HOT NEWS !

From Western Morning News

Fragments of a ship believed to be one of the first ever documented to have fallen victim to the notorious rocks of the Isles of Scilly more than 700 years ago have been located.

Diver and historian Todd Stevens, who has an impressive pedigree as a latter day underwater treasure hunter, has this summer located two potential archeological sites in the waters around his home on the islands.

In one, he found pottery which he believes could have come from a ship which sank in 1305 - the only Medieval vessel which has been documented as lost at Scilly and possibly its oldest shipwreck site.

Meanwhile on the second he found a bottle dated around 1780 to 1820 and remains of a cargo which he believes may have originated just 28 miles away in Penzance.

Mr Stevens said they were exciting finds.

“It is certainly one of the oldest sites at Scilly and could possibly be the oldest,” he said.

“I have been working at these sites all season. It’s about following a trail which leads to a discovery.”

The finds, which have been declared to the Receiver of Wrecks, who administers marine salvage, were located around Nut Rock, near to the inhabited island of Tresco.

Mr Stevens said he found some items of pottery and lifted them from the site before suspecting there was actually a wreck in the area.

However, after finding even more items, he realised he had stumbled across a wreck site.

Full story...

By Gemma Mullin - Dailymail

The world's oldest bottle of mineral water discovered on board a recovered shipwreck from the bottom of the Baltic Sea had been refilled with alcohol - and it's still perfectly safe to drink.

The sealed 200-year-old 'Selters' water stoneware was found by researchers exploring the F-53-31 shipwreck in Gdańsk Bay, near the Polish coast in June.

It was submitted for testing to uncover whether it contained original Selters water and preliminary analysis found it had a 14-per cent alcohol distillate – which could be vodka or gin diluted with water.

Selters is a supplier of high-quality carbonated water, first discovered about 1,000 years ago in the Taunus Mountains area in Germany.

It was one of the oldest types of mineral water in Europe, with many claiming that a few sips of the water, also known as 'fluid treasure', can boost strength and health.

Tomasz Berdnarz, an underwater archaeologist from the National Maritime Museum, led the search on the shipwreck.

He said: ‘The bottle dates back to the period of 1806 to 1830 and has been recovered during the works on the F-53-31 shipwreck, or the so-called Glazik – which means small rock in Polish’.

The 12 inch (30cm) flask is believed to have been manufactured in Ranschbach, Germany - about 25 miles away from the Selters water spring.

The bottle and its contents were sent to the J.S. Hamilton chemical laboratory in Gdynia, Poland at the beginning of July and the final results are expected to be completed early next month.

Mr Berdnarz told Poland’s Ministry of Science and Science Education: ‘This means it would not cause poisoning. Apparently, however, it does not smell particularly good’.

The springs of this mineral water went dry in the beginning of the 19th century and the characteristic stoneware bottles became rationed goods.

Full story...

By Maureen Milford - Delaware Online

A Florida federal judge has asked a Wilmington lawyer and his prominent law firm to explain why he shouldn't sanction them for bad faith litigation in connection with their conduct in a bogus sunken treasure case.

U.S. District Court Judge James Lawrence King of the Southern District of Florida said sufficient evidence was presented to require the issuance of the show cause order directed at Wilmington attorney Bruce Silverstein and Young Conaway Stargatt & Taylor.

King directed a U.S. marshal to serve his show cause order, which also names another party in Hawaii, on Silverstein and James L. Patton Jr., chairman of Young Conaway on Rodney Square.

The order is the result of a long-running federal case that reads like an adventure novel.

The plot features a novice treasure hunter claiming he found thousands of emeralds on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico about 40 miles from Key West, Florida. Some speculated the stones could be pirate's booty from a 16th or 17th century ship or from a Spanish galleon.

"There was so many of them it was like picking cherries on a cherry tree," said the late treasure hunter Jay Miscovich, who in October put a 12-gauge shotgun to his head, pulling the trigger and killing himself.

Then, in a Perry Mason moment in a Florida courtroom in January, a Jupiter, Florida, jewelry store owner stunned the courtroom by revealing the emeralds were purchased from him for about $80,000. This followed test results that showed the stones were coated with epoxy to enhance them.

Young Conaway represented Miscovich's treasure-hunting company, JTR Enterprises LLC, a Delaware company created to hold the title to the emeralds and the exact, secret location of the discovery site.

The law firm had a right to a percentage of the emeralds and anything recovered by Miscovich, according to an affidavit filed by Silverstein.

If King sanctions Silverstein and Young Conaway, they could be prohibited from practicing in the federal Southern District of Florida. King could also enter a substantial monetary judgment or grant other relief that he thinks is proper.

Full story...

From The Telegraph

A Florida family scavenging for sunken treasure on a shipwreck has found the missing piece of a 300-year-old gold filigree necklace sacred to Spanish priests.

Eric Schmitt, a professional salvager, was scavenging with his parents when he found the crumpled, square-shaped ornament on a leisure trip to hunt for artifacts in the wreckage of a convoy of 11 ships that sank in 1715 during a hurricane off central Florida's east coast.

After the discovery last month, a team of Spanish historians realized the piece fit together with another artifact recovered 25 years ago.

It formed an accessory called a pyx, worn on a chain around a high priest's neck to carry the communion host. The dollar value is uncertain.

"It's priceless, unique, one of a kind," said Brent Brisben, operations manager for Queens Jewels, which owns rights to the wreckage, located in 15-foot deep Atlantic Ocean waters.

Mr Schmitt, who lives near Orlando, last year discovered about $300,000 worth of gold coins and chains from the same wreckage, Brisben said. Schmitt's parents have hunted for sunken treasure as a hobby for a decade.

By law, the treasure will be placed into the custody of the US District Court in South Florida, Brisben said. The state of Florida may take possession of up to 20 percent of the find.

The rest will be split evenly between Brisben's company and the Schmitt family.

By Maev Kennedy - The Guardian

A major underwater rescue excavation is being mounted this summer by English Heritage to solve a 349-year-old mystery: how warship the London managed to blow itself up without firing a shot at the enemy, in broad daylight, within sight of the Southend seafront.

Cotswold Archaeology and local divers hope to recover as much information as possible before the ship’s splinted timbers finally disintegrate.

Much of the wreck has been preserved in pristine condition on the bed of the Thames Estuary, sealed within a deep layer of silt and mud, but it has been on the national inventory of heritage at risk since it was realised that timbers were being scoured bare and quickly destroyed by changing tidal patterns, including the dredging for the huge new London Gateway port development.

In 1665 the explosion was a humiliating disaster.

The London was blown in half, and sank almost instantly. At least 300 people died, perhaps many more: a surprising number of the human remains recovered so far have proved to be female, suggesting that as well as the 350 crew, plus extra gunners for the newly mounted artillery, the 17th century ship was carrying many of their wives and sweethearts.

“It’s a good question why there were so many women, and one on which I wouldn’t care to speculate,” archaeologist and diver Dan Pascoe said.

Only 24 men and one woman survived the disaster, clinging to the ornately carved stern which the archaeologists believe was left sticking vertically out of the shallow water.

A few hours later the London’s new commander, Sir John Lawson, would have gone down with the ship: as it was, several of his children and other members of his family died. The London had been refitted at Chatham, and was sailing to Gravesend to collect him and become his flagship in the second Anglo-Dutch wars.

The ship was carrying 300 barrels of gunpowder and it is believed that a 21 gun salute was being prepared. “Clearly there was some hiccup,” Mark Dunkley, maritime archaeologist at English Heritage said.

By Mark Prigg - Mail Online

Four years ago this month, archeologists monitoring the excavation of the former World Trade Center site uncovered a surprise - part of an ancient sailing ship.

At 22 feet (6.7 meters) below today's street level, in a pit that is now an underground security and parking complex, work was forced to stop as excavators uncovered the ancient ship.

Researchers were baffled by the vessel, but a new study has finally revealed how old the ship was - and how it came to be under the site.

The team were able to analyse tree rings on the wooden 'skeleton to show the boat came from wood cut in Philadeplhia in 1773.

Tree-ring scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory were among those asked to analyze its remains for clues about its age and origins.

Researchers at the lab dried the fragments slowly in a cold room and cut thick slices of the wood to get a clear look at the tree rings.

<>In a study now out in the journal Tree Ring Research, the scientists say that an old growth forest in the Philadelphia area supplied the white oak used in the ship’s frame, and that the trees were probably cut in 1773 or so—a few years before the bloody war that established America’s independence from Britain.

Full story...

From Daily Mail

Deep-sea explorers have recovered thousands of gold and silver coins and more than 40 heavy gold bars easily worth millions of dollars, along with a slew of personal items that are a virtual time capsule of the California Gold Rush in a 150-year-old shipwreck.

Newly unsealed court documents provide the first detailed inventory of a treasure trove being resurrected from an 1857 shipwreck at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

The operation is being directed by a court-appointed receiver of an Ohio company, led by a treasure hunter and dreamer named Tommy Thompson, that first found the Central America in 1988 in what was then a monumental achievement that was funded by a group of central Ohio investors.

Immediately after finding the ship and recovering a fraction of its garden of gold, Thompson became embroiled in a decades-long legal battle over who had rights to the treasure and how it was being dispersed.

None of the investors ever saw a return, and in August 2012 after failing to show up for several court hearings, a warrant was issued for Thompson's arrest. He has been a federal fugitive ever since.

Meanwhile, the Central America and its gold sat untouched since 1991, the last time Thompson and his team were at the site.

The new recovery operation was made possible after an Ohio court appointed a receiver over some of Thompson's companies, and he awarded a contract to conduct the efforts to Tampa, Florida-based Odyssey Marine Exploration.

The inventories, unsealed by a federal judge in Virginia late Wednesday, show that Odyssey Marine has brought up 43 solid gold bars, 1,300 $20 double eagle gold coins, and thousands more gold and silver coins.

Full story...

From the New Zealand Herald

The remains of a ship belonging to the famed French explorer Rene-Robert Cavelier Sieur de la Salle, which sank off the Texas coast more than three centuries ago, began their final journey Thursday at a museum.

It is the last stop in a voyage that began in 1685 with La Salle's ill-fated expedition to find the mouth of the Mississippi River.

The keel and other large structural pieces of the ship La Belle, which have been preserved in a gigantic freeze-dryer at Texas A&M University since 2012, were gingerly loaded onto a truck for the trip to the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin.

The supply ship was built in 1684 and sank two years later during a storm in the Gulf of Mexico's Matagorda Bay, the first in a series of events that dashed France's hopes of colonizing a piece of the New World now known as Texas.

"It's part of Texas and Texas history," said Peter Fix, assistant director of the university's Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation.

Texas Historical Commission archaeologists found the shipwreck in 1995 in murky water, built a dam around the site and pumped it dry.

Researchers dug through mud to retrieve the nearly intact hull and some 700,000 items, including three cases of rifles, plus other guns, swords, a cannon and ammunition, and beads and mirrors intended for trade and tool chests containing hammers and saws.

Archaeologists also found a skeleton, believed to be the remains of a crew member or settler among the 40 or so people aboard.

Full story...