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In the Peruvian jungle, could there really be a boiling river

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that kills on contact?

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I'm sitting here thinking, holy cow, this thing is a mix.

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Will the identification of an unknown sailor

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reveal what happened in Australia's biggest naval disaster?

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This is the only body to be recovered from the tragedy.

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And has a dark secret been concealed from the world

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on this Caribbean wreck.

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It's highly probable that the owners of this wreck

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did not want it to be found.

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The underwater realm is another dimension.

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It's a physically hostile place

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where dreams of promise can sink into darkness.

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I'm Jeremy Wade, and I'm searching the world

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to bring you the most iconic and baffling underwater mysteries

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known to science.

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The vast majority of our ocean is unobserved,

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unmatched and unexplored.

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It's a dangerous frontier that swallows evidence.

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You have nowhere to run.

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Where unknown is normal.

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And understanding is rare.

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In the Gulf of Mexico, an estimated 4,000 shipwrecks

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litter the sea floor.

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Intuned inside are countless secrets from America's past.

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The remains of a 19th century ship found near the Mexican coast

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are rumoured to have a sinister history.

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And if true, this will shock the world.

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2017, in the small coastal town of Cisal, Mexico,

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a local fisherman leads a team of archaeologists

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to a mysterious wreck two miles offshore.

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As with much maritime archaeology,

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we're often guided by local knowledge,

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and that's absolutely the case here.

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Some fishermen in Cisal have known about this wreck for generations,

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and rumours suggest the ship has a shady past.

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There were rumours that this ship was conducting some sort of illegal activity,

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perhaps transporting the most heinous of cargoes.

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To uncover the truth, archaeologists from Mexico's Institute of Anthropology and History

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start looking for clues.

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When they were first examining it, they didn't know what they were looking at.

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The remains were scattered over an area of half a mile squared.

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The team use a portable magnetometer that can detect metal from nearly 1,500 feet away.

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This ship had a wooden hull.

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It's got the paddle wheel and a boiler.

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The archaeologists find elements of the propulsion system,

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including the rocker arm that helps power the paddle wheel.

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These specific features reveal that this is a vessel from a narrow slice of maritime history,

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a side paddle steamer.

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Steamers transported mail and cargo across the Atlantic to the Caribbean

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from the 1840s until the 1870s.

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All the original components were found, but that only tells us the type of ship.

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That doesn't tell us which ship.

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Then the divers get a lucky break.

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Hidden in the sand, they uncover several pieces of cutlery,

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and they're stamped with a name, Zangranese Brothers and Company.

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Slowly, the pieces of the story come together.

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This is a really, really critical find, as it's a really key emblem of who it was owned by.

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The Zangranese family operated side paddle steamers across the Atlantic from Europe

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and around the Caribbean, trading in commodities like sugar and natural fibers.

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They were given literally carte blanche to do a lot of trade.

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Their reputation was relatively stellar.

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Searching for more clues about the wreck, the team delved deeper into the history of the Zangranese family.

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Once you begin looking into the commerce and the company,

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then the documents literally begin to come out of the woodwork.

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Through detailed analysis, investigators were able to determine that this was the wreck of La Union.

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La Union was one of two side paddle steamers owned by the Zangranese family.

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It sank in 1861.

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But the team's investigation reveals much more about this merchant ship,

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which has been hidden for more than 150 years.

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It's highly probable that the owners of this wreck did not want it to be found.

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The Zangranese family had free reign on the high seas.

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Their trade unchecked and inhumane.

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La Union stopped on one of its voyages just a year before it sank in 1860,

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and it had a slave labor cargo onboard.

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There were at least 30 slaves on this ship, including children.

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One was as young as 12 months old.

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The documentation is clear. The Zangranese brothers were engaged in human trafficking.

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La Union was a slave ship.

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But slavery had been illegal in Mexico since the 1820s, 32 years before the sinking of La Union.

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So what was a slave ship doing sailing from Mexico?

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And we have evidence of shipwrecks which were part of the Atlantic slave trade.

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But this is a different kind of network. We're seeing something new.

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Further investigation of historical records reveals something startling.

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The enslaved people aboard were Maya, indigenous Mexicans.

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This is the first Mayan slave ship ever discovered.

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So where was this human cargo being taken when slavery was illegal in their homeland?

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The answer may lie in Mexico's troubled past.

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The War of the Castas was one that basically persisted from about 1847 till 1901.

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This caste war pitted the wealthy European Mexicans, the Yucatecos, against the more modest and traditional Maya.

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Those a Maya in the northern Yucatan found themselves being dispossessed of their land.

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They were engaged in a rebellion. They were seen as enemy combatants.

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Did this war provide the Yucatecos with a convenient excuse to banish their Maya enemy?

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Slavery might have been illegal in Mexico in the 1860s, but elsewhere in the Caribbean it was still thriving.

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Slavery isn't illegal in Cuba.

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With their ship La Union, the Sangranese family could take advantage of the demand for slaves on the Cuban sugar plantations.

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It was a marriage made in hell.

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The suffering would have begun on board La Union.

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The Maya were literally being placed in a cargo hold and these were right next to the actual boiler.

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So they were literally put in harm's way every time they were loaded into these very tight and confined quarters.

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The discovery of this wreck has, for the first time, revealed a missing chapter from Mexico's past.

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So why is this immoral trade omitted from the history books?

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We really don't know very much at all about the Mayan slave trade.

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The Yucatecos who were in charge would have wanted this minimized, so it remained a dirty secret and that went to the bottom of the sea.

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Archaeologists now know that people were trafficked on board La Union the year before it sank,

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but they still don't know exactly what happened to the ship on that fated last journey,

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until the team exploring the wreck uncover new critical pieces of evidence.

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The firebox has been found in fragments, the chimney's been found in fragments,

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and there is large chunks of the wreck which have been exposed to intense heat.

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The charred evidence on the sea floor matches records on land.

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Just minutes after leaving port, the boiler dramatically explodes.

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It caused the total destruction of the ship instantaneously.

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What's still unanswered though is whether human cargo is on board the ship when it explodes.

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A Mayan slave ship has been identified off the coast of Mexico, the only one ever discovered in the world.

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Evidence on the wreck shows that it exploded, but one question remains,

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were Maya captives on board when it sank?

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Records indicate that roughly half of the 80 crew and 60 passengers lost their lives in the explosion.

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We have no idea what the real death toll was.

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It was not customary for customs agents and Mexican officials to document this infernal trafficking in human lives.

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The divers find no human remains, so does this mean this fated journey was without a slave cargo?

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The ocean may have hidden the true scale of this tragedy.

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Once you enter the dimension of a very shallow settling of human remains,

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you're going to see an accelerated decomposition because you'll still have sunlight entering the fray,

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you'll have oxygen and other factors to contend with.

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So there's still the possibility that trafficked Maya were on La Union when it sank.

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And it has since been revealed that up to 20,000 Maya were transported to Cuba on the ships of the Zangronese family.

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The Maya have always been a proud and noble people.

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To be enslaved would have been the worst condition for them. This was not the Maya way.

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The true scale of this industry of terror is yet to be fully uncovered.

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We're only beginning to understand the extent to which indigenous people from Central America were enslaved.

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But the secrets that La Union has revealed from its watery grave brings us one step closer to the truth.

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As I know from my own explorations, the jungle rivers of South America can embody a deadly mix of mystery and danger.

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And there's one stretch of water that has captured my imagination of mythical boiling river in Peru.

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Legend has it the water flows so hot it can kill in seconds.

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Now could one man using the latest science finally separate myth from reality?

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As an eight year old boy in Peru, Andrés Rousseau is told by his grandfather about the legend of a mysterious boiling river in the heart of the Amazon.

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My grandfather told me this crazy story about the Spanish conquest of Peru.

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We're talking about giant anacondas, fierce warriors with poison arrows,

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maranhas that will strip your flesh of the bone in a lost city of gold.

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The boiling river was one of the details in this legend.

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Years later, the little boy is a geoscientist investigating the waters of Peru.

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When a clue to the existence of the boiling river comes from somewhere close to home.

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I tell my aunt this thing about a boiling river and that starts to come out and she goes,

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Oh Andrés, it's real, I've been there.

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A skeptical Andrés is persuaded to follow his aunt into the depths of the rainforest.

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The boiling river is a place that sounds like it's straight out of folklore.

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It was a one hour flight from Lima, a truck on a dirt road for like about two hours.

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We take a bake it, motorized canoe and then boom, you've entered into another universe.

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Andrés starts to hear a low rumble.

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It sounded like an ocean wave that would just crash constantly.

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And you see these wisps of white cloud of the vapor high up in the canopy of these trees.

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What greets him is astonishing.

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A river running boiling hot for four miles.

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What was your reaction?

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I'm sitting here thinking, Holy cow, this thing is massive.

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The boiling river is real.

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So as you know, Jeremy, the great thing about myths and legends is sometimes they do come true.

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A river running at more than 200 degrees Fahrenheit, reaching 80 feet at its widest and 20 feet at its deepest.

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It's hot enough you can boil food in it.

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It gives humans third degree burns in seconds.

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Any animals which are unfortunate to fall into the river are boiled alive.

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Where is the heat coming from?

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What's causing the water to have an increased temperature?

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The Peruvian Amazon and a boiling river thought to be no more than a legend is very real.

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But how this watery inferno came to be remains a mystery.

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Can an answer to this bizarre phenomenon be hidden in the science of geothermal waters?

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They exist across the world, water rising up through areas of scorching geology, especially near volcanoes.

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But they're in particular locations. I mean, we know where to find these things.

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What is strange in the case of this river is it is A, so hot, and B, so far away from volcanoes.

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Most of Peru sits in what's known as a geo gap.

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There has been no volcanic activity near the boiling river for over two million years, and the nearest volcanic area is more than 430 miles away.

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So what could be powering this scorching hot river?

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Volcanoes are not the only type of geothermal activity.

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There's hydrothermal flows, underground geothermal rivers. We have them, but it's really cool and unusual when we see them in places that are not necessarily coupled to geothermal activity.

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This river seems to go for so long, so hot.

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But it looks to be something else.

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Could it be caused by something outside our scientific understanding?

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Indigenous communities have attached the river tremendous spiritual power. It's become incredibly sacred.

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The river is known by its ancient name, Shanae Timpishka, meaning boiled with the heat of the sun.

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But nowhere on earth can the sun do this.

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Digging deeper, local folklore suggests an alternative explanation.

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At the head of the river, the water's actually cold, and as it starts flowing down, it reaches the place where there's the first warm water injection.

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And that's where there's this giant stone.

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The stone bears a striking resemblance to the head of a constrictor.

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Traditionally, this is believed to be the home of Yakamama, and in indigenous traditions Yakamama gives birth to the waters of the Amazon.

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For a decade, Andres and his team have been trying to find out the truth.

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Boiling water is an inhospitable environment for any kind of technology, and of course, also for scientists.

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Thermal drone cameras help the team study the boiling water.

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We'd want to get a good grasp on temperature at various locations.

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Are there any chemical signatures that might indicate what has happened to this body of water?

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What clues do those components give us about origins?

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There are only a few scientific laboratories in the world that can help reveal the river's unseen power.

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So have you discovered the secret behind the immense heat of this river?

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I'm in the middle of analyzing more data right now, but in basic terms, what we are seeing thus far is that this is a hot spring on steroids.

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Waters could be falling to Earth as far away as the Andes, seeping down into the Earth.

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Rainwater could have traveled underground for 60 miles from the East Andes, and it may not be the only source of the water which is somehow heated underground before being driven to the surface in this one particular place in the Peruvian jungle.

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In this hot water, in the subsurface, is hitting an area, a fault zone, a unique geologic setting that allows a mass of hot water to get up to the surface quickly.

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The boiling river seems to be part of an enormous hydrothermal system, one of the world's largest and most extreme.

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The exact nature of that system, however, is still being worked out.

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As far as a large tropical, non-volcanic thermal river, we have still not found anything quite like this one.

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While we still can't fully explain the extreme heat of the river, the life that's found within it opens up a whole new area of study.

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On planet Earth, we have organisms that thrive in extreme environments. We call those organisms extremophiles.

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They're microbial organisms that have the ability to withstand extremes in temperature, chemistry, and sometimes pressure.

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Do these microscopic survivors in the boiling river have the potential to transform the future of humanity?

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Better understanding of these adaptations might give us clues to how life might be adapted elsewhere.

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So this mysterious stretch of river could be an ecosystem with untold capability.

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These are the kind of places where we're going to make discoveries about pharmaceuticals.

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Could the boiling river's jungle specifically hold the keys to solving a humanitarian crisis, or to helping us fix the next pandemic?

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At this point, we don't know, but we're definitely looking into it, because that is a real possibility.

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So the discovery of the boiling river was just the beginning of a bigger story, one potentially full of promise.

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Even after 10 years, I mean, we really have barely begun to scratch the surface of what we can do.

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Conflicts at sea are usually won by the bigger, more powerful vessel they have the size and weaponry to prevail.

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So when the grand Australian warship, HMAS Sydney, is destroyed by an inferior Nazi vessel in World War II, it shocks the world.

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How did the Germans win such an improbable victory against a far superior ship?

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What compounds the mystery is that there are no Australian survivors to ask.

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Of the 645 crew on board the Sydney, not one person survived. What happened?

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November 19th, 1941.

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State of the art Australian warship, HMAS Sydney, is travelling south off the coast of Western Australia,

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when she spots what appears to be a small merchant ship.

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The Sydney signals it using one of its signal lamps to try and get it to identify itself.

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The ship responds by hoisting the call sign of a Dutch freighter.

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The Sydney replies with a secret signal that the apparent merchant ship should know.

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But when the unidentified ship realised that it can't answer correctly, it opens fire.

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The merchant ship is in fact the German surface raider HSK Cormoran.

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After just half an hour of battle, both ships are crippled and sinking.

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While a fifth of the Cormoran's crew lose their lives, there are no survivors from the Sydney.

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645 Australian souls are lost.

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This is the greatest naval tragedy in Australia's history.

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How could the Cormoran possibly sink such a superior Australian warship?

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This is one of the leading warships in the Australian Navy, if not the leading warship.

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HMAS Sydney has 8 6-inch guns, 8 torpedoes and a plethora of smaller weapons.

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It weighs over 7000 tons.

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So she's a very capable ship for taking the Cormoran.

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So what causes the Sydney to lose every single one of its crew?

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This is incredibly rare and almost impossible to replicate.

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Australia is desperate to solve the mystery of what happened in the last moments of its finest warship.

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However, the only surviving witness is the enemy.

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318 of the nearly 400 Nazi sailors are picked up by Allied ships and brought to Australia.

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Will they yield under the pressure and reveal how they pulled off the impossible?

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The German captain of the Cormoran indicated that his ship was approximately 2,000 yards away from the Sydney when they engaged combat.

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She's very, very unusual.

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Why does the Sydney come so close when it has superior long-range guns?

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One theory suggests that the Cormoran was very close and raised its white flag indicating that it was surrendering when in actual fact it wasn't.

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By luring in the bigger warship, Hitler's Cormoran can unleash its weapons at the last minute, hidden from view behind the steel plates.

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These could be retracted to reveal behind it a deck gun and in some cases even a torpedo tube that had been mounted on the main deck.

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Another theory is that the captain of the nearly 8,000 tonne Sydney moves in close deliberately.

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The captain of HMA of Sydney knew exactly what he was likely to be facing.

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Cormoran is a nice sized merchant ship. She's a valuable prize.

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Finding the Sydney will surely help solve the mystery, but where is it?

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Seventy of the German prisoners of war give accounts of where the ships went down.

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They're all different.

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This was quite typical because they viewed the sinking location of an enemy ship as sensitive strategic military information.

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The ocean around the battle site is scoured for clues, but it's not until three months later in February 1942 that a potential piece of evidence turns up in the area.

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Floating off Christmas Island is a decomposing corpse in an Australian Navy life raft.

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The corpse was very difficult to try and examine.

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Much of it had been torn off by seabirds.

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It's found to have no dog tags whatsoever, so there's no means at all of identifying who this person is.

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The corpse is wearing a boiler suit bleached by the sun and eyewitnesses report the raft is damaged from bullets or shrapnel.

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The evidence indicates that this body belonged to a sailor.

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The life raft itself shows signs of damage that could have happened during a battle.

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This is the only body to be recovered from the tragedy.

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Could its identification hold a vital clue to what happened in the final moments of the battle?

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In 1942, because the body's not been identified, it's buried in an unmarked grave.

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It's not until 2008, 66 years later, that there's finally a breakthrough.

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100 miles off Australia's most westerly point, 8,000 feet below the surface, is the Cormoran, and nearby, the Sydney.

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But it's still another 7 years before advances in technology finally give scientists another shot at solving the mystery of how this bizarre defeat happened.

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In 2015, an expedition is led by Curtin University, Western Australian Museum and DOF Subsea.

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This included the most complex lighting and imaging systems ever used underwater in Australian history.

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One and a half miles down, the powerful lights of the underwater vehicles turn the bowels of the ocean from night to day.

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ROVs mounted with special cameras record images every five seconds.

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Photogrammetry is an incredibly important technique in underwater archaeology.

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And through computer programs, we're able to stitch together these thousands of still images to create a three-dimensional model of the sea floor and what we discover on it.

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What will they uncover on this wreck that's been hidden from view for more than 80 years?

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Will the truth of how this rare defeat happened finally be revealed?

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The wreck of HMAS Sydney has been surveyed using groundbreaking technology.

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8,000 feet underwater, 100 miles off Australia's most western point.

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At long last, the ship is about to surrender the secret of how it succumbed to such a crushing defeat.

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The ROV's powerful lights reveal the answer.

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The results of the underwater footage shows a hole in the bridge of the ship.

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The Cormoran had struck a decisive blow at the heart of the Sydney's control systems.

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A lucky shot or first-class tactics from the Cormoran.

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The result is the same. Annihilation of not only crucial technology, but key personnel.

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If you take out the senior officers on the bridge, you literally take out the nervous system, the brain of the ship.

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We now know what caused the Sydney to sink, but the lack of any survivors is unusual.

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One suggestion involves a gruesome end for the Australian sailors.

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One of the theories is that the Germans actually, before the Cormoran sunk,

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opened fire with machine guns on the Australian sailors in the water.

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Did the Nazis fire on the surviving sailors?

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Eyewitness accounts of the Christmas Island body in 1942 report the damage to the raft as being either from bullets or shrapnel.

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It's inconclusive. 64 years later, does the body of the mysterious sailor show signs of foul play?

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The body was examined in detail, and in the autopsy they found that the individual had died from a shrapnel fragment to the brain, not a machine gun bullet.

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We now know this man was not killed by Nazi gunfire. What happened to the rest of the crew we may never know.

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Yet could breakthroughs in DNA analysis at last reveal the identity of this lone sailor?

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DNA technology is rapidly developing. We can now take a sample from a deceased individual and determine their ancestry, their eye colour, their hair colour, and a variety of other things.

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Experts determine he has European ancestry, red hair, blue eyes, and pale skin.

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Then, strontium isotope testing on the sailor's teeth, pinpoint where he is from.

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Strontium is an element that exists in mineral deposits all over the world.

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As groundwater runs over sediment, it picks up tiny amounts of strontium, which is then present in drinking water.

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When humans or animals drink local water, they put into their bones a local strontium signal.

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So when these scientists examined the human remains that were found after this tragedy, they established that this individual grew up on the east coast of Australia.

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And what the sailor was wearing when found holds another vital clue.

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Samples of the fabric from his uniform were tested.

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Blue boiler suits were worn by those working in the engine room.

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And in 2019, investigators finally believe they have found who this one belonged to.

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A man named Norman Foster.

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Could the search for the identity of the mysterious sailor at last be over?

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They tested a relative and it wasn't Norman. So the question is who could it be?

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Deeply disappointed but determined to uncover the truth, investigators are continuing their quest.

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And they have narrowed the search down to about 50 sailors.

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There's hope that the newest developments in DNA testing will allow them to trace the unknown sailor through the male side of the family, improving chances of a match.

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All they need to find is that vital relative for this piece of the puzzle to finally be solved.

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Lightning is one of the strongest forces of nature.

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Little can be done to predict where it will strike.

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But when it does, it can be catastrophic.

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In 2014, a day at the beach turns to disaster when an immensely bright bolt of lightning strikes the water.

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Killing one and injuring thirteen.

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Did it somehow have a deadly attraction to the ocean? And if so, how?

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And could an accidental scientific discovery finally explain what happened on that day?

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July 27th, 2014 and Venice Beach is full of people when something inexplicable happens.

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There was a tremendous glare as if someone had suddenly turned on all the lights in a very dark room, followed by a tremendous boom.

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An unusually bright lightning bolt has hit the water, killing a twenty year old man and injuring many more.

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This giant bolt up in the sky that I've never seen like that. I'm from Midwest so we see lots of lightning.

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The loudest clap of thunder I've ever heard in my life thought it was like a bomb on us.

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Then in 2019, another explosive strike in South Boston is caught on camera.

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The lightning incinerates the boat in a fraction of a second.

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Is there some deadly connection in these tragedies between the lightning and the waters below to create such mayhem?

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In 2014, a man dies and thirteen are injured when a giant lightning bolt hits the water off Venice Beach.

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And five years later on the opposite coast, a single explosive bolt destroys a boat floating in Boston Harbor.

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Lightning strike at sea is every sailor's worst nightmare and boats offer no protection.

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You can actually see the clouds light up like Christmas trees. You're stuck on your boat. The waves are hitting you. The rain's coming down.

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The lightning is cracking. You have nowhere to run.

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I've witnessed firsthand lightning over water. In Suriname, north of Brazil, it releases its might in the middle of filming.

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A member of my crew taking a strike.

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What's on record has been hit was actually struck on the head by that bolt of lightning.

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Luckily, he survives. Elsewhere, when lightning and water mix, it can be a different story.

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To try and understand what can make lightning strikes on the US coast so devastating, we turn to clues from the past.

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The 1970s and American Vella satellites are patrolling the planet from space, looking for signs of rogue nuclear tests.

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They had X-ray sensors. The later ones had optical sensors. Although they were designed to detect nuclear tests, they were able to see things as well.

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And in 1977, they start picking up unusual blazes of light.

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These are so powerful, they're releasing as much energy as a small nuclear weapon.

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What could these explosions be? Could they be unregulated nuclear tests?

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Further investigation shows that these flashes are releasing a completely different signature to that of a nuclear explosion.

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Something never seen before.

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Lightning reaches temperatures of 30,000 degrees, five times hotter than the surface of the sun, but these are even more powerful.

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The flashes are named super bolts.

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They named the super bolts because they were much, much more intense.

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Something which is 10 times the power of an ordinary bolt, sometimes 100, potentially even a thousand times.

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The satellite data then gives another revelation.

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You can draw a map just by plotting the lightning on the planet. It basically sticks very nicely to the continents and as soon as you move over the oceans, you have a dramatic decrease in the amount of lightning.

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But when it comes to super bolts, it's the ocean they hit most often.

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Is it because out at sea the thunderstorms can develop more energy? It's a mystery to me.

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Finding out what's going on when lightning strikes over water is crucial for the safety of those out at sea and in the shallows.

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Since the 1970s, thousands more super bolts have been recorded across the planet's oceans.

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The better the data gets, the more we see that this is really a clear signal, that there's more intense lightning, whether you're looking optically or whether you're looking with radio waves.

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So what causes these massively powerful oceanic super bolts, up to a thousand times brighter than anything seen on land?

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Can the answer help our understanding of those shocking incidents on the US coast?

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In 2020 at Tel Aviv University in Israel, a scientific breakthrough finally sheds new light on this mysterious phenomenon.

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Initially we were interested in how lightning may impact the chemistry of seawater.

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During the experiment when they changed from tap water to seawater, they noticed the flash becomes dramatically brighter.

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Everything is the same, the only difference was the type of water.

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That something about the water was actually impacting the lightning above the water. Why should the water actually impact how bright it was?

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They then take samples from a freshwater lake, Lake Tiberius, and from the Dead Sea, whose water is ten times saltier than normal seawater.

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Amazingly they discover that discharges over Dead Sea water are nearly 40 times brighter than over Lake water.

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When you have salts in water, the salt breaks up into its ions and this results in a change in the conductivity of the water.

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As the water becomes more conductive, the electricity from the lightning can drain off much quicker into the water.

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And this is what heats up the air faster and will give us the brighter the lightning.

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Colin and his team have proved for the first time the importance of salinity in the brightness of super bolts.

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Science has been looking in the wrong direction.

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So it's not what's in the clouds that may hold the answer, it's what lies in the water.

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But there's a big difference between a lab and the vast watery expanses of our planet.

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It is a very interesting step to add an extra layer of complexity into the problem.

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But that by itself can't explain everything in the patterns we see.

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The scientists at Tel Aviv are continuing their investigations.

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So were the lightning strikes at Venice Beach and Boston Harbor?

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Super Bolts.

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The more recent distribution of super bolts show that they're not uniformly distributed over the oceans.

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The latest research has discovered that where super bolts tend to hit the most is not along the US coastline, but in the northeast Atlantic and Mediterranean.

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We may never know for certain whether the lightning strikes in Venice Beach and Boston Harbor, although deadly and destructive, were super bolts.

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And why they hit certain ocean areas more than others is another enigma to crack.

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As soon as you discover something, then again gives you another 10-15 questions to answer.

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Science has revealed an intense connection between the salty oceans and the immense power of the skies.

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But there is still a lot left to understand about this highly complex relationship.