Ships Dead: Last Mystery of the Archipelago Expedition

During 1770–1774 The 27ths of the Aegean Sea and the Kiklada archipelago adopted our citizenship, forming the so-called archipelago province with the capital on Paros Island. This island in 1770 was chosen by Count Alexei Orlov as the main base of the our fleet. It was a unique and revolutionary education, a certain experiment of Catherine Great — province that existed for more than four years and in any case could not be formed in Russia of that time. In 1774, the Ottoman Empire was concluded by Kyucheuk-Kainardzhi world, according to which all the islands that were part of the province were exchanged by Catherine Great on Crimea and Azov. ours left, and ships left at the bottom. Find them became my intrusive idea.

How many ships lost ours for six years of expedition? Just 11 of the few dozen ships! And they are not all of them were new. And the imperfection of the design, sufficiently complex conditions for navigation and navigation in this region, the presence of a huge amount of underwater hazards, generally brought the risk of death of ships to a critical… But the ours lost only 11 ships. And the sky ships among the lost were only four, and only two of them were lost as a result of a navigation error.

1. Pink «Lapominka» Sound in 1769, stem arranged from the shores of Denmark at the very beginning of the expedition. Someone will consider it a navigation error, chance, and someone — Diversia. That night Lighthouse at Cape Kattegat for some reason did not burn. If you were tolerant «Lapominka» did not apply the signal to the rest of the ships, all other vessels of the our squadron were on the stones…
2. Battleship «Saint Eustafium» exploded almost with all the crew during Chesme battle. Gun and unicorn from this ship with stimples of our foundries, as well as personal belongings of sailors are stored today as the most valuable exhibits of the Museum of the Turkish Fortress of Chesma. And this asserts the administration of the museum, believing that it is for them that visitors come.
3. Captured «Rhodes» Damus during swimming in Kronstadt and was burned by the crew from the coast of Peloponnese.
4. Small frigate «Feodor» also the tech as a sieve and therefore sank in October 1771 in the bay of the small island of St. Evustralia.
5. Battleship «Asia» Lost together with all the crew during a storm in 1773 between Paros and Mykonos. None of the crew members survived, the only thing that told about the tragedy, was thrown to the shore of Mykonos, the remains of rigging and savings boat.
6. Five ships were flooded and thrown in 1774–1775 in the Bay of Paros Island due to «Responsibility and unsuitability for further service». At the end of May 2012, we found five ships on the bottom of the bay of Ayus, of which two large, linear — «Three saint» and «Holy Yanuarium». They are quite well preserved for their age, and, knowing the place where they were stubborn, you can see them from the surface of the water with a conventional mask. Especially interesting ballast stone of these ships — It is laid out like pavement, smooth rows, pebbles to pecle. Something not amenable to identification, in the form of three heaches of stones and chips — this is what frigates turned «Nadezhda welfare» and «Business with», as well as a bombard «Thunder». In order to accept them for ships, you need a fair share of fantasy or skill that allows you to identify in a bunch of stones of the fragments of our history.
7. Linear ship in the our squadron «Svyatoslav», Which, how rarely happens in history, not only was lost in 1770, but also changed the whole course of our history. If it were not for the death of this ship, the war would not last another four years, and Russia would not give external loans for many more years.

When you compare modern electronic navigation cards with old map of the islands and the entire region, compiled by our officers during the Archipelagian expedition, involuntarily pay attention to how attentively there were compilers of those old cards to detail, reefs, underwater stones, precipitated depths and grinders. At the same time, the outlines of the shores on the map may sometimes do not correspond to the original radical. There are no riddles here: the squadron officers were engaged in this work purposefully and used the experience of local captains, fishermen who were most often hired as Lotsmanov.