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From Christie's

When the Atocha sunk in a hurricane nearly 400 years ago hope of recovering its rich cargo seemed lost. This silver ingot in our 20 January sale, however, is a remarkable survivor.

‘On 6 September 1622, the Nuestra Senora de Atocha sunk during a hurricane near Florida Keys,’ explains Christie’s specialist Jill Waddell. ‘Two hundred and sixty lives were lost at sea, along with tons of treasure bound for Spain.’ Weighing 79lb, this bar of silver was marked with the name of a silversmith who also went down with the ship. 

More than half a century before the foundation of colonial cities including Boston, Philadelphia and New York, the Spanish were leading the rapid expansion of the New World in centres including Potosí, Lima and Mexico City.

The continent’s mineral wealth became vital to the Spanish throne: from 1561 to 1748, two fleets carrying supplies were sent to colonists each year, returning to Spain filled with silver and gold.

‘The Atocha was so richly-laden with treasures that it had taken two months to load, and it left port at Havana six weeks later than scheduled,’ continues Waddell.

‘It was the most heavily guarded ship in a fleet of 20, and was carrying clergymen, slaves and members of the Spanish nobility. When a hurricane struck, the boat was slammed into a reef, sinking in just 55 feet of water.

Just five of those who had been on board survived.’

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From The Telegraph

The sinking of the largest ship ever built, the Titanic, may owe as much to a enormous fire onboard as it did to a gigantic iceberg, it has been claimed.

The doomed vessel, which measured more than 880ft long and 100ft tall, went down with the loss of more than 1500 lives on April 15, 1912 during her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York.

However fresh evidence that the Titanic’s hull may have been crippled by a massive blaze that burned unchecked for almost three weeks immediately behind the spot where it was later pierced.

The claim was made by journalist and Titanic expert Senan Malony, who has spent more than 30 years researching the disaster. He used little known photographs taken by the Titanic’s chief electrical engineer before it left Belfast shipyard to identify 30ft-long black marks along the front right-hand side of the hull.

Mr Malony said: “We are looking at the exact area where the iceberg stuck, and we appear to have a weakness or damage to the hull in that specific place, before she even left Belfast”.

Experts subsequently confirmed these were likely to have been caused by fire damage, as a result of hundred of tonnes of coal catching fire due to “self-heating” in a three-storey-high fuel store behind boiler room six.

Twelve men battled to bring the resulting conflagration under control, but it was still raging days later - as temperatures of between 500 and 1000 degrees Celsius.

Ship’s officers were reportedly under strict instruction from J Bruce Ismay, president of the company that built the ship, not to mention the desperate situation to any of the Titanic’s 2,500 passengers.

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From Janet Begley - USA Today

A Salvation Army bell ringer received a coin with ties to a fleet of Spanish galleons sunk in 1715 off the coast of Vero Beach.

Longtime volunteer Jim Bessy received the gold Spanish escudo worth several thousand dollars from a donor who wished to remain anonymous. He said the donor handed him the coin for safekeeping Thursday so it wouldn’t get mixed up with the other coins in the kettle.

Bessy then turned over the coin Friday to Salvation Army Lt. Jay Needham in Vero Beach. When Needham, in his first year as Salvation Army corps officer in Indian River County, began researching the coin on the Internet, he said he was amazed to learn of its history.

The coin is in a plastic case, marked with the words “1715 Fleet 1 Escudo.” “This is certainly a big welcome for me,” Needham said. “My first Christmas here comes with treasure from a 300-year-old ship. It brings a 300-year-old story about treasure together with a 2,000-year-old story about the birth of our Savior at Christmas.”

In 2015, more than 200 coins were retrieved along the Treasure Coast and valued at more than $1 million. A contractor working for 1715 Fleet-Queens Jewels LLC, a historic shipwreck salvage company based here, recovered the coins that were part of the fleet that sunk in a hurricane off the coast July 31, 1715.

The shipwrecks are what give the area of Indian River, St. Lucie and Martin counties its Treasure Coast nickname.

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From Agi.it

A Borbonic corvette, named Flora, was found in the waters of Naples Harbour. It brings back memories of a very difficult time in the history of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, when King Ferdinand I had to flee Naples to find refuge in Palermo, while the French army arrived in Naples and set off the Republic Revolution.

The Flora, a three-mast ship was built by the innovative shipyards of Castellamare di Stabia - the same yards that centuries later built the glorious ship Amerigo Vespucci.

The Borbonic corvette, which is still at the bottom of the harbour, was found by a team of underwater archeologists belonging to a temporary joint-venture that was awarded a research contract by the Naples Port Authority, in view of works to expand the basin.

Divers started excavating at the end of November and continued through mid December. Their work led to the accurate identification of the shipwreck site. When the French fleet arrived in Naples in 1799 to help the rebels, the king ordered the Flora to be set on fire and sunk, together with five other ships that were at anchor in the port of Naples.

Precious documents were collected during the initial stage of the investigation.

An 1828 map was of great importance. It was found by Armando Carola from Naples' Underwater Studies Centre. It reports with great accuracy the wrecks resting in the Gulf of Naples, which were subsequently confirmed by a Sonar Side Scan and a multibeam prospection used by the joint-venture in charge of the research work, under the scientifc direction of Filippo Avilia, and the technical management of Alessandro Scuotto, CEO of Deep Sea Technology. 

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By Maggie Gillis - CBC News

A group of researchers will explore the underwater battlefields off the coast of Bell Island, to try to uncover more about what happened when four ore carriers were sunk off Newfoundland by German U-boats in 1942.

Memorial University archaeology student Daniel Rees, whose great grandmother nursed the injured sailors, was awarded a JR Smallwood Foundation research grant to study the shipwrecks.

Rees told CBC Radio's St. John's Morning Show he will use forensic analysis — similar to methods employed by crime scene investigators — to learn about the tactics used by the Germans and piece together how the attacks unfolded.

"We can understand the angles the torpedoes would have fired from the German U-boats, we can understand where they would have been in relation to where the guns on the island are that would have been firing back at them, so we can really try to reconstruct everything," said Rees, who received approximately $4,500 from the foundation on Monday.

The SS Saganaga and SS Lord Strathcona were struck by torpedoes on the same day, Sept. 5, 1942. The SS Rose Castle and the Free French Forces vessel PLM27 were hit later that year.

In total, 70 men were killed. Rees said while many divers have explored the Bell Island wrecks, his archeological study will include the use of sonar to map the area and also determine the rate of deterioration of the vessels.

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By Emily Beament - Mirror

A 17th-century shipwreck has been rediscovered by divers in a Cornish bay where TV series Poldark filmed a dramatic wreck scene.

The protected wreck site of the Schiedam was first spotted in 1971 but has been buried under the shifting sands of shallow waters off Gunwalloe Church Cove on Cornwall's south coast, where it stranded during a gale in 1684.

But divers have found the wreck again after a storm, providing a rare opportunity to monitor the historic site, viewing and recording cannons, musket barrels and an iron hand-grenade which were part of the vessel's cargo.

The Schiedam was originally a cargo vessel in the Dutch East India company fleet, but was captured by Barbary pirates off the Spanish coast and its crew enslaved.

It was soon captured again by a Royal Navy ship and taken to Cadiz where the cargo was sold.

The vessel served in the English Fleet and sank while carrying a company of army miners and horses, stores, machinery and captured guns back from Tangier.

The wreck is close to the shore in around three or four metres of water at low tide, but as a protected wreck site it can only be visited with a licence issued by Historic England. It lies in the spot where a major shipwreck scene was filmed in 2014 for the BBC's Poldark.

Archaeologist and novelist David Gibbins, one of the two divers to find the site again, said they had searched the cove many times for the Schiedam but failed to find it until a breakthrough after a storm.

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From Archaeology News Network

Historians examining wreckage in a harbour in the war-torn Crimea region believe they may have found a missing British ship that sunk carrying "30 barrels of gold".

The wreckage is believed to be that of the Black Sea Prince, which was one of a number of ships from a British flotilla that sunk in the Black Sea during the siege of Sebastopol.

The ship had been carrying money to pay the wages of soldiers fighting in the Crimean War and also to help fund the British battle in the region.

But unable to dock in the harbour, it is believed that in total 34 British ships sank and now experts say that they have found five sunken ships while working on reconstruction of the waterfront in the city of Yevpatoria in the eastern part of the Crimean Peninsula.

The city is located in the Crimean region disputed by Ukraine and Russia and annexed in March 2014, and was badly damaged in 1854 by British, French and Turkish troops as part of the Crimean War.

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By Avi Selk - The Washington Post

Tommy G. Thompson was once one of the greatest treasure hunters of his time: A dark-bearded diver who hauled a trove of gold from the Atlantic Ocean in 1988 — dubbed the richest find in U.S. history.

Years later, accused of cheating his investors out of the fortune, Thompson led federal agents on a great manhunt — pursued from a Florida mansion to a mid-rent hotel room booked under a fake name.

Now Thompson’s beard has grayed, and he lives in an Ohio jail cell, held there until he gives up the location of the gold.

But for nearly two years, despite threats and fines and the best exertions of a federal judge, no one has managed to make Thompson reveal what he did with the treasure.

The wreck of the S.S. Central America waited 130 years for Thompson to come along.

The steamer went down in a hurricane in 1857, taking 425 souls and at least three tons of California gold to the sea floor off South Carolina. Many tried to find it, but none succeeded until a young, shipwreck-obsessed engineer from Columbus, Ohio, built an underwater robot called “Nemo” to pinpoint the Central America, then dive 8,000 feet under the sea and surface the loot.

“A man as personable as he was brilliant, Thompson recruited more than 160 investors to fund his expedition,” Columbus Monthly noted in a profile.

He “spent years studying the ship’s fateful voyage … and developing the technology to plunge deeper in the ocean than anyone had before to retrieve its treasure.”

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