HOT NEWS !
Stay informed on the old and most recent significant or spectacular
nautical news and shipwreck discoveries
By Cathy Kightlinger - Indy Star
Visitors today at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis got their first glimpse of one of three "treasures" after a large crate was opened, unveiling remnants from Captain Kidd's 17th-century ship.
The ship's cannon and other artifacts will be on display during "Treasures of the Earth," a collaborative exhibition between the museum and National Geographic. It will open in 2011 at the museum.
In December 2007, an underwater archaeology team from Indiana University -- led by Charles Beeker, IU's director for Underwater Science, announced the discovery of remnants from Captain Kidd's ship, which was made 70 feet off the coast of Catalina Island in the Dominican Republic. The cannon has been submerged underwater at IU, where it will remain until it moves to the museum.
"I could have it squirreled away at my laboratory at IU," Beeker said about the cannon. "But by bringing it to the Children's Museum, we're going to have a very broad audience of people that can come see this."
The cannon will be submerged in a tank of water inside the exhibit, allowing visitors to watch the process used to slowly clean encrusted materials off of it, said Jennifer Pace Robinson, vice president of experience development and family learning at the museum.
"We really want families to come in and feel the thrill of discovery, but (also) that they are part of the archaeological process," said Pace Robinson, who is in the Dominican Republic this week getting ideas on how to replicate excavation activities for the exhibit, and learning how to care for the cannon.
"Kids will have some of the excitement of being at a pirate shipwreck site, and we'll be able to replicate that in the exhibit for people who aren't able to come down to the Dominican Republic and see it first hand," Pace Robinson said.
By Kirsty Johnston - Taranaki Daily News
The wrecks of two historic ships sunk in Taranaki waters during the 1860s could soon come under national protection.
The paddle steamer Tasmanian Maid and colonial steam transport SS Alexandra, both which lie in relatively shallow water off the North Taranaki coast, have been proposed for national recognition by the New Zealand Historic Places Trust.
They are considered nationally rare examples of remains from the New Zealand Wars – rarer still because they have not been relocated, unlike many similar-aged wrecks
Heritage adviser Blyss Wagstaff said many vessels that saw active service in the wars ended up overseas, their location now unknown. That made the identification and recognition of these shipwreck sites that much more important given their rarity.
"They are a part of a series of major historical events in 19th-century New Zealand that have shaped our lives today," Ms Wagstaff said.
"They are reminders of the resistance of Maori to Crown alienation of their land and the Crown's response to those challenges. They are also representative of a commonly used form of coastal transport of the time."
The sites were rediscovered by divers from the New Plymouth Underwater Club in the 1970s. Tasmanian Maid, which lies off the Kawaroa reef in New Plymouth, originally operated as a coastal steamer in the Nelson/Marlborough area earning the distinction of being the first steamer to enter the Buller River in 1862.
It was then put to service as a supply and dispatch vessel in the Taranaki campaign of the New Zealand Wars, before being refitted to serve as the gunboat HMS Sandfly in the Hauraki Gulf and, later, Wanganui.
"While it was lost as a civilian vessel when it hit the Kawaroa reef in January 1868 it remains a significant link to the New Zealand Wars," Ms Wagstaff said. The Tasmanian Maid is being considered for Category I registration. Meanwhile, the SS Alexandra is being proposed for Category II registration.
The search for the Guggenheim treasure
/https://public-media.si-cdn.com/filer/New-York-City-harbor-631.jpg)
By Christopher Solomon - Smithsonian
Among the old-timers casting for stripers along the Arthur Kill between Staten Island and New Jersey talk tends to return to a few well-thumbed topics.
The most intriguing of these is the tale of the silver ingot that once snagged in the eel trident of the old Indian fisherman named Blood. From there, conversation invariably turns to the Lost Guggenheim Treasure.
On the still, moonlit night of September 26, 1903, a tug urged the barge Harold out of what’s today the South Street Seaport and south past the Statue of Liberty.
The Harold’s load that night was nearly 7,700 silver-and-lead bars. They were destined for the glowing Asarco smelters of Perth Amboy, New Jersey. The silver, and the smelters, belonged to the Guggenheim family, which had made its fortune in mining and smelting.
The cargo never arrived, at least in one batch. Somewhere in the Arthur Kill tidal strait the Harold tipped, sending most of the silver bars to the bottom.
The barge’s deckhands—“dumbest skunks I ever had to do with,” the salvage company’s owner later told the New York Times—didn’t notice until docking at dawn.
A secret salvage effort recovered about 85 percent of the bars, but that still left up to 1,400 “pigs” unfound. Today they could be worth $20 million.
One morning last fall, Ken Hayes set out to find himself some sunken treasure—that is, if no one got to Hayes, or to the treasure, first.
Hayes is president and founder of Aqua Survey, a Flemington, N.J., company that usually grabs sediment from the bottom of waterways for clients like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
In recent years Aqua Survey also has gained a reputation for looking for less mundane things someone has lost underwater: Spanish doubloons off Key West. Fighter planes in the Bermuda Triangle. UFOs off Catalina Island.
Divers examine gold-rush vessel
By Sandra mcCulloch - Times Colonist
Five Victoria divers and one from Cowichan plan to be 240 feet under the surface of Indian Arm Inlet near Vancouver this weekend, exploring the remains of a historic vessel that was scuttled in 1936.
Chris Fenton, a commerce student at the University of Victoria, heads a team set to explore the 216-foot-long wreck of the SS Amur, also named the SS Famous, at the request of the Underwater Archeological Society of B.C.
The group, which also includes two divers from Richmond, did a previous underwater exploration of a wreck for the UASBC in the water off Royal Roads University where they found an old wooden sailing ship that was intact.
This type of exploration is called technical diving, requiring training beyond that of recreational scuba divers and using specialized equipment.
"We like to say it's safe but if you make mistakes on these kinds of dives, the consequences are pretty extreme," said Fenton.
The Famous/Amur was launched in England in 1890. It worked in Siberia and China before sailing to Victoria to transport gold miners to Wrangell, Alaska, from where they hoped to get rich in the Gold Rush of 1898. Later, the vessel returned to China, moved on to Japan and then Australia.
The vessel then returned to Canada after being purchased by the Hudson's Bay Company.
Its last owners deliberately sank the Famous/Amur in Indian Arm. It was rediscovered in the summer of 2007 during an underwater survey by the Canadian Hydrographic Service.
Since the vessel is too deep for recreational divers to reach, the UASBC sent a remotely operated vehicle to the site. The ROV sent up blurry images which were enough to raise interest of society members.
And... Khoob-Surat, said the pirate
By Ashleshaa Khurana - Times of India
Burned and scuttled off the Carribean in the 17th century, The Quedagh Merchant, an Armenian trade vessel that was built in Gujarat and hijacked by the notorious William Kidd — whose story inspired 'Treasure Island' — is preparing for a return to her homeland as a 'living museum'.
Shiver me shattered timbers" screamed headlines across the world, when the 310-year-old , barnacle-covered , coral-encrusted 'The Quedagh Merchant' was discovered in the pristine seas off the Dominican Republic, 70 feet off Catalina Island.
This was no ordinary vessel — it was stuff that legends are made of, on the hot list of every treasure hunter.
The Quedagh Merchant, alias Cara Merchant, belonged to the notorious Captain William Kidd — a Scottish privateer-turned-pirate who was hanged after a summary trial in London in 1701. Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and Edgar Allen Poe's The Gold Bug are some among the works of pirate lore inspired by Kidd's story.
Now, three years after this find, Charles D Beeker, director of Underwater Science and Academics at Indiana University, USA, is preparing to visit the Gujarati city of Surat, where the ship was built in the 17th century, for "a presentation on a unique and significant aspect" of India's maritime lore.
By M Dee Dubroff - Amog
The mysterious mechanism was discovered in 1900 in the wreck of a Roman vessel off the Greek island of Antikythera.
The ship held other treasures that were taken over by the Greek government, but one of the items retrieved by the divers was an odd-looking corroded lump of some kind.
When the lump fell apart some time later, a damaged machine of unknown purpose was revealed. It bore large gears, small cogs and a few words engraved in Greek.
At first it was believed to be some kind of astronomical time-keeping device. One researcher in particular, Derek J. de Solla Price, established initial tooth counts and believed that the device followed what is known as the Metonic cycle, which in the ancient world was used to predict eclipses.
The full function of this odd device remained a mystery until recently. Advances in photography and x-rays have revealed the true complexity of this astonishing creation that, anachronistically speaking, is akin to finding the remnants of a supersonic jet plane in the ruins of ancient Egypt.
Photography unlocked many of the mysteries of this device by exposing its surfaces to varying lighting patterns, which in turn created different levels of contrast. Researchers were then able to read more of the inscribed text than was previously possible.
Details of the interactions of the gears were quite complex and clearly revealed through the marvels of x-ray imaging and the creation of 3-D computer models of the mechanism.
The Greek National Archaeological Museum also found some boxes filled with 82 mechanism fragments.
Mary Rose goes on display at Crufts
By Beth Hale - Mail Online
She may have been a mongrel, but in the finest tradition of seafaring, this old sea dog went down with her ship. And there she stayed, on the seabed - for the next four and half centuries.
The unfortunate hound was on board Henry VIII's flagship Mary Rose when the ill-fated warship sank to the bottom of the Solent on July 19, 1545.
The dog, now preserved as an almost complete canine skeleton, acquired the nickname Hatch after divers discovered her remains near the sliding hatch door of the Mary Rose’s carpenter’s cabin.
Experts believe the hound, estimated to have been between 18 months and two years old, earned her keep as the ship's ratter – superstitious Tudor seafarers did not have cats on board ship as they were thought to bring bad luck.
And she was probably very good at her job – only the partial remains of rats’ skeletons have been found on board the Mary Rose.
By contrast Hatch's skeleton is remarkable for how well it has been preserved, it is 99 per cent complete with a just a few teeth and a few paw bones missing.
After 34 years at sea and three wars, the Mary Rose had been regarded by many as invincible.
Then, as she defended England from a French invasion force, she sank taking with her 500 men and a treasure trove of Tudor history with her to the seafloor.
So complete was the Mary Rose's demise that even the rats didn't even the chance to leave the sinking ship, as experts discovered when they brought the vessel and her contents (rodent skeletons included) back to the surface.
But the rats on board ship didn't stand much of a chance back in the 16th century, not with Hatch on board.
Archaeological potential for shipwrecks
From Directions Magazine
The “AMAP2 - Characterising the Potential for Wrecks” project (AMAP2), commissioned in October 2009, is a collaborative project between SeaZone and the University of Southampton (UoS) which seeks to improve the management of the marine historic environment through the interoperability of reference and archaeological data for marine spatial planning.
The aim of the AMAP2 project is to study relationships between the survival of shipwrecks and the natural environment. The results will be used to develop a characterisation of areas of maritime archaeological potential (AMAP) based on the environmental parameters affecting the survival of wrecks in seabed sediments, thus providing the basis for a more justified assessment of potential for unrecorded wrecks.
Following the success of the AMAP1 pilot project in 2008, the AMAP2 project seeks to further the monitoring, mitigation and management of the marine environment for offshore industries such as renewable energy and marine aggregates by facilitating the assessment of potential threats to archaeological assets.
This will be achieved by:
(1) comparing and unifying wreck data acquired by the UK Hydrographic Office (UKHO) and held at English Heritage’s National Monument Record (NMR);
(2) developing interoperability between the wreck data published in SeaZone HydroSpatial and historical data available from the NMR, thereby enhancing the usefulness and accessibility of both datasets; and
(3) analysing the statistical relationships between maritime archaeological data and the environment.
Improving the understanding of the relationships between wrecks and their environment, coupled with the results of seabed modelling undertaken by UoS, will provide a firm basis for interpreting the variables which affect the potential for wrecks to survive in different seabed conditions.