HOT NEWS !

From Gozo News

Heritage Malta are organising a lecture to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1961 survey of the Xlendi wreck site. The lecture will be by Prof. John Woods who directed the survey team.

Visitors will also be able to view the Xlendi wreck material that is on permanent display at the the Gozo Museum of Archaeology and print-outs from digital files documenting the wreck to be donated to Heritage Malta by Prof. Woods.

The Gozo Museum of Archaeology aims to illustrate the rich cultural history of the island of Gozo from prehistoric times to the early modern period.

The museum incorporates themes like burials, religion, art, food and daily life, making use of material from various archaeological sites in Gozo.

The Archaeology Museum is located immediately behind the original gateway to the Citadel in Rabat, Gozo, and is housed in a 17th century townhouse, known as ‘Casa Bondi.’

The building came to house the archaeological collection in 1986 as part of a reorganisation programme of the Gozo museum collection. Since then, the Museum saw the restoration of its entire exterior and the refurbishment of the majority of its interiors including the main hall on its first floor.

The Museum’s permanent display is divided into three main sections: Prehistory, the Classical period, and the Medieval and Early Modern periods.

Items on display range from geological resources put to use by the prehistoric settlers in creating their dwellings and temples, to Phoenician, Punic, and Roman artefacts found in several sites in Gozo and Comino.

Full story...

BBC News

A bottle of nearly 200-year-old champagne has been sold for 30,000 euros ($43,900; £26,700) at an auction in Finland - in what is believed to be a new world record.

The Veuve Clicquot bubbly was bought by an anonymous bidder from Singapore, auctioneers in Mariehamn said.

The same buyer paid 24,000 euros for another bottle of champagne, which was made by the now defunct Juglar house.

They were found in a shipwreck at the bottom of the Baltic Sea last year.

In all, more than 140 bottles were discovered by divers, and the wine is said to be in "exquisite" condition.

Friday's auction at Acker Merrall & Conditt took place in Mariehamn, the capital of the autonomous Aaland Islands between Finland and Sweden, near to the place where the bottles were found.

"This is an emotional bottle, because this is the wine of Madame Clicquot herself," Veuve Clicquot historian Fabienne Moreau told the AFP news agency, referring to Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin - the woman who ran the famous house in the 19th Century.

Experts believe that the booty from the shipwreck dates from about 1825-1830.

The auctioneers said the previous record was set in 2008, when a bottle of 1959 Dom Perignon Rose sold for 27,600 euros. This has not been independently confirmed.

However, Mr Moreau, who had sampled the champagne, said the price "proves the value of the wine and the prestige of the house".

Full story...

From Weblogs Dailypress

Arrrrr this old idea of transforming Hampton into a pirate destination seems to have got a few landlubbers in a stew, leading to the inevitable calls for folks to walk the plank.

The Daily Press revealed this week the fondness for the pirate concept expressed by Yaromir Steiner, the Peninsula Town Center guru who has been brought in to wield a big cutlass to the dusty old treasure map that was the Downtown Hampton Master Plan, as well as that of historian John Quarstein.

Steiner was brought in for a fee of $7,500 a month - for an initial six month period last year to work on a new vision for the downtown.

The pirate museum concept was mentioned in a vision statement report in April produced by Steiner, but so were other ideas such as an art museum, a community art center, a foundry and glass blowing workshops. However, Steiner dwelled on the pirate concept at some length during a speech to the Hampton Downtown Development Partnership last year.

Quarstein has produced a more detailed plan for a pirate museum in the present Circuit Court building, which is likely to be vacated when a new circuit court is built in Hampton.

Quarstein is convinced of the pulling power of the pirate theme..

"Ever since Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and Robert Barre's Peter Pan were released, adults and children alike have been drawn to pirate tales," he said in a report on his concept.

"Movies like Captain Blood and Pirates of the Caribbean always have drawn crowds to enjoy the mythical tales of piracy. Hampton's annual Blackbeard festival draws over 70,000 people into downtown Hampton.

"Obviously, an effective planned museum presenting pirate and pirate hunter stories would bring visitors to be entertained by this learning experience. When coupled with the existing Hampton History Museum and the Virginia Air and Space Center, the Chesapeake Bay Pirate Museum would extend the time travelers, civilians, and students stay in downtown Hampton."

Not everyone is as keen on pirates, it seems.

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By Mark Dunphy - Irish Weather Online

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Graveyard of the Atlantic), which recently participated in a dive to the Titanic, will lead a summer research expedition to locate and study World War II shipwrecks sunk in 1942 off North Carolina during the Battle of the Atlantic, specifically the Battle of Convoy KS-520.

The shipwrecks are located in an area known as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic”, which includes sunken vessels from U.S. and British naval fleets, merchant ships and German U-boats.

“This summer will be the most ambitious of our Battle of the Atlantic research expeditions, and potentially the most exciting,” said David W. Alberg, superintendent, USS Monitor National Marine Sanctuary.

“This expedition is all about partnerships, collaboration and using cutting edge technology to search for and document historically significant shipwrecks tragically lost during World War II.”

On July 14, 1942, a merchant convoy of 19 ships and five military escorts left Hampton Roads, Va., sailing south to Key West, Fla., to deliver cargo to aid the war effort.

The next day, off Cape Hatteras, N.C., Convoy KS-520 was attacked by German submarine U-576. The convoy fought back with an American warship ramming the U-boat while U.S. Navy aircraft dropped depth charges that sunk the submarine.

Alberg said NOAA’s expedition, taking place in several phases beginning on June 1, will build on work conducted by NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries (ONMS) during the past three summers to document and preserve an important part of North Carolina’s history.

The 2011 Battle of the Atlantic expedition survey will be conducted in four phases aboard the ONMS Research Vessel 8501.

- Phase one of the expedition will include a wide area survey in water depths of 100 to 1,500 feet.

Advanced remote sensing technologies, including an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) and multiple sonar systems, will be used to attempt to locate undiscovered wreck sites, including the U-576 and the Bluefields, a Nicaraguan tanker the U-576 sunk in a torpedo strike.

- A more targeted survey will be conducted during the second phase, relying on an AUV and multibeam sonar systems to produce 3-D images of wreck sites. Scientists also will be investigating potential fuel leaks at the sites.

- During phase three, scientists will return to selected targets identified in the wide area survey and use a 3-D scanner to create highly detailed models of the wrecks.

By Stephen Cauchi - The age

The loss of the Coramba's crew devastated Depression-era Victoria; now the discovery of the steamer's wreck has brought closure to some families.

It is more than 76 years since Audrey O'Callaghan last saw her father, Captain John Dowling, but she remembers their last moments together with a clarity born of reliving them in her mind countless times since.

She was 12 when she walked her 47-year-old father to the bus stop at Williamstown before he set off on one last journey on the cargo steamer TSS Coramba. The return trip to Warrnambool in the state's south-west to collect goods meant he would be gone for a fortnight. But she recalls feeling uneasy.

''We were very close … I kissed him good-bye and I said, 'Dad, I wish you were at home every night like other dads.' He said, 'I won't be long,' '' Mrs O'Callaghan, 88, told The Sunday Age from her home in Angaston, in the Barossa Valley.

But the captain's promise was not to be, and his daughter's fears proved well founded.

By the time the Coramba was due to leave Warrnambool, the weather had turned. Captain Dowling requested permission from the shipping office to delay his return, but was ordered out to sea.

In one of Victoria's worst maritime disasters, the Coramba capsized off Phillip Island during a storm on 30 November, 1934, and all 17 on board died.

Full story...

By Ciaran Tierney - Galway City Tribune

It is as close as you can get to entering a spaceship, or a submarine, without leaving dry land in the West of Ireland, and it has helped save the lives of scuba divers.

And yet many people might not be aware that the Republic’s national medical hyperbaric chamber, which opened late last year at a cost of €1 million, is located at University Hospital Galway.

No scuba diver wants to have to use it, and yet each and every one of them should be delighted that it is there. While the popularity of deep sea diving has increased remarkably over the past decade, the chamber ensures that divers no longer need to be airlifted to Plymouth or Portsmouth in the UK for top class medical treatment.

It is operated mainly by a team of committed, highly trained volunteers who are on call to help out medical staff 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in case any diver gets into difficulties in Irish waters.

Whether he or she needs to be airlifted from Co Kerry or take an ambulance from Carraroe, a committed team of three will be on hand to administer the treatment once the alarm is raised.

Decompression sickness or ‘the bends’, caused by breathing excess nitrogen under pressure, is a hazard faced by divers who surface too quickly or are forced to divert from their dive plans. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is the only cure and UHG is the only hospital in the country to provide it.

Symptoms of ‘the bends’ include joint pains along the arms or legs, severe itching, numbness, staggering due to poor balance, and acute pain. It is important to seek medical treatment as soon as possible if a diver experiences difficulties after a dive.

UHG was the first and only hospital in the country to get a hyperbaric chamber, pioneered by the late Dr Peter O’Beirn, who was also a keen diving enthusiast, back in 1976. A diver would be strapped into the old ten foot long capsule for treatment, but the unit became obsolete and had to be shut down a few years ago.

While the old chamber might have seemed uncomfortable, it did the job for any diver who got into difficulties through the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s.

But it was unrecognizable compared to the sparkling new facility at UHG which has seating for ten patients, audio and visual links, and even a DVD player if a patient wishes to watch a film during treatment which can last for up to six hours.

At the moment, the chamber is only used for emergency cases of decompression illness or carbon monoxide poisoning. But, were the funding to become available, it could have a host of other uses, tackling traumatic brain injury, stroke, air embolism, gas gangrene, and nervous system problems which can be tackled by allowing a patient to breathe pure oxygen.

 
Photo Bill Starling

By David Ferrara - Blog

A sound rang out Thursday — in the key of B — that had not been heard in at least 150 years, ghostly echoes of a piece of previously undocumented Civil War history.

David Anderson, who first discovered the 31-inch-tall bell aboard a sunken ship near the mouth of Mobile Bay, tapped the 700-pound hunk of bronze 3 times with a sledgehammer.

“This became known around our place as the mystery wreck,” Anderson said. “It has fallen through the cracks of time.”

When Anderson first spotted the wreckage in about 30 feet of water seven years ago, he figured that it was from a shipwreck in the 1900s. But when he pulled out the bell and cleaned it, he noticed the 1860 marking from Meneely Bell in West Troy, N.Y.

The wreck of this 250-foot merchant sailing vessel — the Amstel — was not even listed in any compilation of ships lost in the Mobile area, Anderson said.

“When the date became visible, we had to take a step back,” he said.

So Anderson, the CEO of Gulf Shores-based Fathom Explorations, began his research to figure out what happened to the British bark.

Through captains’ logs — both Union and Confederate — and newspaper articles the story of the first Civil War naval engagement in Alabama began to unfold.

The Amstel was likely rushing back to Mobile for high-valued cotton before the bay was closed off by a Union blockade.

The ship was apparently carrying cargo for a large construction project, Anderson said. The bell is too large to have been used on the ship, and divers have also discovered large, 2.5-inch thick slabs of Pennsylvania blue stone.

Anderson and state officials said they are unaware of a major building project planned for the area at the time.

“One of the key mysteries about this wreck is: Where was this building?” Anderson said. “What were they trying to build out of all this?

“If you were building something big in the spring of 1861 and you’ve lost your cargo, we probably found it.”

It’s not uncommon to find sunken ships around Mobile Bay, said Anderson, who has excavated shipwrecks around the world. The area is known as the “graveyard of the Gulf.”

In its haste to pick up the cotton, the Amstel snagged on a sand bar, known as Mobile Bar or Dixey Bar, some two nautical miles southwest of Fort Morgan.

The Union blockade commandeered a schooner from Mississippi that came to salvage the cargo aboard the Amstel.

“So the Amstel sits on Mobile Bar and slowly falls to pieces,” before ultimately sinking, Anderson said.

No one is believed to have died when the ship went down — the crew of at least 22 people had long since abandoned it.

Full story...

By  Jessica van Vonderen - ABC

Finally tonight, to North Queensland, where Cyclone Yasi has uncovered a mysterious shipwreck. A group of boaties made the discovery on an isolated beach on Hinchinbrook Island. And according to experts, the wreck could be up to 150 years old. Josh Bavas reports.

DAVID PEARSON, Boatie: And no doubt people died here so it is our history.

JOSH BAVAS: It's a hidden paradise a lonely island; once the home to indigenous tribes and explored by British travellers. But along this stretch of beach lies an unsolved mystery.

PHIL LOWRY, Boatie: Me and me mate were cruising off shore about 100 metres and I could see the water breaking just where the ribs and that were sticking out of the water and I could see the shape of the boat so we knew what it was straight up.

JOSH BAVAS: It's a wreck nearly 150 years old. But nobody knows what boat it was, where it came from or what it was carrying.

PADDY WATERSON, QLD Heritage oficer: It's possible it could come from anywhere. A lot of the ship building techniques are reasonably similar around the mid 19th century. There'll be some nuances and we can perhaps look at those. 

JOSH BAVAS: Cyclone Yasi tore through this region churning up a tidal surge and washing away tonnes of sand. These locals wanted to see what it did to their secluded spot.

DAVID PEARSON: This is our island. We've lived here all our lives. We've been on these beaches all our lives and we wanted to see what damage the tidal surge had done.

JOSH BAVAS: Shortly after, they stumbled across the petrified wood and have been scratching their heads ever since.

MEN TALKING: What do you reckon fellas ? Good find or what ?

PHIL LOWRY: It's been preserved because it's been under the sand for so long (pause) and now with it being uncovered I wonder how much longer it will last especially if the big seas come and break it up you know.

JOSH BAVAS: Small samples taken by the Department of Environment are being crossed referenced with shipping records in London.

JOSH BAVAS: Someone else who might be able to shed some light on the new find is Ed Slaughter. He spends most of his time sifting through and documenting treasures like the salvaged material from the 17-79 Pandora wreck.

ED SLAUGHTER, Assistant Curator, QLD Museum: Yeah, it's exciting, it's detective work. It's something that I'll always be interested in doing and it's important for the resource of Queensland and for the history of Queensland to determine these things.