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Divers recover part of Civil War shipwreck in Georgia
From Fox News
Navy divers, working with salvage operations teams for the Army Corps of Engineers, have recovered 64-square-foot section of a Civil War ironclad warship from the bottom of the Savannah River in Georgia.
The Savannah Morning News reports that divers lifted the 5,000-pound section of the CSS Georgia during a test operation Tuesday.
The removal of the shipwreck is part of a multi-million dollar plan to to deepen the Savannah River channel.
The 120-foot-long CSS Georgia was built in 1862 to protect Savannah during the Civil War. The ship had armor forged from railroad iron, but its engines proved too weak to propel the ship's 1,200-ton frame against river currents.
The Georgia was anchored on the riverside at Fort Jackson as a floating gun battery.
The ship was eventually scuttled by its own crew without having ever fired a shot to prevent its capture by Gen. William T. Sherman when his Union troops took Savannah in December 1864.
In 1987, the shipwreck won a place on the National Register of Historic Places, the official listing of treasured sites and buildings from America's past.
A smaller-scale recovery effort in the 1980s removed two cannon, a few cannon balls and other artifacts, the Savannah Morning News reported.
From Express
Specialist divers spent two years extracting the perfectly preserved pewter plates and bowls from beneath the waves of the Caribbean.
Now more than 1,200 items of the finest quality English pewter will go on sale in the UK later this month.
The haul was recovered from the wreck of an unnamed galleon, which is thought to have sunk around 1540. They have been so well preserved in the seabed that they are said to be as historically valuable as those raised from the wreck of the Mary Rose.
It is believed the ship was transporting the incoming Spanish ambassador from Seville to his new colonial home on the island of Hispaniola, now the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
Onboard were thousands of pieces of top quality dining crockery. But disaster struck when the ship sunk after hitting rocks. The ambassador survived but his possessions could not be rescued and went down with the ship.&
The wreck was only discovered in 2011 and the excavation process is still ongoing. The majority of the pieces will stay in the Dominican Republic but around 200 have made it back to Britain and will now go under the hammer in Doncaster.
The salvage team had to chisel through several inches of rock to uncover the stunning artefacts. Some pieces are said to be in as good a condition as when they were made.
Around a third of the pewter bears the mark of Sir Thomas Curtis, regarded as the most important London pewterer of the 16th Century.
Sir Thomas was Mayor of London in 1557 and his mark also appears on much of the pewter from the Mary Rose, Henry VIII's flagship, lost in the Solent in 1545.
The collection is tipped to fetch £200,000 when it goes under the hammer. Among the highlights are a pair of 16-inch plates made by London pewterer Edward Cacher worth £15,000.
A pair of octagonal plates made by Sir Thomas could fetch £5,000.
U-Boat wreck off RI coast a dark reminder of WWII
By David Keppler - Boston
There’s a German U-boat about 7 miles off Rhode Island’s Block Island, in about 130 feet of water. Bill Palmer, chomping on an unlit cigar, will tell you it’s a time machine.
Palmer, a former Army paratrooper and retired youth athletics coach, has made dozens of dives to the wreck of the U-853 and hauled up watches, uniforms, a harmonica, submarine components and even a pistol, now displayed in his basement.
‘‘These were kids that gave their lives for their country as we gave ours,’’ Palmer said. ‘‘This is the end result of war. It’s a grave. I'll sit out there on my boat, right on top of it, and people sail by and wave, and I just wonder if they know this thing is down there.’’
As the nation prepares to commemorate Veterans Day, few sailors who fought in the Battle of Point Judith survive to remind us just how close World War II came to U.S. shores.
A small service is held each November to remember the 55 German sailors who perished so far from their homes.
The submarine, known as U-853, was sunk the day before Nazi Germany surrendered, ending World War II in Europe. German’s naval authorities had already ordered all U-boats to return home, but the young captain of the U-853 either ignored or never received the orders.
On May 5, 1945, near Point Judith, R.I., the submarine torpedoed and sank the SS Black Point, carrying coal from New York to Boston.
Twelve men died on the Black Point, the last U.S. merchant ship sunk in the Atlantic during the war.
A group of Navy ships was nearby, en route to shore leave in Boston. Kenneth Homberger, on board the USS Atherton, planned to jump on a train back to Quincy, Ill., to see his high school sweetheart.
Shipwreck hunter Odyssey falls after short seller report
By Jack Kaskey - Bloomberg
Odyssey Marine Exploration (OMEX), the deep-ocean salvage company that has recovered millions of dollars of precious metals from shipwrecks, plunged the most in two years after short seller Meson Capital Partners LLC said it will run out of cash.
Odyssey fell 25 percent to $2.14 at 3:29 p.m. in New York. The Tampa, Florida-based company earlier dropped 34 percent, the most intraday since September 2011.
Crew members from Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc. work aboard the Seabed Worker vessel during recovery operations at the SS Gairsoppa shipwreck site in the Atlantic Ocean. Source: Odyssey Marine Exploration via Bloomberg
“The purpose of OMEX is to serve as a vehicle for OMEX insiders to live a life of glamor hunting the ocean while disappointed investors foot the bill,” Ryan J. Morris, managing partner at San Francisco-based Meson, said today in a 66-page report, referring to Odyssey by its stock symbol. Meson has a share-price target of zero.
Odyssey has lost an average of $20 million a year for five years and is unlikely to be able to repay its debts, Morris said. Odyssey will be forced to file for bankruptcy protection in six to 12 months if it can’t raise equity, he said.
Odyssey said it has contacted market authorities about the report and is considering legal action against Meson and Morris.
“The text is filled with lies, false statements, and misleading allegations,” Laura Lionetti Barton, an Odyssey spokeswoman said in an e-mailed statement. “We believe this is a clear attempt to manipulate the market.”
According to the report, Meson was founded in 2009 and is an activist investor that seeks to turn around “faltering” companies.
By Damien Gayle - Mail Online
Its owner survived the sinking of the Titanic and then endured a second shipwreck just two years later.
Miss Roberts spent a life at sea before finding fame by living through the infamous Titanic disaster in 1912, then surviving the sinking of the Rohilla in 1914.
But her trunk had been presumed lost to the North Sea since tempestuous winds smashed the steamship against rocks to the west of Saltwick Nab, near Whitby, North Yorkshire.
Wednesday saw the 99th anniversary of the sinking of the Rohilla, where lifeboat crews battled for 50 hours to pull 144 survivors from the wreck.
Miss Roberts had been a stewardess for White Star Line for several years when she signed on for the Titanic’s maiden voyage.
It struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City and sank on April 15, 1912, claiming the lives of 1,517 passengers and crew.
The crew of the ship had failed to heed warnings of ice in the North Atlantic and were sailing at speed through an ice field when it struck the huge floe.
Long-sought shipwreck of the Roberval
By Chris Carola - National Post
Jim Kennard and his partners were wrapping up their season of searching for historic shipwrecks on Lake Ontario’s eastern end when they decided to make one last sweep of the lake bottom with their sonar equipment.
The U.S. team’s last-ditch effort earlier this month paid off with the discovery of the shipwreck of the Roberval, a 39-meter Canadian steamer that sank nearly a century ago, killing two of the vessel’s nine crew members.
The Roberval was one of only two sunken steel-clad ships still undiscovered in the lake, which made it a much sought-after find by Great Lakes shipwreck hunters, Kennard said.
“We’ve been looking for this for two years now,” he said. “It was a nice way to end the season.”
The Ottawa-based steamer was hauling lumber across the lake’s eastern end, bound for Oswego, N.Y., when it ran into rough conditions in late September 1916.
According to the explorers, tons of spruce lumber piled on deck broke lose when winds kicked up high waves that knocked the ship on its side. Some of the lumber smashed into the upper cabin structure and hit a crewman, who was knocked overboard and drowned.
A second crewman went down with the ship when the shifting timber trapped him in a forward compartment.
Sotheby's to offer one of most important collections of shipwreck photographs
From Art Daily
An unparalleled archive of shipwreck images will be presented for sale at Sotheby’s London auction on 12th November 2013.
Taken by four generations of the Gibson family of photographers over nearly 130 years, the 1000 negatives record the wrecks of over 200 ships and the fate of their passengers, crew and cargo as they traveled from across the world through the notoriously treacherous seas around Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly between 1869 and 1997.
Such is the power and allure of the Gibson’s photographs that these images have captured the imagination of some of the UK’s most celebrated authors.
At the very forefront of early photojournalism, John Gibson and his descendants were determined to be first on the scene when these shipwrecks struck.
Each and every wreck had its own story to tell with unfolding drama, heroics, tragedies and triumphs to be photographed and recorded – the news of which the Gibsons would disseminate to the British mainland and beyond.
The original handwritten eye-witness accounts as recorded by Alexander and Herbert Gibson in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will be sold alongside these images.
The archive will be sold as a single lot in Sotheby’s Travel, Atlases, Maps and Natural History sale, and is estimated to achieve between £100,000 and £150,000.
‘This is the greatest archive of the drama and mechanics of shipwreck we will ever see – a thousand images stretching over 130 years, of such power, insight and nostalgia that even the most passive observer cannot fail to feel the excitement or pathos of the events they depict.’ - Rex Cowan, shipwreck hunter and author ‘We are standing in an Aladdin’s cave where the Gibson treasure is stored, and Frank is its keeper.
It is half shed, half amateur laboratory, a litter of cluttered shelves, ancient equipment, boxes, printer’s blocks and books. Many hundreds of plates and thousands of photographs are still waiting an inventory.
Most have never seen the light of day. Any agent, publisher or accountant would go into free fall at the very sight of them.’ - Author John Le Carré, on visiting the Gibsons of Scilly archive with Frank Gibson in 1997
Reef or hazard? The fate of sunken oil rigs
From Fox News
Oil companies and environmental groups may spar over off-shore drilling, but there's one thing they can agree on: Leaving scuttled rigs on the ocean floor creates a rich environment for coral, endangered species and other marine life.
The Gulf of Mexico – home to approximately 3,600 offshore oil and gas platforms – is set to lose a third of those structures in the next five years, which many claim will destroy almost 2,000 acres of coral reef habitat and the seven billion invertebrates that thrive on or near the platforms.
Such organisms include federally protected species, like scleractinian corals, octocorals, hydrozoans and gorgonians.
Despite an unlikely consensus that the decommissioned rigs create prolific ecosystems, a law enacted more than 30 years ago requires that many of these platforms be ripped from the ocean floor – in turn destroying a habitat used by countless organisms for feeding, spawning, mating and maturation.
Pressure to remove the old rigs comes on two fronts. A 1970s federal law, enacted before the benefits of leaving them on the ocean floor were understood, called for companies to remove them.
Though still in effect, subsequent state rulings that cited the boon to marine life that the rigs can provide conflicted with it. The older law was not strictly enforced until the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which left hundreds of rigs damaged and unusable.
Even then, it appears to be in conflict with state laws, federal programs and even scientific consensus.
Oil companies also find it in their interest to remove some of the rigs – despite the estimated cost of $3 million – because they can be held liable in perpetuity for navigational hazards caused by the sunken wreckage.