Original subtitles

Addio!

[man whistles]

[Damien Hirst] I suppose we're all looking for a whole true story

that makes sense.

But I think what makes you believe in things

is not what's there, it's about what's not there.

With any story, the gaps between things is where you locate your belief.

You know, it's unbelievable to start with, but that makes you believe it.

[Lerner] The expedition began in 2010.

We assembled a group of consultants,

ecological experts, to advise on avoiding damage to the site,

and a representative from the host country to safeguard their interests

and oversee what happened to anything we found.

We had spent the summer of 2009 remotely mapping the site from the surface.

It was clear from our scans that there was something down there...

but there was no clear indication as to what it was.

I've been doing this job for nearly 30 years

and I wasn't about to jump to any conclusions.

Right, are we all here?

-Coffee? -Yes? Very good.

Right, welcome, everybody.

My name's Andrew and I'm the project director on this expedition.

This gentleman here is Piotr Klimek.

He's a maritime archaeologist of extraordinary dive experience.

He will be leading the team under the water,

alongside Bruce, who's gonna be in charge of the divers.

So we're gonna start by ground-truthing the main anomalies from the geophysics.

And as you can see, we have many artefacts spread over a large area,

with the major groups here, here and here.

No sign of a ship, which might indicate the wreck is early

and the hull totally disintegrated,

but do keep an eye out for any hull structure that we might have missed.

Don't forget to record your locations as you work

and keep in communication with the surface team.

[Klimek] This phase of the expedition is what we call a pre-disturbance survey.

And this is mostly to establish, really,

in detail what is and how much of it is down there.

Could you give me a soundcheck? Count back from five, over.

Five, four...

three, two, one.

I copy, over.

Surface support, surface support, this is Piotr.

Yeah, go ahead, Piotr. Over.

Hello, mate. Just a quick update.

We are working our way across the dive site.

I wish you could see this. Over.

It began for me in 2008.

I was in the middle of my doctoral thesis.

I say in the middle, I hadn't really written anything in a couple of months

and I was running out of funds.

And then I discovered the clip on the internet.

I assumed it was posted by a backpacker or a holidaymaker, someone like that.

We could see a beach, I assumed East African,

and a community of fishermen.

And the clip was entitled "Fishermen Discover Statue".

And a group of fishermen have pulled something up in their net.

It looked like a curled up foetal monkey.

To see something come out of the water that you can't quite explain...

that's an adventure and you want to know more.

I thought, if these fishermen found one thing,

it stands to reason that there is more down there.

So I wanted to find this beach and I wanted to talk to these fishermen.

Yeah, this is the beach.

I knew as soon as I saw it, cos I've seen it so often on the video.

The fishermen said they had been back to look

whether there was anything else out there and they couldn't find anything.

So after much negotiation, they took us out to where they said they discovered it.

Do you think we have the right spot?

It's somewhere around here. Let's go down and look.

-Yes... Yeah, wonderful, yes. -Yeah?

First day, we go to this island.

Is this this place? I go in, I dive.

I dive for hours to end.

-Did you find anything? -No.

-So there was nothing again? -No.

It took us days, because it was a blind search.

-Nothing? -Nothing here.

Shit!

-Patience, yes? -Yeah.

Okay.

We nearly gave up.

[Didi] It was on the fifth day.

Had my GoPro on, went down.

Half an hour search...

and voilà!

Finally.

-Peter. -Yes?

This is the place.

-You're sure? -Yes.

-It's awesome. -Yeah?

-Yes. -Yes!

[Peter laughs]

[Lerner] Peter sent me the footage.

It showed what looked like a classical sculpture

that had lain on the seabed for a considerable amount of time.

We knew that it was worth pursuing, but it was going to be hard

to get funding through the usual channels.

[BBC News intro music]

Last year, he caused controversy in the modern art world

by creating a diamond-encrusted skull.

Une révolution dans le monde de l'art.

Brash and brazen artist Damien Hirst...

..is putting more than 200 new pieces up for auction.

Lot number one, 8,200,000. Any more?

8,300,000. Thank you.

[news reporter] Hirst's opened-mouthed shark staggered all expectations.

Sold to you, Bruno, 8 million 5!

Now that's a pretty penny for a pretty pickle.

One of the people that we approached was an artist who had just been in the news.

[Lerner] I didn't know much about him. To me he was the shark guy.

[Damien Hirst] I'd had the auction where I sold all my works,

in, you know, this three-day big sale.

And it really was the point where all the work, like, became commodity.

It just seemed like you make something, sell it, make something, sell it.

Make something, sell it, and it seemed unsustainable and unfulfilling.

£9 million. At £9 million.

Last chance at 9 million 2. Sold! Congratulations.

Some reason, after that auction, it seemed like something had ended

and something new was beginning.

[American narrator] It's the new era in his exploration of inner space.

[Damien Hirst] I loved fantasy shipwreck stories when I was a kid.

You know, I just loved them.

[American narrator] Within the violent waters that cover this Earth,

comes this story of suspense, chills, terror, excitement beyond compare.

All those old movies about treasures found under the sea.

[American narrator] Somewhere in these waters,

is a treasure worth a fortune in gold.

[Damien Hirst] I love the sea because it's an element that's alien to us.

You know, it's like another planet on our own planet.

[American narrator] The ocean is the last of the Earth's great unexplored frontiers.

To find a major sponsor so soon, who had money and an interest, that was amazing.

He was basically prepared to take a gamble.

[Damien Hirst] I think everything that I've ever done has been a gamble.

But I definitely wasn't tempted to get a wet suit on.

Because, erm, I think the sharks would eat me.

Surface support, this is diver Bruce.

Yeah, this is surface support. Go ahead.

I have just located the position.

Give me five minutes.

[Lerner] From the scans we knew there was a lot down there...

but what we discovered was much bigger

and more baffling than we'd expected.

Surface support, this is diver Bruce.

Go ahead, Bruce.

It's amazing!

It's beautiful.

What's amazing is how it's integrated into the reef.

And to actually see the corals and everything that's grown onto it,

and the fish that are attached to it, but it's still a sculpture.

It's like nothing you've ever seen before.

To actually find something that's not been seen for, you know, lifetimes.

It's almost like, you know, finding something in its natural habitat.

That's what's exciting about the whole project.

[Kingdon] Nature is, sort of, claiming it, but it hasn't claimed all of it yet,

so it's like there's... there's the beauty of the nature

and there's the beauty of the sculpture, side by side.

It's in a sort of extraordinary garden.

It's like a sort of strange Victorian grotto of the underworld.

[Didi] It takes lots of years for corals to develop.

And you start asking yourself,

"For how long have these things been down here?"

[Veitch] You've just got so many questions coming through your mind of,

"How did they get there? How were they made?

Who was it that possibly made them?"

And, "What size ship was transporting them?

Why were they coming through this area?"

It's… It opens so many questions.

There are huge pieces just scattered over quite a wide area,

buried at different angles in the sand.

It's no sense really of what happened. There's no sense of...of accident.

Is it...is it a shipwreck? Is it...is it several shipwrecks?

It's a mystery. At this stage, it's a mystery.

Well, these are what we found in the first couple of weeks.

We have a fascinating range of artefacts developing.

A wide range of dates, provenances.

The selection of different styles

suggests this could be the contents of a merchant ship.

As yet, we don't have anything to pin a specific date on.

[Lerner] Today, we will start working with the air-lift.

It's basically a device that will vacuum the seabed.

Takes away the lighter materials and the sand silt.

You know, for the first time

in possibly centuries, you know, we're disturbing what's underneath the sand

and there could be much more down there.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Stop, stop! Hold it, hold it!

[Klimek] I just saw something glinting in the sand.

As you work, in the least expected moments you uncover something that is crucial.

-Guys, look at this. -Whoa, what's this?

Alright.

-Okay. -Can we see it?

Okay.

-What is it? -It's Roman.

-Wow! Let me have a look at this. -Fantastic.

[Bryant] That's Nero. AD 54 to 68.

Roman 1st century.

-It looks like you've got yourself a date. -We've got ourselves a date.

Big moment. Big moment for us.

The picture starts to become much clearer now.

[Lerner] This is great. Exactly the kind of thing we'd hoped to find.

[Bryant] The coin dates from the rule of the Emperor Nero.

So we know for certain the ship could not have gone down before 54 AD.

And I'm trying to get the important bit up here.

Where is it? There it is. It's perfect.

Can you see him? Nero.

So, if we're talking about a shipwreck from

between the mid-1st

and mid-2nd centuries AD...

during this period, there was a Roman market in plunder

of earlier classical cities.

And a market for artefacts from Egypt.

And of course, in the 1st century navigational guide,

"The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea",

there were records of routes of trade

between the Mediterranean world and China in the east.

[Lerner] Now this document, The Periplus, was key to us,

as proof of trade and cultural cross-pollination

across the 1st and 2nd centuries.

Proof that a merchant could amass such an eclectic collection.

But there were no rich cultural centres nearby

where there was any kind of trade in antiques.

What was a cargo as big and valuable as this

doing off this stretch of the East African coast?

[Lerner] We knew the ship was from the 1st or 2nd century,

and although the ship's woodwork would have disintegrated,

we began to uncover what seemed like the personal effects of a ship's crew.

This is...a whole series

of plates, bowls.

There's quite a lot of diversity here of shapes and forms.

Look at that, that looks like a sailor's plate to me.

That's a load of coins, all accreted together.

There's some loose ones here as well.

But that would have been probably in a sack.

And the whole sack went down and the whole thing's fused together.

Nice, isn't it?

Hello, guys.

[Lerner] And then we found something else.

Where is Andrew? At the back?

[Lerner] It was a... a huge surprise.

A huge clue.

-My God! -Yes.

-What is this? -Er...

This is a bolt

that would have been used in the keel of a ship in the 1st or 2nd century AD.

And, er, this is truly enormous for something of this kind.

I've only ever seen a few examples from this era,

but the biggest I've seen have been from a Roman wreck,

from the French coast at la Madrague de Giens,

er, and that ship was big.

But this is much bigger and it's broken at the end.

You know, it's sheered off.

So who knows what the actual size would have been.

[Lerner] This one bolt meant that we could,

with the help of our colleagues from Southampton University,

spend the whole winter recreating how the boat might have been built

and what it might have looked like.

One of the biggest vessels that we have to compare it to

is from the south of France, Madrague de Giens.

And this is a cross-section through the bottom of that vessel.

That's the bolt.

That's the bolt running right the way down there.

And the one from your site is way, way bigger.

So it's got to be coming off a much, much bigger ship.

So we went through to some of the really standard iconography

erm, from the ancient world

that gives us this idea of the re-curved bows. That's consistent with the Madrague

and it's what they seemed to be using on these really, really big merchant ships.

What we got to, with doing that, was this.

So what are we talking lengthwise, do you think?

60 metres. 60 metres seemed like a--

-50% bigger. -Yeah. So really, really big.

And we know vessels that big could have existed.

It's not outside the realms of the engineering capabilities that they had.

You know, quite a lot of crew on this boat. A lot of big, heavy mast sails.

I thought we'd go a little bit further

and start to look at the actual vessel sailing along.

So we've just taken our basic reconstruction

and we've given it the sort of CGI treatment, if you like.

-The Hollywood treatment. -Yeah.

And there it is, sailing along. And you get a real idea of the scale of the--

-This guy sitting on the end. -Yeah, the guy just out on the…

-Yeah. -..the flying gallery at the front.

Quite simply we were looking at an enormous ship.

We knew the ship was from, well, probably from the 1st or 2nd century,

and so we knew that we were looking at, by far,

the largest ship from that period to ever have been identified.

[Weiss] I was looking for records of an extraordinarily large ship.

Even though import and export duties

would have been levied and recorded, very little survives.

Shipping records for the East African coast

during the 1st and 2nd centuries after Christ are virtually non-existent.

There was nothing that helped me identify it.

So I started looking into eye-witness accounts

that would have recorded a monumental ship.

The great Roman chronicalists, like Tacitus

or Pliny the Elder, mentioned nothing.

Neither did the more obscure diarists.

So I moved on to tales of legend.

And that's how I discovered the story of Aulus Calidius Amotan.

As the legend goes, Amotan was a man freed from slavery.

And he developed this love of beautiful things

and amassed this huge collection of treasures.

He planned to build a monumental palace or a temple to house them all.

And he built The Apistos,

the largest ship known to man, to transport them all.

On this great voyage to the temple,

the ship was struck by a storm

or attacked by a giant sea monster,

depending on what version of the story you read,

and lost forever.

[Hau] In the 1st century AD,

one of the really popular genres of literature was collections of marvels,

collections of interesting things that were said to have happened.

But how many of these texts tell the truth,

and the absolute truth, is a very big question.

I would say it's naive to take the story entirely at face value,

but I wouldn't say it's naive to think there's a kernel of truth in it somewhere.

But how many pieces of art he had, what it was that he had,

how far he sailed, why he sailed out?

All that is the stuff that will have been legendised in the telling.

[newsreel] Now to the Mediterranean.

Legend tells of an eccentric collector's enormous ship

and his worldly possessions lost at sea.

Captain George Knowles has made it his life's work to find the treasure.

[Hau] I think it's a very human thing

to romanticise the story of Amotan.

I suppose your common sense would tell you this is made up, this is just a story,

but if actually you find proof of it,

it becomes that much more remarkable cos it's actually true.

[Lerner ] One or two of the more credulous treasure hunters of the 20th century

took this obscure legend seriously.

You know, I come from a background where we must have proof

and we must have evidence.

Ours is a hunt for knowledge and not treasure.

[newsreel] Any firm details about where the wreck may lie

have been lost in the sands of time.

[Weiss] I started to believe

that the wreck had not been found, not because it was a myth,

but because people were looking in the wrong place.

[newsreel] Captain Knowles swears he will leave no stone unturned

until he has found the lost treasure.

Peter's romanticism, I think, sometimes got the better of him.

Morning. Morning, Bruce!

-Andy. -How are you today?

Er, yep, we're back this year for another six weeks.

It's as long as we can dive for before the weather changes.

And the plan is to look at some of the bigger pieces and hopefully bring them up.

Peter, Peter, divers standing by for the crane, over.

-This is it. -Get out of the way.

Okay. We're going to swing over a bit towards you.

This is it.

Quick update. I'll just get the final confirmation.

And I'll give you the go-ahead to start lifting, over.

Bruce standing by.

You can go ahead and start lifting to the surface, over.

Copy that. We're ready to lift now, over.

Alright, she's about to break the surface.

So wanna see this.

[man] Okay, I can see it. It's down there.

[he laughs]

Oh, my goodness, look at that!

Fantastic!

[Bryant] Look at that! You can see its teeth!

[Bryant] What we are looking at is the skull of an elephant

or great mammoth.

It looks like it's man-made, carved out of marble.

When the Greeks and Romans discovered fossil remains,

they informed their popular beliefs.

And it used to be thought with skulls like this,

with the large single cavity in the centre of the face,

that these gave birth to

or at least justification

to the existence of cyclops in mythological tales.

I think it's an incredibly detailed example

of the power of mythology.

One thing that excited me about the project is how you inhabit the past.

And it's like, it's unknowable, really.

But little glimpses and fragments of objects and stories,

that's what makes you, kind of, know the past.

Alright, diver Bruce, diver Bruce, surface support, over.

Let me know when you're ready for lifting. Over.

Copy that. We're ready to lift now, over.

[Damien Hirst] History's always been rewritten and rewritten.

You know, the solidity that we call history is written from fragments.

[Bryant] Amazing, look at him. That raised spine.

Wow! Look, you can see how he's oxidised under there.

He's been there for some time, it looks like.

Human features with bestial traits.

Characteristic of the Mesopotamian demon.

The question is, could this be the so-called Pazuzu demon?

[Aaldenberg] In the 1920s, British archaeologists were digging

in the Upper Tigris Valley of Mesopotamia.

They discovered a small settlement along the banks of the river.

And among their finds was thought, by some,

to be a head of the Babylonian demon king, Pazuzu.

[Bryant] Stylistically, they both seem to be of a piece.

[Damien Hirst] I remember when I first saw the demon.

I was asking myself, "Why am I believing it?

Am I believing it because it's got these missing parts?"

You believe it because, in a history of it travelling through time,

through thousands of years, it's bound to have, you know, had accidents and mishaps.

I love the way that time can age it and deteriorate it.

It's like the action of the world on this object.

You realise that everything in the world is going to become fragments.

And then you realise that's really where belief lies, is between fragments.

We thought he was, you know, lost forever,

and this could be him, and he's beautiful.

What makes you believe in things is not what's there.

It's about what's not there.

[Weiss] A cyclops, demons, unicorns.

It did tell us a little bit about Amotan's character.

[Damien Hirst] I think he genuinely believed in monsters.

He believed in cyclopes, he believed in unicorns.

You know, I just think he was that type of a person.

Then, I guess, if you believe in them in the beginning, then you,

you know, you create things to justify their existence.

[Kingdon] Whether it was this Amotan

that Peter's talking about or whether it's somebody else,

these are not, erm, objects that are just randomly chosen.

I'm not prepared to say it is Amotan,

but for my money...

there's certainly somebody with a vision and with a dream,

a massive dream, and a pretty big ego behind all of this.

I can't see this as a trading vessel.

There are very definite aesthetic choices being made here.

I think if it was trade stuff, you'd see multiples of similar things.

This seems to be more co-ordinated.

[church bells ring]

[Damien Hirst] Obviously, Amotan had an idea of an audience

and then his dreams were scuppered when the boat sank.

But now these objects have come back up again,

I wanted to find a great place to exhibit them.

The Venetians amassed collections and brought things

from far reaches of the world.

You know, when you look at the four horses in St Mark's

and you realise that they're a massive symbol of Venice.

And so is the lion.

But they came from faraway lands.

They weren't really a symbol of Venice. They were plundered.

The lion came from Athens and the four horses came from Constantinople.

The history of where they came from is lost

and they become totally synonymous with Venice.

Surface support, this is diver two, Piotr, over.

Yeah, it's Andrew. Diver two, go ahead, over.

You won't believe what we've got down here. I'm coming up.

Well?

-Let's go to the office. -Okay.

Andrew, can you close the door?

-We've got a little bit of a problem. -A-huh.

We've found, er, quite a lot of gold.

That's great news, isn't it?

Yes, but it will undermine our security here.

[Klimek] We drifted in a strong current over quite a wide area.

Over sea grasses, over big lumps of coral.

And then we found, scattered, half-buried, gold objects.

So on the one hand, I was thinking,

"My God, this is... this is possibly the greatest moment of my career."

But on the other hand, panic set in,

because this stuff is worth millions.

[Lerner] Yeah, to find this much gold is thrilling,

but for an archaeologist it's a big problem.

Your gut instinct is to bring up something valuable, but we can't do that.

Roughly how long will it take us to get it up?

-We've only seen a fraction of it. -I say bring it up.

No, no, we can't bring it up because then, you know,

we lose the advantage of being able to see it in situ.

My solution is simple. I mean, you bring this stuff up as soon as you can.

The reason I sought money for this is to find what could be a treasure.

Ah, ah, ah! This expedition is not about treasure.

No, no, I'm just saying bring it up now.

That way it's safe, we know where it is.

You're missing the point. You're missing the point.

The more time goes by, the more people will know.

We want to be able to study why it's sitting there, where it's sitting.

How the marine life has grown around it.

This is how you work on an archaeological...

I get that, I get that, but what time-frame are you looking at?

Let's say, seven days minimum. We increase the security quietly.

I just think you are naive in thinking we can keep this quiet for seven days.

Peter, you need to trust our judgement on this, okay?

Now, I know we're all really excited but, you know, this goes without saying.

Those confidentiality agreements that you signed, they're serious, okay?

No photos. Absolutely nothing posted on the internet.

I don't want any bloody Tweets or anything like that.

[Klimek] The chances are that once the truth is out,

it will just generate all sorts of interest, you know, from treasure hunters,

from... from pirates, from...

er, all sorts.

Really what I want to be able to do is to just double the security

for the remaining week.

You need to fish way over there. We have divers here.

We are diving here. You need to go over there, please.

They have a ship.

But I don't know what is going on.

But the people, they go there and they come back, you know.

You see, a lot of villagers here, they thought that maybe

they search for something like maybe gasoline, petrol.

They make research for fish maybe?

Some friends, they told me that they see

a big, like, sculpture, like a woman.

They see it down on the sea there.

What I'd like to do is just give a briefing on

what we want to achieve this morning.

Ready?

We're going to load the packer up first,

and we're going to put all the lift bags, all the ropes

and the gear for most of the divers onto the packer,

and we're going to send it out.

Okay. Any questions on that?

So today's the big day.

We've decided, after much deliberation, to bring the gold items up.

Expected time of arrival ten to 15 minutes from now, over.

Okay, over and out.

See, here it comes.

-See the colour? -Uh-uh.

Yes, yes!

[applause and laughter]

Fantastic!

-How good is that? -Whoa!

There you go.

-[laughter] -What do you think of that?

Oh, wow!

Thank you.

[Weiss] I don't think anyone could ever imagine

that something like this would happen to them.

You dream about it...

but do you honestly believe that it will?

Probably not.

-It's going straight into the water? -Yep.

[Damien Hirst] The amazing thing about the gold works that were found

is that gold doesn't tarnish, so they're totally timeless.

You know, it's shiny and it sort of dances in your eyes. You see it in movies.

The guy opens the case and this gold shines on their faces.

There are so many objects made of gold.

I mean, he's a collector. He was obviously obsessed with it as a material.

Gold makes people do crazy things, you know. It's, like, has done for years.

You know, there's a lot of blood associated with gold.

You know, gold can drive people mad.

I mean, who's to say what makes it like that? Is it its rarity?

Its scarcity? Or is it something, you know, naturally inside the metal itself?

Need a hand?

Fantastic!

Unbelievable! Got it?

-[laughter] -Jesus!

God!

-Oh! Wow! -[laughter]

Wow!

Oh, look, it's beautiful!

Yes.

I can't believe these things. [laughs]

It is truly beautiful.

Heavy. [laughs]

[Lerner] It's interesting that the gold was found on its own.

I think that indicates to me that maybe they tried to escape with the gold.

You know, the ship was definitely going down.

It was irreparably damaged,

and they thought the gold was worth the risk

of putting in a smaller boat and trying to escape with.

[Weiss] If you rely on myth, if you rely on legend,

people tend to not take you very seriously,

but this vast amount of gold

suddenly made my story come to life.

At this point, I was prepared to go out on a limb,

by saying that what we had found was indeed Amotan's treasure.

[church bells ring]

Today, one of the divers uncovered a huge golden disc.

And it was found...

in an area where we found many of the other gold items.

But it was completely covered with silt.

And, er...

obviously, there's pressure now to bring it up as soon as possible.

Surface support, surface support.

Diver two, go ahead, over.

We are struggling with the current down here.

Andy, the weather's picked up a bit.

-Right. -We weren't expecting any wind today.

-Yeah. -It's just picked up.

How long is it going to be before we know when it's going to calm down?

We'll just take it hour by hour and see what the weather does.

-I've stopped all operations. -That's a very good move.

We will postpone till tomorrow. Hope for better weather.

[thunder rumbles]

[Klimek] We left a minimal crew on board for now. Just to keep it safe.

And, er, we're waiting for the weather to clear.

And it's not looking like it's clearing, is it?

[Weiss] It's important that we lift the gold disc as soon as possible.

To me, it's the clearest indication yet that we have found Amotan's treasures.

[thunder rumbles]

In later versions of the Amotan myth,

the hero gets visited by the goddess Artemis...

who instructs him to build a temple to the sun god Apollo.

And that becomes his motivation to collect the great treasures of the Old World.

[Aaldenberg] This story was told after Christianity took hold

and can be read as a warning against

embracing the old Pagan gods,

with Amotan punished for worshipping false idols,

gods going back to the earliest civilisations.

[Weiss] Must have been a night like this that it all ended for Amotan.

Imagine The Apistos, loaded with Amotan's collection,

coming up against the storm like this.

The sun is back.

The sun god Apollo is with us.

[Weiss] I believe what we're lifting today isn't just a gold disc.

It's evidence of solar worship.

An image of the sun. A sun disc.

Sun discs have been used by many civilisations and cultures

to venerate the god of the sun by, literally, reflecting his rays.

The Egyptians and Incas used them, the Japanese and the Kurds.

The Ancient Egyptians believed the sun's daily pattern of regeneration

suggested their own rising after death.

This was symbolic of the sun's power

to give life or to take away.

I think that this sun disc is a centrepiece for Amotan's temple

to the sun god Apollo.

And the other items that we found, they were to fill the temple.

[boys shouting, football is kicked]

Er, welcome, everyone. The good news is,

with just a few more things to bring up tomorrow,

we have retrieved 82 items.

The bad news is, it seems there's nothing else down there, so our work here's over.

-Well, what about the drop-off? -Yes, we have a drop-off here.

The depth drops down to... 60 to 100 metres.

So legend has it that there were 100 objects in the boat.

Because we've got 15 or so missing, perhaps we should look there?

The site-scan didn't pick anything up.

Well, perhaps we didn't scan further enough into the drop-off.

Yeah, I mean, we know the ship is driven from the deep water onto the reef,

because of the way that the cargo spilled out.

I'm really happy. I mean, Peter, you should be very happy.

I am. It just feels like... the end is missing.

[Lerner laughs]

To go home now, knowing that there is an area that I haven't looked at,

it's just... it doesn't sit right.

We've got two more days.

Yes, we've got two more days, but we've got an awful lot to do.

I don't really want to start investigating another area when, you know…

Well, it's not another area. It's the drop-off. We know where it is.

Okay.

Peter would like us to explore further into the drop-off,

which we have scanned and we didn't find anything.

If we're not coming back,

shouldn't we make sure that we've checked everywhere?

[Weiss] We're just going to have one last look in the deep drop-off.

I know that this is a long-shot, you know.

Okay, here we go.

-How deep are we? -60, plus 60.

We're at 60 now.

So we're moving north. Loads of marine snow.

-Just give it a minute. -Sorry, guys. This is far from great.

But this is how we...

Okay, so nothing.

Sorry. I'm trying to make a loop and, sort of, go back.

[Bryant] What are these things?

-[Lerner] Pretty much just broken coral. -[Bryant] Coral?

-That is a stack of coral. -Oh!

That was something. Was it?

-That is something. -You saw something?

-Yes. Look. Hang on. -I can't see it.

Shit!

-Yes! -Oh, yes!

-We've got something! -Wait, wait, wait.

What is that?

Can you go back to where we were originally?

-Okay -He's trying. He's trying.

-That was definitely a figure. -You sure?

Yes, absolutely.

Ah, God, this...

What is that?

Jesus! That is part of a figure.

[Bryant] There it is! Look at that.

It's two figures.

So we're coming back next year, I guess?

-Well… -Wow!

[Damien Hirst] The first thing that came to me was the title...

"Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable".

I started thinking of it as a sort of statement.

So it was like "treasures from the wreck of the unbelievable",

like, it's kind of something inside your mind.

Like, the unbelievable is a place in your mind.

You know, years ago, when I was a student,

I was living in a squat in White Hart Lane with some mates.

In my bedroom, I could hear a guy who lived next door

and I could hear him through the wall.

And then I stopped hearing him and we thought maybe something had happened.

And then after I didn't hear him for about a week, I got my friends and I said,

"Look, come on, let’s go and have a look."

So we kicked both doors down and then went in there.

We actually went in first of all because we thought maybe he'd died.

It was like the whole room was just filled with stuff

and there was nobody in there.

I found out later he was called Mr Barnes,

but at the time I didn't know what he was called.

He was one of those guys that went round with, like, a shopping trolley and bags,

and he'd collect things and bring them back. So he was like a hoarder.

The rooms were piled high with stuff and I went to the top of these piles

and excavated through the piles and found every toothpaste tube he'd ever used.

Money wrapped up in bags.

You know, lots of magazines, from like the '40s and the '20s.

There was like a whole bag of 50p's, another bag of 2p's.

He had a collection of, like, clocks

and he, sort of, converted and painted them, mended them.

It was like 60 years of existence in one space.

I don't know, there was something about this man that I got to know.

Going through the time, there were, like, layers of geography going through them.

When we got to the table, I found a normal man.

And he'd just put objects on the table and put objects on the table

until he'd kind of lost his mind or lost touch with civilisation.

And he'd created this huge collection.

In a way, it becomes an infatuation when you discover something like this,

and you try and get inside the mind of somebody who no longer exists.

You start to go on this journey and then you kind of get lost in it.

With any story, I think you get interested in, you know, the characters.

You know, I'm a collector and I'm an artist.

I understand all those things about money and collecting,

and, you know, the kind of addiction of it.

Looking at Amotan through his collection and through his objects,

he was a collector like today's collectors are.

I think that he begged and borrowed and commissioned

and stole to amass this collection.

Welcome, everybody.

We're going to be diving a little bit deeper this year.

We'll be diving down to 60 metres, so all the usual procedures will apply.

And we have a new diver this year.

-His name's Peter. -[applause]

We are going to do this as an assisted dive.

Okay? Let's hit that drop-off.

[Weiss] Diving to this depth for the first time is strange enough.

These figures…

like, they've always been there.

And because you can float around them at any height,

you sort of forget how big they actually are.

[Damien Hirst] You know, I like the fact that Amotan was

kind of nuts on the scale of what he tried to do.

He seems kind of arrogant in lots of ways

and then he seems foolish in lots of other ways.

But, above it all, he seems driven to amass this collection.

[Lerner] So we've identified three, perhaps four, sculptures in deep water.

Because of their depth and because of the size,

we really want to bring them up as soon as we can.

You know, this piece we estimated to weigh up to upwards of 30 tonnes.

We've already had a few divers down to have a scout to see how we might lift it.

The idea is to have that as your main lifting point.

Yeah.

Then you have secondary... lifting points there.

[Kingdon] There's been a huge amount of planning in this,

because we don't even know how fragile it is.

I mean, just the scale of it and the fact that it's survived this long,

potentially, means it must be a very fine casting.

-Everything in place? -I hope so.

A bit worried. A bit nervous.

The worst case scenario is that we've underestimated the weight of this

and it pulls the crane over.

[diver talking indistinctly]

[Cleave] This is just a worrying moment as the crane takes over from the lift-bags.

Bring the boom closer to the barge.

The crane's doing more work than the lift bags now.

So you'll feel the barge listing slightly.

Do I think the enormous ship of legend existed?

It's completely impossible to say

whether this ship that ended up here was The Apistos.

Erm, it certainly chimes with the legends.

Erm, and it would have been similar in scale to the legend, but we'll never know.

Wow!

[Weiss] I know that not all the pieces of the puzzle are here.

I'm very aware of that.

But I think we have enough pieces of the puzzle

to support a story.

[Damien Hirst] When you think about the whole story,

it's unbelievable to start with.

But most things from history do seem very hard to believe.

You know, you look at the Venus de Milo,

look at the way the arms are cut off on it

and you think somebody must have done that on purpose.

[church bells ring]

[music plays]

[indistinct chatter of crowd]

[Damien Hirst] For me, the whole exhibition is about belief.

Belief in the past.

Belief in God.

Belief in gods.

Or not believing.

And belief is a strange thing because there's no absolute truth.

Artists don't have the answers, science doesn't have the answers,

religion doesn't have the answers.

But somehow, collectively, we create some kind of a truth.

But whether you believe in anything or not,

I think we need something.

[end titles music plays]