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By Keith Drew - BBC

Our boat was only half a dozen miles out of St Mary's, the main island in the Isles of Scilly, but the sea had become a different beast entirely.

The waters that lulled against the harbour walls were long gone, and as we arced around the Western Rocks – a notorious cordon of razor-sharp skerries at the very south-westerly reaches of England – the swell surged.

Waves slapped against the bow as the boat keeled to and fro. The water was the colour of midnight, and I peered into the darkness for a sign of the HMS Association, one of 1,000 shipwrecks that lie splintering into the seabed around Scilly.

Two parallel reefs, much of which is submerged at high water, the Western Rocks posed a formidable threat to sailors bound for safe harbour in Tresco or St Mary's. And the names that each cluster of jagged granite has been given over the years – Inner Rags, Tearing Ledge – hint at the devastation wrought.

"It is doubtful if any collection of rocks in the whole of the British Isles has a worse reputation," said Richard Larn OBE, president of the International Maritime Archaeological & Shipwreck Society and author of Sea of Storms: Shipwrecks of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. "This immense area of hidden danger has been the setting for the worst of the many wreck disasters on Scilly."

None, though, have been more tragic, nor played a more significant role in history, than the sinking of the Association in the early years of the 18th Century.

A 90-gun, second-rate English warship, HMS Association was the flagship of Sir Cloudesley Shovell, who had worked his way up from lowly cabin boy to become Admiral of the Fleet in 1705.

Shovell had distinguished himself in the Nine Years' War and in early skirmishes of the War of the Spanish Succession, but after a summer spent (unsuccessfully) laying siege to the French port of Toulon, he set sail for home, departing from Gibraltar for England in late September 1707.

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By Rebecca Speare-Cole - Sky News

Two divers are missing and presumed dead after they were reported to be trapped on a wreck off the coast of Cornwall. HM Coastguard confirmed that the rescue phase of their search is over and it has now become a recovery operation.

The two divers were exploring HMS Scylla, a popular diving destination near Whitsand Bay, when their dive boat reported to HM Coastguard that they had become trapped.

A third diver managed to get to the surface and is being treated for decompression at DDRC in Plymouth.

The coastguard launched a coordinated search with a helicopter from Newquay as well as both Plymouth RNLI lifeboats and Looe's RNLI lifeboat. Devon and Cornwall Police are also involved.

The coastguard said the search continued until the early hours of the morning but the divers were not found.

From The Conversation

In collaboration with the United States Navy’s Underwater Archaeology Branch, I taught a computer how to recognize shipwrecks on the ocean floor from scans taken by aircraft and ships on the surface.

The computer model we created is 92% accurate in finding known shipwrecks. The project focused on the coasts of the mainland U.S. and Puerto Rico. It is now ready to be used to find unknown or unmapped shipwrecks.

The first step in creating the shipwreck model was to teach the computer what a shipwreck looks like. It was also important to teach the computer how to tell the difference between wrecks and the topography of the seafloor. To do this, I needed lots of examples of shipwrecks.

I also needed to teach the model what the natural ocean floor looks like. Conveniently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps a public database of shipwrecks.

It also has a large public database of different types of imagery collected from around the world, including sonar and lidar imagery of the seafloor. The imagery I used extends to a little over 14 miles (23 kilometers) from the coast and to a depth of 279 feet (85 meters).

This imagery contains huge areas with no shipwrecks, as well as the occasional shipwreck.

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By Ellen Gustoskey - Mental Floss
 

By the time divers recovered 168 bottles of champagne from a trade schooner shipwreck near Finland, the bubbly beverage had had plenty of time to mature—about 170 years, to be precise.

But while the Baltic Sea had kept it in technically drinkable condition, the champagne didn’t age all that gracefully. Tasters compared its flavor to “animal odor” and “wet hair” (though it did mellow out once it had a chance to air out).

On this episode of The List Show, Mental Floss editor-in-chief Erin McCarthy is diving deep to unearth all the most fascinating stories behind objects that went down with their ships.

The champagne isn’t the most questionable shipwreck item that adventurous tasters have sampled—that distinction probably goes to cheese salvaged from a 17th-century vessel.

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By George Mair - Mail Online

A rare bottle of whisky salvaged by The Mail on Sunday from a shipwreck that inspired the film Whisky Galore! has fetched a record £12,925. The sum is thought to be the highest ever paid at auction for a single bottle of Scotch from the wreck of the SS Politician, which ran aground in 1941 near the island of Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides.

The blended whisky was recovered during a dive sponsored by the MoS in 1987, and offered as the first prize in a poem competition won by Donald McLaren of Dundee, who passed away aged 78 in 2016.

Mr McLaren’s daughter, Nicola Hastie, offered the bottle in The Grand Whisky Auction’s online sale, where it attracted global interest, and a bidding war saw the price soar to double its £5,000-£6,000 estimate.

Mrs Hastie, 57, who will share the proceeds with brother Andrew, said: ‘It was amazing.

Dad was an avid reader of The Mail on Sunday and read it from cover to cover every week. ‘He was delighted to win such an historic bottle thanks to his poem, but he would be very happy with this outcome.

It feels like Dad’s still looking after us. ‘I don’t know who bought the whisky, but I would love to think that it might go on display for people to enjoy.’

Of her plans for her share of the proceeds, she added: ‘I’m going to visit Rothesay, where my dad grew up, for the first time, to see where he lived and went to school.

‘Dad and I enjoyed art so I’ll look for a painting of Rothesay to hang next to his framed poem as a reminder of him. Also, I’ve never seen Whisky Galore! so I’ll buy it on DVD.’

The 8,000-ton SS Politician was bound for Kingston in Jamaica and New Orleans when it ran aground.

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From Andrea Bernardi - The Jakarta Post

Fish dart across mosaic floors and into the ruined villas, where holidaying Romans once drank, plotted and flirted in the party town of Baiae, now an underwater archaeological park near Naples.

Statues which once decorated luxury abodes in this beachside resort are now playgrounds for crabs off the coast of Italy, where divers can explore ruins of palaces and domed bathhouses built for emperors.

Rome's nobility were first attracted in the 2nd century BC to the hot springs at Baiae, which sits on the coast within the Campi Flegrei -- a supervolcano known in English as the Phlegraean Fields.

Seven emperors, including Augustus and Nero, had villas here, as did Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony. The poet Sextus Propertius described the town as a place of vice, which was "foe to virtuous creatures".

It was where "old men behave like young boys, and lots of young boys act like young girls," according to the Roman scholar Varro.

But by the 4th century, the porticos, marble columns, shrines and ornamental fish ponds had begun to sink due to bradyseism, the gradual rise and fall of land due to hydrothermal and seismic activity.

The whole area, including the neighbouring commercial capital of Pozzuoli and military seat at Miseno, were submerged. Their ruins now lie between four and six metres (15 to 20 feet) underwater.

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Tamara Hardingham-Gill - CNN 

As he slipped through the kelp forest to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, Kamau Sadiki's eyes hooked onto something resembling the item he and fellow divers had been searching for.

However, the water temperature was low at the site just off the coast of Cape Town, and visibility was poor. Veteran diver Sadiki recalls the surge pulling him back and forth as he attempted to get closer to his "first visual of some tangible artifact" of the ship he'd heard so much about.

"It was a piece of wood material that was lodged into the rocks," he tells CNN Travel. "I hesitated before approaching it, and then the surge just carried me straight into it.

" Sadiki became overcome with emotion when he grabbed hold of part of the wreckage of the Sao Jose-Paquete de Africa wreck, which sank off Cape Town while transporting over 500 enslaved Africans from Mozambique to Brazil in 1794.

It's thought that 212 of the captives, along with the crew, drowned in the incident. "It was like I could hear the voices," says Sadiki, who was part of the dive team who located the wreck in 2015.

"The screaming, the suffering, the terror, the pain and agony of all those individuals being shackled arm and leg, and then perishing in a wrecking event. "I knew then that I wanted to help tell their story and get those silent voices into the history books."

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By Isis Davis-Marks - Smithsonian Mag.

Archaeologists off the coast of Palermo, Sicily, have discovered an ancient Roman shipwreck laden with amphorae, or jars used mainly for transporting wine and olive oil.

The Superintendence of the Sea (SopMare), a Sicilian government body responsible for safeguarding historical and natural objects found in marine waters, uncovered the second-century B.C.E. vessel near the Isola delle Femmine, reports local newspaper PalermoToday.

The ship rests in the Mediterranean Sea at a depth of about 302 feet. On board the wreck was a “copious cargo” of wine amphorae, writes Lorenzo Tondo for the Guardian.

Authorities hailed the find as one of most important archaeological discoveries made in the region in recent years. “The Mediterranean continually gives us precious elements for the reconstruction of our history linked to maritime trade, the types of boats, the transport carried out,’’ says Valeria Li Vigni, expedition leader and superintendent of the sea for Sicily, in a statement, per a translation by the Guardian.

“Now we will know more about life on board and the relationships between coastal populations.’’ Experts used an oceanographic vessel called Calypso South to investigate the sunken ship.

The boat is equipped with high-precision instruments, including a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) that was used to capture photographs of the wreck.

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