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From Daily Mail

Staring out to sea on a flawlessly sunny day, underwater archaeologist Ibrahima Thiaw visualises three shipwrecks once packed with slaves that now lie somewhere beneath Senegal's Atlantic waves.

He wants more than anything to find them.

Thiaw has spent years scouring the seabed off the island of Goree, once a west African slaving post, never losing hope of locating the elusive vessels with a small group of graduate students from Dakar's Cheikh Anta Diop University.

Goree was the largest slave-trading centre on the African coast between the 15th and 19th century, according to the UN's cultural agency UNESCO, and Thiaw believes his mission has a moral purpose: to heal the open wounds that slavery has left on the continent.

"This is not just for the fun of research or scholarship. It touches us and our humanity and I think that slavery in its afterlife still has huge scars on our modern society," he said, pulling on a wetsuit and rubber boots for the day's first dive.

Thiaw believes his native Senegal, with its own long and violent history of trade in human flesh, could tell the world more about how modern capitalism was founded on violence inflicted on African bodies.

"The Atlantic slave trade was the foundation of our modernity, so this is a history for all mankind," he added, referring to the so-called "Triangular Trade" of human labour for consumer goods between Africa, the Americas and Europe.

After making final checks on the magnetometer that will run up and down a painstakingly designated strip of seabed for traces of wreckage, Thiaw disappears under the surface of the dark green waves.

- 1,000 slave shipwrecks -

African nations affected by the slave trade have never fully come to terms with it, Thiaw believes, and even today in countries like Senegal, a caste of people still refer to themselves as slaves.

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By James Draper - Mail Online

Holidaymakers can expect to witness numerous unexpected wonders when they explore the world.

But tourists visiting the Micronesian archipelago of Palau discovered an unusually rare sight, re ently - after stumbling across a doomed WW2 plane.

The long lost craft - believed to be a Japanese Aichi E13A long range reconnaissance seaplane - was found in a shallow river on the archipelago of Palau, which boasts 500 picturesque islands.

An image of the remarkable relic, which surfaced on Imgur, shows the plane largely intact with the wings still attached to the fuselage. Eerily positioned upside-down, it's not clear which country the military craft belonged to, but the undisturbed site has now become something of a makeshift grave.

And, clearly, it exerts a fascination with holidaymakers, two of whom can be seen canoeing past the plane's rusted body. Unsurprisingly, the image has stunned people across the internet, with one saying:, 'Looks like a movie set or the beginning or end of a novel.'

Another added: 'If was the pilot that died with that plane, I'd be happy with my final resting spot. So beautiful and serene.' A third chimed-in: 'For me, it's the juxtaposition between the wreck and the person kayaking carefree right next to it.

It seems disrespectful given that someone could have died in that wreck.' Aviation historian and seaplane pilot Paul Beaver told MailOnline Travel that the plane is Japanese.

He said: 'It's an A13 floatplane. It is inverted and has lost its floats. This is a rare beast.'

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By Anna Slater

A giant bronze eagle perched atop a Nazi swastika which was lost in a shipwreck during the Second World Wa r will be sold off to raise money for its military.

The giant statue sunk on board Nazi battleship Graf Spee off the coast of Uruguay in 1939 - but a private salvage company recovered it in 2006, some 75 years later.

The bronze symbol, which weighs 300 to 400 kilograms and is nine feet wide, sat on the ship's prow. The figure recovered from the seabed by Alfredo Etchegaray 11 years ago and as authorities decided what to do with it, it was kept in a warehouse heavily guarded by the military.

After a long battle in court, the Supreme Court ruled the Uruguayan state was the piece's rightful owner. But it also said Mr Etchegaray, who worked for a private salvage company, should get 50 % of its profits when the eagle is sold.

Mr Etchegaray previously told the BBC the eagle could be worth up to £10 million - which will go towards funding the country's armed forces and its Defence Ministry.

The German embassy in Montevideo has urged Uruguayan authorities not to put it on display because it could glorify the Nazi regime.

According to the BBC, Guido Westerwelle, who was the German foreign minister during a visit to Uruguay in 2010 told officials in Montevideo: "We want to prevent wreckage from the ship, in particular the Nazi symbols, from landing on the market for military insignia."

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By Megan Gannon - Live Science
 

Divers have recovered the main telegraph machine from the Lusitania, the wreck at the center of one of the most infamous maritime disasters of the 20th century.

Irish heritage officials confirmed that the telegraph was recovered and brought to the surface Tuesday (July 25) and is now undergoing conservation on land.

The bronze artifact was "undamaged and in excellent condition," Heather Humphreys, Ireland's minister for culture, heritage and the Gaeltacht (areas where Irish is still spoken), said in a statement.

The Lusitania was the largest ship in the world when it made its maiden voyage in 1907.

The British ship was bound for Liverpool after a transatlantic crossing in 1915, when it was struck by a torpedo from a German submarine off the southeast coast of Ireland during World War I.

It sank in just 18 minutes. Of the 1,962 passengers and crew aboard at the time, 1,198 died, most of them from drowning and hypothermia. The attack on civilians prompted diplomatic outrage (though there is still debate over whether the ship's cargo secretly included war supplies and munitions).

As 128 Americans were killed in the disaster, the event helped push the United States into World War I.

The 787-foot-long (240 meters) shipwreck now lies on its starboard side, at a depth of about 300 feet (91 m) off the coast of County Cork. Retired American venture capitalist Gregg Bemis has been the sole owner of the wreck since 1982 and has occasionally clashed with the Irish government over his plans to explore the wreck and recover artifacts, according to a profile in Fortune.

Bemis is particularly interested in investigating the cause of the second explosion that rocked the Lusitania after the initial torpedo strike, which could help to explain what made the ship sink so quickly.

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From Sputnik News

A group of divers from UK-based Advanced Marine Services discovered a chest inside a WWII shipwreck where it laid untouched for almost 78 years.

According to Metro, the chest could contain up to four tons of valuable metal, believed to be gold from South American banks. It could be worth up to £100 million (US $130.8 million). 

The SS Minden, a German cargo ship, headed to Germany when it was allegedly noticed by the British Navy; therefore Nazi officials ordered in September 1939 to sink the SS Minden some 190 kilometers southeast of Iceland.

Advanced Marine Services applied to Iceland's government for permission to open the chest. The Icelandic officials will decide on who owns the shipwreck in the Atlantic.

Treasure hunters and researchers have been chasing missing Nazi gold for decades. There is a widespread legend about three Nazi German-era gold-laden trains, which were buried in secret underground tunnels built by the Nazis in early 1945.

The trains have never been found, but according to rumors, they contain 300 tons of gold, weapons, artwork and jewelry.

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By Nick Wilson - The Tribune

During World War II, a British warplane flying off the coast of Malta in the Mediterranean Sea had engine trouble and made an emergency ocean landing.

Its pilot and co-pilot were rescued by two Englishmen on leave who happened to be sailing that day, but the plane sank. Seventy-four years later, in June, Cal Poly students who are part of an underwater search and mapping project helped find the missing plane.

Their 6-foot robot, an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), used sonar, photography and video technology in its search.

“We’re confident that we found a plane that was documented to have crashed three miles off the coast of Malta,” said Zoe Wood, a Cal Poly computer science professor who has been co-leading the expedition with Harvey Mudd College engineering professor Christopher Clark.

“It matches up with the record of the same type of plane going down about three miles off the coast near the city of Sliema.” They found the Fairey Swordfish at a depth of about 60 meters.

The biplane torpedo bomber was used by England’s Royal Navy in World War II, as well as the 1930s.

Nearly 2,400 Fairey Swordfish aircraft were built between 1936 and 1944 and sank more tonnage of enemy warcraft than any other Allied plane during World War II.

Malta, a picturesque island located 50 miles south of Sicily, is a graveyard of ancient sunken vessels. There are nine surviving Swordfish. Just a handful can be flown.

“We had a feeling of joy to have helped discover a site of a historically significant plane,” Wood said. Divers with the University of Malta marine archeology department have examined the historic aircraft, which has decayed to a skeleton and is now part of an ecosystem for baby fish and crustaceans.

Given that, the plane will be left where it is.

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From The Canadian Press

When the Canadian Museum of History began planning a new exhibition on the Franklin expedition, neither of the voyage's two doomed ships had been found.

But after HMS Erebus was located in 2014 and HMS Terror was found in 2016, curators for the exhibit were given the opportunity to include some of the newly recovered artifacts. The exhibition, now on in the United Kingdom, also highlights the role that Inuit oral history played in finding the shipwrecks.

"We really wanted to give credit where credit was due in the exhibition," said curator Karen Ryan. "The Inuit were in the Arctic long before Europeans went looking for the Northwest Passage.

"What we know up until now about what happened to the Franklin expedition comes largely from Inuit oral history that has been passed down for 170 years."

Ryan noted that Parks Canada and researchers started looking in areas where the Inuit had indicated they had seen ships still inhabited and then later deserted. The expedition led by Sir John Franklin left England in 1845 with 129 men to search for a northern sea route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

No one ever returned, and search missions determined that both ships became icebound and were abandoned. Remains of some of the sailors have been found.

Some theories about the ill-fated voyage include lead poisoning and spoiled tinned preserves. Interest in the mystery has remained strong in the U.K., where some people trace family trees back to Franklin's men.

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By Keith Rossiter - Plymouth Herald
 

A Plymouth shipwreck may be even older than first thought.

The Cattewater wreck in Plymouth was discovered in 1973 during dredging close to Sutton Harbour, and was deemed so important it became the first to be given official protection. The ship was thought to be from the early 16th century, right in the middle of the Tudor period of British history.

Now detailed analysis of finds, which are in the collection of Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, suggest it could date from  as early as 1500. 

Martin Read, lecturer in maritime archaeology at the University of Plymouth, wants to raise awareness of the vessel – and is asking local children to come up with a name for a dog whose skeleton was found in the wreckage. The ship is thought to have been a three-masted armed merchantman, probably built in southern Europe but based locally.

For 10 years Mr Read – who holds an official government licence to study the wreck – has worked with students and local divers on the site. 

He said: “Tudor wrecks are incredibly rare and the Cattewater wreck is one of the world’s most important 16th Century discoveries.

“As a merchant ship, it provided the trade and taxes which allowed military leaders to build great naval vessels, such as Henry VIII’s Mary Rose, which sank in 1545.

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