HOT NEWS !

From DiverNet

Two men have been arrested over the suspected theft of artefacts from sites in the Thames Estuary, including the protected wreck of HMS London, a 17th century warship.

The arrests yesterday followed raids in East Kent on two homes, one business address and a dive boat at Gravesend.

The raids were carried out by police officers from Kent and Essex, archaeologists from English Heritage and officials from the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, including the Receiver of Wreck.

At one address they found what is believed to be a 16th century Dutch cannon from the London, worth an estimated £40,000.

In clean condition it sat partially immersed in a tarpaulin-covered trough of water in a back garden.

Other artefacts found at the same address included deck fittings, lead, china, glass and portholes.

The arrested men are being interviewed at a Kent police station. Police are examining materials including business records and computer images.

The arrests follow the February launch of the Alliance to Reduce Crimes Against Heritage (ARCH), intended to harden up enforcement of heritage law.

Under ARCH, various authorities are working in a more symbiotic way to improve investigative efficiency.

Speaking at one of the raid locations Alison Kentuck, Receiver of Wreck, told the BBC that the aim was to use “the same information to the best of its ability, to share resources to achieve an end result”.

Read more...

 
Photo Chris Borgen

By Deborah Bach - Seattle Times

Beneath Lake Union's inky surface is a graveyard of old boats, an underwater museum of waterlogged artifacts of Seattle's industrial and maritime history that have mostly lain untouched for decades — until now.

The Center for Wooden Boats, on the south end of the lake, is leading an underwater archaeology project to locate and document vessels and other historic artifacts.

With little fanfare, using the latest in underwater technology, divers and amateur archaeologists have been scouring the 40-foot-deep lake, looking at more than 20 spots where sunken vessels may lie.

"What I feel that we're uncovering is a new museum under the water," Center for Wooden Boats founder Dick Wagner said.

Peter Lape, an associate professor at the Burke Museum and one of two archeologists involved in the project, said the lake provides a valuable opportunity to see tangible pieces of Seattle's history.

"It's such a weird, interesting lake, being right in the middle of a big city with thousands of years of maritime history that have dropped things into the bottom of that mud," Lape said. "It's surprising and cool that there are these major shipwrecks just sitting down there that you can rent a kayak and paddle over."

Teams of highly trained and well-equipped volunteer divers have found a dozen shipwrecks — some stacked on top of each other. Those include old sloops, a cannery tender, a powerboat that once was a liveaboard, a 1942 minesweeper named Gypsy Queen, a 1908 Navy barge named Foss 54 and an 1888 tugboat, the J.E. Boyden.

The 85-foot Boyden was used to help square-rigged merchant ships transit the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound. In one of its more memorable chapters, the tug was off Cape Flattery when its crew spotted a Makah tribal canoe towing a whale carcass.

The tribe members asked for help, and the Boyden towed the whale and canoe to Neah Bay, where a feast was held that evening, according to documents found in the Museum of History & Industry.

The Boyden later served as a lumber and coal tug before it was retired in 1935 on Lake Union, where it eventually sank.

Because native people once lived on the shores of Lake Union, Lape said, undiscovered native watercraft likely lie at the bottom of the lake.

"I think our city has been great at bulldozing over its history whenever it has a chance," he said. "This is a place where the physical objects of that history are there to look at, at least through video."

The wrecks found in the lake have been identified by comparing divers' observations with archival documents, historical photos, Coast Guard records and news articles.

This is not work for the claustrophobic. Underwater visibility can be fewer than two feet.

Read more...

By Randy Boswell - Vancouver Sun

Conservation specialists have rediscovered the soundtrack of a deadly shipwreck from the Klondike Gold Rush, identifying three records found with a vintage phonograph alongside the sunken sternwheeler A.J. Goddard, which went down in a storm more than a century ago on Yukon's fabled Lake Laberge.

The exquisitely-preserved wreck of the Goddard - discovered in 2009 by a Yukon government-led team of Canadian and American archeologists - has been hailed as a "time capsule" from the era in which tens of thousands of fortune- seekers from across North America rushed to the remote, northwest corner of Canada following the discovery of gold nuggets in streams near present-day Dawson City.

The phonograph used aboard the Goddard - a steam-powered vessel that transported miners to the goldfields up the Yukon River - was considered the most exciting of artifacts found at the wreck site.

Though damaged from spending more than a century at the bottom of Lake Laberge - a widening of the river and the setting for Klondike poet Robert Service's ghoulish 1907 masterwork The Cremation of Sam McGee - the records were carefully retrieved from the chilly depths and sent to Ottawa for analysis and preservation by experts with the Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI), a federal agency that studies and protects the country's most coveted historical relics.

"The recovered artifacts reveal intimate details of life on a small, functional Yukon sternwheeler," Yukon's tourism and culture minister, Elaine Taylor, said recently in announcing the institute's findings.

"To have the opportunity to learn about the music those on the Goddard would have enjoyed gives us a window into Yukon's past and one small piece of the culture of the day."

Photo Doug Gossage

By Kay Campbell - The Huntsville Times

Even long before the times of Jesus and the Apostle Paul, Malta was the rocky knob at the western edge of the Roman Empire, the place where the leftovers of the Mediterranean Sea washed up and dug in.

Prehistoric worshipers left mysterious stone structures. Phoenician traders planted their alphabet and Arabic-inflected language. Greeks added new words and traditions.

Sailing across the water the Romans grandly called "Mare Nostrum," "Our Sea," a rich Roman governor arrived to add a mosaic-floored villa on a wind-swept hill with a view of the island curved like a pelican's beak to catch the peoples and ideas blown from across the known world.

Malta was the site of the last battle of the Crusades and one of the most-bombed targets of World War II as the Germans unsuccessfully sought to gain a foothold there for the push into North Africa.

And Malta is the site of what John Harkins of Huntsville believes will be the last and best quest of his life.

Harkins, mild-mannered Bible-reading Church of Christ deacon, proud grandpa, Auburn-educated marine biologist who now sells software for a living, is determined to be the first person since the biblical Luke to see with his own eyes evidence of the ship that carried the Apostle Paul nearly to Rome.

Foolish ? Quite possibly, he cheerfully concedes.

"I'm quite in the minority in thinking there might be some remnant," Harkins said this week, unrolling charts of the island on his desk at work. "But I know we're going to find something, though it may not be from Paul's wreck. But there's nothing (no material) I'm looking for that hasn't been found at another site."

Read more...

By Jag Chandakar - UK News Reporter

Even in this era when long lost pirates’ bounty chests seem to be possible only in the movies and books, people still believe in the existence of treasures.

There are still those who spend time, effort, and money just to locate and excavate buried crates and chests of precious jewels and gold.

There are also those who dive under water and explore sunken ships and find out about the valuables that these carried to the depths. Both diving and surface treasure hunters truly require equipment to achieve their goals.

Besides the maps, they need metal detectors particularly if the objects they are searching are buried deeply underground.

Diving treasure hunters may be that unfortunate enough not being able to find treasures on the seafloor.

After a period of time it is only natural for sunken ships to be buried in mud or muck.

Of course, without using metal detectors, divers may only be wasting valuable oxygen in their tanks.

Not only will their quest be unproductive; they also spend for their diving gear without profit from a treasure find. This is why it is necessary for them to equip themselves with a metal detector.

However, not all such detectors have the capability of functioning underwater. In fact, majority of these are only meant for land use. If the ones meant for land detecting are used underwater, these battery-operated devices might short-circuit, making these permanently damaged and not anymore useful.

Divers who like to look for treasures underwater and on the seafloor may need to use a special type of metal detector that is particularly designed for this use. You can find such types of detectors sold out there in the market.

Besides the detector itself, divers can also avail of specific accessories that can make any treasure hunting activity underwater more productive.

From Online

A 19th century schooner that lies at the bottom of Lake Erie belongs to New York state, not the salvagers who found it and want to raise and preserve it as a tourist attraction, a federal judge ruled.

The Abandoned Shipwrecks Act of 1987 gives ownership of vessels embedded in submerged state property to the state, U.S. District Judge Richard Arcara wrote in a decision that could derail the ambitious preservation plans.

Massachusetts-based Northeast Research LLC, which claimed title to the 80-foot wooden ship under maritime law before the state intervened, believes the vessel had a role in the War of 1812 and the Underground Railroad.

The group will appeal Arcara's ruling to a higher court, attorney Peter Hess said Wednesday. He said the case should have gone to trial.

"Northeast Research has spent over $1 million and five years ... identifying and documenting (the ship)," Hess said. "The state of New York has done absolutely nothing."

The company, which operates in Dunkirk, west of Buffalo, envisions raising the well-preserved, two-masted schooner and displaying it in an ice-cold freshwater aquarium on Buffalo's waterfront. Divers have already recovered and documented artifacts, including American and Spanish coins, buttons, rings and other jewelry, that would be part of the display.

The state's general policy is to leave shipwrecks alone.

Arcara ruled the ship was clearly abandoned, since it sat for more than 150 years after it went down in 170 feet of freshwater off the western New York shore.

"What matters is not whether the schooner would have been located, but rather whether anyone even tried looking for it," the judge wrote in a decision dated last week.

The ship's identity is part of the dispute.

A state-hired expert said the presence of grain and hickory nuts in the cargo hold meant the vessel was likely "a nameless 1830s schooner that sank carrying grain," Arcara's ruling said.

Northeast divers believe the schooner is the historically important Caledonia, used in the fur trade in the early 1800s before being commandeered by the British military at the outbreak of the War of 1812 and then captured by the Americans a year later.

By George Crocker - WNCT

For the first time in nearly 300 years, Blackbeard’s flagship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, returns to North Carolina.

It's happening this June in a new exhibit at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort.

It was 1718 when the notorious pirate ran his ship aground in Beaufort Inlet. That's roughly two miles from where the Museum stands today.

“We’re piecing together untold stories of Blackbeard, his crew and the ship, that we’ll be able to share with the public through the diligent work of the Queen Anne’s Revenge Shipwreck Project team and the artifacts they’ve recovered and conserved,” said North Carolina Maritime Museums Director Joseph Schwarzer.

Shifting sands and waterways kept the shipwreck's location a mystery until 1996. That's when the private company, Intersal, Inc. discovered it. For 13 years, archaeologists with the N.C. Underwater Archaeology Branch have led research and recovery on the wreck.

The Queen Anne’s Revenge Conservation Lab in Greenville has cleaned artifacts and prepared them for exhibition as they have been collected.

The new exhibit opens on June 11th. It takes up about a third of the Museum's exhibit space, illuminating the life of pirates aboard the ship with artifacts, interactive features and fun facts.

Read more...

From Maritime Journal

English Heritage has issued a warning that action will be taken against anyone illegally accessing, damaging or removing items from protected historic wrecks.

This follows the launch of the Alliance to Reduce Crimes Against Heritage (ARCH) in February with the support of over 40 organisations

English Heritage and the police are increasingly working together to safeguard wreck sites designated under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973.

In recent weeks, the Ministry of Defence Police (MDP) intercepted divers on the edge of the protected wreck site of the British warship, the Coronation, off Penlee Point, near Plymouth.

A number of items in their boat were then taken for analysis to determine if they had been taken from the wreck. Officers are now awaiting specialist assessment of the items to see if further enquiries will need to be carried out.

Armed vessels from the MDP’s Devonport Dockyard Marine Unit patrol a restricted area of water (112 square miles) adjacent to the Naval Base at Devonport and escort warship and submarine movements in and out of the Base. The Unit is often tasked by the Queen’s Harbour Master (a Royal Navy appointment) at the Base, who has responsibility for keeping the restricted zone clear of non-military vessels, and ensuring the proper enforcement of any legal requirements.

On this occasion a report was received by QHM from the local coastguard that divers had been seen off Penlee Point. A police RIB attended and spoke to two men on board a vessel.

MDP marine unit inspector Gordon Peters said, ‘Penlee Point falls within the Dockyard Port of Plymouth area which is patrolled by MDP launches and boats as part of its protection of Royal Navy assets.

‘We were pleased to assist in this case after receiving a request from the Queen’s Harbour Master to investigate possible unauthorised activity at the wreck of the Coronation.’


Read more...