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Titanic expedition possible in 2010
By Steve Szkotak - Associated Press
The company that has exclusive rights to salvage the Titanic is planning a possible expedition to the world's most famous shipwreck in 2010.
The first expedition to the North Atlantic wreck site since 2004 is revealed in a filing by RMS Titanic Inc. in U.S. District Court, where four days of hearings are scheduled to begin Monday on the company's claim for a salvage award.
Lawyers for RMS Titanic Inc. confirmed the expedition plans but declined to discuss them in detail.
"That is something that is being looked at right now but it's not in any way a done deal," attorney Robert W. McFarland said in an interview. He said the company would have more to say at this week's hearing.
U.S. District Judge Rebecca Beach Smith, a maritime jurist who considers the wreck an "international treasure," will preside over the hearings.
They are intended to determine a salvage award and establish legal guarantees that thousands of Titanic artifacts remain intact as a collection and forever accessible to the public. Some pieces have ended up in London auction houses.
The 5,900 pieces of china, ship fittings and personal belongings are valued in excess of $110 million and are displayed around the world by Premier Exhibitions Inc., an Atlanta company. RMS Titanic is a subsidiary of Premier.
The Titanic sank on its maiden voyage in international waters on April 15, 1912, and has been subject to competing legal claims since an international team led by oceanographer Robert Ballard found it in 1985. Since then, RMS Titanic has retrieved artifacts during six dives.
Courts have declared it salvor-in-possession — meaning it has exclusive rights to salvage the Titanic — but have explicitly stated it does not own the 5,900 artifacts or the wreck itself.
At the hearings this week in Norfolk, lawyers for RMS Titanic will essentially seek title to the artifacts and a monetary award for its salvage costs. More than a dozen experts will be called to support the company's claim, according to a court filing.
In seeking a salvage award, RMS Titanic will have to document the labor it devoted to its previous expeditions, the risks incurred during the 2 1/2-mile trips beneath the Atlantic to the Titanic wreck site, and the preservation efforts and archaeological value of the wreck and its contents, among other factors.
Smith, the judge, has drawn upon the government to help craft covenants to keep the artifacts preserved, intact as a collection and available to the public.
She is mindful of the Titanic's place in history and the 1,522 people who died when it went down after it struck ice nearly a century ago, based on her previous statements from the bench.
"I am concerned that the Titanic is not only a national treasure, but in its own way an international treasure, and it needs protection and it needs to be monitored," the judge told lawyers in the case nearly one year ago.
If the court agrees to RMS Titanic's request, the company could sell the entire collection to a museum with court approval. The company has said it has no plans to do so. The judge will also consider a competing claim.
Douglas Faulkner Woolley, a British citizen, challenges RMS Titanic's legal claim to the wreck site and plans his own salvage operation. Lawyers for RMS Titanic declined to discuss the competing challenge.
International protections have been sought for the Titanic almost since the wreck was discovered.
Nazi treasure made by Hitler's captive counterfeiters
By Petronella Wyatt - Mail Online
Take a stroll along the secluded banks of Lake Toplitz in Austria, near what was once Hitler's propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels' sumptuous summer villa, and you will sometimes see men diving into the cold, inky water or prodding around near to the shore, with long sticks and metal detectors.
It is a dangerous business - 25 divers have lost their lives in the lake's 426 feet depths. Occasionally over the past 50 years, someone has struck lucky and retrieved a rusty box or some fragments of paper.
However, these are not casual enthusiasts - they are seeking the Nazis' biggest treasure trove.
In metal boxes marked ' munitions' are the results of the biggest counterfeit operation in history; nearly £1billion of forged British banknotes which the nazis planned to drop into Britain to create massive inflation and destroy the economy.
Now I am preparing to dive into the lake myself. With me is a young man called Franz, who looks like Sacha Baron Cohen's character Bruno dressed in his short, tight lederhosen.
The area, 60 miles from the city of Salzburg, is the congregating ground for Austria's neo-Nazis.
Wreck of the Atocha in the Caribbean
By Scott Jones - Scuba Diving Examiner
A very rare, delicate, gold amethyst ring was recovered on the famed shipwreck site of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha by scuba divers in the Caribbean it was announced yesterday.
In the year 1622, 35 miles off the coast of Key West, Florida the Spanish Galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha sank in a violent hurricane en route from Havana, Cuba back to Spain.
Famed underwater treasure hunter Mel Fisher first began searching for this wreck years ago. Today, Fisher’s family and crew continue the search he began for the rear section of the ship, which has been dubbed the Sterncastle. This portion of the ship is known to have held the wealthiest of passengers and thus some of the most precious artifacts and jewelry.
The Fisher’s most recent find, announced yesterday, is a rare gold ring bearing a deep purple amethyst stone. It was found by the seasoned crew of the salvage vessel J.B. Magruder, Captained by Andy Matroci.
It is a rare one-of-a-kind artifact that Kim Fisher describes: "It is a plain gold band with a large box-shaped gold setting on the top with an amethyst inside. The amethyst is so dark it is almost black. It probably would have come from a large crystal in order to be that dark. We have found several other rings with similar characteristics without stones in them, or with emeralds, but this is the first ring with an amethyst found on the Atocha site."
Durham cathedral divers discover gold and silver treasure trove in riverbed
By Maev Kennedy - Guardian
After almost 30 years, the riverbed below Durham Cathedral has given up a bewildering secret: a hoard of ecclesiastical gold and silver, including medals, goblets, and crucifixes once owned by the Queen, the pope and other state and church leaders.
A total of 32 objects given as gifts to the late Michael Ramsey – a former archbishop of Canterbury who was bishop of Durham for four years in the 1950s and spent some of his retirement in the city – have been recovered from deep in the bed of the river Wear by two amateur divers, brothers Gary and Trevor Bankhead.
Their finds include gold, silver and bronze medals struck to commemorate the second Vatican council, which must have been presented when Ramsey – archbishop of Canterbury from 1961 to 1974 – met Pope Paul VI at the Vatican in 1966.
The Bankhead brothers, who made some 200 dives over two years under license from the cathedral, also discovered a solid gold Japanese medal probably presented when Ramsey met Nikkyo Niwano, president of the Japanese Buddhist movement, in 1973.
Rare piece of history displayed
By Josh Humphries - The Daily Reflector
An anchor believed to be from Blackbeard's flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge, was taken from the water by researchers with the QAR Project, a state-funded research expedition that will eventually bring up 700,000 individual artifacts.
The anchor was displayed at the QAR Conservation Lab on the East Carolina University West Research Campus on Thursday afternoon.
Historians say that the infamous pirate and his ship ran aground in 1718 in Beaufort Inlet. The wreckage, which was first found in 1996, is located about a mile from Fort Macon in 25 feet of water.
As more artifacts are recovered researchers are more and more confident that the wreckage is what remains of Blackbeard's ship.
“This is the oldest shipwreck we have worked on in North Carolina,” Mark Wilde-Ramsing, QAR project manager, said. “It is associated with Blackbeard and every artifact is important for understanding what was going on at the time.”
Underwater archaeology exhibition opens at Shihsanhang museum
From Taiwan News
An exhibition that promises to offer a fascinating insight into the world of underwater archaeology and the history of ancient maritime links between Taiwan and China is being held at the Shihsanhang Museum of Archaeology in Bali, Taipei County until Dec. 13.
Under the theme Diving into History, the exhibition is composed of six divisions that feature a wide range of biological fossils from the Taiwan Strait that date back 40,000 years, an array of underwater cultural and historic assets, and a virtual underwater archaeological site, according to Lee Li-fang, a Council for Cultural Affairs (CCA) official who is one of the organizers of the exhibition.
Other highlights include 20 artifacts retrieved from a sunken Chinese Qianlong period (1736-1796) vessel that was named General No.
1 after Penghu's General Islet where it was discovered by fishermen in 1994, Lee said.
According to unofficial statistics based on sunken ship records, there are an estimated 500 sunken vessels in the Taiwan Strait, said Ho Chuan-kun, director of the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural Science in Taichung City, who is another exhibition organizer.
A sense of injustice lasting 130 years
By Les Leyne - Times Colonist
George Abbott made his legislature debut as minister of aboriginal relations and reconciliation this week, and one of the first orders of business is a request for an apology.
There's lots to be sorry about in his new job, given how the last two centuries of history have left the original inhabitants of B.C.
And there's one specific incident that has slowly become an issue.
Some native people on the west coast of Vancouver Island want the present-day government to atone in some fashion for what now appears to have been an atrocity 130 years ago.
The story, very briefly, is that after a shipwreck, word made its way to Victoria that survivors had been massacred by the Indians.
A gunboat was sent up the coast to investigate.
It shelled a native village and nabbed two suspects, Katkinna and John Anietsachist.
They were tried and found guilty in Victoria, then taken back home, baptized en route, and hanged.
Expert to unfurl the majestic tale of the Titanic
By Helen Jardine - BDA Sun
More than two decades ago he was collecting jewellery from the deck of the RMS Titanic, two and a half miles beneath the ocean's surface.
Last week he was discussing climate change and space travel with Buzz Aldrin - the second man ever to walk on the moon.
This week ocean explorer, doctor and author Joe MacInnis is in Bermuda to give a talk on the exploration and salvage of one of the world's most famous shipwrecks.
"Titanic is one of those wonderful, extraordinary, majestic stories that everybody can project themselves into," Dr. MacInnis said. "People wonder where they could be on that ship and ask themselves, 'what would I have done on that night?'"
Dr. MacInnis went on his first dive of the Titanic in 1987, when he says he had an "extraordinary experience".
He explained: "I was with the French team and we were at the bottom of the ocean looking into the sediment and the pilot stopped the submarine and said, 'What's that?'
"It was a small bronze statue of a woman with an uplifted arm, about three feet long. And we recognized it right away because it was such an iconic image - it was the statue that stood at the bottom of the grand staircase.