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Photo Belleair Coins

By Wayne Ayers - tbnweekly

Prized artifacts recovered from the shipwreck Atocha are on display at the Silver Queen/Belleair Coins on West Bay Drive in Largo.

Two silver bars weighing about 70 pounds each are the most recent acquisitions, said Belleair Coins president Art Arbutine. The bars were used to mint Spanish coins, both in the New World and Spain.

The Atocha’s discovery in the mid-1980s by famed treasure hunter Mel Fisher was a cause célèbre that spawned several books, a movie and tons of publicity. The legend was further enhanced when the U.S. government sued Fisher for title to the wreck. Following eight years of litigation, Fisher won the case in a Supreme Court decision.

Arbutine said the bars he obtained, which are pure silver, came from someone who “was probably an investor in the venture with Mel Fisher.” They are accompanied by certificates of authenticity that include a photograph of the unique markings on each bar.

When the price of silver goes up, collectors bring in items like the silver bars for sale, Arbutine said.

“The people that had these, had them for a long time,” he said.

The Atocha’s remains lie near the Dry Tortugas, about 35 miles from Key West. The silver was mined in Peru and was on its way to Spain in 1662 when the Atocha was caught in a hurricane, Arbutine said.

Spanish treasure ships would sail to Havana, Cuba, then go halfway to Florida before making a right turn for Spain.

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By Leigh Thomas - Reuters

French police said on Wednesday they had seized a significant portion of an ancient Roman treasure that was discovered more than two decades ago by Corsican divers who became rich by secretly selling it off.

The seizure is the latest chapter in the exploits of a then young Corsican and two friends who spotted gold in shallow waters 25 years ago while diving for sea urchins off the coast of the Mediterranean island.

The three friends enriched themselves by selling the coins and medallions on the black market and later claimed that they had inherited them when the source of their newfound wealth was discovered by the local authorities.

Police did not say on Wednesday from whom they had recovered the latest portion of the treasure, which likely came from an ancient shipwreck. Specialists consider the find to be one of the most important related to ancient coins, dating from the 3rd century AD.

"This submerged treasure, identified as a maritime cultural asset, belongs to the state," France's national police said in a statement, after a long investigation into national and international black markets for antiquities.

One of the original three Corsican friends, Felix Biancamaria, told French daily Liberation in 2005 how the discovery of what he quickly suspected were Roman coins brought him and his fellow divers untold wealth and thrills until the party soured when local police caught wind of their exploits.

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By Bobby Pritchett

Anchor Research & Salvage, S.R.L. (ARS) has entered into an agreement with the Dominican Republic Oficina Nacional de Patrimonio Cultural Subacuático.

The contract gives ARS the exclusive rights to explore and archaeologically recover historic shipwrecks along an undisclosed stretch of the Caribbean Sea on the island nation's South coast.

According to government officials, this is the first time that such a contract has been granted for the area.

Robert Pritchett, president of ARS, says his company will be working under the direction of the Oficina Nacional de Patrimonio Cultural Subacuático. And professional Marine Archaeologist Dr.Lubos Kordac and Dr E. Lee Spence both have wrote books on the islands shipwrecks

ARS will be using state-of-the-art remote sensing equipment to survey the contract area, and a specially designed Geographical Information System (GIS) will be used to map discoveries. All of ARS' survey, archaeological, and GIS data will be shared with the government.

Under a preliminary agreement, ARS has already located a number of shipwrecks threw research & exploration of the lease area,

For Pritchett and the management of ARS this is a lifestyle, not a job. The members of ARS have dedicated their lives to archaeologically sensitive exploration rescue and preservation of historical shipwrecks.

ARS' discoveries and other developments will be posted on the company's website at www.arsdr.com

Pritchett has been personally funding this project, but now expects to raise additional working capital.

By Tyler Treadway - tcpalm.com

Bonnie Schubert couldn’t believe her eyes when, about 1,000 feet off Frederick Douglass Beach near Fort Pierce, she came face to face with a sold gold statue of a bird that had lain under the Atlantic Ocean exactly 295 years and 15 days.

“I remember asking myself, ‘Is this real ?’” Schubert recalled Wednesday as the 5.5-inch-tall statue she found Aug. 15 was revealed to the public at her home in the Vero Shores neighborhood of Vero Beach.

“The Bird,” as it’s come to be known, is real all right.

So is it’s $885,000 appraised value.

The statue was aboard one of 11 Spanish ships laden with treasures from the New World that were bound from Havana to the court of King Phillip V before encountering a hurricane July 31, 1715, and sinking off the Treasure Coast.

Shubert, 49, found the statue as she and her one-person crew — her 87-year-old mother, Jo Schubert — were combing the plot of ocean bottom they’ve been assigned as subcontractors for 1715 Fleet-Queens Jewels LLC, a historic shipwreck salvage operation based in Sebastian and Jupiter that acquired rights to the fleet from the heirs of renowned treasure hunter Mel Fisher.

Bonnie Schubert said she had just started to examine a “hole” where several feet of sand had been blown away when she saw the bird.

“I got a hit on the metal detector, and I was hand-fanning away some more sand when I saw it just lying there upright in the sand, absolutely perfect and so impossibly gold,” she said.

“Every time you get a hit on the metal detector, you’re thinking, ‘It’s a gold bar; it’s a silver bar.’ But it’s usually a fishing weight or a beer can.”

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From Dominican Today

Hispaniola Ventures, LLC and its funding partner Marine Exploration, Inc. have resumed exploration activities in their contract area off of the north coast of the Dominican Republic.

Having suspended operations during the hurricane season, their exploration/salvage vessel R/V Hispaniola is active once again.

During the first week of magnetometer surveys, three new shipwreck sites have been discovered and proofing excavations are being performed in order to determine dating periods and probable nationality.

While performing underwater metal detector anomaly identification dives, a coral encrusted pair of 18th Century flintlock pistols were discovered fused together, muzzle to grip and grip to muzzle, indicating how they were stored in their carrying case.

The amazing discovery was made by Burt Webber’s son Kurt Webber.

Partial cleaning of the brass butt plates have revealed the unique facial images of “The Good” ---- “The Evil”. Webber’s consultation with marine archaeologists and specialists in colonial period weaponry has suggested that this is the first matched set (brace) of pistols ever found on a sunken shipwreck site anywhere in the world.

It is recommended by conservators that the pistols be professionally cleaned and preserved, remaining fused together thus producing a unique museum display piece.

From Nashua Telegraph

In 1914, the British navy lost its star performer in the super-dreadnought battleship class when the HMS Audacious was wrecked off the northern coast of Donegal, Ireland.

It was, however, when all was said and done, more of a ship-whoopsie than a shipwreck.

The HMS Audacious was setting out for training exercises with her fellow members of the 2nd Battle Squadron when she ran up against a naval mine that had been laid by a German ship.

The engine room on the port side of the Audacious flooded almost instantly, causing the ship to list dangerously and the stern to submerge.

The damage to the ship was initially thought to be from an enemy submarine. The Audacious attempted to make it back to shore while the rest of the super-dreadnoughts cleared out of the area to avoid further attack.

When it became apparent that the Audacious would not be able to make it back to shore, smaller destroyers and tugboats were sent to the rescue. By this time, however, the Audacious was in serious trouble.

As the futile rescue attempt continued, naval officials received messages stating that two other ships had succumbed to mines in that same area during the past 24 hours. Prompt communication between squadrons was apparently not the British navy’s strong suit at this time.

The sinking of the Audacious took nearly 13 hours, with sheepish crew members and personnel being evacuated in waves as more and more of the ship slipped beneath the water’s surface.

It finally sank completely and exploded, resulting in the shipwreck’s lone casualty when a piece of flying armor plate crushed a petty officer on a ship about 800 yards away.

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By Paul Fernandes - TNN

In a find that may prove important for research into the state's maritime trade, marine archaeologists of the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) have found a steel-hulled steam engine shipwreck off the Mormugao coast.

The wreck could be of a British merchant vessel, the marine archaeologists have told TOI.

"This is the first discovery of a steam engine shipwreck in Goan waters," A S Gaur, marine archaeologist, NIO, said.

"As far as the time frame and technology is concerned, this is a specimen of a steam engine ship and could be of British origin of 1880s vintage," he added.

Scattered over a wide area in a shallow region called Amee Shoals, the four-decade research and more recent explorations of NIO's marine archaeologists bore fruit as they found the heavily salvaged vessel after two years of continuous research.

Elsewhere in the country, preliminary explorations of only two such shipwrecks were carried out in and around Minicoy in Lakshadweep islands, sources said.

"The stamps on the flanges and the name on the firebricks found on the site (off Mormugao) suggest British origin," Gaur said.

As naval vessels used water-tube boilers from 1880s onwards, the archaeologists aver that three Scotch boilers, almost 100 metres long, in this vessel make it evident that it was a large merchant ship.

Later, the oil-fired boilers were replaced by diesel engines.

The NIO archaeologists found three boilers made of wrought iron lying in a north-south direction, with the rear side pointing south. The triple-expansion type engine is still in fairly good condition, but the hull frames are severely corroded.

Was the vessel used by the British during the late 1880s for transporting steel? As an indication, the Portuguese had entrusted the task of laying the railway line from Mormugao to Castle Rock in 1887 to the British.

"No datable finds are on hand at the site to say when and how the wreck occurred though," Sila Tripathi, another NIO marine archaeologist who worked on the site off Goan waters said.

The preliminary report of the find was compiled by NIO's Gaur, Tripathi and Sundaresh. It was recently published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, released twice a year from UK and USA.

Though studies by Lisbon-based Centro Nacional de Arqueologia Nautica e Subaquatica (CNANS) and by Boxer (1959) and Mathew (1988) have drawn up a list of Portuguese shipwrecks in Indian waters between 1497 and 1612, details of not a single site have been specified.

The studies merely said that the vessels had wrecked in shallow waters due to storms, sand bars and other hidden obstacles.

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By Jack Malvern - Times Online

The question of whether Christopher Columbus and his crew were responsible for bringing syphilis to Europe from the Americas appears to have been answered by the discovery of a collection of knobbly skeletons in a London cemetery. 

A popular theory among experts in tropical diseases is that outbreaks of syphilis in the mid-1490s were a direct result of Columbus and his randy crew returning from their first voyage across the Atlantic in 1492-93.

However, the largest excavation of skeletons undertaken in Britain has unearthed seven that suggest the disease was known in England up to two centuries before that.

Archaeologists believe that rough patches on the skulls and limbs of skeletons found at St Mary Spital in east London exonerate Columbus's crew.

Samples include a skull of a child of unknown sex who had such bad lesions on its scalp that marks were left on its forehead. The child had received the venereal form of the disease from its mother.

Brian Connell, an osteologist for the Museum of London who has studied the bones, said that he had no doubt that the skeletons were buried before Columbus's voyage. Radiocarbon dating of the samples is estimated to be 95 per cent accurate.

"We're confident that Christopher Columbus is simply not a feature of the emergence and timing of the disease in Europe," he said.

Previous discoveries of apparently syphilitic bones buried in Europe before Columbus's voyage have been inconclusive, he said.

"Either radiocarbon dating analysis was not sufficiently accurate or the diagnosis [of syphilis] was less clear. But this puts the nail in the coffin of the Columbus theory."

The seven syphilitic skeletons from St Mary's Spital, two from 1200-1250 and five from 1250-1400, are not only better preserved than those considered previously, but buried alongside other skeletons and objects such as coins that corroborate radiocarbon dating results.

The burial site received its name from the hospital on the edge of the City of London now known as Spitalfields.

The bones suggest that the victims, probably patients of the hospital, were in considerable pain. The child whose skull has been reconstructed would probably have been blind, bald and beset by toothache.

Its teeth came through at 45 degrees to its jaw, Mr Connell said. "It would have had gross facial disfigurement, which would have been very distressing for the child, who was about 10 years old when it died.

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