We intrerviewed the professional diving supervisor and shipwreck technician Julio Cesar A. Castello Branco, that described the wreckage condition in the dives of the 1986/87 research. The data are based on what was seen in the dives and the biography of the wreckage in the National Rio de Janeiro Library.

The usual visibility is from 1 to 2 meters, with strong and cold currents. In te bottom you need technic to not raise material of all species, mainly rust. If you don`t know how to work on the deep, the visibility becomes zero, and only divers with at least 15 years of experience can work using their hands, and that is if he knows where exactly the ship is.

Castello said that he saw that 2 explosions happened on the Prince of Asturias calderons, since the machine area was all open and exposed to the deep, with the calderons away from each other and in different positions.

Aside from those two explosions, more bad calculated explosions were made by the standard diving dress divers and other ambicious divers in the fifties.

The fact that those divers couldn`t calculate the explosions made them lose the dimension of the explosion, and one of the statues in the basement was decapitated and lost its arm, mainly because of the water mass movement and the debris generated by the explosions. 

So, I could feel with my hands that the other statues seemed ready to be taken out, because of the side-by-side positioning. We could see the distorted parts and small rags and perfurations, the messed up ingots, other pilled up, because of more than 4 explosions, and more than 90 years underwater, hitting the coast.

It is common to se a clean part of one of the ship compartiments, and months later return to the same place and find it all covered with sand. The only way to turn it into an Archeological site is to use the Air-Life technology, to suck the sand, but it would have to be done constantly.

The explosions were strong, causing great losses of precious pieces. Photos of those compartiments (basements), where the statues and other cargo are located, are almost impossible, given the debris, with dense "rust clouds".

The damage to the bronze statues (one of them was taken in the nineties), were only touched by our group, and seen only with the piece ver close to the mask. Julio comments that, not only him, but also Raul Cerqueira, José Pombeiro and Antonio Drummond(Tonel) also made this remark.

Castello Branco also says that the passengers "cages", that are from 25 to 28 meters deep, in the middle of the ship, is part covered with sand and part destroyed, and that a lot of pieces were taken with little explosions made by pirates, that are amateur divers, disguised as underwater fishermen, tourists or sportsmen.

 

In Catello`s opinion they are selfless, ambicious and greedy, selling the pieces on the black market, bringing great damage to the wreckage, relating to brazilian underwater archeology.

Julio Cesar Accarino Castello Branco is a professional diver for 29 years now, and still active, co-founder of the Brazilian Divers Association and cofounder of the Brazilian Professional Divers Union - SINTASA, and also commercial and development director of COOPERBRASUB (Brazilian Divers Cooperative), Sub-Sat Businessman, Commercial and Field Operations Director, having made deep dives, saturating dives and deep diving supervisor as a third-party contractor for Petrobras on the Campos Bay (Bacia de Campos), and for other companies. Consultant for underwater resources, and is now dedicating his time to develop projects to tell the world about this still unknown world, with information from field work from humanity last resource, the ocean.

 

Source: http://www.sintasa.org.br/