In 1608, De Brito and his men removed the Dhammazedi Bell from the Shwedagon Pagoda and rolled it down Singuttara Hill to a raft on the Pazundaung Creek.
[2] The load proved too heavy, and at the confluence of the Bago and Yangon Rivers, off what is now known as Monkey Point, the raft broke up and the bell went to the bottom, taking de Brito's ship with it.
Professional deep sea diver James Blunt has made 115 exploratory dives, using sonar images of objects in the area for guidance.
The bell could be buried in up to 25 feet (7.6 m) of mud and is thought to rest between the wrecks of two Dutch East Indiaman ships: Komine and Koning David, along with small pieces of De Brito's galleon.
In 2000, the Burmese government asked an English marine scientist named Mike Hatcher and his team to raise the bell so that it could be restored to the Pagoda.
[citation needed] The project is not without its opponents: Some pro-democracy campaigners say the salvage operation could be construed as an endorsement by the international community of Myanmar's military dictatorship, and should wait until talks with the regime have progressed or until such time as a democratic government is in place.
After a flurry of excitement stirred up by the BBC's announcement of the project, however, it apparently did not get off the ground, perhaps due to complications involved in his discovery in June 2000 of the Tek Sing in Indonesian waters, with the largest collection of porcelain ever found.
[citation needed] In July 2010, the Myanmar Times reported an Australian documentary filmmaker and explorer Damien Lay to be another foreigner who had decided to take up the project.
Lay and his team conducted extensive side scan sonar surveys and diving operations, covering approximately four square kilometers of river floor in the area where the bell was thought to be located.
[7] At the end of June 2012, the Historical Research Department of the Ministry of Culture and SD Mark International LLP Co of Singapore held a workshop in Yangon to organize a renewed attempt with the Singaporean firm pledging US$10 million for the non-profit project.