Human Interest
British team discovers treasure trove─── 08:37 Thu, 16 Apr 2015
London - A British-led team has recovered a 50m pounds (or close to 895 million rand) trove of silver coins that has lain on the seabed since the steamship carrying them from Bombay to England was sunk in 1942.
The SS City of Cairo was torpedoed 772km south of St Helena by a German U-boat and sank to 5 150m.
The 100 tonnes of coins, recovered in the deepest salvage operation in history, belonged to HM Treasury.
The silver rupees had been called in by London to help fund the war effort, but they never made it.
The steamship's tall plume of smoke was spotted by a U-boat on 6 November 1942 and it was torpedoed.
The ship and its cargo was presumed lost until 2011, when a team led by British salvage expert John Kingsford located an unnatural object among the ridges and canyons of their South Atlantic search area.
The wreck of the City of Cairo lay on the South Atlantic Ocean bed for more than 70 years before being discovered.
BBC
