearby. The next day, the frigate settled on one spare anchor.

Terrible storm

On November 14, 1854, at 07.30, before a south-eastern hurricane, there were 24 ships in the outer roadstead near the entrance to Balaklava Bay. "Prince" stood in line to approach the pier. A strong wind began to blow the ship towards the rocky shore. The ships hit each other so hard that some of them almost sank from the damage. The Prince's captain's attempt to keep the ship at one anchor while running the engine failed. Having lost its anchor, the ship drifted with its bow into the open sea. While drifting, the frigate collided with another ship and received several damages. Seeing the inevitable death of the ship, the captain gave the order to the crew to save themselves. The ship's hull survived the first collision with the rocks, but after 5-6 impacts the frigate crashed. According to eyewitnesses, the impacts on the rocks continued for 10-15 minutes, and they say the ship split in half. Six sailors and a junior officer escaped from the crew.

The cost of the ship itself alone was estimated at many thousands of pounds sterling. The English army suffered colossal damage, losing warm clothes. Sickness and death from cold after the storm of November 14 became commonplace in the British camp. English doctors were left without medicines, which sank to the bottom of the Black Sea along with the Prince.

Many people saw the sinking of the ship. Eyewitness artists even painted several canvases. Hundreds of sailors from the crews of ships who were luckier, soldiers of the garrison and just civilians came running to the hills in the area of ​​the Genoese fortress to somehow help the drowning people. And... not a single document where even the approximate location of the death of the “Prince” would be recorded. Of course, the fragments of the hull could not have sunk immediately and were carried a long distance from the site of the disaster. This is how a legend was born. The legend of inaccessible gold.

And the gold rush began

The war had not yet ended, and rumors spread all over the world that an English frigate with a cargo of gold, intended to pay salaries to the troops, had perished off the coast of Crimea. Almost immediately after the conclusion of peace, the search for the remains of the “Prince” began. Italian, French, Japanese, and Norwegian divers searched for gold. But diving work at that time was at a low level. They invented a special bell in which an observer diver was lowered, but it was impossible to work normally in it. After the appearance of the first spacesuit, the search intensified. In France, in 1875, a joint-stock company was established with significant capital to raise the Prince's treasures. The French found about 10 wrecked ships, but did not find the gold of the sunken frigate.

In 1901, an Italian expedition led by engineer Giuseppe Restucci, inventor of the underwater vehicle, arrived in Balaklava. It is known for sure that the Italians found a heavy sealed box, a telescope, a broken rifle, and pieces of iron. The box, which was opened with great trepidation and difficulty, contained lead bullets. The underwater vehicle was extremely inconvenient; it was impossible to move in it: the diver was moved along the bottom using cables based on his signals. Moreover, all underwater work was done while lying on the stomach. The ascent and descent of the “devilish projectile” lasted an hour and a half. A barely alive, exhausted man was lifted to the surface. It is not surprising that the search for treasures again yielded no results. After the Italians left, a real gold rush began. The thought that barrels of gold lay somewhere nearby haunted adventurers and inventors.

Permission to lift the treasure was received by the foreigner Herman Molvo; he explored Balaklava Bay for three years; after his death, his son Friedrich continued the search. The Russian Ministry of Trade and Industry received many more applications from Russian and foreign citizens and organizations asking for permission to lift the Prince’s treasures. But the case dragged on, and the mystery of the sunken gold was never solved.

In the first years of Soviet power, to search for and recover this treasure, on the initiative of Dzerzhinsky, the famous Special Purpose Underwater Expedition - EPRON - was formed. Especially for this expedition, engineer Danilenko created a project for a deep-sea projectile that could be lowered to a depth of 160 meters. Air was supposed to be supplied through a hose into the bell, in which three divers could be located; another hose served for ventilation. Electric lighting and a telephone were provided inside the shell. The device had retractable “hands” with two “fingers”. While the apparatus was being built, the expedition carried out preparatory work in Balaklava. A great variety of remains of wooden and metal ships, a cast iron steam boiler, a steamer chimney, two portholes, a hand grenade, a medical mortar, several bombs, a washstand from an officer's cabin, lead bullets, a pack of hospital slippers and many British type anchors were discovered. As of December 1924, the total expenses of the Soviet expedition to search for the Prince amounted to 100,000 rubles, and work was suspended due to the lack of archival information that there were actually valuables on board the frigate. Nevertheless, the expedition was of great importance for the country. At the bottom of the sea lay a lot of interesting things besides the treasures of the “Prince,” and the expedition switched to raising these valuables from the bottom of the Balaklava and Sevastopol bays. EPRON has gained extensive experience in diving work. The expedition was given a new task of raising large ships and submarines that were sunk in 1920. And, to the delight of scientists, they opened the first pages of underwater archaeological research in the Black Sea.

As for the search for the "Prince", it was decided to transfer this work to the famous Japanese company Shinkai Kogyossio Limited. In 1927, this company gave a master class - carried out demonstration work in Sevastopol. Japanese divers amazed everyone with their skills. They worked at a depth of more than a hundred meters only in glass masks covering the diver’s eyes and nose, without special suits or equipment. Air was pumped through a hose, the diver inhaled through his nose and, without opening his lips, exhaled into the water through his mouth. The diver could remain at great depths for up to 10 minutes without harm to himself. The ascent and descent occurred without any slowdown, and thanks to the special breathing, decompression sickness did not occur. When the Japanese expedition began work, it was assumed that the burial place of the “Prince” had been found. The remains of the ship were littered with collapsed soil. It was necessary to clear the fragments of the ship from many tons of rocks. September 12, 1927 arrived. Around 4 pm the sea was calm. Two divers were lowered to the bottom, but less than ten minutes passed before they received a signal to be raised to the surface. The divers explained that something unimaginable was happening at the bottom: the soil was shaking under their feet. This was the beginning of the famous Crimean earthquake, which occurred on the night of September 12-13. At one o'clock in the morning there was the first shock. But it turns out that 10 hours earlier, divers at the bottom felt vibrations, stopped their work and returned to shore. The earthquake in Balaklava was minor, but the Japanese considered it a bad sign. They treated it as a warning from above. The last measure taken by the Japanese company was to install a dredger at the search site. He threw away the sand, and the divers lifted stones and everything they came across in bags to the top. But this also did not produce results. The Japanese expedition curtailed its work, giving the conclusion: “There is no gold at the bottom.”

And for 83 years they were not looking for “Prince”. Until 2010, there were three official versions explaining the unsuccessful search for the frigate and its valuable cargo:

1. We were looking in the wrong place. The search expeditions made a mistake in determining the main identification points for the "Prince". Archival photographs proved that, in addition to the Prince, the steamships Jason, Houp, and Resolute had a metal hull. According to British archival funds, Jason sank eight years later in Indian waters. But there were also Houp and Resolute in the bay.

2. The absence of valuables on board the frigate at the time of its destruction. Archival research has proven that ammunition, food supplies and especially financial resources were delivered to the battlefields in Crimea, not directly from Great Britain, but from Istanbul, where at that time the headquarters of the Superintendent of the British Expeditionary Force was located. It is likely that the valuable cargo was removed from the Prince in the port of Istanbul, so only ammunition was delivered to Balaklava. The absence of legendary valuables on the sunken ship is confirmed by the fact that, along with a whole list of states that participated in the search for treasures, there was not a single attempt on the part of Great Britain to obtain a license to carry out underwater work on its own ship.

3. Values ​​were raised by the British back in the Crimean War. Upon completion of the work, specialists from the Japanese diving company Shinkai Kogyossio Limited made an official statement that the vessel on which they carried out the work was the frigate Prince. However, during the search they were unable to find the middle part of the vessel. There was severe damage to the stern and bow of the hull, inflicted after the death of the ship. Conclusion of Shinkai Kogiossio Limited: British troops, who remained in Balaclava for another 8 months after the sinking of the ship, recovered valuable cargo even before the end of the Crimean campaign.

At the supposed site of the death of the Prince, a large number of cannonballs, medical glass, shoes, several large-caliber guns, and a large number of plates were discovered. On two of them, during winter laboratory processing, clearly legible marks were discovered indicating the shipping company to which the Prince belonged. On that November night in 1854, on the outer roadstead of Balaklava there were two ships of that shipping company - the Prince and the Jason. As you know, "Jason" managed to survive this storm. This means that these two plates could only belong to the “Prince”. So, after 156 years, the real place of death of the “Black Prince” was put on the map.

On March 23 last year, an official meeting between the leadership of the underwater heritage department and the military attaché of the embassy took place at the British Embassy in Kiev. Our country's department was officially informed that there were no valuables on board the Prince at the time of its death. The main evidence was a receipt from the British plenipotentiary in Turkey, assistant to the chief indent John William Smith, stating that the money was withdrawn from the ship in Constantinople. This receipt is kept in the Bank of England. For the first time in 156 years, Great Britain officially acknowledged the absence of any treasure on board the Prince. Thus, rather boringly, the epic search for the mysterious treasures of the Black Sea ended. The most interesting treasure that existed for a century and a half has been excluded from the register of underwater heritage of Ukraine. But I think no amount of discoveries can eliminate these treasures from the hearts and dreams of romantics.