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By Jim Wyss - Stripes.com

Colombia is pushing ahead with plans to salvage one of the hemisphere’s richest and most legendary shipwrecks — even as a U.S. company insists that it deserves a share of the treasure that went down with the San Jose galleon three centuries ago.

In a news conference Wednesday, President Juan Manuel Santos said an unnamed investor will finance the rescue of the Spanish galleon, which was sunk by the British Navy in 1708 off Colombia’s Caribbean coast.

Santos said he couldn’t reveal the name of the investor until July 14, but said it’s someone, or an institution, “that will guarantee a process that’s respectful of the historical and cultural value of the galleon,” which the government first acknowledged discovering in December 2015.

Santos said the investor had agreed to a public-private partnership that will bring together a “dream team” of archaeologists and engineers to salvage the wreck and put it on display in the tourist port city of Cartagena.

Those plans put the government at odds with Sea Search Armada, a salvage company based in Bellevue, Wash., that claims it identified the site of the San Jose in the 1980s.

After years of legal battles, SSA won a 2007 ruling in Colombia’s Supreme Court granting it rights to half of the riches not considered “national patrimony.”

The government, however, insists it found the wreck independently of previous research efforts.

How much the wreck might be worth is a matter of fevered speculation, but when the San Jose went down, it was thought to be carrying six years’ worth of accumulated gold, silver and emeralds destined for Spain.

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By Brendan Mcdaid - Derry Journal

The council was told that a recent exhibition and series of projects to mark the 100th anniversary of the Laurentic tragedy had generated major interest and resulted in a surge in visitor numbers to the Tower Museum.

The Laurentic exhibition tells the story of the famous White Star Line ship, commandeered by the Royal Navy to transport gold to Canada to buy ammunition for the war effort in 1917.

The ship sank off Lough Swilly on January 25, 1917 after striking two German mines, with 354 sailors perishing in the disaster. The 121 survivors were cared for in Inishowen and eventually brought to the Guildhall in Derry for a meal by the then mayor, Alderman R.N. Anderson and donations collected for them from across Derry and Donegal.

For the 100th anniversary, The Laurentic Bell, a prized artefact was loaned from the shipwreck centre in the Isle of Wight.

The Council Committee was told that the bell will be auctioned for sale in the coming months. Officers proposed that they “consider the purchase of the Laurentic Bell as a key permanent display in the new maritime museum,” with a fuller report on this expected at a later date.

Full story..

Par Thierry Peigné - France Info

Une ou des épaves, afin d'en remonter des objets historiques ou de l'or ou de l'argent, c'est sans aucun doute ce que recherchaient les occupants d'un voilier britannique dans la chaussée de Sein en début de semaine.

Une pratique interdite sans autorisation préalable du département de recherches archéologiques subaquatiques et sous-marines (DRASSM), et à laquelle la marine nationale et les douanes ont mis fin mardi 20 juin.

L'interpellation a été réalisée alors que le voilier britannique se trouve à une vingtaine de milles nautiques (37 kilomètres) dans l’ouest de la chaussée de Sein.

C'est dans cette même zone que l'Egypt, un paquebot anglais, a fait naufrage le 20 mai 1922. C'est alors qu'il effectuait une liaison entre Londres et Marseille, avant de rejoindre Bombay, que le vapeur est entré en collision avec un navire français.

A son bord, 340 passagers et membres d'équipage mais aussi des tonnes d'or et d'argent (4500 kilos d'or en lingots, quarante trois tonnes d'argent et trente sept caisses contenant 165000 souverains anglais). L'épave gisant à 120 mètres de profondeur, il faudra attendre une dizaine d'année avant que sa précieuse cargaison ne soit récupérée à 90%.

10% pourraient donc encore se trouver dans les entrailles du navire, attisant ainsi la convoitise de chercheurs de trésors.

C'est ce lundi 19 juin 2017 après-midi, lors d’un vol de surveillance maritime effectué par un avion des douanes, que l’attention de l’équipage a été attirée par le comportement inhabituel du voilier, le Ice Maiden.

Le lendemain, mardi 20 juin, en vol de surveillance maritime, le Falcon 50 de la Marine nationale relocalise le voilier dans la même zone. L’équipage interroge le navire sur ses activités et effectue des prises de vues attestant du remorquage par le voilier d’un engin immergé dans l’eau.

Toute l'histoire...

From NDTV

Scientists have located two B-25 bombers - one of the most iconic aircraft of the Second World War - that went missing over 70 years ago in the waters off Papua New Guinea.

During World War II, some 10,000 B-25 bombers were deployed to conduct a variety of missions such as bombing, submarine patrols, and even the historic raid over Tokyo in April 1942.

Present-day Papua New Guinea was the site of military action in the Pacific Ocean from January 1942 to the end of the war in August 1945, with significant losses of aircraft and soldiers, some of whom have never been found.

Project Recover, consisting of a team of scientists from University of California, San Diego, and University of Delaware, along with members of the non-profit organisation BentProp in the US, combined efforts to locate aircraft and associated missing items from World War II.

In February, the team set out on a mission to map the seafloor in search of missing aircraft, conduct an official archaeological survey of a known B-25 underwater wreck, and interview elders in villages in the immediate area.

In its search of nearly 10 square kilometres, the team located the debris field of a B-25 bomber that had been missing for over 70 years, associated with a crew of six.

"People have this mental image of an airplane resting intact on the sea floor, but the reality is that most planes were often already damaged before crashing, or broke up upon impact," said Katy O'Connell, Executive Director at Project Recover.

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From Daily Mail

A World War II fighter aircraft was dredged up from the bottom of the Kerch Strait between Crimea and mainland Russia on Saturday.

The Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter aircraft, leased from the US to the Soviet Red Army, spent about 70 years underwater until divers spotted it nearly four miles from the coast.

The divers were searching the waters for mines and bombs with the $3.2 billion construction of the Kerch Strait Bridge - a project Russian President Vladimir Putin as called a 'historic mission'.

The Kremlin sees the bridge, which will span the Kerch Strait, as vital to integrating Crimea, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014. On Saturday, a crane borrowed from the bridge's construction lifted the decayed plane, which may be incorporated into a future exhibition by a historical reconstruction group, RT reported.

The Curtiss P-40 Warhawk was constructed by the Curtiss-Wright Corporation's main production facilities in Buffalo, New York, before the planes were widely used among the Allied powers in WWII.

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From Tornos News

Greek god during underwater construction operation off the Crimean Peninsula, according to recent media reports in Russia.

Chief of the underwater archaeology unit of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Sergei Olkhovskiy has announced that the discovery of the terracotta is a unique artifact of the Northern Black Sea Region, and stressed archaeologists have never come across anything like this before, according to the note published by David Ruiz Marull in the Spanish journal El País.

The finding was located on Kerch Bay, along the strait that occupies the east coast of the Crimean peninsula, where the Black Sea meets the Sea of Azov and a bridge that will eventually link the two coasts is being built.

The archaeological study of the recently discovered “pottery field” commenced about two years ago, when the bridge was being designed. Since then, underwater excavations have collected more than 60,000 pieces (most of them fragments of ceramic vessels made in the Mediterranean and Asia Minor between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC).

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By Neal Baker - The Sun

A nazi ship has been discovered in the depths of the Black Sea — and it could be stashing priceless plunder. The Boy Federsen, believed to be used to transport stolen art, was found close to Crimea in south-western Russia.

It had once been briefly owned by the British after being handed over by Germany in 1919 as part of post-war reparations. But it was then sold to a Spanish company that re-named the ship from its original moniker, Anhalt, to Aya-Mendi.

In 1931 the ship was then passed on to the Soviet Union and named the Kharkov. The Kharkov was almost destroyed in a huge storm travelling from Britain carrying grain. And Soviet soldiers damaged the ship in 1943 when the port of the city of Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine was occupied during World War II.

But Nazi engineers managed to repair the ship and renamed it one more time, this time calling it the Boy Federsen.

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By Sarah Pruitt - History.com

In the 13th century A.D., the city of Acre on Israel’s northern coast was a key stronghold for embattled European Crusaders defending Christianity in the Holy Land. But in 1291, a vast Egyptian army of some 100,000 soldiers led by the new Mamluk sultan overran the Crusader garrison there and razed the city.

Now, marine archaeologists have discovered a long-lost ship that met its watery end in the crescent-shaped bay off the city’s harbor. Carbon dating of the ship, and the cache of gold coins found inside, suggests the wreck dates to the siege of Acre, as Christians made a desperate attempt to flee the city and their knights made their doomed last stand.

The ship that marine archaeologists recently discovered in the Bay of Haifa appears to have been damaged by the dredging that occurred when Acre’s modern harbor was constructed.

All that’s left now are fragments of the wooden hull, the keel and some wooden planks covered with ballast. Carbon-14 testing of the ship’s remains dated the wreck to between 1062 and 1250 A.D., the era when Acre was the last remaining Crusader stronghold in the region.

But what the archaeologists found alongside the ship was even more amazing: A mother lode of some 30 gold coins, which a coin expert identified as Florentine “florins,” minted in the Italian republic of Florence beginning in 1252.

The coins pinpoint the shipwreck to the last half of the 13th century-which means the ship and its cargo may have well gone down during the dramatic fall of Acre in 1291, when Egyptian forces toppled the city.

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