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By Alex Millmow - SMH

The RMS Titanic sails out of Port Phillip Heads this week. More than 300,000 Melburnians have visited Titanic: The Artefact Exhibition since it opened in April at the Melbourne Museum.

It's apparent we can't get enough of the legendary ship, nor can the rest of the world; some 22 million people worldwide have seen the exhibition.

Last week an original promotional poster of the famous ship celebrating its maiden voyage sold for £67,000 ($A109,000) in London. 

The artefacts exhibition featured various odds and ends retrieved from the debris marking the site of the shipwreck. It also included a 16-tonne section of the hull salvaged from the wreck. Hoisting it up from four kilometres down would have taken some doing.

Titanic's rediscovery 25 years ago launched a debate over ownership of the wreck and the artefacts around it.

The American company presenting the exhibition in Melbourne, RMS Titanic Inc, was granted salvor-in-possession rights by a US federal court in 1994. It began sending down manned submersibles to retrieve artefacts from the wreck and the field of debris.

The company mounted six long and arduous expeditions to amass a collection of relics including pieces of china, ship fittings and, movingly, the personal effects of passengers and crew.

The items were subsequently displayed in galleries to tell the history of the ship from genesis to construction and destruction.

You could say that the RMS Titanic's time in Melbourne has been a doubly profitable one. Initially, the American court stipulated that RMS Titanic neither owned the artefacts, nor the wreck itself.

Now a court decision has given RMS Titanic the right to own what it has brought up from the depths. That is, RMS Titanic can now sell artefacts to other galleries and private collectors.

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Pedro Espinosa - El Pais

En la inmensidad del océano Atlántico, un simple botón ha dado la respuesta a una incógnita histórica. El botón 79, procedente de un uniforme francés del siglo XIX, ha permitido localizar, sin riesgo a equivocarse, el punto exacto donde descansan los restos del Fougueux (Fogoso), un navío francés que se hundió con medio millar de soldados tras haber participado en la histórica batalla de Trafalgar (1805).

Es la primera vez que, de forma científica, se verifica el pecio de una embarcación protagonista de la celébre contienda.

La investigación, coronada con éxito por el Centro de Arqueología Subacuática de Andalucía (CAS), con sede en Cádiz, tiene sus raíces en viejas creencias.

Durante años se sospechó que un conjunto de cañones sumergidos frente a la playa de Camposoto, en San Fernando (Cádiz), pertenecían a un buque hundido en la batalla de Trafalgar, que enfrentó a una escuadra combinada de Francia y España contra la armada inglesa.

Las pesquisas del CAS arrancaron en 1999, cuando un buzo, Juan Domingo Mayo, avisó al entonces recién creado centro de la existencia de unos cañones perfectamente visibles en una laja submarina a nueve metros de profundidad. Así arrancaron 10 años de análisis, inmersiones y búsquedas del personal del CAS, un organismo que depende de la Consejería andaluza de Cultura.

Los arqueólogos se sumergieron varias veces y comprobaron la existencia de restos de un buque de guerra de época moderna o contemporánea. Enseguida se pensó en Trafalgar. La batalla había dejado tras de sí numerosos hundimientos.

"Revisamos las fuentes documentales y descubrimos que el Fougueux se había hundido en la zona", recuerda la arqueóloga Nuria Rodríguez.

El Fougueux llevaba a bordo a más de 500 hombres. Había partido en agosto de Ferrol. Al llegar a Cádiz, se colocó en primera línea y no resistió los ataques de la armada británica, aunque logró sobrevivir. Por poco tiempo.

Lo que no logró el enemigo, lo consiguió un gran temporal, que provocó el hundimiento de la mayoría de los 33 buques españoles y franceses.

Al Fougueux trataron de remolcarlo sin éxito. Se hundió con su medio millar de soldados franceses presos y una veintena de ingleses a bordo.

Sobrevivieron 21 hombres, que llegaron a la playa, fueron alimentados en el Ventorrillo El Chato y dieron pie a relatos que salen a flote 205 años después.

Mas...

By Robert Nolin - Sun Sentinel

Far out in the bleak North Atlantic, waves roll restless over the spot where RMS Titanic lies more than two miles down on the ocean floor.

But ghost hunter William Brower of Coral Springs, a self-educated expert on the Titanic, believes more than waves mark the grave of the world's best known shipwreck. Eerie voices of its doomed passengers, he contends, still can be heard on the salty wind. And Brower intends to capture them.

He's one of nearly 20 paranormal investigators who want to mount a spring expedition to where the massive liner sank nearly 100 years ago. They plan to deploy special microphones to record the spectral echoes — cries of fear and despair, perhaps — imprinted on the site by the more than 1,500 people who died there.

"I think it will be dramatic," the 35-year-old author and freelance writer said. "We're probably going to hear people screaming for help."

The Titanic Endeavor Tour, headed by Matthew "Sandman" Kelley, a paranormal researcher from Markleysburg, Pa., will charter a boat to the shipwreck 960 miles east of New York and try to invoke the spirits of those who died there. Expedition members will dine from the Titanic's menu, observe a memorial service and strain to detect, through psychic sensitivity or special equipment, traces of souls who haunt the site.

The goal is to record electronic voice phenomenon of spirits who linger at the site. EVP, in which microphones record silence from which researchers later discern voices upon playback, is becoming a popular paranormal research tool.

"We're going to get a lot of emotion, a lot of people looking for their loved ones, a lot of people realizing they're never going to see their loved ones again," said Kelley, 42, a retired truck driver. "It's going to be very sad."

Not everyone in the paranormal community supports the Titanic mission. Terra King, a believer who writes about the paranormal for an online website, said seeking EVPs in places such as battlefields or disasters is "disrespectful and unethical."

"Too many groups who are searching for the voices of those who have died are downright ghoulish," King said via e-mail. "This expedition falls within this category. Trolling the North Atlantic for EVPs is ridiculous."

Brower, who wrote a book on the Titanic and for years performed a one-man show about the disaster, said people can react strongly over paranormal research. "It's a very, very controversial science," he said.

Kelley said his team will operate with respect. "The Titanic is now part of our history," he said. The expedition "is going to be a form of closure."

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By Alycia Broderick - Sayville Patch

Local scuba divers Christopher Weaver and Michael Salvarezza explored shipwrecks of Long Island with residents at the Sayville Library recently.

From wartime ships to accidents and ships run aground, their presentation touched on some of the more interesting stories that took place in local waters.

The pair started a company called Eco-Photo Explorers, launched in 1994, to promote interest in protecting the environment through knowledge and awareness as well as underwater photography.

"We started to see some changes happening in the underwater environment and we wanted to help," Salvarezza said.

There are thousands of shipwrecks off the Long Island Coast and there is a story behind each of them. While offering just a sampling of the shipwrecks, Salvarezza touched on stories from the Revolutionary War to the modern day.

"One of the most dramatic reasons for a ship to sink is wartime activity," he said.

The story of the HMS Culloden is one example. The HMS Culloden was a 74 gun, third rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, launched in 1776. It sank in January of 1781 and now sits underwater in what is known as Culloden Point, a few hundred yards offshore of Montauk.

A majority of the ship has been recovered, Salvarezza said.

The USS Ohio was built in 1820 and saw action in both the Mexican and American wars. In 1884, it was sold to a group of Long Islanders for scrap and intentionally sunk close to Greenport. The masthead from the USS Ohio, a Hercules figure, was removed before they sank the ship and still sits on Main Street's town square in Stony Brook.

The USS San Diego, launched in 1904, was part of Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet. It saw action in World War I but after a massive explosion it sank in 28 minutes 13 miles south of the Fire Island Lighthouse.

It was believed the explosion was caused by a mine left by a German warship. The ship now sits upside down and is a very popular site for scuba divers, marine life and artifacts.

There's also the story of the U-853, a German U-boat that attacked a U.S. boat 24 hours after a return-to-port-call was issued. It is settled seven miles east of Block Island.

There's also the Arundo, which sank in 1942 after being struck by a torpedo. It sits about 25 miles south of Rockaway Inlet and is a favorite wreck for fishermen. The Tanker Coimbra was sunk on January 15, 1942 by a torpedo from a German submarine.

It was carrying 81,000 barrels of oil. It's estimated that 28,000 barrels of oil are still within the wreck. "Is this a ticking time bomb?" Salvarezza asked.

"The Coast Guard has determined that is more dangerous to try to extract the oil than to let it slowly leak out. If you dive down there, you will notice the oil sheen hovering above the wreck."

From PR Newswire

Where there's silver, there's tarnish. While getting the tarnish off your flatware might be an occasional inconvenience, to museum curators and conservators, it's a threat to irreplaceable works of art.

To protect these objects for generations to come, scientists from the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, have teamed up with conservators from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Md., to develop and test a new, high-tech way to protect silver art objects and artifacts, using coatings that are mere nanometers thick.

The technique, called atomic layer deposition (ALD), will be used to create nanometer-thick, metal oxide films which, when applied to an artifact, are both transparent and optimized to reduce the rate of silver corrosion. The films are created when an object is exposed to two or more gases that react with its surface.

"ALD gives us an exquisite level of control, literally at the atomic level," says Ray Phaneuf, a professor of materials science and engineering (MSE) working on the project. "It's an effective, low-cost strategy to reduce corrosion that preserves artifact appearance and composition while complying with the rigorous standards of art conservation practice."

Eric Breitung, a scientist who runs E-squared Art Conservation Science, proposed the collaboration after conducting preliminary investigations into the use of ALD on silver at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"I approached members of the Clark School faculty because of their expertise and the university's extensive ALD facilities at the Maryland NanoCenter," he says, adding that the faculty members' previous collaborations with museums made them a good match for the Walters and its silver collection.

Walters Art Museum Conservation Scientist Glenn Gates explains the goals the new coating has to achieve.

"First, its appearance must be acceptable for display in a museum context. It has to be tough enough to endure transport and handling, but not so tough that it can't be removed. It needs to be completely removable so an object can be re-treated to meet future standards of conservation and aesthetics. And finally, it should not cause any harm to a piece, even if it breaks down."

Gates, who works with the Walters' world-class silver collection, is well acquainted with the battle against tarnish. He points out the project's figurative mascot, Antoine Louis Barye's 1865 "Walking Lion" sculpture, as exactly the sort of piece that could one day benefit from the new treatment. It has been cleaned and lacquered twice since 1949, but in both cases ultimately experienced deterioration problems with its coatings. It is currently unlacquered but must be kept in a special exhibition case to ward off tarnish.

"The 'Walking Lion' represents a complex shape that, being difficult to coat with traditional lacquer, might benefit from ALD protection," he says.

The team will test the new technique, first on small samples of fine and sterling silver, and then on objects from Gates' own collection, such as 19th century demitasse spoons and Morgan silver dollars. While the Walters does not expect any pieces from its collection to receive the experimental treatment during the course of the study, once it has been proven effective and safe, the "Walking Lion" would be a prime candidate for this procedure.

The three-year project is one of the first to be funded by the National Science Foundation's Chemistry and Materials Research at the Interface between Science and Art (SCIART) grant program, which supports projects in the field of cultural heritage science through the funding of collaborations among conservation experts in museums and scientists in academia. The SCIART program will be highlighted at the 2011 national meeting of the American Chemical Society, which has invited the team to present their work.

The project's other team members include the museum's Director of Conservation and Technical Research Terry Drayman-Weisser, a recognized metals expert, and, from the University of Maryland's Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Professor Gary Rubloff, Research Associate Laurent Henn-Lecordier, and Graduate Assistant Amy Marquardt, who brings to the project her previous experience working on bronze patinas with the Smithsonian's Museum Conservation Institute.

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Photo Florida Aquarium

By Stephen Thompson - The Tampa Tribune

Roughly two miles west of Fort De Soto Park, in about 18 feet of water, lies what's left of the USS Narcissus, a Civil War tugboat that exploded after hitting a shoal in 1866, killing all 29 people on board.

When the state started surveying the wreck in the 1990s, there wasn't much for divers to see in this particular spot in the Gulf of Mexico – basically only part of the ship's steam engine.

But as time passed, the sand surrounding the wreck shifted. Maybe the busy 2005 hurricane season had something to do with it.

Maybe nearby dredging, designed to re-nourish Pinellas beaches, played a part.

In any event, when another group of divers associated with the Florida Aquarium took a look a few years ago -- thanks to a state grant -- it found substantially more was now visible.

"We went out and discovered the vast majority of the site had been uncovered," said Mike Terrell, the dive training supervisor for the aquarium. "We discovered the entire engine, the propeller and part of the boiler that exploded were exposed."

That's one major reason why the aquarium and a handful of archaeologists are asking the state to designate the shipwreck site Florida's 12th Underwater Archaeological Preserve.

A public meeting on the nomination is scheduled to be held at the aquarium tonight from 6 to 8 p.m.

One point of the meeting is to gauge whether there is enough public support for the designation, said Franklin Price, senior archaeologist for the state's Underwater Archaeology Program.

"If people don't support it, we wouldn't make it a preserve," he said.

Roger Smith, the supervisor of the state's Underwater Archaeology Program, said a preserve – or "museum at sea'' – is intended to protect a wreck and foster historical appreciation for it.

"There are some incredible shipwrecks in Florida," Smith said. "The designation means it's a formal Florida historical site."

However, the designation won't mean new restrictions for divers, Smith said. In fact, brochures on the preserves are usually put together and made available to dive shops and dive charters, which can use them as a selling point for expeditions.

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By Claire Marshal - Gazette Series

Just days after grieving families put their loved ones who died in the Severn bridge disaster to rest, fears have been raised that the shipwrecks holding their memories are being damaged. 

The two barges that collided 50 years ago this week were seen being interfered with by a digger in the water two days after a plaque was unveiled in memory of the five men who died on them.

It has raised concerns that part of Gloucestershire’s maritime heritage is under threat with no legal protection to stop people destroying it.

The Arkendale H and the Wastdale H both still lay in the river at Purton after they sank on October 25, 1960.

A photo, taken by the Gazette, showed a large vessel with a digger attached called the Riparian, belonging to Fred Larkham, next to the two shipwrecks.

Mr Larkham, who previously owned the two barges but sold them over a year ago, said he recognised he had gone out at an insensitive time but had wanted to save some of the remaining parts of the ship.

He said that having taken a radio reporter out to the barges a few weeks ago he noticed that many items had been pulled off the wrecks and taken away.

"I felt very shocked to see it, someone had obviously been on the vessels and taken a number of things," said Mr Larkham.

Mr Larkham said he planned to offer the items he recovered to a local museum.

Paul Barnett, of the Friends of Purton, who has worked tirelessly over the years to get all the shipwrecks along the Severn near Sharpness designated by English Heritage, said he was "distraught" to hear the news.

"Just days ago I said to a group of grieving people that Gloucestershire does care about its heritage as we unveiled the plaque and now this happens.

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Photo Felix Biancamaria

Christophe Cornevin - Le Figaro

Il avait été englouti il y a 1700 ans au large d'Ajaccio. Puis retrouvé et en partie dispersé. De nouvelles pièces émergent enfin.

Une enquête marathon, longue d'un quart de siècle, a été nécessaire avant que le fabuleux trésor de Lava ne refasse surface.

Englouti il y a 1700 ans dans une petite anse au large d'Ajaccio, il a fait rêver des générations de pilleurs d'épaves et de pêcheurs d'or, fantasmer les plus grands archéologues et cauchemarder des services entiers de police, de gendarmerie et des douanes qui courent après le magot composé d'un millier de pièces d'or presque pur - 28 carats -, mais aussi de médaillons et d'une fantastique collection de vaisselle en métal précieux.

Ces vestiges remontent à l'époque romaine. Plus précisément au IIIe siècle de notre ère, au moment de la décadence de l'Empire. Après Gallien, Claude II le Gothique puis son frère Quintillus prennent le pouvoir avant que ne règne Aurélien.

La légende veut qu'un haut dignitaire, fuyant une révolte, ait pris la mer à Ostie entre mars 271 et novembre 273 à destination de l'Afrique du Nord, via la Corse. Dans les soutes de sa galère à voiles et à rames, il transporte son précieux chargement, qui n'arrivera jamais à bon port.

Son navire aurait pris feu avant de sombrer au large d'Ajaccio.

Le préjudice est colossal. Il est estimé à plusieurs centaines de millions d'euros - certaines pièces valent 250.000 euros l'unité. Le trésor présente un intérêt scientifique majeur: «Certaines pièces n'ont peut-être jamais circulé et des objets extrêmement significatifs pourraient nous enseigner nombre de choses sur cette période troublée de l'histoire romaine», estime Michel L'Hour, conservateur général du patrimoine, à la tête de la Direction des recherches archéologiques sous-marines (Drasm).

De manière tout à fait mystérieuse, 41 premières pièces d'or, aurei ou multiples, surgissent sur le marché en 1956. Elles sont dispersées aux enchères et font l'objet d'une publication savante établie par Jean Lafaurie, directeur des études de numismatique romaine à l'École pratique des hautes études.

Trente ans plus tard, une petite dizaine d'employés corses, plongeurs amateurs, découvrent un peu par hasard d'autres pièces au fond de la baie de Lava, qu'ils vendent à la terrasse des cafés pour 50.000 francs et s'acheter des BMW, caisses de champagne et magnétoscopes.

Puis, ils trouvent des relais parmi les collectionneurs parisiens chez qui ils dispersent le reste du butin. La justice est saisie et huit pilleurs sont mis en examen.

En novembre 1986, une partie du lot qui se retrouve mis à l'encan au Sporting d'hiver de Monte-Carlo est à son tour confisquée par les douanes.

Parmi les dix-huit pièces rarissimes se trouve un médaillon Gallien, d'une valeur de 150.000 euros et dont il existe trois exemplaires au monde. L'affaire avait défrayé la chronique.

La suite...