It is being hailed as a lucky accident, after salvage teams searching for containers that fell off a ship in a storm discovered a 16th Century shipwreck on the North Sea floor.
The ship, dating back to 1540, was filled with a cargo of copper plates and some of them were put on display on Wednesday when the find was revealed.
It was owned by the Fugger family, one of Europe's richest banking families.
The wreck is being described as "the missing link" in shipping construction.
"It's the way the ship was built that's very interesting because you have to think 100 years later the Netherlands was in the middle of its Golden Age - and this ship is from a transition period," maritime archaeologist Martijn Manders told the BBC.
Although it is still on the seabed, divers intend to revisit the ship during the summer. It is considered to be the oldest seafaring ship ever found in Dutch waters. //
so far the salvage teams have lifted some of the copper cargo along with three wooden planks and 12 wooden ribs from the ship's frame.
Underwater archaeologist Martijn Manders said the early 16th Century ship marked a period of transition in medieval history, when shipbuilders moved away from the traditional clinker-type model of overlapping timber.
This ship too had elements of the old period, but featured the newer carvel system, with a hull made of planks flush at the seams.
Experts believe the 30m by 7m ship could have been carrying as much as 5,000kg (five tonnes) of copper.
A copper expert from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has identified the chemical substance in the cargo as identical to the first copper coins used in the Netherlands.
Copper coins were at the time being developed as a lower-cost alternative to gold and silver, and it now appears that copper from the mines in Slovakia was being used as currency in the Netherlands.
