Indian Notes Recovered from Shipwrecks
Gold and silver aren’t the only treasures recovered from historic shipwrecks. These four vessels carried Indian bank notes and currency paper that survived decades beneath the waves.
All photographs are courtesy of the author.
From time to time, we learn about important treasures of gold and silver coins that have been found in shipwrecks. However, there have also been important findings of bank notes that were miraculously preserved on sunken ships.
Here are four famous shipwrecks that all involve British ships that were en route to India. All occurring in the twentieth century, these ships carried a surviving cargo of Indian bank notes.
The SS Camberwell
On May 18, 1917, the British freighter SS Camberwell was sailing from Middlesbrough, via London, to Calcutta, India, when it hit a mine laid by the German submarine UC-36 as part of the underwater warfare waged in World War I and rapidly sank in the English Channel. The cargo of the ship ended up at the seabed, holding 10-rupee bank notes that were being sent to British India, of which numerous fragments have been recovered. The uniface notes had been manufactured by Portals Ltd., a British papermaking company that used handmade watermark notes that were sent to India unsigned for reasons of safety. The signatures would be engraved in that country shortly before the notes entered circulation. Unfortunately, only bank note fragments were retrieved.
The SS Shirala
The passenger and cargo ship, SS Shirala, had been built in 1901 for the British Indian Steam Navigation Company. While en route from the UK to Bombay, the ship was torpedoed on June 29, 1918, by the German submarine UB-57. The SS Shirala sank off the coast of Sussex with a diverse cargo, which included bank notes and special paper sent from the Bank of England to be printed as rupee notes.
Five- and 10-rupee uniface notes formed part of the sunken cargo. They were all unsigned. Reportedly, some of the notes floated to the shores of Britain. Most of them were recovered and subsequently destroyed by the authorities. However, a few examples have remained in private hands.
The cargo further comprised a shipment of 1-rupee signed bank notes. This is the only known case of pre-signed Indian bank notes being retrieved from a shipwreck. The notes bore the encircled image of King George V and had the year 1917 engraved. Unlike those of higher denominations referred to above, they do not have legends written in Hindi.
The SS Egypt
The SS Egypt, a British ocean liner owned by P&O, collided on May 20, 1922, with the French cargo ship Seine and sank in the Celtic Sea, 25 miles off the French island of Ushant. The ship had sailed a day earlier from London with destination Bombay and carried a precious cargo bound for the UK-controlled Indian state of Hyderabad. Apart from an important amount of silver and gold worth around one million pounds, the cargo also included paper currency for use in Hyderabad.
The notes had been printed in London by the engraving company Waterlow and Sons, in nominal values of 5-, 10-, and 100 rupees. They all lack the signature of the finance member that was to be overprinted in Hyderabad immediately before their entry into circulation. Some of them have been retrieved in the course of specialized expeditions.
The SS Breda
The SS Breda was a cargo-passenger ship built in the Netherlands between 1919 and 1921. It mainly served the maritime route connecting the Netherlands to several ports in South America. The ship was moved to Britain shortly after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940 and given to the British shipping company P&O. It was armed with a 4.7-inch machine gun and used for the transportation of goods and military equipment.
The SS Breda was severely damaged on December 23, 1940, as a consequence of the bombs dropped by a Nazi air raid involving a squadron of three Heinkel He 111 bombers flying from occupied Norway. At the time of the air strike, the ship was part of a convoy anchored off Lismore, on the Scottish coast, loaded with a cargo bound for Bombay. The damaged ship was towed to shallow waters, but a storm swept her into deeper waters where she sank the following day to a depth of around 26 meters. Only part of her cargo could be offloaded before the sinking.
Her diverse cargo included at least 30 boxes filled with uncut paper sheets on which Indian bank notes were to be printed at the Nashik print press. The paper had already been engraved in the UK with the required watermarks indicating the future nominal values, the portrait of King George III and the legend “RESERVE BANK OF INDIA”.
The special sheets had been manufactured by Portals Ltd upon a request made by the Bank of England and were housed in wooden boxes. The uncut sheets recovered from the wreck were those for printing the then circulating 5- and 10-rupee bank notes.
While many artifacts had already been recovered from the shipwreck, the amazing discovery of these bank note sheets was only made in 1992 when divers belonging to the Trailee Bay Diving and Watersports Club could get inside a previously inaccessible cargo room of the SS Breda. To their astonishment, while the wooden containers had long decomposed, a treasure in the form of piles of blank sheets of white paper appeared before their eyes. Despite the time elapsed, many of the sheets were recovered nearly intact, with only some edge deterioration and creases
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