Capo Corso 2 Wreck

N/A (open sea)

ShipwreckN/A (open sea) · Between Cap Corse, Corsica and Capraia Island, ItalyBuilt 90 CE · Destroyed 105 CE

Not standing in 117 CE

About

Divers found the Capo Corso 2 wreck in 2012 lying 350 meters deep in the channel between Corsica and the island of Capraia, dated to around the turn of the first and second centuries CE. Its hold was stacked almost entirely with glass — raw glass blocks meant for reworking plus thousands of finished bowls, cups, jugs, and bottles, some still stacked as loaded. Only one other known Roman wreck in the Mediterranean has carried a cargo this dominated by glass rather than amphorae. It documents the raw-material glass trade that fed Italian glassworking workshops in the decades just before Trajan's empire reached its greatest extent.

What happened here

A merchantman goes down with everything aboard and the sea keeps most of it. Cargo is usually amphorae — wine, oil, fish sauce — stacked in layers in sand, or roof tiles, or marble in the round, or ingots stamped with the smelter's name. Timbers survive where the mud or the cargo covers them, and the hull shows how it was built: planks edge-joined with mortise and tenon before the frames go in, a way of building that is slow, strong and about to be abandoned. Personal things come up too — a cooking pot, a lamp, coins that date the last voyage to within a few years. Most losses happen in autumn, close inshore, on a coast the crew knew.