English ship Black Prince. Crimean War. The Secret of the Black Prince. Lev Skryagin, full member of the Geographical Society of the USSR
The Black Prince is a British Navy ship. He 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 for paying salaries to British soldiers and for other needs. In 1854, after a storm that hit the Balaklava Bay (where the said ship moored), a dozen ships left, including the Black Prince.
By the way, the ship's name was simply "Prince". The adjective "black" was added to it later. There were several reasons for this, each version will be correct. It could be British sailors who never got their money, or they could be scuba divers whose ranks thinned due to the death of some of them during the search for wealth at the bottom of the Black Sea.
There were many who wanted to find the ghost ship. Entire expeditions were organized, sponsored by different countries, including Soviet Union. Over time, all the distinctive signs of ships are lost under water, so it is difficult to answer the question exactly 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 secrets, 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?!
No one knows where the treasures from the ship are and why they haven't been found yet. Photo: akwamir.uol.ua
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, diving boats leave the Balaklava berths almost every day, divers are looking 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.
Legend of the Black Prince
Among the ships of the Anglo-French squadron that died in 1854 during the Balaklava storm was the English three-masted screw steamer "Prince", which became the most expensive loss of England in this storm. The ship for the middle of the XIX century was a very large ship with a displacement of 2710 tons. The main dimensions of the frigate - 300 feet long and 43 wide - is about three football fields. The ship was fast enough, sailing speed reached 13-14 knots. The crew - 150 people, the frigate could take 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.
On a cold November 1854, the loaded "Prince" entered the Black Sea. Ammunition, military equipment, a supply of warm clothes for the army, medicines for hospitals in Balaklava were carried in the holds of the ship. The ship was also loaded with an electric telegraph and a secret underwater weapon to undermine Russian ships. And most importantly, the ship carried money in gold - a salary 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 depth of the anchorage is 55 meters), one after the other, both anchors went to the bottom along with the chains. "Prince" was tied to the stern of the ship Jason, which stood nearby. The next day, the frigate did put on one spare anchor.
terrible storm
November 14, 1854 at 07.30 in front of the southeast hurricane on the outer roads near the entrance to the Balaklava Bay were 24 ships. "Prince" stood in line for the approach to the pier. Strong wind began to demolish the ship to rocky shore. The ships slammed against each other so that some of them nearly sank from the damage. The attempt of the captain of the "Prince" to keep the ship at one anchor, working with the engine, failed. Having lost the anchor, the ship drifted with its bow into the open sea. During the drift, 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 escape. The ship's hull withstood the first collision with rocks, but after 5-6 blows the frigate crashed. According to eyewitnesses, the impacts on the rocks lasted 10-15 minutes, they say that the ship split in half. Six sailors and a junior officer escaped from the crew.
The cost of the steamer alone was estimated at many thousands of pounds sterling. The English army suffered enormous damage, having lost warm clothes. Sickness and death from cold after the storm on November 14 became commonplace in the British camp. English doctors were left without medicines, which went to the bottom of the Black Sea along with the "Prince".
The sinking of the ship was seen by many people. Eyewitnesses-artists even painted several canvases. Hundreds of sailors from the crews of ships who were more fortunate, soldiers of the garrison and just civilians fled to the hills in the area of the Genoese fortress to somehow help the drowning. And ... not a single document where at least the approximate place of the death of the "Prince" would be recorded. Of course, the fragments of the hull could not sink immediately and be carried a long distance from the crash site. Thus the legend was born. The legend of inaccessible gold.
And the gold rush began
The war had not yet ended, and rumors spread around the world that an English frigate with a cargo of gold, intended to pay salaries to the troops, had died off the coast of the Crimea. Almost immediately after the conclusion of peace, the search for the remains of the "Prince" began. Italian, French, Japanese, Norwegian divers were looking for gold. But diving work at that time was at a low level. A special bell was invented, in which a diver-observer was lowered, but it was impossible to work normally in it. After the appearance of the first suit, the search intensified. In France, in 1875, a joint-stock company was established with significant capital to raise the treasures of the "Prince". The French found about 10 broken ships, but they did not find the gold of the sunken frigate.
In 1901, an Italian expedition led by engineer Giuseppe Restucci, the inventor of the underwater vehicle, arrived in Balaklava. It is known for sure that the Italians found a heavy sealed box, a spyglass, a broken rifle, and pieces of iron. In the box, which was opened with great trepidation and difficulty, there were lead bullets. The underwater vehicle was extremely inconvenient, it was impossible to move in it: the diver was moved along the bottom with the help of cables according to his signals. Moreover, all underwater work was carried out lying on his stomach. The ascent and descent of the "devilish projectile" lasted an hour and a half. A barely alive, emaciated man was raised to the surface. Not surprisingly, the treasure hunt again failed. After the departure of the Italians, a real gold rush began. The idea that barrels of gold lie somewhere nearby haunted adventurers and inventors.
Foreigner Herman Molvo received permission to raise treasures, he explored Balaklava Bay for three years, after his death, his son Friedrich continued the search. The Ministry of Trade and Industry of Russia received many more applications from Russian and foreign citizens and organizations asking for permission to raise the treasures of the "Prince". But the case dragged on, and the mystery of the sunken gold was never solved.
In the first years of Soviet power, the famous Special Purpose Underwater Expedition, EPRON, was formed on the initiative of Dzerzhinsky to search for and raise this treasure. 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 through the hose was supposed to be supplied to the bell, which could contain three divers, the other hose was used for ventilation. Inside the projectile, electric lighting and a telephone were provided. The device had retractable "hands" with two "fingers". While the apparatus was being built, the expedition led preparatory work in Balaklava. A great many remains of wooden and metal ships, a cast-iron steam boiler, a steamship 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 anchors of the British type were found. 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 really were 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 acquired rich experience in diving operations. Before the expedition set new task on raising large ships and submarines sunk in 1920. And, to the delight of scientists, they opened the first pages of underwater archaeological research of the Black Sea.
As for the search for the "Prince", it was decided to transfer this work to the famous Japanese company "Shinkai Kogiossio Limited". In 1927, this company gave a master class - held demonstration work in Sevastopol. Japanese divers amazed everyone with their skill. 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 and apparatus. 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 be at great depths up to 10 minutes without harm to himself. The ascent and descent took place without any delay, and thanks to 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 came. At about 4 pm the sea was calm. Two divers were lowered to the bottom, but less than ten minutes later they signaled to be brought to the surface. The divers explained that something unimaginable was happening at the bottom: the ground was shaking underfoot. This was the beginning of the famous Crimean earthquake, which occurred on the night of September 12-13. At one in the morning there was the first push. But it turns out that even 10 hours before that, divers at the bottom felt vibrations, curtailed work and returned to shore. The earthquake in Balaklava was minor, but the Japanese considered it a bad omen. They took it as a warning from above. The last measure taken by the Japanese firm was the installation of a dredger at the search site. He threw sand, and the divers lifted the stones and everything that came across in bags upstairs. But that didn't work either. The Japanese expedition curtailed work, giving the conclusion: "There is no gold at the bottom."
And for 83 years they did not look for the "Prince". Until 2010, there were three official versions explaining the unsuccessful search for the frigate and its valuable cargo:
1. They were looking in the wrong place. Error of search expeditions in determining the main landmarks of the identification of the "Prince". Archival photographs proved that, in addition to Prince, the steamships Jason, Houp, and Resolute had a metal hull. According to British archival funds, Jason sank eight years later in the waters of India. But there were also Houp and Resolute in the bay.
2. The absence of valuables on board the frigate at the time of its death. Archival research has proven that ammunition, food supplies and especially financial resources were delivered to the battlefields in the Crimea, not directly from Great Britain, but from Istanbul, where at that time the headquarters of the superintendent of the British Expeditionary Forces 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 values on the sunken ship is confirmed by the fact that, along with a whole list of states that participated in the search for treasures, the UK did not record a single attempt 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. Specialists of the Japanese diving company Shinkai Kogiossio Limited, upon completion of the work, made an official statement that the vessel on which they carried out the work was the Prince frigate. However, during the search they failed to find the middle part of the vessel. On the stern and bow of the hull were severe damage inflicted after the death of the ship. Conclusion "Sinkai Kogiossio Limited": the British troops, who remained in Balaklava for another 8 months after the sinking of the ship, raised a valuable cargo even before the end of the Crimean campaign.
A large number of cannonballs, medical glass, shoes, several large-caliber guns, as well as a large number of saucers were found at the alleged site of the death of the Prince. On two of them, during the winter laboratory processing, clearly readable marks were found, indicating the shipping company to which the "Prince" belonged. On that November night in 1854, two ships of that shipping company, the Prince and the Yazon, were on the outer roadstead of Balaklava. As you know, "Jason" managed to survive this storm. So these two plates could only belong to the "Prince". So, after 156 years, the real place of the death of the "Black Prince" was put on the map.
On March 23 last year, an official meeting of the leadership of the Department of Underwater Heritage with the military attache of the embassy took place at the Kiev Embassy of Great Britain. The department of our country was officially informed that there were no valuables on board the Prince at the time of his death. The main evidence was a receipt from the plenipotentiary representative of Great Britain in Turkey, assistant chief indent John William Smith, that the money had been withdrawn from the ship in Constantinople. This receipt is kept in the Bank of England. For the first time in 156 years, Britain officially acknowledged the absence of any treasures on board the Prince. So, rather boringly, the epic of searching 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 the underwater heritage of Ukraine. But, I think, no discoveries can exclude these treasures from the hearts and dreams of romantics.
The search for treasures that sank along with the legendary frigate in Balaklava Bay began in the 19th century and continues to this day.
This story over a century and a half has acquired many legends and conjectures. And it all started prosaically. It was 1854 - the height of the Crimean War. The British prepared for this war with all the thoroughness characteristic of them. On September 14, the transport frigate HMS Prince (Her Majesty's ship, also known as the Black Prince) left London for the Crimea. He was carrying warm clothes for soldiers and officers. The caring English government stuffed the holds of a sail-propeller vessel with woolen socks and shirts, sheepskin coats and sleeping bags, underpants and fur boots.
But the main thing is that the "Prince" was supposed to deliver monetary allowances for the English soldiers to the shores of Balaklava. The ship arrived at its destination two months after sailing - by mid-November. Suddenly, a powerful hurricane came up, sinking three dozen ships near the coastal cliffs. Not escaped this fate and "Prince".
"On the open sea, dropping golden chests..."
The members of the British military expedition, who were looking forward to warm uniforms, took the news of the death of the "Prince" with horror: real cold came, soldiers and officers suffered from frostbite.
But the hype in the press rose not even because of warm blankets and underpants: journalists trumpeted with might and main that kegs with gold and silver coins sank off the Crimean coast. At first, the amount of 200,000 pounds sterling was called. Then they began to talk about a million, then the amount of treasures lying at the bottom increased to 60 million - apparently, the fantasy of journalists and ordinary people worked.
The ship soon began to be called the "Black Prince" - it sounded more romantic and hinted at the unenviable fate of one and a half hundred drowned sailors. Newspaper reports constantly repeated information about barrels with countless treasures lying at the bottom of the Black Sea.
After the end of the Crimean War, treasure hunters rushed to Balaklava Bay. They came from Germany, Italy, Norway and even America: everyone wanted to find a treasure, because if the ship crashed on the coastal rocks, then the treasures should, logically, be not too far from the coast, at a relatively shallow depth. However, the equipment in the 1860s and 1870s was too primitive: it was impossible to reach the bottom with it.
Even the most advanced suits at that time - French - gave divers the opportunity to stay under water for no more than a few minutes. All that was found was the remains of wooden ships, and the Prince had a metal hull.
Russian search engines connected later than everyone else - in 1896, but they failed to find anything either. After some time, the Russian government forbade the continuation of search work in Balaklava Bay, citing the ban as divers interfering with sea maneuvers.
After civil wars s, in the 20s of the twentieth century, the search continued.
Photo pxhere.com It was 1923. Soviet Russia suffered severely from hunger. To save people - and at that time entire villages were dying of starvation, children were the worst - food and money were needed, a lot of money. It was then that hope arose again for the treasures that sank off the coast of Balaklava.
A ship engineer, from Sevastopol, came to the GPU Vladimir Yazykov. He claimed to have invented a way to raise the gold and save the country. An expedition of special underwater works (EPRON) was immediately organized.
Its participants were instructed to search not only for the Black Prince's gold - in 1918, Russian ships were flooded off the coast of Novorossiysk, the sailors went to this measure in order not to give them into the hands of the enemy. They designed an ingenious deep-sea apparatus, through which they hoped to explore the bottom.
The search seemed to be on the right track - a metal fragment of the hull was found. They decided that this was part of the Prince, because, as the Epronians were sure, the Prince was the only metal ship among the many wooden ones. But the expedition was disappointed - it turned out that the hulls of other ships were also made of metal, so the found fragment could belong to any ship.
However, they say that the gepeshniks nevertheless became the owners of the treasures, only the course of the operation was strictly classified, all the papers regarding EPRON were destroyed, and the participants in the search operations were separated into different projects so that they would never again intersect with each other.
Or maybe the British?
In order for citizens to get rid of dreams of getting hold of sunken treasures, the Soviet Union began to persistently spread the version that the gold and silver of the "Prince" had long settled in the pockets of the English commissary service: they say that corrupt officials divided the precious cargo among themselves, and it simply did not reached Balaklava Bay. Such a development of events was presented as the only true one, they wrote about it in popular science magazines and talked about it in radio programs.
In the late 1990s, another expedition was undertaken to search for the Black Prince's gold reserves. As the captain of the 1st rank who led it said Viktor Korzhov, no gold was found. But it turned out that the middle of the ship was literally cut out. This became an indirect confirmation of the version put forward earlier by the Japanese (they undertook a global expedition in 1927): the Epronians found kegs of gold - and in order to bring them to the surface, they cut out part of the ship. The money was spent on the needs of the Land of the Soviets. But exact evidence that the gold was in the hands of the Chekists was never found.
The mystery of the barrels of gold has not yet been solved. Perhaps there are no treasures at the bottom of the Balaklava Bay for a long time, or maybe there never was, according to the version with rogue English quartermasters. However, some lovers still do not give up trying to get the treasure from the bottom of the sea.
In November 1854, Allied ships under the command of Admiral Lyons were stationed at the entrance to Balaklava Bay. Among them was the Prince screw steamer. More than forty thousand sets of warm clothes, medicines, food, ammunition and equipment for blowing up sunken ships in the Sevastopol roadstead were brought from England. There was no place in the harbor, and he was left to anchor in the outer roadstead - extremely dangerous when the wind blows from the sea.
By that time, there were five warships, four military ships and many transport ships under Balaklava. About 30 ships were in the harbor.
November 14, 1854 began a violent storm. The wind speed reached 37 meters per second. The British camp was literally blown away by the wind. Blankets, caps, greatcoats, frock coats and even tables and chairs swirled in the air. Mackintoshes, rubber dishes, bed linen, tent canvas flew down the valley towards Sevastopol.
Barrels of rum rushed through the camp, bouncing on the rocks. People and horses, knocked down, rolled helplessly on the ground. The roof from the house of the English commander-in-chief Raglan was torn off and flattened on the ground ...
The commander of the allied fleet ordered all battleships to go to sea.
The captain of the "Prince" Gudel vainly relied on the power of the steam engine. If the steamer had gone to the open sea, then he would have had a chance to escape, and at the very shore he was doomed. The ship tore off the anchor and carried on the rocks. The captain ordered the masts to be cut down. The felled mizzen mast fell overboard, the rigging wrapped around the propellers. The midshipman and six sailors threw themselves into the raging sea, and miraculously managed to escape. "Prince" stern crashed into the coastal rocks and began to sink.
In total, the Allies lost 60 ships that day, 11 of them in the Balaklava area.
The cost of the "Prince" was estimated at no less than 600-700 thousand pounds sterling, or about 13 million rubles in silver. People's rumor renamed the ship and gave it the name "Black Prince".
After his death, there were rumors that there was a gold salary of the British military on board. They also called "exact data" - thirty kegs of gold in English and Turkish currency in the amount of two million rubles, then five million and even ten. A.I. Kuprin in “Listrigons” claimed that the old people in Balaklava knew the figure absolutely exactly: “Sixty million rubles in ringing English gold!”
The glitter of gold was haunting. The old-timers of Balaklava assumed that it sank to the left of the entrance to the bay, about 50 meters from the white rocks, at a depth of about 100 meters.
In 1905, the Italian company Restucci was the first to search for gold. But they did not find not only gold, but even a ship.
In the autumn of 1923, the underwater enthusiast V.S. Yazykov, since 1908. engaged in the search for gold came to F.E. Dzerzhinsky with an offer that was difficult to refuse. On December 17, 1923, by order of the OGPU No. 528, the Special Purpose Underwater Expedition (EPRON) was formed
In the summer of 1925, a number of items from the legendary steamer were discovered. It became obvious that the ship was crushed by blocks of rocks brought down by the sea. It was extremely difficult to get to him. By this time, an additional study of the documents did not confirm the presence of gold on it.
The last one to make an attempt to raise the ship was the Japanese company Shinkai Kogiseio Ltd. The Japanese undertook to reimburse the state for the funds previously spent on the search for the "Prince" (about 70,000 rubles in gold), to divide the mined gold in half, to leave the equipment used in the work for EPRON and the deep-sea diving mask, the most advanced at that time. However, their work was not successful. Having spent 300,000 rubles, the company stopped working. In total, "... seven gold coins" were found.
At this, the search for the treasures of the "Black Prince" stopped. But the organization created by Dzerzhinsky - EPRON - at that time the largest center of the maritime search and rescue service in the country, remained. In 1931, EPRON was renamed the Emergency and Rescue Service. The main job of the divers was to lift the ships.
On the Black Sea, the Epronovites raised nine submarines that were sunk in 1919 during the intervention. From 1925 to 1940, the destroyers Kaliakria, Sharp-witted, Stremitelny, Lieutenant Shestakov, Gadzhibey, as well as four towers of the battleship Empress Maria, which sank in 1916 in the Sevastopol Bay, were raised (the weight of each of them 850 tons). During the war, divers got from the bottom of the latest German naval mines with several degrees of protection. In the postwar years, employees are engaged in rescue operations: in 1955 they rescued the sailors of the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, the battleship Novorossiysk, which was blown up in the same place where the battleship Empress Maria sank in 1916; in August 1957, divers fought for three days for the life of the crew of the M-351 submarine, which sank in the Balaklava roadstead and came out victorious.
On August 31, 1986, near Novorossiysk, the passenger steamer Admiral Nakhimov collided and sank. Specialists of the emergency rescue service saved the lives of its passengers for several days ...
Thus, we can safely say that Balaklava is the "cradle" of the diving business of the country of the Soviets.
The British prepared thoroughly for a protracted war on the Crimean peninsula. Although the landing took place only on September 14, back in July, the heavily loaded transport HMS Prince left London for the Black Sea. Its spacious holds were filled with warm clothes. According to the Illustrated London News of December 16, 1854, among the goods accepted by the "Prince" were 36,700 pairs of woolen socks, 53,000 woolen shirts, 2,500 guard coats, 150,000 sleeping bags, 100,000 underwear woolen shirts, 90,000 0 flannel underpants, 40,000 fur coats, and 120,000 pairs of boots. The sail-propeller transport reached the Crimea only by November. The British soldiers were looking forward to it, and not only because they were freezing without flannel underpants and woolen socks. "HMS Prince" was carrying monetary allowance for the entire British expeditionary force.
The transport safely sailed to Balaklava, but things did not go well after that. When trying to get into the roadstead, two stern anchors were lost. With difficulty, the last remaining one caught on to the bottom. As it turned out, not for long and unreliable. On November 14, 1854, a terrible hurricane that swept over the Crimean peninsula threw onto the rocks and sank three dozen ships, including the Prince. Of his crew of 150 people, only six sailors got ashore. Commander Bainton and all the officers did not escape. After the death of the transport, the losses from frostbite in the English army, which did not receive warm clothes, increased markedly.
Balaklava Bay, late 19th century. (crimoved-library.ru)
Immediately after the death of the "Prince" followed by a flurry of publications in the European press about his sunken cargo. The journalists were not interested in shirts and blankets. They wrote only about "a considerable amount of silver coin and 200,000 pounds sterling in gold to pay the salaries of the English troops in the Crimea." Over time, the amounts in which the precious cargo was estimated grew - 200 thousand, 500 thousand francs, 1 million pounds sterling, 60 million francs, millions of rubles in gold. But in all publications it was stated that the gold and silver were securely packed in barrels, and are at the bottom in complete safety. In the 1860s, newspapermen renamed the transport "Black Prince". A gloomy epithet was added, apparently for greater romance.
Almost immediately after the conclusion of peace, attempts began to find the sunken ship. The Germans, Americans, Italians and Norwegians were looking for him at the bottom of the Balaklava Bay. The search was unsuccessful. The primitive equipment of that time did not allow one to go down any deep. In 1875, in France, a solid joint-stock company was created to search for the "Prince", which purchased the most modern spacesuits at that time. But they also allowed divers to be at the bottom for only a few minutes. Nevertheless, the bottom of the bay was surveyed, and the remains of about ten sunken ships were found. All of them were wooden. The metal hull of the Prince was not among them.
The collapse of the Black Prince, painting by Ivan Aivazovsky. (wikipedia.org)
Russian search engines connected only in 1896, but the inventor Plastunov was also left with nothing. The Italians were lucky. During several expeditions at the beginning of the 20th century, they found the remains of two metal ships, but could not identify them as the Prince. No gold was found either. In the end, the Russian government, tired of the treasure-hunting projects, banned diving operations in the Balaklava roadstead - they interfered with the maneuvers of the navy.
The Bolsheviks remembered the gold of the "Prince" after the Civil War. In 1922, an amateur diver accidentally discovered several gold coins at a shallow depth. The GPU became interested in the treasure. They found and interrogated eyewitnesses of the hurricane that broke out 70 years ago. The decrepit old people remembered the storm with difficulty, and they never heard of any “Prince”. Nevertheless, during interrogations, all of them showed where the English transport sank, however, all these places turned out to be at a considerable distance from each other.
Meanwhile, naval engineer Vladimir Yagoda interested the head of the GPU, Heinrich Yagoda, in search of the Prince's gold. Under the security authorities, an expedition for special-purpose underwater work (EPRON) was established, headed by Yazykov. In September 1923, a specially designed underwater vehicle began to search the vicinity of Balaklava Bay. Yearly searches yielded nothing new. On October 17, 1924, one of the young divers discovered the remains of a steam boiler at a depth of 17 meters. Yazykov rejoiced: according to his concept, the Prince was the only steam-powered ship that sank off the coast of Crimea. All EPRON forces were thrown to the place where the boiler was found, but nothing of value was found.
Heinrich Yagoda. (yarwiki.ru)
By this time, the cost of searches exceeded 100 thousand rubles. Yagoda was nervous. Through the embassy in London, a request was made to the English Admiralty with a request to clarify the data on the death of the "Prince", but the local lords refused, citing the prescription of events. A risky situation for Yazykov was saved by the Japanese. The Shinkai Kogiossio Limited Corporation was considered one of the leaders in underwater work. She offered the Soviet government extremely favorable conditions: the Japanese took on all the expenses, during the search they taught the Epronians diving secrets, promised to give 60% of the treasures found to the USSR, and then also donate to EPRON part of the equipment used. From June to November 1927, Japanese divers sorted out the remains of the found steamer. The catch was small. Among the found horse bones, bullets and shovels for cakes were only five gold coins. Most likely they fell out of the pockets of drowned officers. To preserve the honor of the samurai, the Japanese who suffered a fiasco said that the steamer they found was the “Prince”, but the British, who remained in Balaklava for eight months after the disaster, probably raised the gold themselves back in 1855.
Treasure hunters around the world were discouraged, but then someone inquisitive climbed into the British archives and found out that Yazykov's version was originally based on an erroneous assumption. "Prince" was far from the only metal transport that died off the Crimean coast. In total, about a dozen of them sank there, among them HMS Jason, the twin brother of the Prince, built at the same shipyard. Since neither EPRON nor the Japanese found any fragments with the name of the ship, it is not known what kind of transport remains they carefully sorted out.
In 1928, the search for the Black Prince's gold turned off. EPRON switched to more promising work on the rise of ships sunk during the First World and Civil Wars. By the way, the economic effect of these works far exceeded the estimated cost of the sunken British treasures. Vladimir Yazykov was shot in 1937. Among other accusations that were standard for that time in his case, there was a connection with the exposed enemy of the people Yagoda, as well as cooperation with British and Japanese intelligence.
Immersion of EPRONs. (neganews.ru)
In the USSR, a version that suited everyone and was ideologically correct appeared: there was no gold on board the Black Prince when it died on November 14, 1854. The precious cargo was removed from the transport back in Constantinople, where the quartermaster service of the British Expeditionary Force was located. There, corrupt military officials attributed gold and silver to British soldiers who had already died near Sevastopol. And in fact, they divided all 200 thousand pounds among themselves. The only confirmation of this version was the fact that anyone but the British dived in search of the Prince's gold at Balaklava. The "correct" version was published on the pages of popular science magazines and even hammered into the heads of young listeners of the radio program "Club of Famous Captains".
Again, the "Black Prince" was remembered only in 2010, when reports appeared that a group of archaeologists from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, led by Sergei Voronov, discovered the "Black Prince". Among the things they picked up from the metal ship found near the Balaklava rocks were items from the captain's table service. They had the word "Prince" on them. Nothing was reported about gold, but it was emphasized that Voronov and his colleagues were looking for foreign sponsors to survey a large section of the bottom in the area of the found ship. This information did not cause a new "gold rush", and four years later the situation in the Crimea and around it has changed dramatically.
The secret of the "Black Prince" is still kept by the waves of the Black Sea. However, whether there is this very secret in their depths, no one knows for sure.
