Standing on the bow of his flagship, The Dreadnought, King Charles I watched helplessly as the ironically named Blessing laden with his coronation treasures disappeared under the waves, taking its entire cargo and more than 30 courtiers, servants and crew to the sea bed. According to historical accounts, The Blessing sank a mile offshore of Burntisland during a storm on July 10, 1633, and with her went a 280-piece silver dining service commissioned by Henry VIII and other royal heirlooms valued at 500 million today. While King Charles might have thought her gone forever, recently there has been growing interest in the lost ship from those keen to exploit its possible potential if found. The Burntisland Heritage Trust, supported and licensed by Historic Scotland, has been tirelessly searching for the wreck and diving the site where they believe the ship is buried. An American team also joined the race to locate The Blessing, prompting controversy among archaeological circles which view the wreck as more valuable in terms of heritage than purely commercial potential. And, while the Burntisland team believe they have located the ship, others remain unconvinced. But The Blessing is not alone in creating a frenzy among those hooked on finding treasures lost in the depths. A paddle steamer that sunk in October 1865, en route from New York to Orleans, has just been discovered off the east coast of the United States. Believed to carry a cargo of 20,000 20 gold coins, the 1170-ton SS Republic’s booty is now valued at an estimated 52m, while salvage experts believe it could be closer to double that figure. Unsurprisingly, commercial hawks are already preparing to swoop on what they believe could literally be a pot of gold. A lost ship bursting with the treasure of past generations is a topic of timeless fascination, stirring even the most unromantic of souls - not least movie makers, who have capitalised on our appetite for silver screen shipwreck epics. And while locally there is nothing quite on the scale of the tragic Titanic, we have dozens of wrecks on our doorstep. For the Firth of Forth alone is home to a staggering 862 recorded ship losses, while the number of "demonstrable remains" is 170. But because of her reported treasure trove, The Blessing is the one which has generated the most speculation. "I’m optimistic that we have all the scientific evidence to indicate that there is something buried within the vicinity that we are searching," says Ian Archibald, project manager of Burntisland HT. "What we’re looking for now is some solid, physical proof. You’re looking for something that’s been buried for almost 400 years. We’re very slowly investigating this and we are far from dead and buried. "We are active, but it is a long, slow process because we are all professional people doing this on a voluntary basis." HE adds: "The target, which is completely buried, lies on a very fluid, soft and muddy seabed that is almost flat. We’ve been using sonar scanning equipment and from our data we believe we have found what appears to be a bow and stern. "The distance between these is approximately 20 metres. Is it the remains of a structure buried beneath the seabed? We’ll just have to wait and see. "Two divers are taking core samples of what we were hitting beneath the seabed in previous months. If this is wood it will be sent off for dating." But a spokesman from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) is less than convinced that it’s likely to be The Blessing. "The remains of the historically recorded treasure ship of King Charles I, The Blessing of Burntisland, have been tentatively identified, but these remain unverified," he says. "What they’ve found down there is scattered timbers; what they’ve not found is a coherent wreck. "It’s a fairly well protected anchorage and any anchorage tends to accumulate debris. A wreck was claimed by an American commercial salvage company, but remains unverified. The likelihood is that there isn’t a wreck there." But, other than the increasingly controversial Blessing, the RCAHMS spokesman says there are dozens of fascinating wrecks in the Forth. The only other "designated wreck" - for which a licence is required to dive - is the Campania, an old Atlantic liner. "The Campania was built in the 1880s," he says. "It sank on November 5, 1918 - a week before the end of the First World War. It’s a vast hunk of rather twisted metal. "It was anchored at Burntisland and its anchor cable broke. It was blown downwind, bumping every other ship in sight until it rammed a battleship. They exploded it to get it out the way in the 1920s. "Other than The Blessing of Burntisland, there’s nothing indubitably earlier than the 18th century. Most of our references are documentary or historical. "What the Firth of Forth has is a lot of fishing vessels, small cargo steamships and a relatively small, but very significant, assemblage of warships." October 14, 1881, marks another date of watery tragedy, the Eyemouth fishing disaster, when a substantial number of relatively sizeable wooden sail-powered fishing boats went out to sea in bad weather and sank, killing all on board. The RCAHMS spokesman adds: "There are quite a lot of steamships because steam travel remained an alternative to the railways up to the Second World War. The Royal Archer, which was mined in 1940, is off Inchkeith, and The Royal Fusilier, off the Bass Rock, was bombed by German aircraft while on passage from London to Leith during the Second World War. The Fusilier was the last ship to be sunk in World War Two. "On the naval side, the interest in the Forth is very much that Scotland is not the Navy’s home waters. The average naval officer would have been far more likely to go to Malta, Gibraltar, Singapore or Hong Kong than Rosyth. "The result is that Scotland is very much a training and experimental area, and the wrecks in the Forth tend to be unusual ones." Such as the submarines around the May Island. The spokesman adds: "The K Class Submarines were a rather strange attempt to produce a submersible destroyer - a big submarine powered by steam. It was an attempt to produce a nuclear submarine without nuclear power. "On the night of January 31, 1918, they sent them out with a group of surface warships with the result that two sunk in collisions with heavy loss of life. They’re both out in the Forth." Further out, at the Forth’s periphery, is the HMS Pathfinder, the first surface warship sunk while moving by a submarine. Meanwhile, back in Fife, Anstruther also harbours reports of a lost ship, The Christian, which legend has it set sail from Leith for London in December 1739, loaded with a priceless cargo of silver. Two days after it left port, the ship vanished and was never seen again, though her lifeboat was washed up on the shore at Anstruther shortly afterwards. The mystery remains - did The Christian sink, or did its men scuttle the vessel and make off with its treasures? And while it may sound tempting to take up diving and attempt to claim the treasures of the Forth’s wrecks for yourselves, doing so requires a licence. Phil Robertson, a training officer at the Nautical Archaeological Society of Scotland says: "The site that is supposed to be The Blessing is designated under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973 so you have to apply for a licence to visit, licence, survey, recover artefacts from or excavate it. How much illegal diving goes on I have no idea." And, while the jury is still out on The Blessing, there seems to be more of a consensus on the American paddle-steamer SS Republic. The RCAHMS spokesman says: "The ship in America with lots of gold coins is being excavated by a firm called Oceanics Ltd. It’s being excavated for profit and the finds will be sold in due course. That’s the object of the exercise, whereas we are more concerned with information aimed towards presentation of the maritime heritage of Scotland. "And since Scotland has a remarkably long coastline, it has a correspondingly rich maritime heritage." But retired cartographic manager Ian Archibald is unlikely to give up hope in finding The Blessing. "It is a wonderful story in its own right that we have this wreck on our doorstep. It’s a wee bit like the Loch Ness Monster in that even though we may not have found it, we know that somewhere it’s out there. "All we’re concerned about is that the project is managed professionally. Our motives are for the sheer enjoyment of doing this and the kudos behind it all."