HOT NEWS !

By Cahal Milmo - The Independent

Why are we asking this now ? 

Magistrate Mark A Pizzo, sitting in the US Federal Court at Tampa, Florida, might not be a major figure in international law but he has just made a potentially vital decision on the future of 3,000 treasure-laden shipwrecks that lie in the world's oceans.

Mr Pizzo ruled that an American marine archaeology company should return gold and silver coins worth £300m to the Spanish government after the bullion was removed from a sunken vessel in the Atlantic.

Odyssey Marine Exploration removed the 500,000 coins, weighing 17 tonnes, in 2007 and flew them back to its Florida base from Gibraltar. 

The move was greeted with fury by the Spanish government, which insisted the wreck was the Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes, a frigate which was sunk by the Royal Navy in 1804.

Odyssey insisted there was not enough evidence to prove the site, which it called Black Swan, was the Nuestra Senora and, even if that were the case, the ship was on a commercial mission and its cargo could be legitimately recovered under salvage law and shared among salvors and claimants.

Mr Pizzo dealt a serious blow to these plans when he issued a ruling that the sunken vessel was probably the Nuestra Senora and its glittering bullion should be returned in its entirety to Madrid. Odyssey has said it will appeal. 

Why is a 205-year-old Spanish wreck so important ? 

The Nuestra Senora, whose sinking provoked war between Britain and Spain, goes to the heart of a debate about which shipwrecks can be explored and their cargoes retrieved.

The 1989 International Convention on Salvage ruled that wrecks found in international waters were effectively there for the taking, requiring salvors to obtain "title" to the site which in most cases gives them ownership of whatever they can recover. But a key exception are the estimated 3,000 sovereign immune vessels which litter the world's seabeds. 

These state-owned ships, including all naval vessels, remain the inalienable property of their originating nation. The US judge decided that the Nuestra Senora was a sovereign vessel despite evidence that it was on a commercial voyage taking privately owned gold from Peru.

Odyssey's share value plunged on news of the ruling. If the recommendation is upheld on appeal, it could have major implications for the dozen or so underwater treasure hunting companies that have sprung up by obliging them to return their finds to government coffers. 

Where have all these treasure hunters come from ? 

The marine archaeology business has been transformed in the past decade by the arrival of remote-controlled submersible robots which have allowed explorers to reach deep-water wrecks for the first time. Such exploration does not come cheap.

The smallest remote operating vehicle (ROV), necessary for probing, photographing and retrieving artefacts from the sea bed, costs about £35,000. Odyssey operates a Land Rover-sized ROV called Zeus which cost up to £2.5m and is capable of picking up anything from a two-tonne cannon to a single coin as well as taking high-resolution photographs of a wreck site. Operating costs are vast – about £600,000 a month to run a fully-equipped survey ship. 


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By Emil Sanamyan - The Armenian Reporter

This has been a mystery three centuries in the making. Burned and scuttled off the coast of this former Spanish colony, an Armenian merchant ship captured by British privateer Captain William Kidd has since become the stuff of legend and an elusive prize for treasure hunters.

Since it was accidentally found in December 2007, the researchers involved have called Quedagh Merchant an unprecedented discovery of its kind in recent history. They are now working on ascertaining the vessel's identity and on the creation of a unique museum.

According to British records, Kidd captured the Quedagh Merchant (also known as Cara Merchant) in January 1698 from Armenian traders near the coast of India and then sailed on it to the Caribbean.

In 1701, after a two-year public trial in London, Kidd was hanged to his death on charges of murder and piracy - charges based in main part on testimony from the Armenian vessel's owners.

Seeking to bury the evidence after looting much of its precious cargo, Kidd's associates set the ship on fire and sunk it in 1699.

Subsequent efforts sanctioned by the British Crown to find the vessel and its cargo and compensate the Armenians proved fruitless.

Full story...

By Nicole E. Smith - Independent Mail

State archaeologists working in the Pee Dee River on Friday found two cannons used in the Civil War.

Chris Amer, deputy state archaeologist and head of the Underwater Archaeology Division at the University of South Carolina, teamed up with the Pee Dee Research and Recovery Team, state archaeologist and USC research associate professor Jon Leader, representatives from Francis Marion and East Carolina universities and students plan to raise the five-ton cannons used aboard the C.S.S. Pee Dee. They expect to raise a third.

They have also found the site where Mars Bluff once stood in Marion County. Mars Bluff was a Confederate naval yard from 1862 to 1865, built inland because of its wealth of natural resources and proximity to the Atlantic Ocean.

The site is “indicative of the Confederate spirit,” Amer said.

“All the way through the war, the Union side had the advantage,” he said. The Union had “quite a big navy that could block 3,5000 miles of the coast, and it was industrial while the South was agrarian. When the war started the South had very few industrial ports.”

From BBC News

A deep sea treasure-hunting company has been ordered by a US judge to hand over half a million gold and silver coins to the government of Spain.

The company, Odyssey Marine Exploration, raised the haul from a shipwreck in the Atlantic, suspected to be that of a Spanish naval vessel.

The Spanish government argued that the treasure formed part of the country's national heritage.

But Odyssey intends to appeal, saying it has a claim to the treasure.

This is just the latest round of a long-running and sometimes murky dispute, says the BBC's Steve Kingstone in Madrid.

The haul of coins - thought to be worth some $500m (£308m) - came to light in 2007, when Odyssey announced the recovery of artefacts from a wreck in the Atlantic.

It kept the location of the wreck secret, in what it said was an attempt to deter looters.

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From CBC News

Second World War artifacts, including a pile of vintage 500-pound bombs and the nose section of an American B-25 bomber, have surfaced in Watson Lake, causing a small turf war between the Yukon government and the Alberta couple that salvaged the plane wreckage.

The couple recovered a section of the bomber, which was part of an Allied training fleet during the Second World War, from a nearby lake last week.

While details are sorted out between the government and the couple, the recovered material isn't going anywhere.

"What we have right now is a section of the aircraft, the nose section, on a trailer, out at the lake," Watson Lake RCMP Cpl. Tom Howell told CBC News on Wednesday.

"What we're dealing with here is an aircraft that's been known to be there for a while, but people who have salvaged it were doing it basically as a … working holiday, just trying to raise this wreck and perhaps restore it."

The B-25 bomber is believed to have skidded off an airport runway in 1944, ending up in the water.

From Odyssey

Since the announcement of the Magistrate’s recommendation in the “Black Swan” case, intense international media coverage has led to many questions that Odyssey Marine Exploration, Inc. would like to address.

What was this recent court filing by the Magistrate ?

This was not a ruling in the case. The recent filing was a recommendation by U.S. Federal Court Magistrate Mark A. Pizzo that Spain’s Motion to Dismiss the “Black Swan” case be granted. The recommendation which was filed June 3, 2009, opines that the Court lacks jurisdiction to hear the case. Odyssey and any other interested parties may file written objections to the recommendation before any ruling is issued, and Odyssey intends to file an objection.

How do you feel about the recommendation ?

While we respect the Magistrate’s experience, judges are not infallible, as evidenced by the multitude of verdicts that are overturned each year in appellate court.

We believe key pieces of evidence were ignored or discounted that show the Mercedes WAS clearly on a commercial mission when she sank and that the majority of cargo (coins) aboard the ship was owned by PRIVATE individuals, not the government.

“Returning” the coins to the Spanish Government when they never owned them defies logic and reason. We also disagree with the Magistrate’s apparent assumption that a vessel was found at the site. Furthermore, the Magistrate accepted facts as presented by Spain without giving Odyssey an opportunity to cross examine witnesses at a trial.

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Odyssey Marine Exploration, Inc. v. The Unidentified Shipwrecked Vessel - The full story

From Balkan Travellers

Archaeologists are currently exploring, trying to map and preserve one of the oldest known submerged cities in the world, the ancient town of Pavlopetri located near Neapolis, the southernmost town of mainland Greece in the Peloponnese.

“The site is submerged in about three to four meters of water, and covers an area of about 500 square metres, about 50-60 metres offshore,” one of the project leaders, underwater archaeologist Jon Henderson from the University of Nottingham told Nature News.

“There are about 15 buildings made up of three or four rooms, some streets, rock-cut tombs and courtyards – and there could be more underneath, because so far there has been no excavation.

Some ruins date from at least 2800 BC, but we think the town Pavlopetri itself dates from the Mycenaean period, about 1600–1100 BC,” he added.

According to Henderson, the city’s structures were intact when it was submerged and the discovered pottery artefacts seemed to stop at the 1,100 BC threshold, which could mean that the constructions were covered by the sea shortly after.

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By Mitchell Martin - Art Info

The problem with stolen art is that once you start to sell it, word gets out. When the art involved is a hundred or more bronze religious medallions, each worth perhaps $1,000, eventually somebody will notice, call the FBI, and there go the profits.

Which is apparently what happened with a haul of bronze medallions that took a 237-year journey from Spain to Anguilla to Vermont and then back to the Caribbean.

Shortly after midnight on June 8, 1772, the Spanish vessel El Buen Consejo smashed into Anguilla in the Leeward Islands, stranding passengers and crew on a voyage to Mexico.

The ship and an accompanying vessel, El Prusiano, sank, with their cargoes.

The lost goods included thousands of bronze religious medallions carried by 50 Franciscan priests who were bound for the Philippines and meant to be used to win converts and for educational purposes.

On Tuesday, more than 100 of the medals were returned to the government of Anguilla by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI said it had assisted Anguillan authorities in recovering the medallions, which are considered to have “international archaeological significance.”

Under Anguillan law, such goods are not supposed to leave the country.

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