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By Stephanie March - ABC News
 

A team of US researchers believe they have narrowed down the search for the wreck of Captain Cook's HMS Endeavour to a group of five ships in a Rhode Island harbour, but it is unclear if any artefacts would ever make their way to Australia.

The remains of the ship the British explorer used for his voyage to Australia, supposedly uncovered in Newport Harbour, legally belong to the state of Rhode Island.

US archaeologists from the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project (RIMAP) will work with the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney to confirm the remains of a ship found in the harbour belong to the HMS Endeavour.

They knew Endeavour was likely to be one of 13 ships scuttled in 1778 by the British navy in order to blockade a channel during the American Revolution.

The research team, headed by marine archaeologist Kathy Abbass, uncovered new documents from the UK which allowed them to narrow down the location of the Endeavour in a 500-by-500-metre area.

The marine archaeologists believe five ships are in that section of the harbour. The team has already mapped four of the wreck sites.

"We have one more year to do of this kind of preliminary work," Dr Abbass said. "But to figure out which ones are which means we have got to do excavation." Australian National Maritime Museum maritime archaeologist Kieran Hosty said experts dived the area in September after using a site scan sonar, but the water was extremely murky.

He predicted 10 to 15 per cent of the hull remained.

Full story...

From The Vintage News

There is good news for marine archaeologists.

The shipwreck discovered in 2011 near the coast of Panama has finally been identified as belonging to a Spanish merchant ship.

The wreck identified as Nuestra Señora de Encarnación, along with the tools and weapons found aboard the ship, has been well-preserved for more than 330 years.

Encarnación was a Mexican-built Spanish merchant vessel in the Tierra Firme fleet that supplied Spanish colonies in the Americas. In 1681, a storm sunk the loaded ship at the mouth of the Charges River in Panama.

Scientists have found over a hundred boxes filled with sword blades, lead seals, ceramic artefacts, scissors, nails, wooden barrels, and mule shoes preserved in the wreck.

Scientists are thrilled with the find as it will help them understand the ship-building technology of the fifteenth century.

According to Fritz Hanselmann, who is an archaeologist with the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University, “Ships that were built hundreds of years ago didn’t come with blueprints.”

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By Hugo Gye - Mail Online

A collection of rags found at the bottom of the North Sea has been revealed to contain a luxurious wardrobe which may have belonged to one of Charles I's female courtiers.

Divers off the coast of the Netherlands found the treasure, which came from a shipwreck, after it was exposed by a storm which washed away silt that had covered it for four centuries.

When they separated the items, they realised that they had discovered one remarkably well-preserved dress as well as a book linking the find to the Stuart dynasty.

And now researchers have found a letter which proves that one of the ships carrying the retinue of Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I, to Holland in 1642 sank in the same area as the new discovery.

They have been able to make a tentative suggestion that the gown could have belonged to Jane Ker, Countess of Roxburghe, a controversial Catholic adviser to the queen who accompanied her on the voyage in the early years of the English Civil War.

Divers from the Dutch island of Texel frequently stumble upon old shipwrecks because the area was used by vessels as a safe harbour while they were ploughing the North Sea, and many got in trouble while entering or leaving the region.

They first found the Stuart haul in August 2014, shortly after the treasure was uncovered from the silt due to turbulent conditions.

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By David L. Phillips - Star Tribune

A Navy tugboat that disappeared after it sailed from San Francisco in 1921 has been found by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researchers in shark-infested waters about 30 miles west of San Francisco, ending a 95-year-old mystery.

The tugboat, the USS Conestoga, left California with 56 officers and crew members on board, bound for Tutuila, American Samoa, by way of Hawaii.

When the ship failed to arrive, the Navy carried out an expansive air and sea search, but only a battered lifeboat with the letter “C” on its bow was ever found, hundreds of miles off the expected course.

In 2009, the NOAA Office of Coast Survey spotted an uncharted shipwreck near the Farallon Islands, a forbidding cluster of sharp rocks known for shipwrecks and a large population of great white sharks.

Video from an investigation in 2015 using remotely operated vehicles shows the shipwreck under nearly 200 feet of water, encrusted in rust but largely intact, festooned with colorful sea anemones, rockfish and eels. Using the video, the NOAA and Navy researchers confirmed that the wreck’s distinctive propeller and deck-mounted gun matched the long-lost tugboat.

“After nearly a century of ambiguity and a profound sense of loss, the Conestoga’s disappearance no longer is a mystery,” Manson Brown, a deputy NOAA administrator, said this week.

Weather logs indicate that soon after leaving California, the tugboat hit high winds and rough seas.

A radio transmission relayed by another ship said that the tug was “battling a storm and that the barge she was towing had been torn adrift by heavy seas.”

From Phys.org

During a test dive last week, the Hawai'i Undersea Research Laboratory (HURL) recovered the bronze bell from the I-400 - a World War II-era Imperial Japanese Navy mega-submarine, lost since 1946 when it was intentionally sunk by U.S. forces after its capture.

Longer than a football field at 400 feet, the I-400 was known as a "Sen-Toku" class submarine —the largest submarine ever built until the introduction of nuclear-powered subs in the 1960s.

The I-400 is now protected under the Sunken Military Craft Act and managed by the Department of the Navy. The recovery was led by veteran undersea explorer Terry Kerby, HURL operations director and chief submarine pilot. Kerby was joined by Scott Reed, Chris Kelley, and Max Cremer (all with HURL) on the dive.

The team used both of HURL's human-occupied submersibles, Pisces IV and Pisces V.

Teamwork between the two subs was instrumental in recovering the bell. Since 1992, HURL has used its submersibles to search for historic wreck sites and other submerged cultural resources as part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) maritime heritage research effort. Heritage properties like historic wreck sites are non-renewable resources possessing unique information about the past.

This recovery effort was possible because of a collaboration between the University of Hawai'i School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, California State University-Chico (CSU-C), Naval History and Heritage Command and the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum.

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From Yle.fi
 

The Finnish Maritime Administration confirmed the identity of 300 year-old frigate Huis te Warmelo on Monday. The vessel, which was found at a depth of 64 metres near Helsinki, was once part of the Dutch navy, more specifically a region known at the time as West Frisia.

The ship was identified on the basis of hull dimensions, location, structure and its canon fire power.

Divers reported that the vessel was extremely well-preserved and that the wooden structures were in surprisingly good condition, since all of the canons were still located on the gun deck.

The ship was a member of the West Frisian Admiralty or navy and had been built in Medemblik, a port town in the West Frisia region of modern-day Netherlands.

No other frigate from the latter part of the Dutch golden age has been found in such sound condition. The Huis te Warmelo apparently ran aground in the shallows off Helsinki before quickly sinking to the sea bottom.

The ship was first detected years ago when the maritime administration MKL conducted a seabed mapping exercise. However documentation of the wreck didn’t begin until 2014. At that time it was confirmed that the vessel was a 35-metre triple-mast frigate.

Research indicates that the ship sank in an upright position after running aground, explaining why all 17 canons on the upper gun deck are still in their original positions.

Researchers leaned on Russian and Swedish archive material to determine that the ship didn’t belong to either seafaring power. Officials then stated looking to other countries with naval forces.

Historian Peter Swart helped solve the mystery of the ship’s origins when he unearthed an old Dutch sea chart, which marked the spot where the war ship had gone down. The date of the sinking was recorded as 1715.

Researchers plan to continue their work during the summer. Weather conditions permitting, the Finnish research company SubZone will dive to probe the wreck and further document their findings.

One of their main goals will be to verify the name of the vessel.

By Kristin Romey - National Geographic

The oldest shipwreck from Europe's Golden Age of Exploration has been found off the coast of Oman, the country's Ministry of Heritage and Culture will announce on Tuesday.

The wreck is believed to be that of the Esmeralda, which was part of a fleet led by legendary Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama during his second voyage to India (1502-1503).

The wreck was initially located in 1998 and excavated between 2013 and 2015 by a partnership between the Oman Ministry of Heritage and Culture and the shipwreck recovery company Bluewater Recoveries Ltd., which is directed by David Mearns.

Support for the project was provided by the National Geographic Society Expeditions Council.

Analysis of the thousands of objects recovered from the wreck is ongoing, but researchers have concluded in an interim report that the vessel belonged to da Gama's fleet — and is in all probability the Esmeralda.

Their conclusion is based on extraordinary artifacts that include a Portuguese coin minted for trade with India (one of only two coins of this type known to exist) and stone cannonballs engraved with what appear to be the initials of Vincente Sodré, da Gama's maternal uncle and the commander of the Esmeralda.

If this is indeed a wreck from da Gama's 1502-1503 fleet, it will be the earliest ship from the Age of Exploration ever to be found and excavated.

Full article...

By Kim Palmer - Reuters
 

A U.S. judge is keeping a former treasure hunter in jail for again failing to answer questions about the location of 500 commemorative gold coins from the discovery of a 19th century shipwreck, prosecutors said on Monday.

Thomas "Tommy" G. Thompson, 63, of Columbus, Ohio, was arrested in 2015 and jailed because he failed to appear in court to disclose the whereabouts of the gold coins discovered in 1988 in the wreck of the SS Central America.

Last December, Thompson was sentenced to one year of supervised release, a $250,000 fine and 208 hours of community service, but the sentence was not to take effect until he revealed where the coins were.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley of Ohio found Thompson in contempt of a court order in a civil lawsuit over the treasure, said Jennifer Thornton, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's office in Columbus.

Marbley also continued a daily fine of $1,000 until Thompson reveals the location of the treasure, Thornton said. Thompson's lawyer could not immediately be reached to comment.

Thompson told the court last December that he had a stroke and suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome, short-term memory loss and other physical problems. He apologized then for not appearing in court previously to answer questions.

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