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By Paul Easton


A maritime entrepreneur - and 50 friends - is steaming for the Auckland Islands for a fourth attempt to find gold from a ship that sank 142 years ago.

The General Grant foundered on the remote sub-Antarctic islands on May 14 1866, along with its cargo of gold.

The group left Bluff on Friday, led by Bill Day, of Wellington, who has tried to find the wreck of the General Grant three times.

Over 20 other salvage attempts have been made since 1866.

Mr Day said the trip was as much about showing friends and family the beauty of the islands and sub-Antarctic region as finding gold. "It's such a majestic place.

Having said that, there are definitely a couple of sites I want to check out."

The General Grant had 2576 ounces (73kg) of gold on its manifest, worth around $2.4 million today.

From DNI


The 18th century sailing ship Frau Maria (Vrouw Maria) that was carrying the Hermitage treasures onboard when it sank in the Baltic Sea near the shore of Finland is going to be lifted.

The salvage works will be jointly carried out by the Russian and Finnish parties.

This schooner was transporting treasures ordered by Catherine II the Great for the Hermitage says Anatoli Vilkov, Head of Rossvyazokhrankultura, the Russian media and culture supervision agency.

According to him, jewelry and China collections might have remained intact on board the ship. Previously divers discovered that the cargo had not been damaged during the shipwreck, yet they managed to lift only six items.

The precious cargo intended for the Russian imperial court never reached the shore of the Northern capital. The schooner started off from the seaport in October 1771 yet was caught in a heavy storm and wrecked nearby Aland Islands.

By Jasper Copping

The final resting place of three German U-boats, nicknamed "Hitler's lost fleet", has been found at the bottom of the Black Sea.

The submarines had been carried 2,000 miles overland from Germany to attack Russian shipping during the Second World War, but were scuttled as the war neared its end.

Now, more than 60 years on, explorers have located the flotilla of three submarines off the coast of Turkey.

The vessels, including one once commanded by Germany's most successful U-boat ace, formed part of the 30th Flotilla of six submarines, taken by road and river across Nazi-occupied Europe, from Germany's Baltic port at Kiel to Constanta, the Romanian Black Sea port.

In two years, the fleet sank dozens of ships and lost three of their number to enemy action.

But in August 1944, Romania switched sides and declared war on Germany, leaving the three remaining vessels stranded. With no base and unable to sail home - the Bosporus and Dardanelles were closed to them because of Turkish neutrality - their captains were ordered to scuttle the boats before rowing ashore and trying to make their way back to Germany.

However, all three crews were caught and interned by the Turks.

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From PR-Inside

Marine archaeologists will begin work in June to uncover the sand-buried hull of a 2,300 year-old cargo ship thought to have been ferrying wine from the Aegean island of Chios before it sank off Cyprus' southern coast, researchers said Thursday.

The vessel, dating from the late Classical period (mid-fourth century B.C.) is one of only a few such ships to have been found so well-preserved, said University of Cyprus visiting marine archaeologist Stella Demesticha.

«The shipwreck looks very promising about shedding light on the nautical and economic history of the period in the east Mediterranean» The wreck rests on the seabed at a depth of 44 meters (144 feet) some 2½ kilometers (1½ miles) off the island's southern coast.

Demesticha said the wreck was also unique because it lies at a depth that divers can easily reach, unlike similar discoveries found in deeper waters.

Unreleased underwater photographs that researchers took of the vessel on initial surveying dives in November show a jumble of dozens of amphorae - clay urns used in antiquity to carry liquids and solid foodstuffs - lying on the seabed in the shape of the ship.

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By Murphy Givens

Four ships were making ready to sail from San Juan de Ulúa, the port of Veracruz, on April 9, 1554.

They were homeward bound for Seville, with a stop to meet the rest of the armada at Havana.

As the ships were taking on cargo and passengers, a Dominican priest, Juan Ferrer, had forebodings of disaster.

"Woe be those who are going to Spain," Ferrer told fellow passengers.

"Neither we nor the fleet will ever arrive.

Most of us will perish." Four great-bellied galleons -- the Santa Maria de Yciar, San Estebán, Espíritu Santo, and San Andrés -- were loaded with gold, cochineal, but mostly silver from the vast silver mines at Zacatecas.

It was a treasure fleet -- Plata Flota, the silver fleet.

The priest's forebodings of disaster were forgotten. The ships had smooth sailing across the Gulf.

They landed at Havana to join other ships in the armada, a precaution against the dangers of piracy.

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By Robert Fairburn


A German U-boat sunk off the Scottish coast more than 90 years ago has finally been discovered by two divers after a five-year search.

Jim MacLeod and Martin Sinclair found the wreckage of the U12, the first ever submarine to have an aeroplane carried on its deck, 25 miles from the Berwickshire port of Eyemouth at the weekend.

The exact location of the 60-metre boat had become a mystery to the two divers after a number of searches of the seabed where it was recorded to have been lying proved fruitless.

The pair worked with a researcher and shipwreck enthusiast Kevin Heath, of Orkney, who tracked down the logbooks of British destroyers HMS Ariel, Acheron and Attack, all of which were involved in the sinking of the U12.

The precise location of the vessel was then pinpointed, 15 miles from where it was originally thought to be.

Mr MacLeod, 45, a computer systems analyst from Bo'ness, and Mr Sinclair, 47, a mechanical engineer from Falkirk, then enlisted the help of specialist Eyemouth firm Marine Quest Dive Charters to visit the location where they found the submarine lying 150 feet down on the seabed.

It was the first time the wreck had been visited since it was sunk in 1915.

By Roger Highfield

A new DNA technique could provide a revolutionary insight into the lives of the Ancient Greeks - using jars that have lain on the seabed for millennia.

These amphoras were the cargo containers of the ancient world, used for shipping all kinds of things, from wine to olive oil.

Studying those left in shipwrecks could tell us much about the trade, agriculture and climate of historic societies - except that the contents wash away over the centuries, leaving archaeologists with glorified empty bottles.

Now a team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the US and Lund University in Sweden has performed the first successful extraction of DNA from the remains of a 2,400-year-old shipwreck off the Greek island of Chios.

The wooden merchant ship sank in the fourth century BC, coming to rest 70 metres down.

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From The Age

Going, going, gone ...

Vin Maskell reports there are almost 200 sunken ships in the waters of Port Phillip Bay.

When the party hire boat the Maheno sank near the mouth of the Yarra River two weeks before Christmas, it joined a long list of vessels that have come to grief in the not-so-benign waters of Port Phillip Bay, not far from the beaches that Melburnians flock to over summer.

Heritage Victoria estimates there are 130 shipwrecks in the bay, with a further 50 at the narrow Port Phillip Heads between Point Lonsdale and Point Nepean.

In the bay itself, these include the 19th-century warship HMVS Cerberus, an 1890s wooden pleasure yacht, cargo boats and passenger ferries.

Five people died when the steel steamer the Kakariki collided with another steamer, the Caradale, off Williamstown at 11pm on January 29, 1937.

The Kakariki sank within minutes and later salvage operations were hampered by the vessel being stuck in four metres of mud.

Full story...