For divers, Loanda is one of those wrecks that rewards curiosity as much as good buoyancy. She lies upright in roughly 17 to 23 metres, standing several metres proud, with exposed engine remains, an intact propeller, and a cargo story worthy of a Victorian dockside whisper. Reports mention gin and champagne bottles, clay pipes, perfume bottles, trading beads, and the persistent tale of newly minted shillings, although the shilling story is not supported by the manifest. It’s shallow, atmospheric, artifact-rich and very much a slack-water dive, the kind of Dover wreck where every broken bottle and clay pipe feels like it has been waiting 116 years to be noticed.

Her career was brutally short. On 28 November 1864, Mindora collided in the English Channel with the Khersonese, another outward-bound sailing ship, reportedly on passage from London to Calcutta. Contemporary shipwreck listings place the collision about 8 nautical miles south-west by west of South Foreland, with Mindora sinking and the other vessel abandoned in a sinking condition. For divers, this is a proper Victorian mystery wreck: a young barque lost almost as soon as her story began, a collision in one of the world’s busiest sea lanes, and a seabed site that still gives up small clues from a long-vanished age of sail.