The Black Rock

This British(?) slave-trading vessel disappeared in 1881, on a return voyage from a gold mining operation in the South Indian Ocean. Perhaps more interesting than the fact the ship was lost were the circumstances preceding and following its disappearance. According to traders on Papua New Guinea, the ship sailed away from port in an Easterly direction, rather than West to Africa, where it would exchange gold from the mines in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea for more slaves. Furthermore, though a copy of the ship's manifest has been discovered - no accurate information is available on the ship's ownership. According to the manifest, The Black Rock initially sailed from (and was supposed to return to) slip 23 in Portsmouth, Britain -- but no shipping company claimed ownership. A crew of some 40 men, along with an uncounted number of slaves, was presumably lost at sea.

The New World Sea Traders was owned and operated by Magnus Hanso, a former ship's captain who became a business entrepreneur. While no direct ownership has been stated, it is known that the Black Rock sailed out of slip 23 in Portsmouth docks, and Hanso's trading group managed slips 18 to 27. Magnus Hanso was known to still have a hands-on passion for the sea and insisted on captaining several voyages every year. It is likely that he was captaining the Black Rock himself when the ship disappeared.

The New World Sea Traders company was sold to the East Ocean Trade Group in 1882 (a year after the disappearance of the Black Rock). The company would later be purchased in the 1950s by the Hanso Group, renaming it to the Allied Copenhagen Marine Merchants.

In 1996, the first mate's recovered journal was sold at a Southfield's auction by Tovard Hanso, in lot #2342, for £380,000 to bidder #755, Charles Widmore.

The contents of the journal are unknown. We have received no response from Charles Widmore regarding repeated requests for information on this and other topics.

In late 2004, the ship Christiane I was conducting an archaeological survey. Their objective was to locate the wreck of the Black Rock, . Instead, they discovered the remains of Oceanic Flight 815.

It is not fully explained why the crew wish to find the wreck, but the expedition supervisor Oscar Talbot, assigned to the ship by The Maxwell Group, commented in an interview that the mission was an archaeological survey of the wreck, which they believed sank in the Sunda Trench in 1881.