Aagtekerke (Lost VOC Treasure Ship)
Region — where it (roughly) is
Land & claims · BLM · live
The story
She had a sister ship, and that is the cruelest detail of all. We know almost everything about what the Aagtekerke was carrying — because her identical twin, the Zeewijk, met the same waters and left a record. The Aagtekerke herself simply sailed into the Indian Ocean and was never seen again.
On 27 January 1726, she departed the Cape of Good Hope with around 212 crew, bound for Batavia in the service of the Dutch East India Company. In her holds: roughly 30,000 silver coins — about three tonnes of silver — along with 214 ivory tusks. Then nothing. No wreck, no survivors, no word. Somewhere between the Cape and Batavia, the Aagtekerke vanished completely. The Western Australian Museum lists her among its missing wrecks, a ship known to have left and never known to have arrived.
The hunt for her has fixed on the Houtman Abrolhos, the dangerous scatter of reefs and islands off Western Australia where her sister Zeewijk was wrecked. And there is a tantalizing clue: near the Zeewijk site, searchers have found ivory tusks and extra cannon — items that may belong to the Aagtekerke, hinting that the two sisters met their ends in the same deadly waters. But the evidence is not yet conclusive. The tusks and cannon raise the possibility; they do not prove it.
And the silver — the three tonnes of coin that went down with her, wherever she went down — remains entirely unrecovered. Not a coin of it has been brought up and tied to her name.
So the Aagtekerke stays lost in the fullest sense: a ship with a known cargo and an unknown grave, hunted in the reefs where her twin lies, her silver still somewhere in the dark.
Fact vs. legend: The Aagtekerke's departure from the Cape of Good Hope on 27 January 1726 with ~212 crew, her cargo of ~30,000 silver coins (~3 tonnes) and 214 ivory tusks, her status as a missing wreck per the WA Museum, and the tusks and extra cannon found near the Zeewijk site are documented; that those finds belong to the Aagtekerke is not yet conclusive, and the silver remains entirely unrecovered.
Search area: The point marks the Southern Houtman Abrolhos, WA, near the Zeewijk site — the search area or landmark, not the treasure, whose exact location is unknown.