Treasure Hunters Raise a Toast! Nine hundred bottles of old booze are new news Ralph Finch dips his toes into a story of a group of underwater treasure hunters who have salvaged bottles of rare cognac and liqueur from a ship that was sunk by a German U-boat during World War I.
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ivers and unmanned underwater vehicles last October hauled up case after case of booze from the Swedish steamer SS Kyros, which has been sitting 250 feet down in the Baltic Sea. They recovered 600 bottles of De Haartman & Co. cognac and 300 bottles of Benedictine liqueur (a brand now owned by Bacardi). “We don’t know yet if it is drinkable. We get a fraction of smell from the Benedictine bottles and it smells sweet and from herbs,” one salvager said. The Kyros was on its way to Russia’s St. Petersburg, then known as Petrograd, when it was stopped by German submarine UC58 in 1917. Russia was ruled by Czar Nicholas II at the time, and “We can’t tell for sure that these bottles were for the Czar himself, but for the nobility around him for sure,” a salvager said. The German submarine captain had the boat sunk because its cargo was considered contraband. They put explosives in the Kyros’ engine room to sink it. The wreck was first discovered in 1999 and has been damaged by fishing equip-
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Antique Bottle & Glass Collector
