Flor de la Mar (Flor do Mar)

Type

Carrack

Period

16th Century

Nation

Portugal

Overview: Flor de la Mar (also Flor do Mar, "Flower of the Sea") was a Portuguese nau or carrack built in Lisbon in 1502, famed both for her outsized role in the early Portuguese Indian Ocean empire and for sinking with what is often called the richest treasure ever lost at sea. Specifications: The ship was rated at 400 tons burthen, making her the largest carrack built up to that time. Historical summaries give her a length of roughly 36 m, a beam of about 8 m, a crew complement around 500, and an armament of about 50 guns; a modern Malaysian replica uses these same approximate dimensions since no original plans survive. Service History: Over nine years she plied the Carreira da Índia between Portugal and Goa, serving as flagship at the 1509 Battle of Diu under Francisco de Almeida and later supporting Afonso de Albuquerque's conquests of Goa (1510) and Malacca (1511) under Albuquerque. Chronic leaking and poor handling forced lengthy repair stops in Mozambique on more than one homeward voyage, and on 20 November 1511, while carrying Albuquerque and a vast treasure looted from Malacca back toward Portugal, she was wrecked in a storm off the coast of Sumatra. Notable Facts: The wreck, believed to have held enormous quantities of gold, jewels, and porcelain, has never been conclusively located despite decades of speculative and controversial salvage attempts. A full-scale museum replica built in 1994 is on permanent display as the Maritime Museum in Malacca, Malaysia, and is a common visual reference for modelers since no contemporary technical drawings of the original ship survive. Image Note: The chosen image is a period woodcut/line engraving of Flor de la Mar from the 16th-century "Roteiro de Malaca," one of the only contemporary depictions of the actual ship (as opposed to the modern museum replica), hosted on Wikimedia Commons under a Public Domain Mark.