The Royal Captain was a British East India Company trading ship that struck a deep-sea shoal off a coral reef in the Philippines in 1773, loaded with porcelain, spices, and silk acquired in Canton. Her crew abandoned ship and a rescue mission a week later found no trace of the wreck. Underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio picks up the search over two centuries later, working from the ship's original log to narrow down a location. In 1985 his team found a cannon and a large bow anchor that matched the historical record, confirming the site while much of the cargo stayed hidden. This film follows Goddio's crew back to the shoals, filming from two-man submersibles as divers use the vehicles' mechanical arms to free artifacts from the seabed and haul them up in a custom-built lift basket. The footage tracks the wreck's slow reappearance piece by piece, turning a corroded anchor and scattered porcelain into evidence of an eighteenth-century trade route between Canton and British ports.