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By Tuck Thompson

The man who found the HMAS Sydney off Western Australia said he would submit a proposal to locate the hospital ship Centaur.

But David L. Mearns, who heads UK-based Blue Water Recoveries, could face competition from Australians involved in the HMAS Sydney project, including deep-water oil and gas pipeline firms.

Explorers have until January 23 to respond to an advertisement for a project manager, a post expected to be filled next month.

Centaur was torpedoed off the Brisbane Coast in 1943 by a Japanese submarine, with the loss of 268 lives. Hundreds of families across Australia have waited years for the war grave to be discovered.

The Queensland Government has defended a steering committee overseeing the $4 million project .

By David Wilson

This swirling tale of intrigue sets sail off Hong Kong in the waters of the Pearl River Delta. There, in 1279 after repeated engagements, the Mongol ruler routed the Song navy, completing the grand plan of his grandfather, Genghis Khan: the conquest of China.

In the wake of victory, the new Grand Khan ruled the largest empire ever seen, stretching from the China Sea to the plains of Hungary. His navy, the world's biggest, consisted of more than 700 top-notch ships born of the great rivers that bisect the Middle Kingdom.

"The craft that plied those rivers, the coastline and the distant oceans beyond were the technological marvels of the eleventh through fifteenth centuries, surpassing anything that Europe put into the water," writes prolific undersea chronicler James Delgado.

No wonder the Grand Khan felt emboldened to embark on a spot of maritime enterprise. Cue a series of doomed shock-and-awe assaults on Japan, Vietnam and Java.

Within 15 years, the visionary ruler adept at home affairs but a less able warlord than he originally looked, had frittered his fleet.

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By McClatchy

A search for sunken treasure on the ocean floor plays out like a cold case mystery on "Treasure Quest," a new Discovery Channel series that follows the undersea salvage work of Tampa-based Odyssey Marine Exploration.  

The 11-part series, debuting at 10 p.m. Thursday, takes viewers along on the hunt for the Merchant Royal, a trading ship loaded with gold, silver and jewels that went down in the English Channel in 1641.

A mix of adventure, science and history, "Treasure Quest" details the work of the world's only publicly traded company dedicated to deep-ocean shipwreck exploration.

"It's a chance to show people what we do and what's involved in locating, identifying and then recovering artifacts," says Odyssey co-founder and CEO Greg Stemm.

"We're doing more than just recovering lost treasure," he adds. "Our goal is to map the entire ocean bottom."

Odyssey made headlines in recent years with two major discoveries: the SS Republic, a steamship that sank 100 miles off the coast of Georgia in 1865 while carrying a fortune in gold coins, and a Colonial era shipwreck near Portugal that yielded $500 million in silver and gold coins.

From Subhashish Mohanty

A French cargo ship, Veleda, sank off the Orissa coast some 133 years ago, even before the Titanic sank in 1912.

Nobody had bothered to trace the Veleda till December 31, when a diver almost touched it. While the state government has slapped a case against him, a Hollywood filmmaker is planning a movie on the ship.
 
The 250ft long and 50ft wide ship, carrying liquor, wine, food grains, sugar and other goods from Paris, sunk near Hukitola Island, about 140 km from here as a severe cyclone struck the area.

The ship's captain failed to anchor the ship and it sank.

The ship's crew was buried at a cemetery near a lighthouse, wrote John Beames, Cuttack collector from 1875 to 1878, in his autobiography Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian.

Scuba-diver Sabir Bux, 42, decided to find the ship on the last day of 2008.

He and some friends went to the island, crossing the Gahirmatha marine sanctuary, and with some effort managed to trace the ship that sank in 1875.

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By Jeremy Grange

A muddy river bank in the flat, watery landscape of southern Essex may seem an unlikely place to find one of the most important ships in scientific history. 

But a combination of painstaking detective work and archaeology have convinced maritime historian Dr Robert Prescott that the banks of the River Roach near the village of Paglesham are the last resting place of HMS Beagle. 

The historic ship will be forever associated with Charles Darwin who served as its naturalist on her second great voyage between 1831 and 1836. 

This journey sowed in Darwin's mind the seed of the ideas that would eventually become his theory of natural selection and revolutionise the way we look at the world and ourselves.

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By Shân Ross

In 1588 a Spanish galleon believed to be laden with gold and silver plate and a chest of 30 million ducats in gold coins mysteriously blew up in Tobermory Bay in the Inner Hebrides as she fled home following the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

Over the years, numerous treasure-seekers have arrived, the most recent laden with sonar technology, determined to dive to the sea bed and retrieve the riches held in the Armada's paymaster's chest.

The current search mission is being conducted by Sir Torquhil Ian Campbell, the 13th Duke of Argyll, whose family was granted rights to search for the wreck by royal charter in 1641.

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By Randy Mink

We all have romanticized visions of pirates and may have daydreamed about a swashbuckling life at sea.

Chicago's Field Museum will shed light on those notorious seafaring plunderers of yesteryear in the touring exhibition "Real Pirates: The Untold Story of the Whydah from Slave Ship to Pirate Ship."

From Feb. 27-Oct. 25, landlubbers can sail with legendary pirate Sam Bellamy and his crew and learn the true story of the Whydah, an empty slave ship that was captured in the Bahamas in February 1717.

Two months later, the vessel, laden with booty seized from 50 ships, sank off the coast of Massachusetts.

Underwater explorer Barry Clifford discovered the shipwreck in 1984 and is excavating the site.

More than 200 artifacts from the first fully authenticated pirate ship ever found in U.S. waters will be on display at the Field.

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By Bruce Bower

Surprising insights about ancient shipbuilding have floated to the surface from the submerged remnants of two major harbors, one on Israel’s coast and the other bordering Istanbul, Turkey.

Researchers described their finds January 9 at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America. 

Analyses of salvaged crafts indicate that shipbuilders started making sophisticated frames for their vessels by about 1,500 years ago, 500 years earlier than had been suspected, reported Yaakov Kahanov of the University of Haifa in Israel.

By a few hundred years later, craft constructors had steadily improved hull designs for a diverse collection of ships, says Cemal Pulak of Texas A&M University in College Station.

Frames provided greater structural stability for ships than an earlier hull-building technique that had relied on joining planks with adhesives and fasteners to form a shell. Such vessels date to as early as approximately 2,000 years ago.

Kahanov and his colleagues have documented the existence of frame-based hulls on five shipwrecks, all from the fifth to ninth centuries. Water-logged wood from the vessels was recovered at the now-submerged Mediterranean harbor off the island of Dor in Tantura Lagoon, south of Haifa. Researchers then transported the finds to the University of Haifa for study.

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