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From The Jakarta Globe

One of Australia's richest men, Clive Palmer, has unveiled plans for a 21st century version of the Titanic to be built in China, with its first voyage from England to New York set for 2016.

Palmer, a self-made mining billionaire, said he has commissioned state-owned Chinese company CSC Jinling Shipyard to construct Titanic II with exactly the same dimensions as its predecessor.

"It will be every bit as luxurious as the original Titanic but of course it will have state-of-the-art 21st century technology and the latest navigation and safety systems," Palmer said in a statement, released on Monday.

"Titanic II will sail in the northern hemisphere and her maiden voyage from England to North America is scheduled for late 2016.

"We have invited the Chinese navy to escort Titanic II on its maiden voyage to New York."

His announcement comes just weeks after the 100th anniversary of the sinking of Titanic, which went down on April 15, 1912 after striking an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York.

Palmer said the new ship would be a tribute to the spirit of the men and women who worked on the original.

"These people produced work that is still marvelled at more than 100 years later and we want that spirit to go on for another 100 years," he said.

Titanic was commissioned by White Star Line and was the largest liner in the world at the time.

Palmer said he has established his own shipping company, Blue Star Line, with the new ship having the same dimensions as its predecessor, with 840 rooms and nine decks.

By Erich Wagner - Maryland Community News

Southern Prince George’s officials and historians hope a nearly unprecedented archaeological dig in the Patuxent River near Upper Marlboro will advance historic tourism during the state’s War of 1812 bicentennial commemorations.

Archaeologists with the State Highway Administration, the Maryland Historical Trust and the Navy are working on plans to excavate a shipwreck they believe to be the U.S.S. Scorpion, a scuttled warship from the War of 1812, starting next spring as part of the state’s efforts to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the war.

This year officials are preparing plans for how to excavate the wreck and obtain a series of environmental permits to allow the dig to move forward.

Stephen Sonnett, president of Upper Marlboro’s board of town commissioners, said he hopes interest in the shipwreck will attract additional visitors to the town’s own piece of War of 1812 history: the grave site of Dr. William Beanes, a Revolutionary and War of 1812 doctor who was taken captive by British troops during the war.

“We are active participants in the Prince George’s County War of 1812 Committee, and we hope events like this will certainly add to the interest people may have in the town,” Sonnett said. “We hope to be ready for them.”

Dave Turner, chairman of the county Historic Preservation Commission, said the shipwreck shows how the war was felt throughout Prince George’s County, not just around Bladensburg. He said there’s no reason the county shouldn’t capitalize on the battlefields, which draw people to Gettysburg, Pa., and archeological digs, which draw people to Williamsburg, Va.

“It truly is a countywide tourist experience,” Turner said. “We’d like to see some kind of effort made by either the private sector or the county to get actual tours from Washington [D.C.] out to the sites. ... We need to go to where the tourists are, rather than rely on them coming to us.”

Officials plan to excavate artifacts from the wreck using a method of cutting the ship off from the rest of the river and excavating as if it were on dry land, something that has only been done once before North America, they said, to excavate the La Belle, a 17th century French ship that wrecked in Matagorda Bay in Texas.

Bob Neyland, a Navy underwater archaeologist, said the ship in question is believed to be the flagship of Navy Commodore Joshua Barney’s Chesapeake Bay Flotilla, which was built in 1814 to harass the much larger British ships that had formed a blockade in the bay.

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BBC News

A mystery object in the River Foyle thought to be a submarine or U-boat has turned out to be nothing more than an illusion, Environment Minister Alex Attwood has said.

Royal Navy divers were brought in to examine the area, and Mr Attwood said there was a "thrilling possibility of something significant" but the news is disappointing.

"The experts now conclude that while there is something lying there, it's not a vessel or a sub or anything of significance," he said.

"The reason why the original sonar photograph looked like a vessel was that an illusion was created when the sonar scoped out the site.

"In turning around at the site, it exaggerated and enlarged what is lying on the sea-bed."

Mr Attwood said the object is made of metal but it is not a vessel.

Some people had speculated that the wreck could be a German U-boat, as at the end of the war, Nazi submarines surrendered in the Foyle from where they were taken out to sea and destroyed or sunk.

Others believed it is unlikely to be a full-sized submarine, suggesting it could be a British two-man mini submarine - known as an X craft.

Another theory was that it could have been a small boat or even a private yacht, as one is known to have sunk in the area many years ago.

From Sydney Morning Herald

Nobody knows what's buried on Oak Island in Mahone Bay, nor does anybody know who put it there. Nobody knows if the Money Pit, as it has come to be called, hides the lost jewels of Marie Antoinette, though some have suggested as much.

It has been excavated sporadically - and unsuccessfully - since 1795. Some have argued that the pit holds documentary proof that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays.

If it wasn't for booby traps (with six fatalities to date), Canada could finally pin this great mystery on Freemasons, the Knights Templar or Sir Francis Drake.

Even Captain Kidd has been fingered as a possible culprit: perhaps pirates, returning to the Caribbean by way of the Gulf Stream, stopped off in Nova Scotia to hide their booty, like dogs hiding a bone, on the edge of the northern Atlantic.

Spanish scissors and coconut fibres have been found in the pit - odd, given that the closest coconut tree is more than 2000 kilometres away.

The chairman of the Friends of Oak Island Society, Charles Barkhouse, remains unconvinced by the Captain Kidd theory.

"No pirate did this because it's a massive feat of engineering," he tells me one morning when I stop to see the island, closed to visitors though clearly visible from the shore.

"Still, somebody went to a lot of trouble to bury something of great value out there."

Maybe he's right, along with past believers such as Errol Flynn, who tried to scour the island in 1940 until he discovered that search rights already belonged to John Wayne. Maybe, on Oak Island, the two unknowns of "who" and "what" really do equal something incredible.

Full story...

By Mark Staniforth and Peter Veth - The Conversation

The study and preservation of Australia’s neglected and decaying historic shipwrecks stands to leap in sophistication through a new multi-disciplinary project.

Bringing in expertise from behavioural archaeology, maritime archaeology, conservation sciences and maritime object conservation, the Australian Historic Shipwreck Protection Project (AHSPP) aims to set new national and international benchmarks in historic shipwreck management.

The three-year project is primarily funded by the Australian Research Council with supplementary sponsorship from public and private organisations (AHSPP).

It investigates the excavation, reburial and in-situ preservation of degrading and at-risk wrecks and their associated artefacts, and could reveal much about technological innovation in the colonial period.

The AHSPP will focus on a particular shipwreck site at risk – the colonial schooner Clarence in Port Phillip. The ill-fated colonial schooner Clarence – built in 1841 and sunk in 1850 (with accusations of insurance fraud) – is considered ideal for study.

It has already been extensively monitored by Heritage Victoria for more than 25 years and was partially test excavated in the 1980s.

The first season of excavation on the Clarence runs from 16 April to 12 May 2012 from a jack-up barge positioned over the wreck. The barge will be the base for the diving operations, as well as purpose-built imaging and conservation laboratories.

Overseas researchers and practitioners from Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Philippines, the US, and New Zealand will participate.

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From CBC
 

The Canadian military is getting up close with a big piece of history.

Divers are sending remote operating vehicles under the sea ice to explore HMS Breadalbane, which is the most northerly known ship wreck.

The exercise is part of the military’s annual Operation Nunalivut which is underway near Resolute, Nunavut.

“It's the very first time we've been able put a remote operating vehicle, an ROV, through the ice, especially with the thickness that we have of 2.2 metres and 1.2 metres in some spots. But for us to cut a hole in the ice and put an ROV through - we've never done that before.

And we thought, while we're up here trying, if we were successful, we might as well do something useful for other departments,” said Chief Petty Officer Cameron Jones.

The ship is now a National Historic Site.

Full story...

 
Photo Sebastiano Tusa

By Rossella Lorenzi - Live Science

Evidence of ancient smuggling activity has emerged from a Roman shipwreck, according to Italian archaeologists who have investigated the vessel's cargo.

Dating to the third century AD, the large sunken ship was fully recovered six months ago at a depth of 7 feet near the shore of Marausa Lido, a beach resort near Trapani.

Her cargo, officially consisting of assorted jars once filled with walnuts, figs, olives, wine, oil and fish sauce, also contained many unusual tubular tiles.

The unique tiles were apparently valuable enough for sailors to smuggle them from North Africa to Rome, where they sold for higher prices.

"They are small terracotta tubes with one pointed end. Put one into the other, they formed interlocking, snake-like tiles. Rows of these so-called fictile tubes were used by Roman builders to relieve the weight of vaulting," Sebastiano Tusa, Sicily's Superintendent of the Sea Office, told Discovery News.

Tusa will detail the wreck discovery in a forthcoming publication by the Museum of the Sea in Cesenatico, within a national meeting of underwater archaeology and naval history.

Following an analysis of the jars and their contents, Tusa and colleagues concluded that the 52- by 16-foot ship was sailing from North Africa when she sank some 1,700 years ago, probably while trying to enter the local river Birgi.

In North Africa the vaulting tubes cost a quarter of what builders paid for them in Rome.

"It was a somewhat tolerated smuggling activity, used by sailors to round their poor salaries. They bought these small tubes cheaper in Africa, hid them everywhere within the ship, and then re-sold them in Rome," Tusa said.

Full story...

From Phys
 

A group of four archaeology students searched the sea and land on Kangaroo Island’s west coast earlier this month in a bid to find the historic Loch Sloy and the burial sites of 11 bodies recovered from the sea when the barque, en-route from Glasgow to Port Adelaide, sank on April 24, 1899.

Records show 30 people, including the captain, six passengers and most crewmen, died when the ship ran into rocky waters while heading towards the Cape Borda lighthouse.

There were four survivors, one of whom died after reaching land, but the exact location of the shipwreck and the bodies recovered from the waters, except for one, has remained a mystery.

During the week-long field trip – led by Department of Environment and Natural Resources Maritime Archaeologist and Flinders graduate Amer Khan – the team excavated an area between Cape Borda and Cape du Couedic in the hope of finding any remnants from the tragic incident.

Flinders archaeology masters student Lynda Bignell said the researchers believed they had found the exact position of the wreck, using a magnetometer.

“Historically the whereabouts of the ship has been roughly documented but we used a special maritime metal detector at that location and it came up with a high reading, indicating that something is definitely down there,” Ms. Bignell said.

“It’s quite exciting because we originally went out there to look mainly for the graves, the search for the shipwreck was just one part of our extensive research into the incident.

Full story...