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By Clare Mccarthy - Mail Online
 

The wreck of an 18th century floating gin palace has been found in the Gulf of Finland. The vessel was spotted by Russia's Baltic naval fleet and has given up its secrets.

The boat - believed to be Dutch - was delivering hundreds of bottles of gin to Tsarist capital St Petersburg, seat of power of the Romanov emperors. Other small bottles contained perfumes or the ingredients for fragrances including eucalyptus and the essence of pine needles.

Some elaborate gin bottles appear to have a 'London' seal on them, though it still needs to be verified as genuine.

Roman Prokhorov, an underwater archaeologist with the Russian Geographical Society, said: 'These bottles are the most interesting. 'They were transported in wooden boxes. 'Obviously, they were not empty. 'There are bubbles of air in the glass, so they must have been hand-manufactured.'

The reason the ship sank, and the date it went down, near Moshchnyi island is so far unknown but Russian experts intend to solve the mystery of the floating gin palace. Little is left of the vessel but it is believed to be a Dutch tjalk - or barge - used to carry cargo.

Sadly, no surviving gin has been found at the wreck site. It is possible to determine what was transported in the vessels only by the smell and type of bottles, say reports. 'Most likely, the ship was sailing to St. Petersburg and was carrying bottles of alcohol on board,' said Prokhorov.

The vessel sank some 80 miles west of St Petersburg.

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By Alex Lemaire - The Maritime Excecutive

On this same day, 35 years ago, the legendary deep-sea explorer Mel Fisher discovered the shipwreck of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha. The galleon was sailing from the new world to Spain. It was hit by a hurricane and sank in 1622. 260 people lost their lives in this accident. Only five survived by climbing the mizzen, which remained above the water.

Senora de Atocha was loaded with several precious items. But what makes this ship so special is that it contained 40 tons of gold and silver and around 70 pounds of Colombian emeralds, some of the finest and most expensive in the world.

Spanish salvors tried and failed to recover this precious cargo because the hatches were locked tight. A second hurricane further destroyed the shipwreck and it was lost without a trace.

In 1969, more than 300 years later, Mel Fisher started looking for Atocha’s treasure. This mission was lengthy and dangerous. A few finds along the way convinced him that he is getting closer to the great discovery. The crew found some silver bars in 1973; their tally marks matched Atocha’s paperwork. Two years later, they found five of the galleon’s cannons. In 1980, they discovered the wreck of the Santa Margarita (Atocha’s sister ship).

Three members of his crew (a diver, his son, and his wife) lost their lives during this quest when their boat capsized. The treasure hunter was shaken but he didn’t lose hope and he knew that the lost teammates would have wanted the expedition to resume. He always kept saying “Today’s the day!”.

In addition to the previous difficulties, the treasure hunter has to fight a court battle against the state of Florida who wanted ownership or at least a percentage of the treasure. The US Supreme Court ruled in his favor.

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By Alex Fox - Smithsonian Magazine

Two professional divers exploring the waters off the coast of northern Italy have discovered the wreck of a large wooden ship thought to date to the 16th century, reports Vincenzo Bruno for Italian news site Notizie.

Investigation of the find is ongoing, but a statement from the Archaeology Superintendency of Italy’s Ministry for Cultural Heritage & Tourism suggests the wooden hull may represent the remnants of a much sought-after galleon that sank in the area in 1579.

Named the Santo Spirito and Santa Maria di Loreto, the ship was one of the largest Italian merchant vessels of its time.

In February, Gabriele Succi and Edoardo Sbaraini of local business Rasta Divers were diving near Porto Pidocchio when they spotted the remains of a wooden ship at a depth of around 164 feet, according to Diver Net.

The pair immediately knew their find was something special, as wood rarely survives in saltwater unless it is buried by sediment.

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By Ben Hendry - The Press and Journal

When the SS Politician ran aground off the coast of Eriskay in 1941, it was carrying 28,000 cases of malt whisky – filled with about 264,000 bottles.

Islanders couldn’t believe their luck and quickly conducted unofficial salvage missions to the wreck in the ensuing days, in an escapade captured in the comic book and film Whisky Galore.

Some locals went so far as to wear their wives’ dresses so that leaking engine oil from the hold would not get on their clothes and give them away to customs officials who visited the Hebrides to stamp out the practice.

Collectors are now fighting to purchase a bottle secured during a diving expedition decades later, which has gone up for auction online. Offers will be accepted until Friday night with the current highest bid already approaching the guide price of £10,000.

Sellers from The Grand Whisky Auction website describe it as a “very exciting and rare bottling” which offers the chance to own “a piece of whisky history”.

The bottle was recovered by diver George Currie, from Orkney. He was working on a subsea cable repair from South Uist to Eriskay when his team located the wreck.

The whisky onboard included Gilbey’s, Ballantine’s, VAT 69 and more and the lot up for sale includes an original poster from the 2016 remake of Whisky Galore, the diving helmet Mr Currie had on when he found it and bricks from the ship.

The auctioneer adds: “It is incredibly rare to recover a bottle from the wreck that has not been destroyed by the tides and the passage of time.”

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By Ben Cousins - CTV News
 

For Isabelle Ramsay-Brackstone, the Mary Celestia is among the most prized scents at her perfume boutique -- not just because of the scent itself, but also the story behind it.

Ramsay-Brackstone was born and raised in Montreal, but since 2004 she’s been the owner and perfumer at Lili Bermuda, which has two locations in the island country. Ramsay-Brackstone is also the honourary consul of Canada in Bermuda.

Among her most asked-about scents is the Mary Celestia, a modern recreation from a 150-year-old perfume that was found in a sunken ship that bears the same name.

“It's really, really fascinating and the fragrance to me is beautiful,” she told CTVNews.ca in a recent phone interview.

“It's a very simple fragrance. You think of back in 1864, we didn't have a fraction of the materials we have now to make perfume. So it's a very simple, easy, very, very simple composition.”

The ship operated as a blockade runner for Confederate soldiers during the U.S. Civil War. Before its sinking in 1864, the vessel was used to transport banned goods in and out of Confederate ports.

The vessel ultimately sunk after it struck a blind boiler while transporting food, guns and ammunition to Wilmington, S.C., according to the Bermuda 100 Challenge, which works to digitally document Bermuda’s sea floor. There remains speculation that the ship was sabotaged, but it has not been proven.

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By Agnieszka Rakoczy - Cyprus Mail

Controversy continues to swirl around the discovery in the murky depths of the Mediterranean of a 17th century Ottoman shipwreck in the Lebanese EEZ and the subsequent confiscation of its salvaged cargo by customs officials in Limassol.

News of the recovery of the artifacts and their confiscation at the end of 2015 recently resurfaced in the wake of a press release issued by Enigma Recoveries, the London-based company that funded the underwater exploration of the site.

Enigma hailed the discovery as a “once in a generation find that tells the story of the beginning of the globalised world”.

The company claims the legal problems it has encountered in Cyprus were the result of a simple administrative mistake. The department of antiquities, which currently has custody of the 588 artifacts confiscated in Limassol port, has a decidedly different take.

It accuses the company of carrying out illicit underwater excavations. Furthermore, the department claims that the people responsible for the underseas operation are no more than professional treasure hunters, motivated solely by their pursuit of a profitable pay-off.

From Paul Peachey - The National

Underwater archaeologists have discovered a giant shipwreck two kilometres beneath the Mediterranean Sea that casts new light on the advanced state of multinational trade in the Middle East nearly 400 years ago.

Cargoes drawn from 14 nations were found on the trading vessel that sank around 1630 while sailing from Egypt to Istanbul. Its load included fine Chinese porcelain fit for the table of Sultan Murad IV, the ruler of the Ottoman Empire, according to the company behind the discovery.

The 588 items recovered from the wreck in 2015 have been impounded following a dispute over documentation by Cyprus which is seeking to sell them at auction. The UK-based company Enigma Recoveries said it was seeking an “amicable agreement” which would see the items eventually displayed in a major international museum.

The trader was found by underwater robots two kilometres down in waters off the coast of Lebanon following seven decades of fruitless searching.

Another 11 wrecks were discovered within a few kilometres, one of which dated back more than 2,000 years, in an area that Enigma described as the “cradle of navigation”. The company believes that the oldest ship was caught in a storm some 2,200 years ago and sank while its crew were at prayer owing to the discovery of religious artefacts on the uniquely preserved deck.

The search centred on the Levantine Basin, a deep-water area that had attracted less attention for archaeologists then the western Mediterranean, according to Enigma.

Its experts believe that the large shipment had probably been amassed in Cairo – the second biggest city in the Ottoman empire and a huge centre of trade – before being transported to the port of Alexandria to be loaded for onward passage to Istanbul. “If you want to find better preserved stuff, you have to go into the abyss,” said Dr Sean Kingsley, an adviser to the project.

“Nothing like this has been found before. This is the archaeological equivalent of finding a new planet.”

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From Michelle Starr - Science Alert

A sunken ship found in the Nile river may have lain undisturbed for over 2,500 years, but it is finally ponying up its secrets. Scientists think that this ship has revealed a structure whose existence has been debated for centuries.

In fragment 2.96 of Herodotus' Histories, published around 450 BCE, the Ancient Greek historian - who was writing about his trip to Egypt - describes a type of Nile cargo boat called a baris.

According to his portrayal, it was constructed like brickwork, lined with papyrus, and with a rudder that passed through a hole in the keel. This steering system had been seen in representations and models through the Pharaonic period - but we had no firm archaeological evidence of its existence until now.

Enter Ship 17, of the now-sunken port city Thonis-Heracleion near the Canopic Mouth of the Nile, dated to the Late Period, 664-332 BCE.

Here, researchers have been exploring over 70 shipwrecks, discovering countless artefacts that reveal stunning details about the ancient trade hub and its culture. Although it's been in the water for at least 2,000 years, the preservation of Ship 17 has been exceptional. Archaeologists were able to uncover 70 percent of the hull.

"It wasn't until we discovered this wreck that we realised Herodotus was right," archaeologist Damian Robinson of The Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology told The Guardian back in March 2019.

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