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From Yahoo News

A British father was arrested in front of his family at a Turkish airport after trying to bring home 13 historic bronze coins he found while snorkelling on holiday.

Toby Robyns, 52, was arrested at Bodrun airport on Turkey’s Aegean coast and could face up to five years in prison if convicted of trying to take artifacts out of the country. Mr Robyns, an ambulance driver from Southwick, West Sussex, told police he had no idea it was against the law to take the coins.

"We were on a daily tour. When our boat stopped I took my goggles and dove into the water. There were broken ceramics in the sea. When I cleaned the sand off with my hand I saw the coins. I never thought that carrying them would be a crime,” he said, according to a Turkish police statement.

Police said the coins were 800 years old and were found when Mr Robyns put his luggage through an X-ray machine at the airport.

Mr Robyns’ wife, Heidi, and two young sons returned to the UK while he was reportedly taken to a prison in Milas, around 30 miles away. Mrs Robyns declined to comment when reached at the family home near Brighton.

The family had been on a two-week summer holiday in Bodrun Mr Robyns has not been charged with a crime but is likely to be held in prison until prosecutors make a decision.

Turkey’s judicial system is on an August break, meaning that Mr Robyns could face several weeks in prison before any decision is made. He appeared before a magistrate’s court the day after his arrest but will need to appear before a higher court if he is charged.

He could face between three and five years in prison if convicted of smuggling historical artifacts, according to the BirGun newspaper.

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From USA Today
 

"We've located the wreckage of the USS Indianapolis in Philippine Sea at 5500m below the sea."

That tweet from entrepreneur and billionaire Paul Allen around 12:20 p.m. Saturday confirmed what many have been searching for since the ship was sunk on July 30, 1945.

Allen, who is leading a 13-person team on his 250-foot research ship, the R/V Petrel, said the wreckage was found at a depth of more than 18,000 feet.

The heavy cruiser, carrying 1,197 sailors and Marines, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine while sailing back to the Philippines after delivering components for "Little Boy," the atomic bomb that helped end World War II. It took only 12 minutes to sink.

While 900 crewmen made it through the initial sinking, only 316 survived to be rescued when help arrived five days later on Aug. 2. Many had died of exposure or thirst, drowned or were attacked by sharks.

Families of those aboard the ship found out about the deaths of their loved ones just as the rest of the country was celebrating the conclusion of World War II.

The latest break in the search for the wreckage came in July 2016, when the Naval History and Heritage Command Communication and Outreach Division reported that a sailor had confirmed that a tank landing ship, LST-779, had passed the Indianapolis 11 hours before the torpedo struck. That backed up the testimony of Captain Charles McVay III and was confirmed by deck logs.

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From BBC News

A ship excavation is expected to reveal a "treasure trove" of items and stories from Europe's global trading history.

An international team of maritime archaeologists are diving, excavating and recording the wreck of Dutch ship the Rooswijk off the Kent coast. All 300 shipmen died when the vessel, carrying coins and silver ingots, sank on Goodwin Sands in January 1740.

Never before have any of the Dutch East India Company's 250 wrecks been scientifically excavated on this scale.

Historic England manages the protected site and is working with the Dutch government, which owns the ship's remains. It is only now, after more than 250 years, that the sands have shifted enough to unveil the wreckage.

Some explorations were carried out last year and those finds are being showcased as part of the #Rooswijk1740 project, led and financed by the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, with open days in Ramsgate between 19 August and 16 September.

They include a large seaman's chests, pewter jugs, ornately carved wooden knife handles and leather shoes.

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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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