It was the autumn of 1838 when the English merchant ship Beatrice set sail from Malta bound for the port of Liverpool. She never arrived. The news of the loss of the ship was reported in Lloyd’s ‘Loss and Casualty Book’.
The entry for Thursday, 31st January 1839 reads: “Beatrice, Wichelo, [the skipper of the vessel], sailed from Alexandria 20th Sept. & from Malta, 13th October for Liverpool, & has not since been heard of”.
The vessel, it seems, had simply vanished, and along with it disappeared one of history’s priceless and unique relics – the sarcophagus of the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh Menkaura
, builder of the third pyramid at Giza, who ruled more than four thousand years ago. |
| The sarcophagus was found in the “sepulchral chamber”, now generally referred to as the permanent burial chamber. From Vyse’s Operations Carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837 |
But in early June 2008 news broke that Dr Zahi Hawass
, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, had approached the National Geographic Society to fund a search from the sarcophagus off the Spanish coast near the port of Cartagena. The Egyptian Ambassador in Madrid had met Spanish officials this month to seek their co-operation in the search, it was claimed. It was further reported that American ocean explorer Robert Ballard
, famous for his discovery of the sunken R.M.S. Titanic
and who is president of the Institute for Exploration, scientist emeritus from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and director of Institute for Archaeological Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, has been approached to lead the search. Both Dr Hawass and Dr Ballard are ‘explorers-in-residence’ with the National Geographic Society. 
