HOT NEWS !

By Murphy Givens

Four ships were making ready to sail from San Juan de Ulúa, the port of Veracruz, on April 9, 1554.

They were homeward bound for Seville, with a stop to meet the rest of the armada at Havana.

As the ships were taking on cargo and passengers, a Dominican priest, Juan Ferrer, had forebodings of disaster.

"Woe be those who are going to Spain," Ferrer told fellow passengers.

"Neither we nor the fleet will ever arrive.

Most of us will perish." Four great-bellied galleons -- the Santa Maria de Yciar, San Estebán, Espíritu Santo, and San Andrés -- were loaded with gold, cochineal, but mostly silver from the vast silver mines at Zacatecas.

It was a treasure fleet -- Plata Flota, the silver fleet.

The priest's forebodings of disaster were forgotten. The ships had smooth sailing across the Gulf.

They landed at Havana to join other ships in the armada, a precaution against the dangers of piracy.

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By Robert Fairburn


A German U-boat sunk off the Scottish coast more than 90 years ago has finally been discovered by two divers after a five-year search.

Jim MacLeod and Martin Sinclair found the wreckage of the U12, the first ever submarine to have an aeroplane carried on its deck, 25 miles from the Berwickshire port of Eyemouth at the weekend.

The exact location of the 60-metre boat had become a mystery to the two divers after a number of searches of the seabed where it was recorded to have been lying proved fruitless.

The pair worked with a researcher and shipwreck enthusiast Kevin Heath, of Orkney, who tracked down the logbooks of British destroyers HMS Ariel, Acheron and Attack, all of which were involved in the sinking of the U12.

The precise location of the vessel was then pinpointed, 15 miles from where it was originally thought to be.

Mr MacLeod, 45, a computer systems analyst from Bo'ness, and Mr Sinclair, 47, a mechanical engineer from Falkirk, then enlisted the help of specialist Eyemouth firm Marine Quest Dive Charters to visit the location where they found the submarine lying 150 feet down on the seabed.

It was the first time the wreck had been visited since it was sunk in 1915.

By Roger Highfield

A new DNA technique could provide a revolutionary insight into the lives of the Ancient Greeks - using jars that have lain on the seabed for millennia.

These amphoras were the cargo containers of the ancient world, used for shipping all kinds of things, from wine to olive oil.

Studying those left in shipwrecks could tell us much about the trade, agriculture and climate of historic societies - except that the contents wash away over the centuries, leaving archaeologists with glorified empty bottles.

Now a team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the US and Lund University in Sweden has performed the first successful extraction of DNA from the remains of a 2,400-year-old shipwreck off the Greek island of Chios.

The wooden merchant ship sank in the fourth century BC, coming to rest 70 metres down.

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From The Age

Going, going, gone ...

Vin Maskell reports there are almost 200 sunken ships in the waters of Port Phillip Bay.

When the party hire boat the Maheno sank near the mouth of the Yarra River two weeks before Christmas, it joined a long list of vessels that have come to grief in the not-so-benign waters of Port Phillip Bay, not far from the beaches that Melburnians flock to over summer.

Heritage Victoria estimates there are 130 shipwrecks in the bay, with a further 50 at the narrow Port Phillip Heads between Point Lonsdale and Point Nepean.

In the bay itself, these include the 19th-century warship HMVS Cerberus, an 1890s wooden pleasure yacht, cargo boats and passenger ferries.

Five people died when the steel steamer the Kakariki collided with another steamer, the Caradale, off Williamstown at 11pm on January 29, 1937.

The Kakariki sank within minutes and later salvage operations were hampered by the vessel being stuck in four metres of mud.

Full story...

By Nikolai Lukashov

An international archaeological expedition to Lake Issyk Kul, high in the Kyrgyz mountains, proves the existence of an advanced civilisation 25 centuries ago, equal in development to the Hellenic civilisations of the northern coast of the Pontus Euxinus (Black Sea) and the Mediterranean coast of Egypt.

The expedition resulted in sensational finds, including the discovery of major settlements, presently buried underwater.

The data and artifacts obtained, which are currently under study, apply the finishing touches to the many years of exploration in the lake, made by seven previous expeditions.

The addition of a previously unknown culture to the treasury of history extends the idea of the patterns and regularities of human development.

Kyrgyz historians, led by Vladimir Ploskikh, vice president of the Kyrgyz Academy of Sciences, worked side by side with Russian colleagues, lead by historian Svetlana Lukashova and myself.

All the Russians involved were experienced skin-divers and members of the Russian Confederation of Underwater Sports.

We were responsible for the work done under water.

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By Hartmut Kaiser

In the final days of the third reich, some Nazi officers loaded gold, documents and counterfeit British currency (pounds) into army trucks in Berlin, Germany, and drove south toward the Alps.

Some nazi remnants -- a gold urn, personal seals, etc. -- have since been found in Bavarian and Austrian lakes such as Walchensee (Bavaria) and Altausee (Austria).

Yet most of the nazi's gold treasure is still missing. Many people believe that it was dumped into Lake Toplitz at the time of the downfall of the nazi empire.

The story of lake Toplitz has inspired many authors and filmmakers as well as treasure hunters who dived in the lake in search of the missing gold. The nazis had planned to destabilize the British economy by dropping counterfeit British pounds from airplanes over the country -- a plan they never carried out.

Some of this counterfeit currency has been found by diving expeditions in Lake Toplitz. Other lakes in Bavaria and Austria are supposed to contain also nazi gold treasures, yet nobody knows the details.

Nor does anybody know what happened to the Nazis who transported the gold and secret documents.

From China News

An 800-year-old Chinese merchant ship loaded with precious trading goods was moved to its purpose-built museum on Friday in Guangdong Province, five days after being raised from the sea.

The intricate salvage process, which involved constructing a special container around the 5,000-ton Nanhai (South China Sea) No. 1, finished with the delivery of the 30 meter wooden vessel to its "Crystal Palace" at the Marine Silk Road Museum in Yangjiang.

The glass pool featured a water temperature, pressure and other environmental conditions that were the same as where the ship had rested on the sea floor for centuries.

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By Joe Ryan


On Dec. 15, 1901, a four-masted ship heading for New York Harbor with $1 million in silk, porcelain and a rumored golden Buddha got lost in a blizzard and ran ashore in Ocean City, where it sank into the sand and left generations dreaming of sunken treasure.

The Sindia was on the last leg of a voyage from Kobe, Japan, when she beached at 17th Street shortly after midnight. Rumors that the crew was drunk quickly spread and were later debunked as the ship vanished under the shifting sands.

In the decades since, powerful tides have sometimes revealed Sindia's masts, tiller post, hull, or capstan. Each ghostly re-appearance has left beachgoers wondering.

Does the Sindia's hull hide the rumored statue of Buddha cast in gold and other priceless artifacts said to have been looted from temples in China during the chaotic aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion ?

A handful of attempts to excavate the ship have failed. The state dedicated its sandy grave as a historical site in 1969. And on Christmas Eve, 1970, the last surviving member of her crew, David Jackson, died in Philadelphia at the age of 90.