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From Scarborough Evening News

A ceremony will be held today to mark the 150th anniversary of one of Scarborough’s most famous shipwrecks.

Five volunteers died during the rescue attempt of the Coupland on November 2 1861 – including Lord Charles Beauclerk, who was swept to his death in the icy waters after he leapt into the north sea in a desperate attempt to save the crew of Scarborough’s first RNLI lifeboat, Amelia.

Now, a century-and-a-half later, the nobleman is set to be honoured by his descendants when his decaying pauper’s grave is replaced with a new headstone in recognition of his bravery.

His great grandson, John Beauclerk, is travelling to Scarborough to lay a wreath to all five men in remembrance of the anniversary, and the plaque will be revealed as part of a special programme of events, hosted by the RNLI, which will mark the anniversary.

John Porter, a spokesman for Scarborough Lifeboat, said: “Scarborough has had many tragedies at sea over the years, with lifeboat crew being lost on several occasions. Each year we hold a memorial service at St Mary’s Church to commemorate the men who have given the ultimate sacrifice and it’s fitting that on the 150th anniversary of the death of Lord Beauclerk that his courageous actions are remembered in this way.”

The Coupland was trying to enter Scarborough harbour when her sails were disabled and she was forced onto rocks, leading to the death of five volunteers during the rescue attempt when the vessel struck the lifeboat.

By Chris Summers - BBC News

It is 10 years since a deal to protect the world's thousands of shipwrecks, but the UK and several other major maritime powers are yet to ratify it. Should this underwater heritage be protected or is it acceptable to plunder ?

When a ship sinks and lives are lost, it is a tragedy for the families involved.

For the relatives of the dead, the ship becomes an underwater grave but as the years pass the wreck can become a site of archaeological interest.

In recent years technological innovations have allowed commercial archaeologists, decried by some as "treasure hunters", to reach wrecks far below the surface.

The most famous of them all, the Titanic, is more than four miles down and to get there as film director James Cameron has shown, involves using "robot" divers which are prohibitively expensive - around $50,000 (£32,000) a day.

Salvage firms are most interested in ships with cargoes of gold and silver, ceramics or other valuables.

In November 2001, the Unesco Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage was finally adopted.

But 10 years on, it still has not been ratified by the UK, France, Russia, China or the US, and commercial archaeologists continue to locate wrecks, remove their cargoes and sell them off.

"The convention has not been ratified yet because of the issues it throws up about the cost of implementing and policing it," a spokesman for the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport, says. "Discussions continue within government, but ratification is not currently seen as a priority."

In September Britain's Department of Transport announced it had signed a deal with Odyssey Marine Exploration for the salvage of 200 tonnes of silver, worth up to £150m, from the SS Gairsoppa, which was sunk by a German U-Boat in 1941.

The British government will get 20% of whatever Odyssey recovers but Unesco says the deal broke the spirit of the convention.

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By Catherine Rhea Roy

Discovery Science Treasure Quest takes you on board a search for shipwrecks with Greg Stemm

The interest began with reading about Jacques Cousteau and ocean exploration. Greg Stemm, Co-founder and CEO of Odyssey Marine Exploration successfully combined his passion and his profession.

He saw an interesting opportunity to use technology that had been developed to find in and study commercial and cultural resources under water.

The series “Treasure Quest,” gives viewers a front row seat on Odyssey's adventures. Greg talks about the series as well as all that goes into discovery and recovery of underwater treasures. Excerpts from the interview

Can you tell us Treasure Quest?

The ‘Discovery Science Treasure Quest' show basically gives people a front row seat to watch what happens on our ships. Over the years what people have wanted most of all is to accompany us on an expedition to see what happens when we find shipwrecks.

On this series, the viewer gets to join the expedition as a passenger on the ship and sees everything we do from the time that we initiate a project for finding a shipwreck to the search for the shipwreck to when we put the robotics on the bottom and experience that amazing moment of discovery of a new shipwreck that no human has ever seen before.

What obstacles do you face in your line of work ?

There are natural obstacles that come from the complicated work in the deep ocean and man-made obstacles including bureaucracy and legal issues. As soon as you head out to sea there are all kinds of problems that prevent you from finding and keeping shipwrecks.

What is the difference between excavations carried out by a private organisation and those carried out by the government ?

I think that as a private company, we typically can choose to work on the projects that we are interested in.

When it comes to exploration I think it's very important for explorers to be able to make decisions on a ship based on new knowledge that they gain as they conduct a project.

Very often in government or even academic operations you will find a lot of bureaucratic infrastructure which complicates the mission. I think that allowing exploration activities to be run by the people on the ship as opposed to people making rules on shore allows flexibility.

What is the research that goes into your line of work ?

We have an in-house team of archaeologists and researchers at Odyssey of about eight people. Then we have 25 or 30 people all around the world that are specialists in searching libraries and looking at ancient manuscripts. How it usually works is we have an idea for a shipwreck project and then the researchers will go to all the different researchers they have around the world who will try to find out information about exactly where the ship was lost.

We'll try to find log books from the ship as well as other information and reports that can help us figure out exactly where a ship has gone down.

Often there is contradictory information so one of our tasks is sorting the information that is true from that based on gossip or sometimes intentionally published to try to mislead people.

How long does each excavation last ?

Full story...

From NTD

When two Swedish treasure hunters went out in June this year searching for ancient bottles of champagne in shipwrecks in the Baltic Sea, they found more than they’d bargained for.

Dennis Åsberg and Peter Lindberg didn’t find any champagne, they found something else.

[Peter Lindberg, The Ocean Explorer Team]:
“I magnified it, looked at it and realized that this is very unusual, in my years as a treasure hunter I have many hours in front of the sonar, I've never seen anything like it.”

A huge disc-shaped object showed up in their sonar pictures 197 feet in diameter, as big as a jumbo jet.

On the sonar it looked like a point of impact, as though something had hit the ocean floor, continuing 4000 feet, creating a track before it came to a halt. It had dug into the sea bed making a sand bar on its right side.

The object is about 275 feet deep, the Baltic sea floor is dead with no underwater currents to create such sandbars.
Recently another object was found about 500 feet from the mysterious disc.

According to Peter this object comes from the same direction as the disc and could be a part of it.

Sonar shows the objects are made of hard material. It could be something like hard concrete, hard granite or of some kind of metals.

The two explorers have been in contact with many experts around the world and no one can say what it is.

Full story...

From Bernews

The giant Free French submarine “Surcouf” — which vanished after leaving Bermuda during World War Two [1939-45] and has long been the subject of controversy and conspiracy theories — is the subject of a lengthy report in the latest issue of a Nova Scotian naval journal.

“Bosun’s Call”, the Nova Scotia Naval Officers’ Association newsletter, recounts the story of the ill-fated French Navy “corsair submarine” — at 361-feet in length, the largest ever built up to that time.

Named after an 18th century French pirate and launched in 1929, “Surcouf was designed as an “underwater cruiser” intended to seek and engage in surface combat as well as torpedoing enemy shipping while submerged.

For reconnaissance, she carried a Besson MB.411 observation floatplane in a hangar built abaft of the conning tower; for combat, she was armed with 12 torpedo tubes and twin eight-inch guns in a pressure-tight turret forward of the conning tower.

In theory the Besson observation plane could have been used to direct fire out to the guns’ maximum range in these pre-radar days. Anti-aircraft cannon and machine guns were mounted on the top of the hangar.

Despite her impressive specifications, “Surcouf” proved to be plagued by mechanical problems: her trim was difficult to adjust during a dive, on the surface she rolled badly in rough seas, and she took over two minutes to dive to a depth of 40 feet, making her vulnerable to aircraft.

“While the German U-Boats were prowling off the Atlantic coast and the Caribbean, the Free French submarine, ‘Surcouf; patrolled the eastern seaboard from Canadian Maritimes, to New England, to Bermuda, and toward the Panama Canal Zone,” write retired American submarine captain Frederick Hallett and former US Coast Guard journalist Neal P. Cortell in “Bosun’s Call”.

Full story...

By Philip Sherwell - The Telegraph
 

Newly-discovered wrecks off the coast of Panama are believed to be the first physical remains found of the ships of Sir Francis Drake. Philip Sherwell joined the divers searching for his final resting place.

Seen through a diver's mask, the wooden ribs of the two vessels fan across the seabed like the carcasses of animals stripped bare.

Lying in the warm, shallow waters of the Caribbean, the ancient timbers almost certainly date back more than four centuries to the voyages of one of England's great seafaring heroes.

These newly-discovered wrecks are believed to be the first physical remains found of the ships of Sir Francis Drake, scourge of the Spanish and the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe.

The discovery, off Portobelo in modern-day Panama, was made after a complex maritime detective operation that began in archives in London and was completed deploying the latest in British underwater technology.

Now, after a breakthrough that one of the team behind the project compares to finding the Titanic wreck, they are hoping to locate the final resting place of Drake himself.

The hero of the Armada died of dysentery in 1596, and his body - in a full suit of armour and lead-lined coffin - is known to have been laid to rest near the ships, which were scuttled shortly afterwards to prevent them falling into Spanish hands.

The Sunday Telegraph was granted exclusive access to the mission that is being conducted from the aptly-named Pirate's Cove by Deeptrek, a British-run subsea exploration company, working for the site's permit holder, IMDI Eco Olas.

Off a coastline of sheltered bays and malarial jungle, the waters here once teemed with Spanish and British fleets and pirates and privateers, all fighting for a share of plunder from the treasures of the New World.

So it is a thrilling sensation to look through a diving mask at what is very probably English oak hammered together in an Elizabethan shipyard in the late 1500s, at the height of the Crown's battles for maritime supremacy with Spain.

"To find two such vessels is very special," said James Sinclair, the team's marine archaeologist, as we bobbed above the wrecks between a rocky outcrop and headland long denoted on maps as Drake's Island and Drake's Point.

Full story...

By Jeannine Manning Hutson

A few hours after underwater archaeologists plucked one of four large anchors from the wreck of Blackbeard’s Queen Anne’s Revenge in the waters near Beaufort Inlet in May, a tourist looking at the encrusted artifact on a flatbed truck asked when it would be on display at a museum.

“Years” was the collective answer from QAR project team members standing nearby.

The answer would be the same for the approximately one-ton cannon raised Wednesday from the site. The cannon arrived Thursday at the QAR Conservation Lab at East Carolina University to begin the process of being saved for future generations.

Today the large anchor sits in a 6,500-gallon tank at the QAR Conservation Lab beside hundreds of other artifacts from the shipwreck site. Similar types of artifacts are submerged in tanks filled with sodium carbonate solutions, waiting to be conserved and prepared for display in the North Carolina Maritime Museum.

The Queen Anne’s Revenge, Blackbeard’s flagship, wrecked off the North Carolina coast in 1718. Initial fieldwork at the site under the direction of the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources’ Underwater Archaeology Branch began in 1997, and it has progressed slowly and methodically.

The clock is ticking to pull artifacts from the wreckage. “We want to start bringing these pieces up off the main mound because we have a directive for three years to do full recovery as hard as we can, to get it all up. It’s about 50 percent of the site out there,” Mark Wilde-Ramsing, state underwater archaeologist, said in May as he stood by the newly hoisted anchor.

Wilde-Ramsing earned his doctorate in coastal resource management at ECU in 2009. He has directed the Queen Anne’s Revenge project since it began in 1997.

Full story...

By Megan Hart - The Muskegon Chronicle

Muskegon ship lovers can be among the first to hear about three wrecks discovered near Sleeping Bear Point last fall.

Shipwreck hunter Ross Richardson, of Lake Ann, found three sunken ships he believes were previously undocumented while doing a sonar scan in shallow water last October after a gale.

He will speak about his successful search for the “Westmoreland” and discovery of the other wrecks during the “Shipwrecks and Technology” day Saturday evening at the Great Lakes Naval Memorial and Museum, 1346 Bluff. The evening speakers start at 7:30 p.m.

Richardson announced the discovery Friday at the Almira Township Library in Lake Ann. He said he found four ships in between 15 and 22 feet of water, within the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore waters.

“Only one, the schooner 'James McBride,' is a previously documented shipwreck, according to my research,” Richardson said in a statement.

Shallow water wrecks are often difficult to find and identify because sand moves to cover and uncover them, and ice and rough waves may damage the ships. Typically, usable equipment was also removed shortly after they sank, Richardson said.

One of the wrecks defied the odds, though, and has much of its equipment still intact.

Full story...