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From Xinhuanet

Treasure hunters have swarmed to the South China Sea in great number in recent years, seeking to uncover the region's massive quantities of underwater relics. However, their actions have also endangered the region's cultural heritage, prompting authorities to take action.

China's Xisha Islands, also known as the Paracel Islands, occupy an area of 15,000 square km in the South China Sea. Speculators and local fishermen have been surveying the waters around the islands for treasure since 1996, when a local fisherman discovered an ancient shipwreck in the area.

Many of the hunters use crude means to retrieve underwater relics, lacking both proper equipment and government approval. Destructive looting has done irreversible damage to the shipwrecks of the Xisha Islands.

Lying on the route of the ancient maritime Silk Road, the waters around the Xisha Islands were and still are heavily traveled shipping lanes, with ships transporting goods between China and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

However, the waters around the islands are also known for their poor navigability, as they are surrounded by coral reefs. Historical records show that a number of ships struck hidden reefs and sank near the islands, taking their treasures with them to the ocean floor.

Official archaeological surveys show that there are at least 122 wrecked ships on the bottom of the South China Sea. Many of them date back to the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1276) dynasties, when trade with foreign countries was thriving.

"According to studies of previously salvaged ships, most of the sunken ships departed from China's costal regions, bound for overseas countries," said Wang Yiping, director-general of the Hainan Provincial Administration of Cultural Heritage.

"Previously, official maritime archaeological surveys were largely limited to coastal waters due to a lack of technology and funds. However, archaeological research and salvages of several wreckages have helped to fill in knowledge gaps regarding Chinese and foreign interaction, production, consumption and trade relations centuries ago," Wang added.

The valuable artifacts discovered in the ancient ships, including porcelain, gold and bronzeware, have helped to shed new light on commerce and shipbuilding as they were practiced centuries ago. They are the "missing links" on the Silk Road trade route that linked ancient China with the Western world, Wang said.

Looting destroys the archaeological and anthropological context in which the relics exist, preventing people from fully appreciating the historic significance of the region, Wang said.

From CBS News

A 2,000-pound cannon pulled from the waters near Beaufort Wednesday will give archeologists and historians more ammunition for separating fact from legend surrounding the infamous pirate Blackbeard.

The Queen Anne's Revenge Project brought the massive gun ashore and displayed it to the public before taking to a laboratory at East Carolina University. Onlookers cheered as the 8-foot-long gun was raised above the water's surface.

"The last people who saw this were pirates," QAR project director Mark Wilde-Ramsing told more than 100 spectators who later gathered in front of Beaufort's Maritime Museum for a closer look at the 18th century weapon.

Dozens of local residents turned out, while some Blackbeard enthusiasts drove in from other parts of the state.

"We read about it last night, and I asked the kids: are we going to skip school tomorrow and go see this?" said Joy Herndon, who made the roughly 230-mile trek from Greensboro with her children, Lucy and Kevin.

Separating the Blackbeard legend from historical facts is one of the goals of the QAR recovery effort, which has so far netted some 280,000 artifacts, said Joseph Schwarzer, director of the North Carolina Maritime Museum.

"This is about as close to that particular point in American history, and to piracy, as anybody is ever going to get," Schwarzer said.

The recovery effort involves collaboration between the state departments of Cultural Resources and Environmental and Natural Resources, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, East Carolina University and other agencies.

The gun recovered Wednesday was the 13th cannon raised from the shipwreck.

Other items have included medical supplies, dishes, gold dust, prisoner shackles, African jewelry and small weaponry.

Schwarzer said researchers believe the ship was built as La Concorde, a French slave-trading vessel, but was commandeered by Blackbeard and his crew six months prior to its grounding near Beaufort Inlet.

Historians theorize that the ship was intentionally scuttled by Blackbeard, who then took off in a smaller boat, because he could no longer afford the expense of four ships and a pirate following estimated at 400.

From Fox News Latino

A U.S. court ruled in favor of Colombia in a decades-long legal dispute over the ownership of pieces of a sunken galleon found in Colombian territorial waters 300 years ago.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled the Andean country does not have to pay $17 billion to Sea Search Armada, a U.S.-based salvage company. The company claimed the South American country breached a contract granting it the right to salvage Galleon San José, a British Navy ship that sank June 8, 1708, off the coast of Colombia.

The Spanish ship, which was trying to outrun a fleet of British warships, came loaded with more than 200 tons of gold, silver and emeralds when a mysterious explosion made it sink 700 feet below the surface, near the Rosario Islands. The treasure was owned by Peruvian and European merchants.

The Spanish galleon San José was trying to outrun a fleet of British warships off Colombia on June 8, 1708, when a mysterious explosion sent it to the bottom of the sea with gold, silver and emeralds owned by private Peruvian and European merchants, and lies about 700 feet below the water’s surface, a few miles from the historic Caribbean port of Cartagena, on the edge of the Continental Shelf.

Sea Search Armada said it found the shipwreck in the 1980s, and was given exclusive rights to claim 50 percent of what it found. Colombia later signed a decree – which eventually became law – giving the company a 5 percent “finders fee” – triggering Sea Search to sue Colombia for a larger share of its find.

The treasure is reportedly worth $4 billion to $17 billion.

“Without a doubt, the San José is the Holy Grail of treasure shipwrecks,” Robert Cembrola, director of the Naval War College Museum in Newport, R.I., said when the lawsuit was first filed.  

Full story...

By Lindsay Knake - The Saginaw News

A local filmmaker will share his experience with the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

The freighter sank in November 1975 in Lake Superior, and remains the largest ship to have sunk in the Great Lakes. Saginaw’s Ric Mixter gathered 16 years of research to produce a comprehensive documentary on the ship.

Mixter spoke with workers who put the freighter together and the first expedition leaders who found the 29 crew members’ remains.

The SVSU History Club is hosting the viewing at 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 1 in the Regional Education Center’s Ott Auditorium.

Mixter is the leading producer on Great Lakes Shipwrecks documentaries for PBS.

This event is free and open to the public.

By Julian Ryall - The Telegraph

The wreck of a Mongolian ship presumed to have been part of a 13th century invasion fleet has been discovered beneath the seabed off southern Japan.

The vessel is the first of its kind to have been discovered relatively intact and dates from a series of attempts by Kublai Khan, emperor of the Yuan Dynasty, to subjugate Japan between 1274 and 1281. 

Researchers have previously only been able to recover anchor stones and cannonballs from the scattered wrecks of the Mongol fleets and they believe that this latest find will shed new light on the maritime technology of the day. 

The warship was located with ultrasonic equipment about 3 feet beneath the seabed at a depth of 75 feet.

The archeological team, from Okinawa's University of the Ryukus, had been carrying out a search of the waters around Takashima Island, in Nagasaki Prefecture, because the area had yielded other items from Mongol ships.

Historical records suggest that some 4,400 ships carrying 140,000 Mongol soldiers landed in Japan in 1281 and skirmished with samurai in northern Kyushu.

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From BBC News

The owner of an American pirate museum claims to be close to finding the remains of Sir Francis Drake, the Elizabethan sailor and navigator.

Drake died at sea in 1596 and his body, clad in a full suit of armour and in a lead coffin, is thought to be off the coast of Panama.

He was knighted for his successful exploits around the world.

Pat Croce claims he has located two ships which were scuttled shortly after Drake died of dysentery.

"This is absolutely a dream come true - to find the ships of the most successful pirate in history, who single-handedly wreaked havoc on Spain's New Empire," said Mr Croce, who is blogging on the expedition live from Panama.

They are now hoping to find Drake's lead-lined coffin, which may still contain his body, which was reportedly buried in a full suit of armour.

Mr Croce said the remains of the ships, the Elizabeth and the Delight, had been discovered at the bottom of Portobelo Bay.

Drake is credited for defeating the Spanish Armada's invasion of England in 1588 and also became the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe.
After a career as naval officer, Drake drifted into piracy and was also one of the earliest exponents of the slave trade, bringing African men and women to work in the English colonies of North America in the 16th Century.

Mr Croce, who runs the St Augustine Pirate & Treasure Museum in Florida, said they had found the burnt timbers of Elizabeth and Delight, which sank shortly after Drake's death.

The team's marine archaeologist, Jim Sinclair, said: "Finding the Elizabeth and Delight near where Sir Francis Drake is buried is as exciting to me as helping discover the (Spanish galleon, Nuestra Senora de) Atocha and diving the RMS Titanic."

The expedition focused on Portobelo Bay after hiring London-based researcher Trevor McEniry to pinpoint areas where the ships might have gone down.

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From Expatica 

Sport divers off the northern coast of Borneo have discovered the wreck of a Dutch World War II submarine, missing for the past 70 years, the Dutch defence ministry said Monday.

"The Hr. Ms. KXVI, which has been missing with a crew of 36 since 1941, has been found," it said in a statement released in The Hague.

"It was discovered by Australian and Singaporean sport divers in the waters 'above' the island of Borneo after a tip-off from a local fisherman," the ministry added.

It did not state the exact location of the wreck out of respect for the dead crew and their descendants.

The 1,000-tonne KXVI was part of the Allied fleet tasked with stopping the Japanese invasion of the then Dutch East Indies. It torpedoed the Japanese submarine hunter Sagiri on Christmas Eve 1941, only to be sunk itself the following day by a Japanese submarine.

The latest find brings to six the number of Dutch submarines lost during the war that have now been found, the ministry said. Only one wreck, that of the Hr. Ms. O 13, remains missing somewhere in the North Sea.

Borneo, the world's third largest island, is split between Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia.

By Nastasia Campanella - ABC

The only known shipwreck from the First Fleet has been added to the National Heritage List. The HMS Sirius was the lead ship of the First Fleet during its six month journey from England to Australia.

The vessel was shipwrecked on another journey to Norfolk Island in 1790.

The Minister for Environment, Tony Burke, added the ship to the list in a ceremony at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney today.
He says the ship tells an important part of Australia's story.

"It is a critical part of the colony of New South Wales," Mr Bourke said.

"It's a critical part of Norfolk Island and put together, it's a part of the heritage of the nation we all call home."

The shipwreck site and its associated relics have been protected from damage or disturbance under the 1976 Commonwealth Historic Shipwreck ACT since 1984.

Mr Bourke told an audience of school children that today marked the 225th anniversary that the ship was commissioned.

Full story...