Scientists have used cutting-edge scanning techniques to crack the code on a shipwreck’s combination padlock that had been buried in sand for over 400 years — solving a small maritime mystery, and leaving a bigger one in place.
The padlock belonged to the Ann Francis, a treasure-loaded vessel that sank off the coast of South Wales in December 1583 after getting caught in a fierce storm while returning from Spain. The ship’s cargo lay untouched on Morfa Beach in Port Talbot until the late 1990s, when metal detectorist Peter Hughes found a hoard of gold and silver coins, personal belongings, kitchen utensils — and the brass lock.
The lock had four rotating rings, each bearing six different letters: 1,296 possible combinations, the sixteenth-century equivalent of encryption. A team from Museum Wales and Cardiff University finally opened it without breaking it, using micro-computed tomography — a 3D scanning technique normally used to examine the human body — to reconstruct the internal mechanism and see how the notches lined up. The combination was ANCE.
What the padlock was protecting is still unknown. Researchers believe it may have guarded a captain’s chest filled with Spanish silver, high-value textiles, or sensitive maritime documents. The lock is now on public display at the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea.
It is a small case, but it belongs on the “Explained at last” shelf: a 400-year-old secret, opened by patience and a scanner, with the one question it cannot answer — what was inside — still waiting.
Sources: BBC; New York Post, 4 November 2026.