The Gold Jewelry Recovered From Lord Elgin’s Shipwreck Off Greece

The shipwreck of the Mentor, Lord Elgin’s brig carrying part of the Parthenon Marbles from Greece to Britain, continues to reveal well-kept secrets.

Over recent years, items of old jewelry, cooking pots, a surveying instrument, and personal belongings have been recovered from the vessel.

The Mentor sank off the island of Kythera in 1802 while transporting a portion of the priceless antiquities Lord Elgin’s team had plundered from the Parthenon and other areas around the Acropolis as well as Athens monuments in general.

Findings at Lord’s Elgin’s shipwreck

Among the findings recovered in recent years are:

• • • a gold ring
    • a pair of gold earrings
    • chess pieces
    • intact cookware
    • ship fittings
    • pieces of rope
    • items of clothing

  

  • furniture
  • a well-preserved base of a theodolite, a surveying instrument used for measuring angles

The instrument is of particular importance, as the Mentor was carrying the well-known surveyor, diplomat, and antiquarian William Martin Leake (1777-1860) at the time of its sinking.

Leake, then a young officer in the Royal Artillery, spent much of his early career surveying Mediterranean seaports, traveling extensively, and developing a keen interest in antiquarian topography.

The instrument most likely belonged to him and may have been used for the extensive maps and detailed observations of antiquities that he made in Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and Cyprus. These drawings were subsequently lost in the sinking.

The ship sank en route from Greece to Malta

The ship had left the port of Piraeus near Athens and was en route to Malta with the United Kingdom as its final destination.

The Mentor sank due to severe weather on September 15, 1802 after crashing onto rocks off the small port of Avlemonas on Kythera. It quickly sank to the bottom of the sea, coming to rest at a depth of 23 meters (75 feet). All the passengers and crew were rescued by the vessel Anikitos.

Upon receiving news of the disaster, Elgin, who was not on the Mentor at the time, scrambled to salvage the crates of antiquities by hiring a team of sponge divers from the islands of Simi and Kalymnos, renowned for their skill and expertise at deep diving.

Once the marbles were recovered, Elgin had them shipped to Malta and then England, where, in 1816, he sold the collection to the British Museum in London.

Since 1817, seventeen marble figures from the the east and west pediments of the Parthenon, fifteen of the original ninety-two metopes depicting the battle between the Centaurs and Lapiths, and 75 meters of the 160-meter-long frieze have been on display at the British Museum.