Part of our series based around the work of Dom Robinson and his Deep Wreck Diver Youtube channel. Dom is doing his own form of local history detecting, visiting shipwrecks!
In November 1888, a steam cargo ship called the SS Nantes went down in the English Channel with twenty-three of her crew. Bodies washed ashore at Talland Bay and Looe on the Cornish coast. The Nantes herself, though, gone. No satellite navigation. No precise position. The sea had taken her and nobody knew exactly where.
Until Dom Robinson found her with a broken plate.
The sinking
The SS Nantes was built in Glasgow in 1874, a steam-powered cargo ship operated by the Cunard Steamship Company. She was fourteen years old when she died; not ancient by the standards of Victorian merchant shipping, but well-used. On the day of her last voyage she was carrying coal from Liverpool to Le Havre, a routine Channel crossing of the kind she would have made many times.
In November 1888, conditions in the Channel were poor. Somewhere in the grey water south-east of Plymouth, the Nantes met the Theodor Ruger, a German full-rigged sailing ship. The collision tore a hole in the Nantes’ hull.
What followed was a slow-motion catastrophe. The two ships were briefly locked together before separating. The impact had wrecked the Nantes’ lifeboats. The crew had no way off. For the next several hours, they worked to save their ship: stuffing mattresses into the gaping wound in the hull, bailing, doing everything they could think of. They bought themselves some time, but not enough.
The ship drifted and eventually went down with twenty-three of her crew still on board. Three others survived; two had managed to scramble across to the Theodor Ruger before the ships separated, and a third was picked up from the water hours later. The Theodor Ruger also sank, though her lifeboats were intact. Most of her crew got away.
The bodies that washed ashore told the story well enough. Beyond that, there was not much to go on. No GPS or precise recorded position. The Nantes had sunk somewhere in the Channel and nobody alive knew where.
The lead
The wreck was not entirely invisible to the historical record. It appeared in old newspapers, in Cunard’s files, in the notes of maritime historians. Dr Harry Bennett, an honorary associate professor at the University of Plymouth and a specialist in maritime history, knew the story. The Nantes, he later told the BBC, was one of those vessels that had been “known about but lost for a long period of time.”
What broke the impasse was a tip from the UK Hydrographic Office.
The Hydrographic Office maintains records of anomalies on the seabed around Britain — objects that sonar has spotted but that remain unidentified. There was such an anomaly, 30 miles south-east of Plymouth, at a depth of 75 metres. Dom heard about it and decided to go and take a look.
The dive itself, by Dom’s account, was not obviously promising. Deep, dark, cold. The Channel in autumn is not what anyone would call inviting. The wreck had been dived before by others and never identified. There was no particular reason to think this visit would be different.
Then, towards the end of the dive, Dom spotted a piece of crockery on the seabed.
The plate
He brought it up.
Back on the surface, he turned it over. On the back, a stamp: Cunard Steamship Company.
That is the moment the puzzle started to come together. Cunard had operated relatively few steam cargo ships of the right era in these waters. The dimensions of the wreck, roughly 260 feet, confirmed against the Hydrographic Office records, matched those of the Nantes precisely. The technology visible in the wreck, the cargo, the location: all consistent. Further dives recovered additional Cunard crockery from the same site.
Dr Bennett later described the identification as “the underwater archaeological equivalent of a needle in a haystack.” For Dom, it was rather more straightforward.
“Even though the wreck had been dived before,” he said, “it was never identified, and this small piece of broken plate allowed us to do exactly that.”
The Nantes had been found. A Victorian cargo ship that had sunk in a night-time collision in the Channel had been sitting at 75 metres for 136 years waiting for someone to pick up a piece of crockery and read the back of it.
What the wreck holds
Dom describes the Nantes as a ship frozen in time. At that depth in the Channel, many of the structural features of the vessel are still intact. The cargo of coal is still there, scattered across the seabed. The story of the collision is legible in the wreck itself, the damage, the disorder, the evidence of a ship that went down quickly in the end after hours of desperate effort.
There is something particular about a wreck like this one. It is not a naval vessel. It is not a famous ship. It is a working cargo ship — one of hundreds that crossed the Channel every year in the 1880s, carrying coal and timber and goods from port to port, crewed by men whose names barely survive in the historical record. The Nantes is the kind of ship that history routinely forgets.
Twenty-three men died on her. Their bodies washed ashore on the Cornish coast and were found by local people. It’s an event that deserves more than a footnote in a list of Victorian maritime casualties.
Finding the wreck does not change what happened. But it does change what we can know about it. The Nantes is no longer simply lost. She has a position now. She has dimensions and cargo and crockery and a hole in her hull that her crew spent several hours trying to fill with mattresses.
She has a story that can be told properly.
Dom published his account of the discovery on his YouTube channel Deep Wreck Diver, and it attracted exactly the kind of attention a story like this deserves, from CNN, from the BBC, from maritime history communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Dr Bennett’s “needle in a haystack” line travelled widely. So did the image of the broken plate that cracked the mystery.
The discovery had been made in the autumn of 2024. By the time the world heard about it, Dom had already moved on to his next wreck.
That is, after all, what he does.