HOT NEWS !

By Patrick Oldendorf - Journal Star

A replica of Christopher Columbus' famous ship will be dropping anchor in Peoria next month.

The Nina has stopped in Chillicothe and Peoria several times in the last 15 years, but this year the wooden, sea-going vessel is back - this time with its sister ship, the Pinta.

The replica ships will dock from July 9 to July 12 at the RiverPlex landing adjacent to the Spirit of Peoria.

"Little children love scrambling around the ships, and school-aged children study Columbus and his ships," said A.J. Sanger, a spokesman for the Columbus Fund. "Older people can appreciate and admire the work that went into building (the ships) ... and think about how small (it was) for men to go to sea in."

The Nina was built completely by hand and without the use of power tools in Bahia, Brazil, in 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus' entry into the new world. Archaeology magazine dubbed it "The most historically correct Columbus replica ever built."

The boat is 93 1/2 feet long and about 52 feet tall and was featured in the film "1492."

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By Olga Pshenitsyna - The Voice of Russia

“Polar Odyssey” brigantine, a replica of 18th century historic ships, has been launched in Karelia. Reconstructed from old drawings, the vessel will hoist its sails in the harbor town of Petrozavodsk on the western shore of Lake Onega, in northwestern Russia. 

Together with a team of his associates, engineer Victor Dmitriev has been engaged in designing and building ships for 30 years already. He said it took them quite a long time to design and build “Polar Odyssey".

"Unlike building boats to order, which takes approximately a year, the brigantine has been under construction for a total of 10 years. Our hard work eventually resulted in a well-wrought vessel, mature like cognac in casks," says Dmitriev. 

16 meters in length and 4.6 in width, “Polar Odyssey” is a replica of high-performance serviceable 18th century warships, used to conduct patrol and surveillance missions. Such vessels used to enjoy increased demand by sea pirates.

The brigantine has six cannons on board, which will serve a dual purpose, Victor Dmitriev says: "Above all, these are guns for saluting. Besides, we developed a tutorial program in the form of a role-playing game “Treasure Island” or “Pirates of Lake Onega”. This is a kind of sea paintball, with cannons firing paint-filled capsules."

By Cathy Hunter, Renee Braden and Krista Mantsch - Natgeo News Watch

"Il faut aller voir." ("We must go and see.") - Jacques Cousteau

Jacques-Yves Cousteau began his lifelong odyssey with the sea seeking a little adventure; by the end, he had inspired people around the globe to look more closely at the oceans that make up most of our planet.

For 15 years, it was an odyssey that Cousteau and National Geographic undertook together.

He came to us in 1950, a 42-year-old French naval officer and co-inventor of the Aqua-Lung who also claimed to be an underwater filmmaker.

We hesitated. Yet there was something about this Frenchman, so impossibly slim, with that smile so huge, those eyes so large and mesmerizing. So in 1952 we embarked together on what might have seemed an uncertain adventure. Yet he never doubted the outcome.

"Personally," Cousteau declared, "I have the greatest confidence that our work, helped by your Society, will be particularly fruitful."

National Geographic magazine articles showcased Cousteau's underwater photography, and in 1955 we funded the now-legendary voyage Calypso made to the gorgeous, unspoiled reefs of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.

The film he made there and released in 1956 as "The Silent World" is arguably the most influential underwater documentary ever made, winner of both an Academy Award and the Prix d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

By 1960 Cousteau was a household name in the United States in an era as excited about exploring the sea as it was about venturing toward the stars.

Over the years, the Society's Committee for Research and Exploration sponsored and supported many of Cousteau's advanced underwater projects, from construction of the famous diving saucer to establishment of one of the world's first undersea habitats.

With Cousteau, the exceptional became the norm.

There was the singular luncheon, for example, served at Society headquarters on 2,000-year-old plates, plucked from a stock of unbroken crockery the captain had recovered from an ancient Roman shipwreck.

From CBC News

The Yukon government has designated the A.J. Goddard, a Gold Rush-era steamboat found on the bottom of a lake last year, a historic site.

This means the shipwrecked stern wheeler, which remains almost intact at the bottom of Lake Laberge, will be protected from damage or harm by people, according to Yukon government officials.

"We're delighted to see the designation because it shows that not only are shipwrecks important pieces of the past, but that they're also important resources," James Delgado, the Texas-based president of the Institute of Nautical Archeology, told CBC News.

Launched during the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898 to carry miners and supplies, the A.J. Goddard vanished in Lake Laberge, north of Whitehorse, in a storm Oct. 22, 1901. Three crew members drowned and two survived.

An archeological team, which included Delgado and Doug Davidge of the Yukon Transportation Museum, found the steamboat with its hull intact and many of the crew's belongings preserved.

Delgado said he remembers seeing the ship's boiler door propped open, and clothes and shoes were still sitting on the deck of the sternwheeler.

"In this case, this little mini-museum helps bring that Gold Rush to life," he said.

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From Otago Daily Times

Was Cleopatra a conniving temptress who seduced her way to the top, or the target of recorded history's most effective negative political campaign ?

A splashy exhibit making its world premiere at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia makes a case for the latter, using recently discovered artifacts to illustrate two archaeologists' search for the truth - and the tomb - of one of antiquity's most maligned figures.

Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt, features many never-before-seen artifacts from a pair of ongoing Egyptian archaeological expeditions. It remains in Philadelphia until January, when it begins a tour of five not-yet-announced American cities.

The show employs theatrical lighting and sound, 17 video screens documenting archaeologists uncovering some of the 150 artifacts on display, and a four-minute video providing an overview of Cleopatra's life and loves in a style that looks and sounds like a trailer for a slick action movie.

"We're using ancient objects to tell a modern-day story about the search for Cleopatra," said John Norman of Arts and Exhibitions International, the company that organised the show.

The first of the exhibit's two sections showcases the discoveries of French underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio, whose 20-year Egyptian expedition so far has uncovered Cleopatra's palace, two ancient cities near the coast of the ancient city of Alexandria, and 20,000 artifacts and counting.

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By Melissa Nelson

When Matthew Kuehne dives to the sandy bottom of Pensacola Bay, he reaches back 450 years to Spaniard Don Tristan de Luna's hurricane-doomed effort to form the first colony in the present-day United States.

Archeologists say the buried hull of a ship from de Luna's fleet of 11 ships holds crucial clues to the 1559 expedition that sailed from Mexico to Florida's Panhandle.

That was six years before another Spanish explorer, Pedro Menendez de Aviles, founded St. Augustine, Fla., the oldest city in the United States.

The ship's discovery was announced in October after lead sheeting and pottery from the wreck site were matched to the de Luna expedition. Another ship in the fleet was found nearby in 1992.

Mr. Kuehne, a University of West Florida archeology student, has been diving from a barge anchored in the Gulf of Mexico to retrieve artifacts from the submerged ship.

He can only imagine what de Luna and his men would think of his modern-day exploration.

“I don't know if they would be honoured that we are out here digging up their stuff or if they would be embarrassed that their technology, their efforts at colonization, failed,” he said.

The two shipwrecks off Pensacola are the second-oldest discovered in U.S. waters. The oldest are a fleet of 1554 merchant ships that sank off Padre Island, Tex.

The West Florida archeology team has brought more than 800 artifacts from the new de Luna site to the surface, including pieces of olive jars used to transport food and wine, chunks of the ship's wood frame, cow bones, Spanish bricks and even tiny balls of mercury, used to extract gold from ore.

Of the 11 ships that departed from Veracruz, Mexico, on de Luna's expedition, seven ran aground in the water, one was blown ashore and three survived the storm, said John Bratten, a West Florida professor of maritime archeology.

By Edward Rothstein - The New York Times

It may be best to dispel any illusions immediately. The only certain images we seem to have of the last queen of Egypt, Cleopatra VII, have no discernible resemblance to the painted faces of Elizabeth Taylor or Claudette Colbert or Sarah Bernhardt. Those visages can be contemplated with far more sensuous contentment than the Egyptian queen’s bulbous, knotty and eroded features stamped on gold coins from the first century B.C.

But by the time we see the cinematic, romanticized faces of Cleopatra from films and paintings in the final gallery of the new exhibition “Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt,” opening Saturday at the Franklin Institute here, we are prepared to acknowledge the virtue of at least some idealization.

The wonder we feel is not at Cleopatra’s beauty (which Plutarch reports was “in itself not altogether incomparable”) but at the extraordinary cultural universe that preceded her and surrounded her before Egypt submitted to the Romans in 30 B.C. and Cleopatra — Egypt’s last pharaoh and the end of the Ptolemaic dynasty — committed suicide.

The exhibition is powerful. But that is not really because of Cleopatra; it is because a lost world is resurrected here. There are some 150 artifacts on display, and the vast majority were found buried in the silt and clay of the Bay of Aboukir, off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt. Since 1992 those waters have been explored by Franck Goddio and his European Institute of Underwater Archaeology.

Using a nuclear magnetic resonance magnetometer, Mr. Goddio mapped the geographic fault lines beneath the clouded waters and has brought to the surface a small fraction of what lies below.

He has identified the relics and ruins as remnants of the ancient cities of Canopus and Heracleion, submerged by tidal waves, earthquakes and wars; he has also discovered palaces and temples of the nearby eastern port of Alexandria, the city that the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great made his capital, and that Cleopatra imagined could rival Rome.

The first half of the exhibition shimmers in atmospheric blue light, the artifacts accompanied by videos of their excavation by red-suited divers maneuvering through opaque waters.

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By Jeff Hampton - The Virginian Pilot

A shipwreck exposed in December by winter storms could date back to shipping between England and Jamestown in the early 1600s.

Possibly the oldest known wreck on the North Carolina coast, the timbers and construction of the ship are very similar to the Sea Venture, the 1609 flagship of a set of vessels carrying people and supplies to Jamestown, said Bradley A. Rodgers, a professor of archaeology and conservation in the maritime studies program at East Carolina University.

Remains of the Sea Venture rest off the Bermuda coast.

North Carolina underwater archaeologists and maritime history experts and students from ECU have documented, sampled and measured the 12-ton remains since they were towed from the surf to rest on a lot near the Currituck Beach Lighthouse.

Plans are to transport them 90 miles down N.C. 12 to the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras for long term display.