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WET & HOT NEWS ! > Famous Wrecks
Well known and particularly famous wrecks all over the world.Titanic artefacts surface in Melbourne exhibition
The 02 Mar. 2010 at 15:35Famous WrecksBy Simon Plant - Herald Sun
Buried treasure recovered from the wreck of the world's most famous ship has surfaced at Melbourne Museum.
But a bronze cherub ripped from the Titanic almost a century ago is just the tip of the iceberg.
Titanic: The Artefact Exhibition, opening soon in the museum's Touring Hall, will present 280 authentic objects - from perfume vials and a pocket watch to chamber pots and coins - and recreate sections of the ship's opulent interior, including the Grand Staircase.
"This is biggest and best exhibition I've ever seen in my life,'' said promoter Michael Gudinski.
"When you see what's been discovered underneath the water so long after the event, its just gripping.''
Gudinski's Frontier Events, a division of Frontier Touring, is presenting Titanic: The Artefact Exhibition with Museum Victoria and the support of Victorian Major Events.
And like last years' A Day in Pompeii, museum chief Dr J Patrick Greene expects the show to give visitors a fascinating, intimate and often poignant glimpse into another era.Team finds lost U.K., Japan coins
The 26 Jan. 2010 at 16:10Famous Wrecks
From the Japan Times
A Japanese-Turkish research team announced Monday the discovery of a British-minted gold coin and a Japanese silver coin from a Turkish warship that sank 120 years ago off Kushimoto, Wakayama Prefecture.
"Still there should be lots of gold coins" inside the ship Ertugrul, said Tufan Turanli, who heads the underwater archaeological team.
The gold coin, dated 1856, measures 2.2 cm in diameter and weighs 8 grams.
Ertugrul, a 76-meter wooden ship of the Ottoman Turks, sank in a typhoon in 1890 after the Turkish delegation on board delivered a message and decoration to Emperor Meiji.
Of the 650 crew members, 69 were rescued by local residents. The rescue has become a symbol of Japan-Turkey friendship.
The gold coin was retrieved at a depth of 12 meters. The team, which launched a three-year survey in 2008, has already discovered about 5,800 items from the wreck."Titanic" addition: Exhibit's new panels depict Kentuckians
The 03 Jan. 2010 at 17:34Famous WrecksBy Diane Heilenman - Courier-Journal.com
Panels added to the “Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition,” which will be on view through Feb. 15 at the Louisville Science Center, bring to the surface a new back story: that of three Kentuckians who made that fateful voyage in mid-April 1912.
There was Charles Hallace Romaine, a banker and/or confidence man and gambler raised in Georgetown, Ky., and Anderson, Ind., who was working for a trust company in London at the time he sailed. Romaine survived the sinking of the ship.
There was the inventive Louisville ophthalmologist, Dr. Ernest Moraweck, whose sideline was operating a rest home for wealthy older women at his farm in Brandenburg, Ky. He died at sea.
And, there was a former Courier-Journal reporter-turned-presidential military aide, Maj. Archibald Butt. He, too, died at sea.
Maj. Butt's first job after graduation in 1888 from the University of the South, where he founded the school newspaper, was as a reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal, recruited by its founder, Henry Watterson. Butt wrote for the Courier-Journal for three years before moving on to Washington, D.C., and reporting for The Atlanta Constitution and the Nashville Banner. He served as the military aide to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.Titanic artifacts exhibit an amazing adventure
The 20 Dec. 2009 at 22:33Famous Wrecks
By Amy Robinson - Sunday Gazette Mail
When I was in the third or fourth grade, I purchased Robert Ballard's "Exploring the Titanic: How the Greatest Ship Ever Lost Was Found" at a school book fair, thus beginning my interest in the Titanic. In fact, for several years, I wanted to be a marine archaeologist and go on expeditions like Ballard.
So when I found out that my family vacation this fall would include a day in Las Vegas, where the Luxor Hotel houses "Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition," I was very excited. This was the chance to see in real life what I'd only seen in pictures.
Your experience starts before you even enter the exhibit hall, when the ticket taker hands you a "boarding pass." On the back, there is a profile of a Titanic passenger. At the end of the exhibit is a memorial that lists all the ship's passengers. You can see what your fate is.
I was first-class passenger Margaret Brown -- aka The Unsinkable Molly Brown, so I knew from the start that I survived. We learned at the end that, of my family, my sister survived but my parents perished.
First look inside England's new Titanic museum
The 19 Dec. 2009 at 09:30Famous WrecksBy Peter Law - The Daily Echo
The final plans for Southampton's £15m Sea City Museum can today be exclusively unveiled. The museum, which will reshape the city's Civic Centre forever, is expected to attract 150,000 visitors a year. The Daily Echo can reveal a dramatic cruise-liner inspired extension which will be the largest museum display area in Hampshire.
Known as "The Pavilion", Southampton City Council hopes it will bring international blockbuster exhibitions to the city for the first time. The old magistrates' courts will be transformed into two permanent exhibitions, titled "Southampton's Titanic Story" and "Gateway to the World".
Southampton's Titanic story will be told through the eyes of the crew and community to which they belonged.
"We have taken time to research other commemorative displays and museums to understand how we could take a tragic subject matter and make it engaging, informative and respectful," Caroline Keppel-Palmer, from museum designers Urban Salon, said.
"Our focus is to focus on the human stories surrounding the disaster, rather than the event itself and we also focus on Southampton in 1912 and life in the merchant navy at the turn of the century."Wreck may hold clue to nation's discovery
The 01 Dec. 2009 at 10:15Famous Wrecks
By Steve Meacham - Smh.com.au
Did American whalers discover the east coast of Australia before Captain Cook?
That is the intriguing question a crack team of maritime archaeologists, divers and marine scientists hope to answer when they sail tomorrow for a remote reef 450 kilometers off the coast of Queensland.
The expedition leader, Kieran Hosty, describes the 200-year-old mystery of Wreck Reef as one of the great untold sagas of our maritime history.
The story began in 1803, after Matthew Flinders had completed his epic circumnavigation of Australia and was returning to England. He was a passenger on HMS Porpoise, a 10-gun sloop under the command of Lieutenant Robert Fowler. The ship was traveling in convoy, accompanied by Cato, an armed cargo ship, and Bridgewater, a cargo ship owned by the East India Company.
But disaster struck close to midnight on August 17 when Porpoise hit an uncharted reef in the dark. Fowler ordered a cannon to be fired to warn the other ships. In the confusion Cato and Bridgewater were heading for a catastrophic collision until Captain Park, on the Cato, changed course, even though that meant hitting the reef about 400 meters from the Porpoise.South Pole explorers to drill for Sir Ernest Shackleton's whiskey
The 15 Nov. 2009 at 22:08Famous Wrecks
By Simon Johnson -Telegraph
Explorers are planning to recover a rare batch of whiskey lost during explorer's ill-fated voyage to the South Pole a century ago.Two crates of the now extinct “Rare Old” brand of McKinlay and Co whiskey have been buried in the Antarctic ice since Shackleton was forced to abandon his polar mission in 1909.
But Whyte & Mackay, the whiskey giant that owns McKinlay and Co, has asked a team of New Zealand explorers heading out on a January expedition to return a sample of the drink for a series of experiments.
The team intends to utilise special drills to free the trapped crates and rescue a bottle from the wreckage, which is believed to have been discarded 97 miles from the pole.
If they cannot retrieve a full bottle, they are hoping to use a syringe to extract some of the contents.
The sample will then be brought home to Richard Paterson, Whyte & Mackay's master blender, who intends to replicate the famous old whiskey.UK vessel found six decades later
The 03 Nov. 2009 at 09:22Famous WrecksFrom AFP
Search teams said on Monday that they had found the wreck of the British destroyer HMS Volage, whose sinking in 1946 off Albania prompted a diplomatic row and is seen as an early episode of the Cold War.
The wreckage of the vessel was found in the Ionian Sea by a team from the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, the Albanian Archaeology Institute and Albanian defense ministry, project spokesperson Auron Tare said.
The Volage sank on October 22, 1946, when it hit a mine near the Albanian port of Saranda, as it raced to the aid of the HMS Saumarez, a second British destroyer which itself had been hit by a mine shortly before.
Forty-four sailors lost their lives and 42 more were injured in the incident which severely strained relations between Britain and then Soviet ally Albania.
It was one of several incidents involving Royal Navy ships getting into difficulties in Albanian waters at the time, and together the events became known as the Corfu Channel Incident.
The wreckage of the Volage was found three months ago, but the British and Albanian governments have only now decided to make the discovery public, Tare said.Bones of English sailor from disastrous expedition returned to U.K.
The 31 Oct. 2009 at 09:58Famous Wrecks
By Randy Boswell - Canwest News Service
More than 160 years after his death in the Canadian Arctic during the ill-fated Franklin Expedition, the bones of an English sailor — among the only human remains ever repatriated from the disastrous 19th-century search for the Northwest Passage — have been laid to rest once more during a solemn rededication ceremony in London attended by Canada's High Commissioner, James Wright.
The service, also attended by Parks Canada's top marine archeologist, Robert Grenier, followed the refurbishment and relocation of a monument dedicated to the sacrifice of the expedition's 130 members, who perished in the late 1840s after their ships — the Terror and the Erebus — became locked in ice near Nunavut's King William Island.
The 20-year search for the ships commanded by Sir John Franklin yielded various artifacts and the graves of several of the doomed crewmen, including that of Lt. Henry Le Vesconte.Copper clue may solve mystery of doomed Victorian Arctic expedition
The 29 Oct. 2009 at 10:45Famous Wrecks
By Maev Kennedy - Guardian.co.uk
Find could help reveal fate of Sir John Franklin's ships that disappeared in hunt for North-West Passage.A few snippets of copper may be a vital clue towards solving one of Arctic exploration's most haunting mysteries: what happened to Sir John Franklin's two superbly equipped ships when he and all 150 members of his expedition died in the search for the North-West Passage more than 160 years ago?
The fate of the 1845 expedition haunted Victorian imagination, and accounts suggesting some of his starving men prolonged their lives by cannibalism destroyed the reputation of those sent to find them.
Expensive rescue expeditions continued for almost 20 years, spurred on by Franklin's formidable widow, Jane Griffin. Evidence confirming Franklin's death was only discovered in 1859. Dumped supplies were recovered along with personal possessions, letters describing his death and those of many of his senior officers, and finally bodies, but his twin ships – the Erebus and the Terror – have never been located.
