Historical flotsam: Nazi cargo on the Brazilian coast

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Vehicles of the Brazilian environmental administration with "mysterious boxes"

Photo: Adema / dpa

"Mysterious boxes" is what the Brazilians call the mysterious flotsam that recently appeared again in large quantities on the beaches of the northeast.

Washed up by the sea, the brown packages remain in the sand.

The state environmental administration (Adema) of the state of Sergipe has even set up a hotline to which you should report if you find a "box".

"We get calls for a different beach every day," says Jefferson Torres of the Adema hotline.

The Adema collected more than 350 "mysterious boxes" on various beaches in the northeastern state in around a month.

Scientists have established that they most likely came from a German ship that sank off the coast of Brazil in 1944 - the »Rio Grande«.

The "caixas misteriosas", some brownish in color and some with marine animals, actually look like somewhat tattered boxes that could contain treasure from the ocean or old letters.

In reality, the mysterious flotsam is not boxes, but balls of rubber that the sunken ship had on board.

This is what the marine biologist Luis Bezerra from the University of the State of Ceará found out together with other experts.

They investigated the riddle after Bezerra found a "mysterious box" while walking on Almofala beach in the state of Ceará in July 2019.

The starting point was the photo he took back then, which was published in July together with the study in the journal "Marine Environmental Research".

Load from a sunken blockade breaker

What Bezerra noticed as a biologist were the barnacles, which had to be from far away because they occur in the open sea.

In addition, they must have been on the road for a long time because the crustaceans were grown up.

One box had an inscription: "Product of French Indochina", product from French Indochina.

"With this inscription we could tell that the bales are old," says Bezerra. The French colony in what is now Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam existed until 1954. He and his colleague Carlos Teixeira found information on the sinking of the Rio Grande on the Internet based on US military information.

The German blockade breaker was tracked down by Allied ships on the way from Japan around 80 years ago.

The crew sank their own freighter 1000 kilometers off the coast of Brazil.

The exact location in front of the city of Recife has been known since the British wreck researcher David Mearns tracked down the "Rio Grande".

The ship that was on the South America - Hamburg route before the Second World War was temporarily the deepest sunk ship in the Guinness Book of Records in almost 6000 meters of water.

Numerous unanswered questions

Mathematical models with winds and currents by the scientists showed that when rubber balls are released from the »Rio Grande«, they arrive on the coast of the northeast - as they have been since October 2018. For almost three years they have been appearing regularly in the second half of the year.

Bezerra attributes the fact that the shipload is only now being washed ashore, more than 80 years after the sinking of the Rio Grande, to the natural decomposition of the shipwreck.

But it could also be that someone with great effort and complex technology wants to approach the other, much more valuable cargo on the ship: cobalt.

The fact that the rubber balls are driven off in the process could be a side effect of the wreck robbery.

Luis Bezerra does not want to rule out that the bales could also come from another, previously unknown, sunken ship.

The "mysterious boxes" pose further puzzles.

Farm farmer / him / dpa