BPSC 69th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 31 of 144

Correct — A, Off the coast of Goa. All three names in the stem belong to the same small stretch of sea at the mouth of the Zuari, outside Mormugao (Marmagao) harbour, and all three have been surveyed by the Marine Archaeology Centre of CSIR-National Institute of Oceanography at Dona Paula, Goa. Sila Tripati and Ravi Korisettar's review of Indian shipwreck archaeology in Current Science (vol. 117, no. 10, 25 November 2019) opens by listing the sites investigated so far and names 'Sunchi Reef, St George's Reef, Amee Shoals, Sail Rock, Grande Island off Goa' as one group, before moving on to the other coasts. Each is a distinct wreck. Sunchi Reef, worked from 1989 — the first shipwreck investigation ever mounted in Indian waters — lies in only 3 to 6 m of water over laterite bedrock and yielded cast-iron guns about 2 m long, a brass handgun barrel, Martaban stoneware storage jars, Chinese blue-on-white sherds, eight elephant tusks, nine hippopotamus teeth, an iron anchor and dressed granite ballast blocks; thermoluminescence dating of the pottery (360 ± 40 years) and radiocarbon dating of the ivory place it in the early 17th century CE, making it the oldest wreck yet surveyed anywhere in Indian waters and the first Portuguese wreck to be documented in detail. Grande Island enters the list through the wreck at St George's Reef, which the same review locates 'on the eastern side of Grande Island' at 15 m depth — a 19th-century cargo vessel whose bricks and floor tiles carry the stamp 'Basel Mission Tile Works 1865' and whose timbers are benteak (Lagerstroemia microcarpa). Amee Shoals lies just south of Sunchi Reef, close to Marmagao bay, at 6 to 9 m: three wrought-iron Scotch boilers, boiler bricks stamped 'FURNA…' and 'B 84', flanges and a water tank, from a steel-hulled, triple-expansion steamer roughly 100 m long that grounded on the shoals while working in or out of Mormugao port, dated to 1880 CE or later.

• (b)Off the coast of Lakshadweep — Not a random wrong coast — Lakshadweep genuinely is one of India's main wreck-diving grounds, which is exactly why it is offered. But its sites carry different names. Archival records list five wrecks in the shallows off Minicoy between 1862 and 1910 — SS Colombo, SS Thrunscoe, Duffryn Manor, SS Delagoa and the sailing ship Tolna — and CSIR-NIO explored three of them between 1994 and 2001. CSIR-NIO and the Indian Navy surveyed Byramgore Reef with INS Sandhayak in 1990, war material lies on Suheli Par, and the Archaeological Survey of India's Underwater Archaeology Wing worked a wreck off Bangaram with the Navy in 2002. Minicoy, Suheli Par, Byramgore, Bangaram — none of them is Sunchi, Amee or Grande.
• (c)Off the coast of Tamil Nadu — Tamil Nadu has one famous explored wreck and it is not on this list. A wooden-hulled ship was found 3.5 km off Poompuhar, the ancient Chola port at the mouth of the Kaveri, lying at 19 m; airlifting brought up a large quantity of lead ingots, a 2.1 m iron cannon and a copper rudder gudgeon, with ingots stamped 1791 and 1792 by the W: Blackett company, so the wreck post-dates those years. Candidates who half-remember that Poompuhar and marine archaeology go together, or who associate underwater exploration with the submerged-city work off the Tamil coast, are the ones this option is written for.
• (d)Off the coast of Odisha — Odisha's explored wreck sits off Konark, on the northern side of the temple coast, where boilers, a cabin, a winch and anchor chain have been recorded — boilers comparable in size to those at Amee Shoals, which is precisely the confusion this option invites. India Meteorological Department records show many ships destroyed by cyclones off Odisha between 1832 and 1900, and archival sources place H. M. ship Carron on the seabed four miles north of Konark in July 1820. Real wreck coast, real exploration, wrong place names — the stem's three toponyms are Goan, and two of them are Portuguese-derived.

Marine or underwater archaeology studies the material remains of seafaring that now lie below water — sunken ports, submerged settlements and shipwrecks. In India it is barely four decades old. S. R. Rao's excavations off Dwarka in the late 1970s created the discipline here, and in 1981 a Marine Archaeology Centre was set up at the CSIR-National Institute of Oceanography in Dona Paula, Goa, becoming an integral division of NIO in 1990. Archival research has yielded information on more than 200 wrecks in Indian waters, almost all of them post-16th-century, because European trading companies kept the shipping records that Indian sources do not. The wrecks so far explored belong to the 17th–20th centuries, the transition from wood to iron hulls and from sail to steam, so each one is a datable snapshot of maritime technology as well as of trade. Goa's dominance in the field is not accidental: the national laboratory that does the diving is in Goa, the Portuguese kept meticulous loss registers, and the approaches to Mormugao are laced with submerged laterite reefs and shoals that sank ships for four centuries. 'Shipwreck tourism' is the recreational face of the same resource — recreational divers visiting wrecks that archaeologists have already recorded.

This is a place-identification question wearing the clothes of a current-affairs question, and the reasoning route is toponymy rather than tourism policy. Read the three names aloud: 'Grande' is Portuguese for large, and Ilha Grande is the big island off Goa's Mormugao coast; 'Sunchi' and 'Amee' are Konkani-coast forms. No comparable Portuguese-derived offshore toponyms exist off Lakshadweep, whose islands are Minicoy, Kavaratti, Bangaram and Suheli Par; off Tamil Nadu, whose coastal archaeology names are Poompuhar, Tranquebar and Arikamedu; or off Odisha, whose wreck site is simply called Konark. That single observation settles the question before any of the diving detail matters. The trap the setter has built is that every one of the other three options is itself a genuine shipwreck-exploration coast, so a candidate who knows there are wrecks off Lakshadweep or Poompuhar can talk himself into the wrong answer. The discriminating fact is not 'where are there wrecks in India' — the answer to that is 'on all four of these coasts' — but 'which coast owns these three particular names', and that is Goa. A second anchor: the institution that explored all three sites, CSIR-NIO, is itself headquartered in Goa, and it began its shipwreck programme in 1989 at the nearest reef to its own front door.

• The Marine Archaeology Centre was established at CSIR-National Institute of Oceanography, Dona Paula, Goa in 1981 and became an integral part of NIO in 1990; India's first shipwreck investigation was mounted off Sunchi Reef, Goa, in 1989.
• Sunchi Reef, in 3–6 m of water, is the oldest shipwreck yet surveyed in Indian waters — dated to the early 17th century CE by thermoluminescence on its pottery (360 ± 40 years) and radiocarbon on its ivory, and identified with the Indo-Portuguese trade by its cast-iron guns, Martaban jars, Chinese blue-on-white sherds, elephant tusks and hippopotamus teeth.
• The Grande Island wreck is the one at St George's Reef, on the island's eastern side at 15 m depth: a 19th-century cargo vessel carrying chimney bricks, roof and floor tiles and a Corinthian column capital stamped 'Basel Mission Tile Works 1865', the Basel Mission's first tile factory having opened at Jeppo, Mangalore, in that year.
• Amee Shoals, south of Sunchi Reef near Marmagao bay at 6–9 m, holds the first steam-engine wreck found in Goa waters — three wrought-iron Scotch boilers about 4 m high, boiler bricks stamped 'FURNA…' and 'B 84', from a steel-hulled triple-expansion steamer about 100 m long, dated 1880 CE or later and of British origin.
• Portuguese records for 1497–1612 list 806 ships sailing from Lisbon to India: 20 ran aground, 66 were shipwrecked, four were captured, six burnt, 285 remained in India and the rest returned — which is why Goa's approaches hold so much of India's documented wreck heritage.
• The other coasts in the options are real but differently named wreck grounds: Minicoy, Byramgore, Suheli Par and Bangaram in Lakshadweep; Poompuhar in Tamil Nadu, where an 18th-century wooden hull yielded lead ingots stamped 1791 and 1792 by W: Blackett; and Konark in Odisha.

• Assuming that because Lakshadweep and Tamil Nadu also have explored wrecks, the named sites could belong to either — the test is the names, not the existence of wrecks
• Confusing Grande Island off Goa with the island of the same name in the Philippines, or with Elephanta and other Portuguese-named islands in the Konkan
• Treating the Sunchi Reef wreck as Indian-built: the guns, Martaban jars and Chinese porcelain point to a foreign, most likely Portuguese, wooden-hulled cargo ship

BPSC uses a current-affairs headline — here 'Shipwreck Tourism' — as the wrapper for what is really a one-step location fact, and rewards the candidate who can place three unfamiliar names on the right coast. UPSC almost never asks a bare 'where is it' question of this kind any more; it works the same syllabus through matched lists of coastal sites and their states, through the institutions that manage heritage, or through statement-pairs on a convention or a programme. So prepare the same material twice: BPSC will want the place, UPSC will want the agency, the law or the significance.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Marine Archaeology Centre that has carried out most of India's shipwreck explorations is part of which institution?

  • (a)The Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi
  • (b)CSIR-National Institute of Oceanography, Dona Paula, Goa
  • (c)The Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services, Hyderabad
  • (d)The National Institute of Ocean Technology, Chennai

  Answer(b) CSIR-National Institute of Oceanography, Dona Paula, Goa — the Marine Archaeology Centre was set up there in 1981 and became an integral part of NIO in 1990. The ASI has its own Underwater Archaeology Wing, but the Goa, Lakshadweep, Poompuhar and Konark wreck surveys described here were led by CSIR-NIO.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The shipwreck explored off Poompuhar, which yielded a large cargo of lead ingots stamped 1791 and 1792, lies off the coast of which State?

  • (a)Kerala
  • (b)Andhra Pradesh
  • (c)Tamil Nadu
  • (d)Odisha

  Answer(c) Tamil Nadu — Poompuhar, the ancient Kaveripattinam at the mouth of the Kaveri, where a wooden-hulled ship was found at 19 m depth about 3.5 km offshore. Odisha's explored wreck is off Konark, and the Goa sites are Sunchi Reef, St George's Reef and Amee Shoals.