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From RT

The missile cruiser Varyag has brought the jack of its legendary namesake home to Russia. The Varyag was sunk by its own crew in 1904 during the Russo-Japanese war following a fierce battle against an overwhelming force.

The jack (a military naval flag flown on a vessel’s bow), has been lent by a South Korean museum as part of the celebration of the 20th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Moscow and Seoul next year.

The relic was handed over to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on November 11 during the G20 summit

From the Pacific port Vladivostok, the jack will be delivered to St. Petersburg’s Navy Museum, where it will be displayed for two years. Earlier, the flag, along with several other objects from the Varyag and the gunboat Koreets, which also took part in the historic battle, were part of a traveling exhibition of the city of Incheon’s Metropolitan Museum, which visited a number of Russian cities over nine months.

The Varyag and the Koreets were two Russian navy ships stationed in Korea’s Chemulpo Bay (now part of Incheon) in February 1904, when a vastly superior Japanese fleet arrived to capture this strategic port. Russian commander Captain Rudnev declined to surrender and decided to try to fight his way out of the port and head to the Russian naval base in Port Arthur.

In the ensuing two-hour battle, the two Russian ships failed to break free and suffered much damage and many casualties. Then, Rudnev decided to destroy his two commands rather than let Japanese capture them. After crewmembers were transported to neutral vessels, the Koreets was blown up and Varyag sunk.

The desperate stand-off impressed all witnesses, including the Japanese, who later cited it as an example of Samurai conduct. There is a popular song describing the battle and the sinking of the Varyag.

By Meg Jones - Journal Sentinel

At 8:30 p.m. on Oct. 22, 1929, as the S.S. Milwaukee car ferry was caught in a ferocious gale, the ship's purser wrote this note and tucked it into a watertight case: The ship is taking on water fast.

We have turned around and headed for Milwaukee. Pumps are working but the sea gate is bent and won't keep water out. (Crew compartment) is flooded. Seas are tremendous. Things look bad. 

By the time the note was found, the ship's purser and the rest of his shipmates were already dead. A few members of the crew - some accounts say 52 died on the S.S. Milwaukee, others say it was 47 - managed to escape the 338-foot-long car ferry before it plunged to the bottom of Lake Michigan, along with its cargo of rail cars carrying bathtubs, automobiles, lumber, barley, canned peas and salt.

Four crew members fled in one of the lifeboats but it wasn't a refuge, only another vessel of death. Their bodies were found in the lifeboat four days after the ferry foundered.

Now a popular wreck for scuba divers, the car ferry sits in 90 to 120 feet of water three miles northeast of Atwater Beach. For non-divers, though, it's hard to picture just what the wreck looks like or its historical significance in a time when railroads often moved rail cars by water to avoid crowded rail yards.

Soon, though, the S.S. Milwaukee will be more accessible, not just to divers but to those who won't need a tank of compressed air to see the shipwreck.

Starting next summer archaeologists will survey and document the S.S. Milwaukee and four other Lake Michigan shipwrecks in Wisconsin waters through a federal grant awarded this month to the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Chosen because they represent a cross section of historically significant vessels, the shipwrecks are near Milwaukee, Manitowoc, Kewaunee and Sturgeon Bay.

"Part of what we were looking for were five shipwrecks that are already popular with people," said Jim Draeger, deputy state historic preservation officer. "They're all ones that are pretty intact and have good archaeological potential."

The $170,000 grant from the Federal Highway Administration Transportation Enhancement program will pay for digital photo mosaics, sketches and measurements, photos, site plans and historic research.

Digital photo mosaics illustrate the wreck as it now looks by piecing together hundreds of photos taken by scuba divers. Divers will measure and sketch the wreck, said Draeger.

Read more...

Alex Dawson/Aalands Landskapsregering

By Richard Vines - Bloomberg

As windswept, sparsely populated places go, Aaland is probably not the spot to sport an Amy Winehouse beehive or to go in search of a crowd.

Just 27,500 people live in this Finnish-controlled archipelago of 6,500 islands in the Baltic Sea, 11,000 of them in the only town, Mariehamn.

If you’re looking for vintage fizz, however, this may be just the destination for you.

In July, divers found a shipwreck, 50 meters (yards) down, in the waters south of Aaland. The hull was mainly intact and on board there was a precious cargo: bottles of Champagne that may be almost 200 years old, the Aaland Board of Antiquities says. Today, I am among 16 journalists scheduled to taste it.

“Despite the fact that it was so amazingly old, there was a freshness to the wine,” sommelier Ella Grussner Cromwell- Morgan told Aalandstidningen newspaper after trying a bottle that was opened. “It wasn’t debilitated in any way. Rather, it had a clear acidity which reinforced the sweetness. Finally, a very clear taste of having been stored in oak casks.”

The construction of the hull suggests it dates back to the early 1800s, and plates on board were manufactured by Rorstrand porcelain factory between 1780 and 1830, the antiquities board says on Aaland’s website.

The sweetness to the Champagne -- about 70 bottles were discovered and one has been opened -- prompted speculation it might have been headed for Russia.

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From BBC News

Investors who helped bankroll a salvage expedition to recover sunken gold off the coast of Anglesey claim they were misled by the project leader.

Veteran diver Joe McCormack sought the cash after finding what he claimed was evidence of a wrecked galleon intended for Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1746.

But his salvage bid was stopped in late 2009 after running out of money - without unearthing any gold.

Mr McCormack said investors who spoke to the BBC had "an axe to grind".

The BBC's Inside Out North West programme has spoken to 10 investors who funded the ill-fated excavation project who feel they have been misled in some way.

Richard Holland, a doctor of genetics from Southport, put money in and convinced nine other friends and family to do the same, making a total investment of £70,000.

He said: "He [McCormack] was very convincing about the project. It was going to reinvigorate the area around Holyhead. There was going to be a major documentary about the project that we were on and there was going to be a book published as well.

"We've been lied to... not just me, there's a lot of people been told the same story.

"I feel very bitter about it. I feel very embarrassed by it, embarrassed because I've introduced some of my friends into it and I feel bitterly sorry that I've done that and I'm more than angry at Joe McCormack."

Read more...

Photo Deep Blue Marine

By Lois M. Collins and Kassi Cox - Deseret News

It is a windy, wicked strip of the Caribbean and the battle is wildly uneven: three English ships hammering the French vessel Le Scipion and its escort, Le Sybille. Still, Le Scipion, only four years old, is a veteran of this Revolutionary War.

She's fought alongside the upstart Americans in the tide-turning Battle of Chesapeake Bay and later in the Battle of the Saints.

Although her captain, Nicolas Henri de Grimouard, and 43 of the crew are wounded, another 15 dead, Le Scipion will not back down.

In the heat of battle, cannonballs flying, the crew manages to rake the 90-gun London, wounding it. Then they race the ship away, into the shelter of Samana Bay, just off the coast of Hispanolia, now the Dominican Republic.

As he tells the story on a recent October day, Wilf Blum is sketching the treacherous Mona Passage on the whiteboard in his Utah office, punctuating it with dotted lines and trade routes and mad scribbles that oddly contribute to the sense of a frenzied fight.

There's a chest at his feet and a visitor's quick glance spots photographs and coins and bits of pottery.

"I get caught up in the story," he says. "Stop me if I go on too long or you get bored."

Then he dives back into the October 1782 battle. Enemy fire, he says, can't take her down. But a reef can. As Le Scipion moves to drop anchor, she founders, then begins to break apart. There's just time to get everyone off the ship before she disappears into 25 feet of water.

Nearly 200 years, he says. That's how long she lay there before world-famous diver Tracy Bowden found the ship in 1978. Even then, it would be close to three decades before Le Scipion would get much undivided attention.

Blum is a "recovery" expert in this most unlikely of places, landlocked Midvale, Utah, headquarters of Deep Blue Marine.

As he draws pictures and rattles off facts about famous battles and lesser-known ships, the fax machine in the background is spitting out photographs in real time of the items Blum's twin daughters are recovering from the wreckage of Le Scipion: the musketballs and coins, the still-intact vinaigrette and the decorative buttons of the Revolutionary War.

By Betsa Marsh - Miami Herald

But another contingent zeroes in on the region’s quirky collections, from Marilyn Monroe’s locks at Leila’s Hair Museum to TWA’s paper flight attendant dresses at the Airline History Museum.

And who can resist the bullet hole in the Jesse James Home where that dirty coward Robert Ford shot the outlaw in 1882 ?

But lovers of the roadside bizarre hit the jackpot with Kansas City’s Arabia Steamboat Museum.

Museum owner David Hawley was as susceptible to the lure of shipwrecks and buried treasure as the next explorer. His distinctive siren call, however, drew him not to the Atlantic or Pacific, but to a Kansas cornfield.

His quest was for the Arabia, a side-wheel steamboat that was only 3 years old when she rammed a log and sank in the muddy Missouri River in 1856. Hawley was undaunted when his research indicated that the wreck was probably under Judge Norman Sortor’s corn crop.

The Missouri River had moved east a half mile, leaving the steamboat shell and her mystery cargo buried under 45 feet of river-bottom silt. Once the Sortor family gave permission for exploration, Hawley arrived with his proton magnetometer.

“I walked back and forth across that field,” Hawley recalled. “It didn’t take long before the metal detector picked up the boilers.”

Hawley was on his way to unearthing — literally — one of the great shipwrecks in American history. Today, the boat’s treasures gleam at the Arabia Steamboat Museum in Kansas City’s historic City Market.

Hawley quickly spread shipwreck fever among his family and friends. His father, Bob, and late brother Greg were soon digging side by side, along with friends Jerry Mackey and David Luttrell, all partners in River Salvage Inc.

The quintet knew they were searching for a fully loaded steamboat, provisioned in St. Louis and headed for pioneer settlements in Missouri, Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska. But what condition would that antebellum cache be in now, after 132 years?

On Dec. 5, 1988, they found out. The adventurers pried the lid off an oak barrel and pulled out a muddy but intact china bowl, the first of 200 unbroken pieces unearthed that day.

It was the start of a flood of artifacts, more than 200 tons pulled from the mire of the Arabia’s holds. Hundreds of hats, thousands of boots, cases of still-green pickles — a sunken emporium rising again to the surface.

“This is the largest wet organic collection of artifacts in any archaeological site in the world,” said Hawley, who asked advice from preservationists around the globe.

The partners took on the massive cleaning and restoration task themselves, turning Bob and Flo Hawley’s kitchen into a preservation lab.

“We didn’t have any money for food anyway,” David Hawley joked.

The partners initially financed the project themselves, raising $200,000. “We did great [with that] for three weeks,” said Hawley, who worked in the family refrigeration business. “Then we went to the bank and borrowed some, then went back again and borrowed some more.”

The greatest expense was the equipment and supplies for 20 dewatering wells to pump groundwater away from the excavation pit, working at a furious 20,000 gallons a minute. Friends and family members donated their time to the project that ran round the clock for four months.

The cadre salvaged all the artifacts and parts of the Arabia herself, finally allowing the groundwater to reclaim the hull in 1989.

Not content with homespun detection, salvage and preservation, River Salvage Inc. decided to design its own museum, too. “We were originally going to sell what we found,” Hawley said, “but it was such a neat collection we didn’t want to break it up.”

Today, the power of the Arabia Steamboat Museum is its sheer volume. Not one thimble, but a phalanx of thimbles. Not one pair of children’s boots, but a wall of boots.

China displays worthy of a department store. Hundreds of hammers, keys, whale oil lamps, clay pipes, hat pins, bottled medicines, matches and candles: All were on their way to waiting settlers in the West.

The international scope of the goods is impressive, too: Chinese silk, English Wedgwood china, Bohemian trade beads and French perfumes, one of which has been duplicated in the museum’s own 1856 brand.

Some finds surprised even professional historians, such as the rubber shoes patented by Goodyear in 1849. “A living history settlement near here now lets its re-enactors wear rubber shoes, because they were on the Arabia in 1856,” Flo Hawley said. “They thought they came much later.

“The rubber items are the only things that no one’s been able to help us preserve, because they didn’t think rubber could last this long.” The rubber shoes on display were merely washed to remove a century of accumulated muck; there are 250 more awaiting preservation.

About half of the Arabia’s artifacts are on display in the large museum. Others are frozen in blocks of ice, awaiting preservation, a process that could take 20 more years.

Each explorer has a favorite find. David Hawley’s is the food.

The Arabia was stocked with oysters, sardines, coffee beans, pickles, ketchup, bottled pie filling and crates of gin, cognac and still-bubbly champagne. The excavators toasted each other with the champagne, “and one of our guys ate one of the sweet pickles,” David Hawley said. “He’s still alive today.

“The blueberry and cherry pie fillings were amazing. We would take them out of the packing straw and the sun would shine on those bottles and it looked like you could go home and make a pie with it.”

One of the most disquieting artifacts is a bleached, twisted walnut tree trunk almost two feet in diameter -- the recovered snag that took the steamboat to the bottom.

The log pierced the hull and smashed the timbers, causing Arabia to take on water and sink 15 feet to the river bottom.

Over the years as the river shifted course, silt and sand bars built up in the Missouri — too thick to drink, too thin to plow — until the Arabia was 45 feet beneath Judge Sorter’s cornfield.

Arabia was just one of 300 to 400 steamboats estimated to lie in the graveyard of the Missouri.

After two decades of research, excavation and restoration, David Hawley’s shipwreck fever rages unchecked.

“I’d like to find a steamboat that went down in the 1830s,” he said, “and take the whole boat and cargo out. That would be a phenomenal exhibit.”

His father, Bob, adds the only cautionary note to his son’s treasure-hunting ardor. “There’s one little saying our wives have: ‘One boat, one wife.’ ”

Photo Kageaki Smith

By Meredith Ebbin - Bermuda Sun

The shipwreck that led to Bermuda's settlement had broad implications for the New World. A monument to the eclectic band of sailors who made history was unveiled yesterday in St. George's.

On June 2, 1609, a fleet of nine ships set sail from Plymouth, England, headed for Jamestown, Virginia, leaving in its wake the hopes and dreams of an entire nation.

The ships were packed with passengers and supplies for the Jamestown colony, which was founded two years earlier.

Jamestown was another disaster waiting to happen. The English had made numerous attempts to establish a foothold in Americas, where the Spanish reigned supreme. All had been spectacular failures and Jamestown was headed in that direction.

As every Bermudian schoolchild knows, seven weeks later, on July 28, after a brutal storm lasting four days, the Sea Venture was wedged onto a rock off Fort St. Catherine and the 150 passengers, two of them pregnant women, scrambled ashore, wet and bedraggled, but miraculously alive.

The expedition leaders — Admiral Sir George Somers, captain Christopher Newport and Sir Thomas Gates, the governor-designate of Virginia, were inexplicably, all sailing together aboard the Sea Venture.

Others making the journey were writers Silvester Jourdain and William Strachey, whose first-hand accounts of the shipwreck and the survivors’ 10-month sojourn in Bermuda gave renewed hope to Virginia Company investors and became the inspiration for Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Passengers who went on to earn a permanent place in New World history were John Rolfe, Stephen Hopkins and Anglican minister, Rev. Christopher Bucke.

Much lower down on the social scale, in a world in which class and rank were paramount, was Christopher Carter. He is the only one of the 150 passengers to have stayed put in Bermuda and is considered the first Bermudian.

Yesterday afternoon, at a ceremony organised by the Corporation of St. George’s and the St. George’s Foundation, a monument etched with the names of 50 people whom historians have definitely identified as Sea Venture passengers was unveiled at Barry Road, St. George’s.

Historian George Cook, a retired president of the Bermuda College, has made it his mission to track down and compile the names of passengers — a journey that has taken him to Virginia to inspect 17th century census records.

Read more...

By Cahal Milmo - Independent

With 25 guns and a plunder-thirsty crew, La Marquise de Tourny was the scourge of the British merchant fleet some 260 years ago.

For up to a decade, the French frigate terrorised English ships by seizing their cargoes and crew under a form of state-sanctioned piracy designed to cripple British trade.

Then, in the mid-18th century, the 460-ton vessel from Bordeaux, which seized three valuable cargo ships in a single year and distinguished itself by apparently never being captured by the English, disappeared without a trace.

Nearly 300 years later, the fate of La Marquise and its crew can finally be revealed.

Wreckage from the frigate, including the remarkably well-preserved ship's bell carrying its name and launch date of 1744, has been found in the English Channel some 100 miles south of Plymouth by an American exploration company, suggesting that the feared privateer or "corsair" sank with the loss of all hands in a storm in notoriously treacherous waters off the Channel Islands.

The vessel is the first of its type to be found off British waters and one of only three known around the world, offering a unique insight into a frenetic phase of Anglo-French warfare when both countries set about beefing up their meagre navies in the mid-1700s by providing the captains of armed merchant vessels with "Letters of Marque" to take to the seas and capture enemy ships in revenge for attacks on other cargo convoys.

The result was an escalating war of commercial attrition during which these privately-owned English and French floating raiders fought each other to a stalemate by seizing more than 3,000 vessels each in a nine year period between 1739 and 1748 as both sides sought to choke off valuable trade with their colonies in America and the West Indies. The proceeds from the sale of a single cargo could be enough to make a corsair's crew rich for life.

Dr Sean Kingsley, a British marine archaeologist who has studied the remains of La Marquise de Tourny, told The Independent: "It is a rare symbol of the mid-18th century need to fuse business with warfare at a time when naval fleets were small.

Many sea captains dreamed of finding enemy ships stuffed with treasure and becoming rich beyond their wildest dreams."

The wreck was first discovered by researchers working for Florida-based Odyssey Marine Exploration in 2008, but it has taken two years of painstaking archaeological detective work to conclusively establish the identity of La Marquise, not least because the site in the western end of the English Channel has been badly damaged by trawlers.

Evidence such as the ship's hefty 52kg bell could now be offered on loan to French and British museums.