Provenance

From the personal collection of Connie Muller, one of the original salvors of the Bredenhof Wreck.

Ingots from the same wreck were sold by Christie's, Amsterdam, 'The Bredenhof Bullion', 4 December, 1986.

Notes

Recovered by one of the original salvors of the Bredenhof wreck, discovered in 1986 on the Silva Shoal, Mozambique Channel.

This exceptionally well-preserved silver ingot is one of the surviving bars from the treasure cargo of the Dutch East India Company ship Bredenhof, lost off the East African coast in 1753.

Independent testing of four examples of the ingots listed in the Christie’s Amsterdam catalogue, revealed silver purity ranging between 979 and 988 parts per thousand, with trace gold content of 2 parts per thousand. The bar has the rare assayers’ markings of G.v.D (Gerrit van Driel) and countered marked with the coat-of-arms (double headed eagle). Of the over 500 ingots sold by Christie’s, only 43 were marked G.v.D.

The Bredenhof, a 136-foot, 800-ton VOC vessel built in 1746 for the Middelburg Chamber, was ordered in 1752 to sail via Ceylon to Bengal. Her cargo included 14 barrels of copper duiten and 30 chests of bullion—29 of bar silver valued at 300,000 guilders, and one chest containing 5,000 gold ducats valued at 25,000 guilders—intended for minting silver rupees in Bengal.

After departing Zeeland on 31 December 1752, the Bredenhof reached the Cape on 11 April 1753, took on wheat and wine, and continued her voyage. On 6 June 1753, calm conditions and hidden counter-currents drove her onto a reef about 13 miles off the African coast, 120 miles south of Mozambique. In a desperate effort to prevent looting, the captain and ship’s council cast 14 chests of silver overboard through the rudder trunk before the ship broke apart.

Two VOC salvage attempts in 1754 and 1755 proved unsuccessful. More than two centuries later, divers rediscovered the wreck in 1986, and the bullion was auctioned that same year at Christie’s Amsterdam as The Bredenhof Bullion.

The experience of discovering and salvaging the Bredenhof Wreck is documented in a first-person account in Gavin Clackworthy’s book Treasure & Tragedy.