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in the Turko Archipelago, a maze of twenty thousand islets, islands and rocks. The ship, surprisingly, was still afloat, though there was little chance of saving her as the decks were close to the water. But some of the cargo might be saved, so Lorentz ordered the crew back to Vrouw Maria. For the next three days, they worked the pumps to keep the rising water in the hold from swamping the ship. The sugar cargo was certainly ruined; when Lorentz tasted the water pouring out of the pumps as the men labored, it was sweet. His dismay deepened when each stroke of the pumps brought up gouts of coffee beans. The crates, bundles, bags and boxes in the flooded hold were banging and bumping around, and breaking up.

Lorentz’s luck held long enough for the crew to open the hatches and start pulling out the top layer of cargo. Taking their knives in hand, the sailors also cut down Vrouw Maria’s sails and some of her rigging, salvaging everything they could before the ship slipped into the deep. Finally, on October 9, as they rowed to the ship after spending the night ashore, they found the sea was empty. In the night, alone in the darkness, Vrouw Maria had finally sunk. There was no trace of the ship, not a scrap of floating debris, to mark her passing.

ST. PETERSBURG: OCTOBER 16, 1771

Count Nikita Panin, Russia’s foreign minister, sat at his desk, signing a confidential letter to the Swedish government. His letter asked the Swedes, who controlled the Turko Archipelago, to assist the Russians in an “unusual” matter. Vrouw Maria’s secret shipment had included not only silver, snuffboxes and art for members of the Imperial Court but also, Panin explained, “several crates with valuable paintings belonging to Her Imperial Majesty the Empress.”

Empress Catherine the Great was in the midst of assembling one of Europe’s greatest collections of art and treasure for her small Hermitage (or retreat) in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg. She had married Peter, grandson of Peter the Great and heir to Russia’s throne, when she was sixteen. But Catherine soon grew disaffected with her husband, who was said to be weak-minded, indecisive and not conjugally interested in his passionate Prussian princess. After Peter was crowned tsar in 1761, his unpopularity grew. Catherine plotted with a group of nobles and army officers led by her lover, Count Grigory Orlov, to depose the tsar. When their coup toppled Peter from his throne in 1762, Catherine seized power. Her reign was a time of sweeping change in Russia. The empress, like her predecessor Peter the Great, was interested in modernizing and westernizing the nation, which was still a feudal state. Among her accomplishments was the introduction of smallpox vaccine to Russia in 1768. Under Catherine, the Russian court became a center for European culture. The empress invited prominent intellectuals to St. Petersburg, encouraged public building projects, and was a patron of the arts and literature both in Russia and abroad. An admirer of the French philosopher Voltaire, Catherine regularly corresponded with him. When Voltaire died in 1778, Catherine purchased his entire seven-thousand volume library and had it shipped to St. Petersburg.

In her lifetime, Catherine the Great amassed collections so diverse and magnificent that she had to build an addition to her Winter Palace to house the paintings, sculptures, porcelain, antiquities, exquisite furnishings and silver. The secret cargo of Vrouw Maria had come from one of the most famous art collections of its day, making the loss all the more painful.

When wealthy Dutch shipping merchant Gerrit Braamcamps died in Amsterdam on June 17, 1771, he left behind a home filled with that his contemporaries called a “treasure cabinet” of more than three hundred paintings, porcelain, silver and other valuables. But the heirs of Braamcamps wanted cash, not the collection, so they sold it at auction. Catherine ordered Russia’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Prince Galitsyn, to “look after her interests” at the sale. On her behalf, he acquired a number of European