Slot ter Hooge

The final voyage

Slot ter Hooge sailed from Vlissingen for Batavia in October 1724 carrying a substantial cargo of silver bars and coin for the VOC's Asian trade. Roughly 254 people were aboard. On the night of 19–20 November 1724, a storm drove the ship onto the coast of Porto Santo, in the Madeira archipelago; only 33 survived and made their way back to the Netherlands.

News of the wreck's silver reached England, and within roughly a year an English recovery team led by inventor John Lethbridge arrived using his purpose-built wooden diving barrel — one of the earliest documented uses of an enclosed diving device for shipwreck salvage. Lethbridge's team, working over several campaigns between 1725 and 1734, recovered a substantial portion of the silver, though not all of it.

What was aboard

Period accounts describe the cargo in general terms — chests of silver bars and coin, along with wine, brandy, and oil — rather than a fully itemized surviving invoice. Quantities cited in secondary sources vary and should be treated as approximate.

Silver bars: Multiple chests of silver bars, reported in period accounts in quantities of roughly a hundred bars per chest, formed the bulk of the specie cargo.

Mexican and Spanish coin: Chests of Mexican and Spanish coin are recorded among the cargo alongside the silver bars.

Bagged florins: Sacked Dutch florins are documented as part of the specie shipment.

General trade goods: Wine, brandy, and oil are recorded as part of the ship's outbound cargo.

How to collect

Distinguish the two salvage eras: Material with an 18th-century Lethbridge-era provenance is a different category of rarity from the 1974 Sténuit recovery; sellers should specify which.

Ask for the Sténuit-era paperwork: The 1974 recovery involved formal Dutch and Portuguese authorization and a customs deposit in Funchal; documented pieces should trace to that process.

Treat cargo quantities as approximate: Period figures for bars and coin chests vary across sources and are not a precise, audited total.

Recognize the site's legal significance: The 1974 recovery dispute helped shape later Portuguese underwater heritage law; this legal history is part of responsible provenance discussion.