Do fundo do mar... Sea bottom

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After being struck by a Norwegian freighter on May 29, 1914,
the passenger liner Empress of Ireland sank in the St. Lawrence River,
near Rimouski, killing 1,012 people.


MIRO CERNETIG

Rimouski, Que.—Right about now, Rob Rondeau is crossing the prairie, rattling westward through the wheat fields in a red van stuffed with a valuable collection of Canada's heritage: Wreckage from the Empress of Ireland, the Canadian Pacific passenger liner that sunk to the bottom of the St. Lawrence River 90 years ago, killing 1,012 people.

He, and some others, are doing what the federal and Quebec governments won't. They're buying up historically valuable artifacts treasure-hunters have scavenged off Canada's worst-ever shipwreck for most of the last 30 years. Rondeau's aim is to keep the ship's remains from being bought up, piece by piece, by private collectors, who most likely would keep them in their homes or ship them off to the United States and Europe, where they would probably be lost to Canada's museums forever.

"This is our Titanic and I don't want to see Canada lose it," says the 40-year-old commercial diver, standing on a dock in Rimouski, leading to the wind-whipped waters of the St. Lawrence River. It's more than 45 kilometres wide here, a big and treacherous stretch of water that has swallowed dozens of vessels over the years.

"We've already lost a lot of history from this wreck," laments Rondeau, who retired from full-time commercial diving to concentrate on documenting and preserving shipwrecks. "There's stuff from the Empress of Ireland that's disappeared into basements up and down this coast and been hidden in warehouses all over the world. Somebody's got to do something to save what we still can, while we still can. This is a forgotten ship, a forgotten part of our history."

A powerfully built man, Rondeau's got the thick, calloused fingers deep-sea divers develop from 20 years of lugging around heavy oxygen tanks and working wrenches far beneath the ocean, keeping oil rigs afloat and undersea pipelines flowing. But he's also a trained marine archaeologist and displays a delicate touch as he holds a perfectly preserved porcelain plate, from the Empress of Ireland's first-class dining room, which he is packing in bubble wrap for the trip to Alberta, destined for a museum exhibit.

He deposits it into his van, now filling up with other treasures from the Empress' last voyage, which he's bought from local Quebec divers who have "worked" the rusting wreck. There's the brass radio phone on which the crew likely sent out its calls for help; he's paid $1,000 for a wine bottle, purchased the finger bowls, candle holders and a lasagna dish from the last meal in the wood panelled first-class dining room. There's even a brass bugle, from the ship's dance band, which unlike the Titanic's, didn't have time to strike up as the ship went down.

"It's a long drive to get these out West," says Rondeau, thumping shut his 15-year-old van's door, ready to start his dawn-to-dusk trek to Alberta. "It takes me 4 1/2 days from Rimouski to Alberta. That's about $800 in gas each way. I sleep in the van at truck stops. So I never actually let the artifacts out of my sight. And I've got my shotgun in the back. They'll be safe."

On May 29, 1914, people were understandably more worried about lost lives than the lost treasures left on the Empress of Ireland.

Shortly before 2 a.m., having steamed past Rimouski on a six-day voyage bound for Liverpool, the 548-foot-long Empress found itself facing down a Norwegian freighter, the Storstad, coming upriver laden with a cargo of coal. After the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, caution prevailed aboard ocean liners like the Empress, which had been outfitted with extra lifeboats. Captain Henry George Kendall anticipated a routine passing in the night.

Then, one of the St. Lawrence's thick and unpredictable "phantom fogs" descended on the river. Minutes passed, with each ship blindly feeling its way through the mist, sounding their foghorns. It wasn't enough.

Without today's radar or ship-to-ship communications, the snub-nosed prow of the coal freighter suddenly emerged from the mist. There was no time for the Empress to veer out of the way as the Storstad sliced through its side. It was so clean and quick a cut through the Empress's steel hull, some survivors reported feeling only a nudge and chose to remain in their bunks.

But a gaping hole had been punched into the ocean liner. The cold, black water of the St. Lawrence flooded in at more than 200,000 litres per second. The ship rolled to its side, becoming a death trap for those below. Within 14 minutes, at 2:09 a.m., the Empress sank, killing all but 465 of its 1,477 passengers.

When divers went down a few months later, to recover bodies and salvage the millions in gold and silver in the ship's safe, they were horrified to see the heads of people sticking out of the portholes. To escape the rising black water, passengers had tried to wedge their bodies through the narrow, brass portholes, the last part of the ship offering passage to the surface before she sank 37 metres to the bottom of the St. Lawrence.

News of the disaster flashed around Canada and the world. But too soon, it seemed to drift out of most people's minds.

The Titanic, sunk by an iceberg on its maiden voyage, had been a bigger tragedy and settled in the public mind of what could go wrong at sea. The Canadian Pacific, which made a fortune on its reputation of offering safe passage across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, did its best to downplay the sinking. And the world was on the brink of war, offering new tragedies for Canadians to ponder.

"I only started to get involved in this when I was watching Peter Mansbridge, on the CBC," says Marion Kelch, a retired schoolteacher from Czar, Alta., who is leading the fight to save the artifacts. "There was this report about somebody selling off the biggest collection of Empress artifacts to someone in the United States. And I just thought, `This is wrong. How can we allow this priceless history to leave Canada?'"

Kelch struck up the Empress of Ireland Artifacts Committee, beginning a grassroots campaign that soon attracted people from across the country. "This was an immigration ship," she explains, "so there are people all over Canada, especially the West, who have descendants who sailed on her to Canada. It's a ship, and a story, that touches many families."

Indeed, the Empress tragedy is still remembered each year by the Salvation Army, which lost as many as 200 members of its Toronto band who were on their way to Britain.

"This is part of the fabric of our land," says Karl Larson, who works in the Army's heritage archives. "It's important that they remember this and important that we protect this history for the future. I think these artifacts should be in the Museum of Civilization."

Kelch quickly found out that the collection destined for the U.S. belonged to Philippe Beaudry, one of a small group of elite Quebec divers who started diving the Empress wreck decades ago, long before the 1999 decision by the Quebec government to outlaw treasure hunting on the wreck. It was a time before "archaeological sensitivity," when divers would emerge from the river, with 60-year-old bottles of champagne from the Empress' wine cellar, some of which they would crack open and guzzle in celebration.

Beaudry, amongst the best of the era's divers, managed to amass what is considered the most impressive Empress collection — more than 500 artifacts, including the prize of every major shipwreck: The brass bell.

A few years ago, Beaudry says, he felt the pinch of retirement looming. It was time to collect on his bounty and those years of diving. He decided he would sell his collection, now resting in a storage depot outside of Montreal, to a U.S. collector for $1.5 million. The bell alone would be appraised at a cool $1 million.

After years of the wreck being pillaged with little protest, the prospective sale ignited a firestorm. Ottawa initially blocked it, requiring that Beaudry apply for an export permit and give Canadian museums the first chance to buy his collection.

To encourage that, the federal government said it would kick in $750,000 to purchase the collection, providing that the Musée de la Mer, a museum near Rimouski with a small collection of Empress of Ireland artifacts, would raise the other half.

"We couldn't get the money from the Quebec government," said Annemarie Bourassa, the museum's assistant director. "It's strange. The Quebec government was willing to pay for Maurice Richard (collectibles) that were being sold to the United States. But they didn't help us with this."

That meant Beaudry was free to sell to the U.S. But by then, to the delight of Kelch, the sale had fallen through.
Today, Beaudry is trying to sell the collection off piece by piece to people in Canada, and he chuckles at the irony that Kelch and her committee are now his biggest customer. So far, Kelch has managed to raise $25,000 to buy a few dozen pieces that she plans to put on a "dinner on the Empress" display that she will take on a western tour that will end at the Vancouver Maritime Museum.

"I'm doing this all out of my own pocket," says the 63-year-old Kelch, who hopes to set up a public foundation. "I'm hoping to raise awareness and maybe embarrass the government into doing something."
Beaudry isn't optimistic that will work.

"The best thing I could do is put these artifacts back under a couple of thousand feet of water," he grumbles. "Believe me, the other divers around Rimouski have sold off thousands of artifacts to the United States. But because I have the best collection, it's been nothing but trouble for me. I risked my life putting this together and now I can't find a museum in Canada that wants to buy it."

The Empress of Ireland wreck, which has claimed the lives of at least six divers, can be a dangerous obsession, as Jean-Pierre Bouillon well knows.

On his first dive, he got tangled in the steel cables that still hang from the wreck, an underwater spider web hidden by the total blackness at the river bottom. He barely freed himself before his air ran out. On his last dive, in 1991, he was hit by the bends, the deadly build-up of nitrogen caused by surfacing too quickly. He was rushed to a decompression chamber, saving his life, but his legs are now partially paralyzed.

Leaning on a cane as he stands on the porch of his house, he can see the white buoy almost seven kilometres away that marks where the Empress went down. Boullion admits that over the years he was one of the divers who took the most out of the Empress. He unearthed bottles of 1907 champagne, still chilled by the St.

Lawrence. He banged out dozens of the ship's heavy, brass portholes, selling them to collectors, "but only to people who respected them, understood they were holy things."

Today, however, he's happy to see that the ship is protected. Things were getting out of hand.

"There were divers who wanted to come and blast the wreck, to get at things inside it," says Bouillon, who now runs a charter service for divers. "That would have destroyed the wreck. Now it's against the law to take things away."

But people still do, he concedes. This week, divers discovered a skull lodged inside a lifeboat has gone missing. His fear is that somebody has stolen it, as a gruesome souvenir.

"That's the dark side of diving," says Rondeau, who is meeting with Bouillon about buying some of his artifacts. "There are people who collect skulls. A guy in Florida offered me $5,000 if I got him one. It's pretty awful."
After his years of ripping things out of the Empress, Bouillon has now become something of a cultural nationalist himself. He wants to sell part of his own collection to Kelch's committee, saying "it would be good to let other Canadians see these things. It might bring them out here, to Rimouski, to see where it happened."

Opening up his basement door, Bouillon takes Rondeau into a cellar full of bottles and portholes from the Empress. He sells one blue-green bottle to Rondeau for $150, considered a bargain. A little later, Bouillon has a friend bring over another brass porthole that causes Rondeau's eyes to light up.

"It's perfect for our exhibit," he gushes.

But there's a price: $7,000 (U.S.).

"That's not bad," says Rondeau, already planning another trip to load up his van with history. "I'll be back in Rimouski next month. Maybe then we'll be able to pick this porthole up, too."

See article here.

Side scan sonar here.


©1997 KEN MARSCHALL, DETAIL FROM LOST LINERS,
MADISON PRESS BOOK

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Mick Hamer
NewScientist.com news service

Unstable fuses could cause unsalvaged World War II bombs aboard an abandoned shipwreck in the river Thames, UK, to blow, reveal investigations by New Scientist.

For 60 years the people of Sheerness in Kent have been living next door to a 1400-tonne time bomb. A lethal mixture of unstable second world war bombs is in the rusting wreck of the Richard Montgomery, a US cargo ship that lies half-submerged on a sandbank in the Thames, only two kilometres from the Kentish town.

If the wreck explodes it will be one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions ever. The cargo contains a mixture of fused and unfused bombs that were destined to support the Allied push in France following the D-Day landings.

For the first time a New Scientist investigation has established that UK government explosives experts believe that some of the fuses are unstable. Even a small shock could cause one of them to detonate, setting off part or all of the rest of the cargo.

Deadly cargo

The investigation has uncovered official estimates of the devastation that the explosion would cause, including predictions of a three kilometre high column of water, mud, metal and munitions sent into the air by the blast.

Five years ago the government asked independent consultants to carry out a risk assessment of the wreck. The consultants said that the safest course of action would be to remove the wreck's deadly cargo.

In 2001 the government held a meeting in Southampton to discuss what should be done about the wreck. But three years later this risk assessment remains unpublished and the Richard Montgomery remains on its sandbank, slowly rusting.

Full exclusive details are published in New Scientist print edition, 21 August.

Article.

Related article here and here (sonar images).

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Web site:
Visit the WXTide32 web site
Author:
Mike Hopper

WXTide32 is a FREE 32-bit Windows (9x/NT4/2k/ME/XP) program for predicting tides from 1970 to 2038.

The included database has tide data for around 8,500 locations worldwide and tidal current data for about 100 locations in North America.

Any number of user (custom) stations can be configured. Predictions can be displayed graphically or in any of several text formats including daily tide lists and month tide calendars.

The program is self-contained and has context sensitive help and extensive options to customize the content, display and presentation of data. Program source code in "C" is included.

Version 4.0 adds a new User Station Manager, nearest station command line option, and an updated database with U.K. Ireland and Scotland stations.

Link:

http://simtel.net/pub/pd/57988.html - also downloadable here

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A Pollen Grain


By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News

Pollen analysis could provide ancient shipwrecks with rather reliable birth certificates, according to French research.

The study focused on pollen grains trapped in the sticky resins used to seal the joints of ship's boards and sometimes even to cover the entire hulls.

"Local pollen would become incorporated into the ship as it is being built. This can provide important clues in order to deduce the shipyard's geographical origins," Serge Muller of the University of Montpellier-2 in France told Discovery News.

According to his study, pollen analysis can show key information more reliably than timber analysis. Since the wood was often imported and may predate the ship's construction, beams have proven largely useless in pinpointing where a wreck was originally built.

Muller used his identification technique to trace the origins of three ancient wrecks located in the French Golfe du Lion: the Baie-de-l'Amitié, the Cap-Be'ar III and the Port-la-Nautique.

Baie-de-l'Amitié is a 2,000-year-old wreck that now lies 150 meters (492 feet) from the beach near Cap d'Agde in a rocky hollow at a depth of 3 meters (10 feet). Of the three wrecks, its origins turned out to be different than thought.

"The occurrence of Platanus pollen in the three resin samples of the Baie-de-l'Amitié wreck, in relation to the wood pieces, strongly suggests a shipyard localized east of southern Italy, which represents the western boundary of Platanus orientalis range," Muller writes in the current issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Muller also found pollen grains from Haplophyllum, a species which does not exist in France. The presence of this weed, seven species of which live in Europe, among which six grow in the eastern Mediterranean, "may be considered as supplementary evidence in favor of the eastern Mediterranean origin of the Baie-de-l'Amitié wreck," concluded Muller.

"Palynology (the study of plant pollens) offers innumerable opportunities to archaeologists, and has been widely used to trace the origins and history of various items. But as far as I know, this is the first time that pollen analysis has been applied to pinpoint geographical areas for ancient shipyards," Marta Mariotti of Florence University's department of vegetable biology told Discovery News.

Mariotti has recently analyzed the clay sediments from archaeological excavations in the ancient port of Pisa. The study showed that most likely the ships embedded in the clay were built just around Pisa.

Though pollen and resin analysis can offer reliable clues to trace shipwrecks' roots, there is always a risk of contamination, especially if the resin has been imported, according to Mariotti.

Muller's method will be used soon by archaeologists from the Faculté de St-Jérôme, Marseille, on other Mediterranean antique shipwrecks.

Robert Hohlfelder, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, also hopes to use the technique. The archaeologist is looking for the remains of the Persian fleet that sank off Greece in 492 B.C. More than 1,000 ships, which were supposed to invade Greece, are thought to lie 100 meters (328 feet) beneath the sea.
"If we find any ships with resin as caulking, I would be delighted to see what results could be obtained by Muller's techniques. Any new scientific techniques that expand our ability to better understand archaeological data are always most welcome," Hohlfelder told Discovery News.

Link:

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20040202/pollen.html

http://www.histarmar.com.ar/HYAMNEWS/HyamNews2004/HY14-04%20Napoles-Polen-proyecto.htm - In Spanish

Bibliography:

Muller, S. D. Palynological study of antique shipwrecks from the western Mediterranean Sea, France. Journal of Archaeological Science, 31, 343 - 349, doi:10.1016/j.jas.2003.09.005 (2004).

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Divers search for slave ship 'Guerrero' off Key Largo Florida

Powered by CDNN - CYBER DIVER News Networkby
JENNIFER BABSON

KEY LARGO, Florida (29 August 2004) -- It was a passage like thousands of others made in the shadow of an untamed island chain off Cuba -- 561 Africans shackled below, the Spanish ship that claimed them gliding under cover of darkness toward a colony still fueled by the slave trade.

On the night of Dec. 19, 1827, however, an otherwise routine haul of human cargo on the Spanish-flagged Guerrero turned into a shipwreck that archaeologists and others are literally trying to piece together nearly 200 years later...

Continues here.

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Chinese archaeologists are excavating sunken warships used by Zheng Chenggong and his followers to reclaim Taiwan from Dutch occupiers more than three centuries ago.

The ruins of Zheng's fleet were found near Dongshan Island in east China's Fujian Province in 2000. But as long as ten years before, local people had found bowls, plates and other porcelain wares with the seals of Zheng Chenggong.

Local fishermen said they can see rusty cannons at ebb tide.

The excavation began on June 6 and is scheduled to finish by the end of September. It may last longer, though, if the sunken ships are found to be still intact, said Chen Liqun, a cultural official in Dongshan County.
Chen said that archaeologists have yet to determine how many ships are under water.

More than 20 underwater archaeologists from the National Museumin Beijing are working in Dongshan. They have discovered broken china pieces, cannonballs, grenades, iron blocks and muddy sand mixed with gun powder.

Archaeologist Lin Guo said that the ruins are located in a geologically complex area. Tides and typhoon also add to the difficulty in excavation.

Lin said that what they have found can help prove that Dongshan served as an important military training base for Zheng's troops.

Zheng Chenggong was born in 1624, the year Dutch invaders occupied Taiwan. His troops drove the invaders off the island in 1662. Zheng died on the island in the same year.

See article here.

Related articles here and here. And the story of Zheng Chenggong.


Zheng Chenggong.

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by Diana Michelle Fox

An in-depth examination of a newly identified shipwreck in Alaska

On July 15, 2004, a mystery was finally put to rest when East Carolina University archaeologists identified the remains of a shipwreck that has been below Alaskan waters for 144 years. The identification of Kad'yak--the culmination of years of document compilation, translation from Russian, and proposal writing--was a triumph for those who worked on the discovery and recording of the vessel's remains. The find of Kad'yak is important scientifically, and it is so significant historically that it has already joined the National Register of Historic Places.

The 132-foot Russian American Company ship Kad'yak, a German-made vessel, was once a mighty three-masted freighter. In 1860, the ship was headed toward San Francisco from Woody Island in Kodiak, Alaska (Kodiak and Kad'yak come from the Alutiq word for island).

It was carrying more than 350 tons of ice to San Francisco so that the gold miners could enjoy cold beverages.

The ship never completed its journey, which would have taken two to three months. Along the way, it struck a rock and filled with water.

The ship's crew survived, but the vessel was lost. The ice kept it afloat for three days, and the ship's "corpse" drifted six miles until it eventually sank to the bottom of Monk's Lagoon on Spruce Island.

The loss of this vessel spawned a fascinating local myth, especially among those of the Russian Orthodox faith. Illarion Archimandritof, the captain of Kad'yak, had promised the governor of Russian America that he would pay homage to Saint Herman. The saint was the most important Russian Orthodox missionary who had converted the Native Alaskans.

Captain Archimandritof never kept his promise to go to Herman's chapel on the shore of Spruce Island. When Kad'yak sank, it was right in front of the chapel.

To feed the mythological tradition even further, the mainmast's top and a yardarm remained above the surface, forming the shape of a cross.

Even today, many locals, especially those of the village of Ouzinkie, where the chapel was located, see the sinking as an act of retribution by Father Herman, who had died in 1836.

Whether or not one believes that these coincidences were the results of divine intervention, we do indeed know that the wreck of Kad'yak is a physical reality and is near the spot of its demise as revealed in this legend.

The modern story of Kad'yak and the events leading to its discovery and identification begins in the late 1970s, when Mike Yarborough, now an archaeological consultant in Anchorage, found references to it in archives while researching a shipwreck in Cold Bay.

He and several others began to investigate the story and keep a file on the subject, eventually eliciting the help of Katherine Arndt of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, to translate Russian documents into English.

For years, Yarborough's leads on the Kad'yak remained undeveloped, until a fortuitous meeting between Yarborough's wife and Bradley Stevens through their shared folk music hobby.

Upon learning about the wreck, Stevens, an Alaska-based marine biologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, took a great interest in the story, eventually gathering a volunteer team of divers who discovered the wreck in July of 2003. Only a year later a team of professional underwater archaeologists were brought in from East Carolina University who were able to identify the wreck for certain as the Kad'yak, thanks to an amazing find--a brass object that was possibly the hub of the ship's wheel.

It was inscribed with the ship's name in Cyrillic, telling archaeologists that the site they had found was indeed the Kad'yak.

The remains of the ship are located 80 feet below the surface of the water and scattered across a few hundred yards. Most noteworthy, however, is its preservation.

Before this summer's work on Kad'yak, which was primarily a survey rather than an excavation, many archaeologists thought that a wooden vessel would not be able to survive well in the rough Alaskan waters.

However, upon finding the remains of the ship, it seems that the cold water and anaerobic conditions have helped to keep the ship from deteriorating.

Since the work on the ship was a survey, few artifacts were removed. Archaeologists recovered just a few brass items, which are easier to conserve than iron objects. On the bottom, however, they identified three anchors, a ballast pile, deck braces, two cannons, and copper sheathing that once covered the ship's wood.

The artifacts that were removed are now being conserved in the lab facility of Alaska's department of archaeology being conserved.

Dave McMahan, state archaeologist at the Alaskan Department of Natural Resources, hopes to work with the local museums of Kodiak Island to develop exhibits with artifacts from Kad'yak.

Continued work on the site will depend on funding, and grant proposals are being submitted. This summer, the project was funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation.

For now, McMahan is working to ensure the integrity of the shipwreck site. Recreational diving is currently restricted in the area, and the East Carolina University archaeologists have a special permit to be able to work on the site. Alaska's State Department is also relying upon the people of Ouzinkie, the nearest village on the site, to notify authorities if they see anything suspicious.

No matter what the future of the wreck holds, Kad'yak's identification brought a local myth alive and solved a long-standing mystery. The Kad'yak project has been the first official maritime work in Alaska, and all involved hope that it will continue next year, paving the way for further underwater archaeological work in our 49th state and teaching us more about the history of Russian Alaska and the Russian American Company.

Diana Michelle Fox, a classics major at the University of Chicago, is an intern with ARCHAEOLOGY.

See article here. And the search for the Kad'yak here.


The identifying artifact of the Kad'yak wreck
(Courtesy Tane Casserley, NOAA)

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The Epoch Times
Translated from the Chinese Edition


Visitors to Shanghai's International Media Center will have the chance to see artifacts from the ship Titanic over the next two months. Shanghai is the first Asian stop for the Titanic Experience and Priceless Artifact Exhibition, which has been touring the world since 1994.

The exhibition has gone from Chicago to Los Angeles, and from Paris to London, attracting more than 14 million visitors. Parts of the Titanic have been reproduced and more than 300 items found beneath the doomed luxury liner will be on display.

Among the objects featured in the exhibition are ship ruins such as the anchor, rudder and compass. There are also personal belongings and letters of passengers. Survivor statements and some photographs taken on board the ship, a twisted cabin window, the frame of a deck chair, flat-bottomed pans used for cooking, cash, jewellery, and glassware with the mark of the “White Star Line” are also on display. Although these objects are either stained with rust or broken into pieces, they are considered priceless treasures.

Security is paramount for Titanic Experience organizers. The exhibition’s halls and cabinets all have impressive monitor systems. The cabinets consist of touch-sensitive plexiglass shells fitted with alarm devices that automatically alert police and emit a very loud alarm.

On April 15, 1912, the Titanic sank after striking an iceberg. The grand luxury cruise ship was carrying 1,316 passengers and 891 crew members. Nearly 1,500 people died as a result of the shipwreck that is considered one of the 10 greatest calamities of the 20th century. In 1985, the remains of Titanic were found in the northern Atlantic Ocean two-and-a-half miles below sea level.

See article here.



The Titanic Experience and Priceless Artifact
Exhibition landed in Shanghai on the first leg of its
Asian journey. Photo: Getty Images

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By Arul John


Swede and his crew comb the waters of Malaysia and Indonesia for buried history

He has been attacked by pirates and his ship had to be escorted by navy frigates.

Move over Indiana Jones because Mr Sten Sjostrand is a modern-day treasure hunter who has had his fair share of close calls.

Like how his ship once hit a rock and he had to bail out just before it sank.

All in a day's work for the modest Swede who used to work here as an oil rigger.

Mr Sjostrand's fascination with treasures of the waters of Malaysia and Indonesia started when he bought an antique Chinese bowl. He dreamt of the day when he would buy his own ship and scour the seas.

It took him more than 20 years but there's no looking back.

Today the 60-year-old Swede makes a living out of his treasures.

It involves good old detective work.

He told The New Paper: 'In fact, the recovery is the easy part and often takes only about two days. But locating the shipwreck and the research can take months.'

And that means going through piles of tattered documents and books for leads.

He claimed his firm, Nanhai Marine Archaeology Sendirian Berhad, is unusual.

'We are not a salvage firm,' he said. 'Salvage firms search for cargo for profit, but we are motivated by our love for historical accuracy.

'So we like to think of ourselves as a recovery and excavation firm.'

Nanhai means South China Sea in Mandarin. It is also the name of a place in China's Guangzhou province where one of his first wrecks came from.

Mr Sjostrand left Sweden after graduating in engineering and naval architecture and moved to design offshore oil rigs in then booming South-east Asia.

He bought an antique Chinese bowl in Singapore as a souvenir in the '70s.

That inspired him to do research and he set up Nanhai after he retired in 1992.

He and his three associates have taken part in salvaging 10 shipwrecks.

They have recovered pottery and ceramics from the 10th to 19th centuries.

Nanhai operates out of its building near Johor's Endau-Rompin national park, or from its lone research ship, which he said was as long as a fishing trawler and cost 'a few thousand ringgit'.

Mr Sjostrand's Thai wife also travels with him. The couple have no children, but Mr Sjostrand has two grown-up children in Scandinavia from an earlier marriage.

He said: 'My wife usually helps with the cooking, while the rest of us do the diving, excavation and research.'
He prefers to deal with a select group of collectors and museums, usually through the Internet or at hotels.

'I do not like auctions because they are usually held overseas among the wrong crowd. South-east Asian treasures should be sold or appreciated in the region.'

Most of the items sold for between $250 and $2,000 but one 630-year-old ceramic piece fetched RM48,000 ($21,600)

Mr Sjostrand said: 'We live off the proceeds of the sales and are comfortable. We often live on the boat and do not have salaries.'

Article.

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WHANGAREI, New Zealand (Aug 2004) -- Secrets of the World War II wreck Niagara are being revealed by advances in diving and computer technology and the work of a Northland dive expert.

Keith Gordon, of Tutukaka, has the exclusive salvage contract for the Niagara, a cargo ship which sank after hitting a German mine near the Hen and Chicken Islands south of Whangarei in 1940.

When it sank 120m to the seabed, it was carrying 8.5 tonnes of gold.

Most of the 590 gold bars were recovered - 555 in 1941 and 30 in 1952 - but five bars worth about $1.4 million are still believed to be in the wreck or on the seabed nearby.

The depth of the wreck meant only the most experienced and hardiest scuba divers could visit it but new technology is making it more accessible.

Mr Gordon said remotely operated vehicles could dive to the wreck with video cameras and lights, allowing people on the surface to examine it in detail.

And improved scuba diving technology enabled more people to dive to the wreck.

"When we first started looking at the Niagara in 1988, not a lot of scuba divers could go to that depth," said Mr Gordon.

"Going down 120 metres was almost unheard of in those days, especially for sport divers."

New technology enables divers to go deeper by breathing a mix of oxygen, nitrogen and helium.

But this new technology is not cheap - divers to the Niagara have to spend about $30,000 for their equipment.

"But like any new technology, it's just a matter of time before it's more affordable," Mr Gordon said.
He has salvaged some items from the Niagara, including cups, pipes and a porthole, and says the ship still holds a wealth of items - possibly including the five missing gold bars.

The gold is still owned by the British Treasury, which would claim any recovered by Mr Gordon.

He said the wreck, which is lying on its port side, was starting to deteriorate and was in serious risk of collapsing in the next 10 years or so.

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The bitter dispute over an eighteenth century shipwreck has moved to the Turku Court of Appeal, with divers and the state arguing over who owns the wreck.

The two-masted wooden merchant ship Vrouw Maria sank off Turku in October 1771, carrying a load of art belonging to Czarina Catherine the Great.

The scuba divers who found the wreck are appealing a ruling by the Turku Maritime Court in June. That court rejected a previous appeal by the divers and their company against the state and the Maritime Museum of Finland, who have claimed ownership of the ship.

Citing the Protection of Antiquities Act, the court ruled that it is state property and that the treasure hunters do not have rights to it.

The court also declared that the divers no longer have any right to carry out salvage on the shipwreck, which they found in June, 1999 at a depth of 40 metres. The court of appeal is expected to rule on the case next spring.

The 26-metre Vrouw Maria was en route from Amsterdam to St Petersburg when it was caught in a fierce storm in Finland's south-western archipelago. Only a few paintings from its priceless cargo were rescued before the ship went down.

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See the Vrouw Maria complete story and artistic draws here.

See photos here.

Shipwreck Central online magazine



Photo: Jukka Nurminen

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By Shawna Gallagher Vega staff writer
August 23, 2004

FORT PIERCE — It was a cloudy, dull day at Riverside Marina, but the glimmer of gold coins and exotic jewels kept John Brandon's boat Endeavor shining as a summer storm approached.

Brandon, a large gold medallion hanging from his neck, showed off his latest acquisition from undersea treasure hunting — $100,000 worth of coins and jewelry he and his crew found off the coast of Fort Pierce.
But it's more than a lucky catch borne of a wishful hobby for Brandon and his men. It's the result of a hard day's work.

"It's the only thing I've ever done, to go out and find treasure," Brandon said.

Brandon, a 35-year veteran of historical shipwreck salvage missions, has had plenty of luck. He's found a $43,000 gold bar, $6,000 gold coins, gold cufflinks and a 14.5 carat emerald ring in his searches.

Fellow divers Ryan Iacona of Port St. Lucie and Tim McGuire of Fort Pierce helped Brandon find the $100,000 treasure Aug. 4. They came upon what is known as the "Douglass Beach Wreck" — the remains of a 1715 Spanish galleon that sank near Frederick Douglass Memorial Beach.

Among the loot they found were 300-year-old gold and silver coins and a 22-Karat gold ring worth almost $15,000. On Aug. 6, the findings were brought to the Mel Fisher Center in Sebastian, where it will go through various inspections and archaeological research.

The historical value of the findings will be assessed at the Fisher Center. "In about a year, Florida will take 20 percent, then we get 80 percent," Brandon said.

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Look for information here, and here.

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By Laila Rahman

Bandar Seri Begawan - The Brunei Museum at Kota Batu yesterday launched an exhibition and a book on the artifacts unearthed at the Limau Manis River archaeological site.

The guest of honour at the function was Pehin Dato Seri Paduka (Dr.) Haji Awang Hussain, the Minister of Culture, Youth and Sports.

Also present at the ceremony were the Director of Museums and foreign ambassadors and high commissioners.

The ceremony began with the welcoming remarks by Pengiran Dr. Karim bin Pengiran Haji Osman, the Curator of Archaeology cum the chairperson of the exhibition committee.

In his speech, he explained that the `Secrets from the River' showcase was one of the exhibitions initiated by the Brunei Museum to attract visitors.

The Limau Manis River archaeological site is situated at Kampong Limau Manis in Mukim Pengkalan Batu in the Brunei-Muara District.

It was discovered when a local company was carrying out a project to expand and deepen the river. The Archaeology Department was informed on the discovery on Oct 19, 2002 by the local residents.

Excavating work at the site commenced on Oct 21, 2002. Till now, it has unearthed 52,637 artifacts, comprising mostly of Chinaware dating back to the 10th to 13th centuries, which coincided with the Sung and Yuan Dynasties of China.

He added that the result of their analysis showed that the artifacts are more than 1,000 years old. This finding is not only important to the nation but also to the research work on the archaeological site.

The exhibition aims to create greater public awareness on the importance to preserve and maintain the country's heritage.

The highlight of yesterday's ceremony was the launching of the book entitled 'Limau Manis River - Archaeology Site of the 10th till 13th Centuries' by the minister.

The book can be purchased at the museum in Kota Batu.

At the end of the ceremony the guest of honour toured the exhibition to get a closer look at the artifacts on display. -- Courtesy of Borneo Bulletin

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Moscow - Russian divers, with a little help from a state-of-the-art robot, have reached the wreck of a famous icebreaker that has lain untouched for 70 years at the bottom of Russia's far-northern Chukotsky Sea, RIA Novosti news agency said on Monday.

The scientific ship Akademik Lavrentyev left the Arctic port of Anadyr, on Russia's Chukotsky peninsula, last week to reach the spot where the Chelyuskin icebreaker sank in 1934 after becoming trapped in ice.

According to Yevgueny Kupavykh, who heads the scientific expedition, the shipwreck lies 50m under the sea, 250km from Cape Severny and 230km from Cape Uelen, RIA Novosti said.

Kupavykh said that the expedition's divers were trained to work in extreme conditions as the temperature of the water around the wreck hovered the freezing point.A state-of-the-art robot operated by remote control and equipped with video cameras and scanners was also used to explore the wreck of the Cheliuskin.

According to Kupavykh, more information will be available after the expedition's return to Anadyr, planned for Tuesday.The icebreaker Chelyuskin left the port of Murmansk in July 1933 to explore Russia's far northern waters. But it soon became trapped in an icefield in the Chukotsky Sea and drifted with the ice for seven month before finally sinking in February 1934.

About 100 passengers, including a two-year-old child, managed to flee the sinking ship and spent three months in a tent built on the ice before being rescued in a spectacular airlift. No one died in the incident. - Sapa-AFP

See article.

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The Loss of Ice-breaker Chelyuskin

The North-East Pssage was important. Along the Siberian coast there were trappers, weather stations and others who needed supplies - food, clothing, machines and medicines. Now, the ice-breaker Chelyuskin was planned to go along the northern coast, and the work was to be finished before the winter. On July 16 1933, the expedition left under Otto Schmidt's command and with Krenkel as Chief Radio Operator. On board were engineers, carpenters and others who should replace people on the Wrangel Island.

The ship advanced slower and slower, and finally it was stuck in the pack-ice. It was clear that everybody had to leave the ice-breaker. Cases and boxes containing rice, canned food, sugar, lemons, onions, blankets, fur coats etc were brought out of the ship. Suddenly the ship was hit by a heavy blow, and then by another one. The forebody was already under the ice. Otto Yulyevich Schmidt gave the ship's log and the scientific observations to the captain and went to Krenkel to have a distress message sent. Krenkel transmitted it, dismantled his radio equipment and carried it onto the ice.

Suddenly the ship rised, stood for a moment almost vertically. A big smoke cloud came out of the funnel. And then, there was nothing left than dark water.

This happened in February 1934. 104 men and women had to encamp on the ice. In the radio tent lived Otto Schmidt, Ernst Krenkel and three others.

"On February 24, we rebuilt the radio tent. We made a table of rough boards and put it in the rear, with accumulators under it and receiver and transmitter on the top of it. The table was my sacred place. I became very angry if someone tried to put a tea mug or a tin-can there. In the tent we also had a small kerosene heater and a lamp. At 0530, Ivanov lighted the heater and melted ice for the tea. I got up a few minutes to six and exchanged weather reports with the mainland at 0600."

Small aircraft could bring a few persons to the mainland each time, provided that the weather was favourable both at Cape Vankarem and the camp on the ice at the same time. The book does not tell the distance, but other sources say that the distance to Cape Wellen was 230 kms. Women and children (there was a two year old child among them!) were evacuated first. 30 men volunteered to be among the last ten, so it was decided that the last 50 should be considered as being "the last ten".

The rescue operation would have been impossible without the radio communication. Lacking modern navigational aid it was still very difficult. Krenkel had to maintain the equipment carefully. In the night the "indoor" temperature was below 0° C, and when the heater was lit, dew appeared in the cold radio gear."I had to take the equipment apart, polish the contacts and let the components dry near the heater. When working with that noone was allowed to talk to me, I cursed and muttered to myself. Schmidt was silent, knowing that the rescue operation depended on the radio equipment."

The night between April 8 and 9 there was a heavy ice-pressure, and the antenna mast was saved in the last moment. The day after, the weather was extraordinary favourable, three aircraft could operate, and one of them could make three round-trip flights. On April 12 (after 7 weeks on the ice) only six men were still to be rescued, and among them was Ernst Krenkel, of course. The following is not printed in the book, but Krenkel has told it to me. He, Schmidt and some others were waiting for the last aircraft. As usual, they had to light a fire so that the pilots could see the smoke. But no firewood was left, so they had to set their fur-coats afire - hoping that they would not be left on the ice another night. However, Krenkel sometimes seemed to apply the Swedish proverb "Small lies adorn your speech". So we will never know for sure.

This story here.

North pole voyages.




USSR stamp from 1935 - Aeral Rescue of Ice - breaker
Chelyuskin Crew and Scientific Expedition




Expedition to rescue the crew of the Icebreaker, 'Chelyuskins', 1934.

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An SBD Dauntless rests 150 feet below the surface of Lake Michigan.
This front view shows the cockpit with its bomb sight and twin .50-caliber machine guns.
PHOTOS FROM THE A&T RECOVERY AND CREW


By JACK DORSEY, The Virginian-Pilot © August 23, 2004

Today, they have Oceana, Fentress and the decks of a dozen aircraft carriers.

But 60 years ago, in the heat of World War II, young Navy pilots learning the art of carrier takeoffs and landings had it a little rougher.

With German submarines patrolling the East Coast and the Japanese threatening the West Coast, the Navy took its carrier-landing training inland to Lake Michigan. Flying off the shore of Chicago, nearly 18,000 pilots – including former President George H.W. Bush – honed their skills on “lake carriers.”

They practiced on two converted side-wheel paddle steamers – coal-fueled former excursion ships with their tops cut off. Much smaller than the Navy’s biggest carriers, the makeshift flat-tops were a considerable challenge for fledgling aviators.

Eight pilots died in the training; hundreds of others survived accidents that left an estimated 200 planes at the bottom of Lake Michigan. That graveyard of planes is a treasure trove of Naval aviation history: Grumman F-4F Wildcat fighters, Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers, F-4U1 Corsairs and F-6F3 Hellcats.

The aluminum carcasses at the bottom of Lake Michigan – and other wrecks across the world – are also at the heart of a clash between two Navy agencies with different ideas on how best to preserve the wrecks.

Officials with the National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, Fla., want to retrieve the planes and put them on display.

But archaeologists with the Naval Historical Center in Washington, which claims ownership of all Navy aircraft and ship wrecks, believe the treasures may be better left alone.

Proponents of retrieval say waiting could result in the eventual corrosion of the wrecks, especially those in salt water graves.

“The Navy Historical Center and its underwater archaeology people are the obstacle to the salvage of Navy aircraft, not only from Lake Michigan, but everywhere else in the world,” said Ed Ellis, the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation’s secretary and a retired Navy captain and lawyer. But Robert S. Neyland, head of the underwater archaeology branch of the Navy Historical Center, defends leaving the wrecks undisturbed.

“Those that are left are very good resources for the future,” he said. “That resource should be used in good stewardship. Think how much more important it will be to recover one in 100 years from now, or 150 years from now, once this generation has died.”

For now, the two sides are at a stalemate – no U.S. Navy planes have been raised since 1996.

The Navy used more than 100 carriers in World War II; today’s Navy has just 12 of the floating airfields.
During the war, the “real” carriers were needed for combat, mostly in the Pacific. So for training purposes, the Navy cobbled together the two lake carriers.

The excursion ships, renamed Wolverine and Sable, were fitted with 550-foot flight decks just 27 feet above the water. The real carriers had decks that were almost 900 feet long and 80 feet off the water.

Normally, planes have to take off from carriers headed into a stiff wind, often generated by a fast-moving carrier. But the lake carriers barely were able to make 20 knots, and when they couldn’t do that, training stopped until the wind increased.

The ships left almost daily from Navy Pier in downtown Chicago. The main complaint from the locals was that when they left the pier, soot from their smoke stacks soiled laundry drying on lines. So the ships were ordered to leave port before dawn, before the clothes were hung.

Operating from nearby Glenview Naval Air Station, the pilot trainees would visit the carriers only briefly. They needed just eight successful takeoffs and landings and often qualified in two or three days; today’s pilots need a minimum of 48 “touch-and-goes” to be qualified.

The Lake Michigan wrecks are just a fraction of what is out there: the Navy has identified about 12,000 World War II crash sites on land or in the water. Museums have retrieved some for restoration and display, including 31 from Lake Michigan before the Navy Historical Center put the clamps on raising planes.

Many of the planes raised from Lake Michigan were in near-pristine condition because of the cold, fresh water. Some had fuel in their tanks, propellers that spin, inflated tires and 12-volt batteries still able to accept a charge.

A few were even restored to air-worthy status. A Grumman F-4F3 Wildcat discovered in Lake Michigan in 1992 is the only one still flying out of 2,000 produced.

Another group also favors raising the wrecks: salvage companies that can recover the planes. “The turf battle between the agencies is relatively new,” said Peter E. Hess, an admiralty lawyer from Wilmington, Del., and an avid wreck diver for 20 years. “But the battle between the private-sector salvor wishing to recover the wrecks and the bureaucrats wishing to stand guard over them has been going on since the advent of scuba diving.”

Taras C. Lyssenko of A&T Recovery in Chicago has retrieved three dozen aircraft from Lake Michigan, including the prized F-4F3 Wildcat that is back in the air. He has no love for the Navy Historical Center.
“NHC has been the most harmful agency to the preservation of naval history,” Lyssenko said. “They have stopped the recovery of airplanes which are being ripped apart by zebra mussels and salt water in the ocean.”
Some of Lyssenko’s discoveries are on display at museums in Long Island, N.Y.; aboard the carrier Yorktown, in Charleston, S.C.; aboard the carrier Lexington in Corpus Christie, Texas; in San Diego, Palm Springs, Calif., and Seattle; at O’Hare and Midway airports in Chicago; and at the Navy museum in Pensacola, Fla.
Robert Rasmussen, director of the Pensacola museum for the past 17 years, declines to criticize the NHC and says that the 30 aircraft the museum has recovered from Lake Michigan “have given us tremendous resources.”

Four of the museum’s planes were in combat before being returned to the United States and used for training on Lake Michigan. One was a veteran of the Battle of Midway.

“We are working on a project now to recover two from the lake,” Rasmussen said. “One is a F-4U1 Corsair and the other is a F-6F3 Hellcat. The Corsair is very rare. It was used by the Marine Corps during the greater part of the war in the Pacific.”

Rasmussen did say that “there is urgency to get them up.”

In some cases, the Lake Michigan planes are the only examples left in the world of some models . “Before we got the combat veterans out of Lake Michigan, we had zero combat veterans of World War II,” Rasmussen said.

Lyssenko, a former Army Ranger who has operated his salvage business out of Lake Michigan since the early 1980s, says he has mapped the location of at least 80 aircraft wrecks, but won’t reveal the locations to the Navy without a fee.

In June, Navy Historical Center archaeologists attempted to locate the lake wrecks . A team of seven Navy divers from Fort Story in Virginia Beach – Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit 10 – towed two of their boats to Lake Michigan to search for the wrecks. But the poor weather inhibited the search , and the divers were only able to verify two sites.

Hess, the admiralty lawyer, successfully has battled state and federal governments to open shipwrecks, such as the Monitor, to the diving public. He maintains that the public has a right to the underwater aviation wrecks.

“You don’t protect the site by leaving it underwater,” he said. “You protect it by recovering it and restoring it.”

He noted that Neyland headed the recovery efforts of the confederate submarine H.L. Hunley, which sank in 1864 off South Carolina’s coast and was raised in 2000.

“Why raise a submarine and not an airplane?” he said .

Neyland, who joined NHC in 1994 , says he is concerned that some planes are further damaged in the process of being raised, and that often there is no clear plan to preserve their originality. “If somebody has a good use for the aircraft and can learn something from them, and if they have a good plan for the display, I don’t think we have any real objection,” Neyland said. “I don’t know where Pensacola plans to display the two aircraft from Lake Michigan.”

Neyland also said that some planes have been raised, then used by museums as currency, a transaction authorized by the Secretary of the Navy.

“In the past we did have some concern here about aircraft being traded out of the Navy to pay for other services by the museum and the foundation,” he said. “We questioned whether that was being a good use of the aircraft as a resource.”

Through the Pensacola museum, Lyssenko said he had permits to retrieve two planes, but that those permits expired in 2001 and have not been renewed by the Navy Historical Center.

Lyssenko said the center placed so many additional demands on the projects, including increasingly detailed archaeological reports, that it increased the recovery cost by $80,000 per plane. That increase is passed on to the foundation, or museum, and eventually the Navy, which funds both organizations .

Generally, the cost of salvage, depending on water depth, has been between $150,000 and $170,000 a plane, according to Ellis, secretary of the Pensacola museum.

Ellis said that the Navy Historical Center also has added red tape to the salvage process.

“They have taken the position that every aircraft crash site must have an archaeological survey and a fully documented record of the salvage,” he said.

Reach Jack Dorsey at 446-2284 or jack.dorsey@pilotonline.com.

The article here.



This photo link.

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From AFP
August 23, 2004

THE wreck of a 17th-century ship found preserved in a sandbar in southern Ireland five years ago could well be the navy flagship of England ruler Oliver Cromwell, according to a Irish government archaeologist.Connie Kelleher of the environment ministry's underwater archaeology unit said the historical and archaeological value of the find in the Waterford Harbour estuary "cannot be overestimated".

It was found in 1999 after a dredger cut through part of it when working to keep a commercial shipping channel open through the estuary and is the first shipwreck from the period to be discovered in Irish waters.
Kelleher said the prime candidate for the find is the "Great Lewis", a 410-tonne frigate which sank in 1645 with 200 soldiers aboard.

Scans of the sandbar by Kelleher's team show the wooden structure of the vessel embedded almost intact in the sand.

A line of cannons are exposed above the seabed about 8m under the surface. They have been dated to between 1636 and 1670 and were made in an English foundry, according to research published by the magazine Archaeology Ireland.

"Very little is known of ship typology from this period," Kelleher told the magazine Archaeology Ireland.
"The possibility that it could have been directly involved in a period of our history that has left such an immense mark adds even more importance to the wreck, as does the realisation that we could, in fact, be looking at a war grave," she added.

The wreck has been declared a national monument and the site is protected by an exclusion zone. Diving can take place only with a government licence.

Cromwell was Lord Protector and leader of the English republican commonwealth between 1653-58 after the execution of King Charles I.

The militant Protestant or "puritan" leader who died in 1658 is notorious in Ireland for the brutal suppression of the Catholic country by his parliamentary army.

In the 1640s civil war broke out in Ireland and Britain. The Great Lewis arrived in Waterford Harbour with three others ships to relieve the parliamentary forces in Duncannon Fort.

Irish Catholic Confederate forces loyal to the royalist cause had laid siege to the fort, the night before the Great Lewis-led flotilla arrived at Duncannon.

On arrival, the Irish forces began to bombard the anchored ships.

While three cut their cables and escaped, the Great Lewis was caught by the tide and was pounded by mortar fire that smashed its masts.

The ship drifted out of range but was so badly damaged it sank two days later with the loss of most of the crew.
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Related News, here, here and here.



Photo Description: Statue of Oliver Cromwell
in St. Ives, England.

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THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
August 23, 2004

CROTON-on-HUDSON, N.Y. - It was tough digging, according to archaeology students Erin Head and Matt Napolitano.

Cold seeped through wet suits. Dislodged river muck swirled through the water. Visibility was only a few inches.

"Some days you can't see your hand in front of your face," said Head, waist-deep in a Hudson River bay. So it goes in the world of underwater archaeology.

Diggers this summer at Croton Point Park donned wet suits and scuba gear as they dug up discoveries beyond the reach of landlocked archaeologists.

Daria Merwin and a team of students found buckets of submerged stone artifacts where the Croton River flows into the Hudson, about 30 miles north of New York City.

"I know it's stone tools, but it's stone tools people haven't seen in a few thousand years," said Merwin, an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University.

Creeping sea levels over thousands of years are believed to have submerged settlements that stood by the water's edge.

The dig site today is a peninsular park by a commuter train station and the suburban bustle of Westchester County. But thousands of years ago, it was a wild area with easy access to sturgeon, berries, oysters and fresh water - a great spot for hunters and gatherers, according to Merwin. She was enticed to the site by a local's man discovery of washed-up artifacts.

Merwin, whose underwater work has included shipwrecks in the Hudson, recently devoted the first half of a six-week summer course in underwater archaeology to the Croton site.

The work is typical archaeology - sites are meticulously mapped into grids and methodically dug out. Pairs of divers follow a tape line about 150 feet out, then dig exploratory holes every 15 feet as they work back to shore. They use the same type of scoops found in hotel ice machines. Metal screens are used to sift the silt. Results are logged on clipboards, though divers write on waterproof Mylar instead of paper.

Low tide allows the divers to use snorkels.More than 100 stone artifacts have been bagged and tagged in the three weeks. Many artifacts are "cores," heavy stones from which spear points or other tools were made. Some artifacts are "flakes," leftover chippings from tool-making.

Working under hazy skies, Napolitano and Head found a good example of the latter - a finger-sized gray rock with ragged edges on either side."Holy cow, that's a big flake!" Merwin said as she waded out to examine her discovery.

That find was trumped later in the day by another pair of students who found an arrowhead - the first fully formed tool found at the site. Based on the design, Merwin believes the arrowhead is roughly 2,000 years old.

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

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Posted on Sat, Aug. 21, 2004

Union sub wreckage sought off N.C. coastU.S.
Navy’s Civil War vessel, the Alligator, believed to be older than the Confederacy’s HunleyBy

MICHAEL KILIAN Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON — Undersea explorers will plunge into the waters off Cape Hatteras and into the depths of long-forgotten history Sunday in hopes of finding the 141-year-old wreckage of the U.S. Navy’s first submarine.

Named the Alligator because of its green color and the leglike oars that initially propelled it, the vessel was launched in 1862. It failed in its assigned missions against Confederate targets in Virginia’s Hampton Roads area and sank off North Carolina’s Outer Banks while under tow in a fierce storm in 1863.

Discovery of the Alligator would undercut the claim of various Confederate historical groups that the Confederate navy’s H.L. Hunley was the first working submarine. Built in 1863 in Mobile, Ala., the 25-foot Hunley sank the Union warship USS Housatonic the following year.

The Hunley wreckage was discovered off Charleston harbor in 1995 and was raised in 2000.

The expedition to discover the Alligator, a joint enterprise of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Navy’s Office of Naval Research, will spend 10 days working a shallow underwater area east of Ocracoke Island, where unidentified sunken objects have recently been discovered.

If this effort fails to find the vessel, future searches ultimately could take the team to deep water on the brink of the Atlantic Shelf.

QUEST THROUGH HISTORY
For decades, historians had identified the USS Holland, an 1897 precursor to the submarines used in World War I, as the Navy’s first submarine. But in recent years, Civil War historians have come across evidence of the existence of the Alligator, prompting the Navy to become extremely interested in locating the 47-foot vessel.

“I had never heard of the Alligator,” said Rear Adm. Jay Cohen, chief of naval research. “I had never read about or seen a reference to it — nothing.”

It was only last year that exploration project manager Catherine Marzin found letters and scale drawings of the sub in an obscure archive in France.

The Alligator was designed by French inventor Brutus de Villeroi, whose papers were in the French archive. It was originally developed for the Union Navy as a counter to the first Confederate ironclad, the CSS Virginia, also called the Merrimack. In the end, it was the Monitor that thwarted the Virginia.

The Alligator was nevertheless launched May 1, 1862, at Philadelphia, where its strange appearance so frightened residents that the vessel was initially confiscated by the Philadelphia police.

Taking possession of it, the Union Navy sent the craft down to the lower Chesapeake Bay area, where it was ordered to destroy a key Confederate bridge over the Appomattox River and remove debris from the James River that was blocking the water route to Richmond.

But the rivers proved too shallow for the Alligator to maneuver, and the submarine had to be withdrawn to the Washington Navy Yard.

President Abraham Lincoln himself took part in the subsequent sea trial observations.

Far ahead of its time, the Alligator was equipped with an air-purification system and a water-tight air lock for divers. The submarine carried a crew of 17 to 22, depending on its mission.

FATEFUL STORM SEALED SUB’S FATE
The Alligator was assigned to take part in Union Navy operations against the port of Charleston. But taken under tow by the Union warship USS Sumpter in April 1863, it met its doom when the Sumpter encountered a ferocious storm off Hatteras.

The sub was a drag on the other vessel and threatened to sink them both.

“There were two towlines, and one broke,” said Marzin. “The Sumpter had no choice but to cut the other line and set the submarine adrift.”

No crew members were aboard the sub at the time.

NOAA and Navy experts have been using computer technology and weather models to try to determine the position of the vessels when the Alligator was cut loose, and to figure out how far it might have traveled before sinking. The expedition team is using a research vessel along with side-seeing sonar and magnetometers.

“No decision has been made about recovering the Alligator,” said Marzin, noting that Titanic discoverer Robert Ballard and other undersea archaeologists have strong feelings against disturbing underwater wrecks.
For the Navy, simply locating the submarine may be enough.

“If we can find the Alligator, we can find anything,” said Cohen.

News article. Another one.

The saga of the submarine.

Alligator Project.

To follow the search for the Allligator, go to http://sanctuaries.noaa.gov/alligator/hunt2004/

For historic information on the Alligator, go to http://sanctuaries.noaa.gov/alligator




A woodcut shows the Navy’s first submarine, the Alligator.
The sub was set adrift in 1863 and never found.
COURTESY PHOTO

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Sat Aug 21, 7:34 AM ET
By IAN JAMES, Associated Press Writer

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Archaeologists are set to begin an expedition this month in hopes of finding a Spanish ship that wrecked along the jagged reefs off the Turks and Caicos Islands in 1841 carrying a cargo of African slaves.

The story of the Trouvadore is unusual because all 193 slaves made it to shore, and all but one survived to see their freedom granted by a British government that had just outlawed slavery. Most settled in the arid, low-lying islands and began new lives working its salt ponds and raising families.

The shipwreck holds particular significance for the British territory of 25,000 people because researchers believe virtually all native islanders have ties by blood or marriage to the survivors.

Their story was nearly forgotten, reflected only in vague tales passed down over generations, until archaeologists in the past decade pieced together details from records in Britain, Cuba, Jamaica, Bahamas and the United States.

The two-week expedition is to begin Aug. 28, with searchers using swimmers dragged on tow boards behind a dive boat to scan 3 square miles of shallow, clear waters seldom visited by divers.

"We are very confident we're going to find it simply because all the paperwork points to one location," said Nigel Sadler, an English archaeologist and director of the Turks and Caicos National Museum.

All accounts say the Spanish brigantine sank off Breezy Point on uninhabited East Caicos island, a treacherous coastline littered with shipwrecks.

The chartered search boat, T&C Explorer, is to leave Grand Turk with a 13-member team including filmmakers from Windward Media of Kemah, Texas, making a documentary for U.S. public television. The expedition is funded with $80,000 given by resorts, developers, the islands' hotel and tourism association, tourism board and private donors.

A first hint of the ship's existence came in 1993 when Grethe Seim, late founder of the National Museum, and American archaeologist Donald Keith were looking through records of artifacts at the Smithsonian Institution (news - web sites) in Washington.

One century-old letter from an artifact dealer mentioned two wooden African idols from a shipwreck off Turks and Caicos. Research showed the ship's name was listed in documents as Trouvadore — Trovador in Spanish — and that the idols weren't African but from Easter Island, probably mementos brought by Spanish or Portuguese sailors.

"The whole story is not told anywhere in one document. It's little bits and pieces that you put together — letters back and forth," said Keith, who runs the group Ships of Discovery at the Corpus Christi Museum of Science and History in Texas.

Keith has studied shipwrecks in spots from Turkey to South Korea (news - web sites), and in the 1980s excavated the 16th century Molasses Reef Wreck off Turks and Caicos, about 575 miles southeast of Miami.
He suspects the Trouvadore broke apart after hitting reefs, probably leaving metal hatches and slaves' chains strewn about and perhaps buried in sand. If the team finds promising spots, they will apply to excavate artifacts for the National Museum.

The ship wrecked on its way from Africa to Cuba seven years after Britain's 1834 order to emancipate slaves.
In a letter sent to colonial authorities in Nassau, Bahamas, on April 3, 1841, a British magistrate wrote that the Africans were found naked, then quarantined in a jail where they were given food and clothing.

The crew had shot and killed one African woman on the beach who tried to escape. The 20 Spanish and Portuguese sailors were sent under guard to Nassau and deported to Cuba.

While 24 freed slaves were taken to Nassau, 168 stayed in Turks and Caicos and were assigned to work on the many salt ponds under one-year contracts, raking salt into piles in exchange for shelter and food, Sadler said. They brought a 7 percent increase to a population of about 2,300.

It's not clear from where in Africa they came. In 1842 freed slaves founded a settlement with the African name Bambarra, and it remains today with several dozen residents.

Towns named Bambara also exist in Mali in West Africa and Chad in central Africa. Sadler and other researchers say survivors probably brought that name with them, along with traditions from music to basket-weaving.

On the Net:

www.slaveshiptrouvadore.com

Expedition Diary

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GHOST SHIPS TELL THEIR TALES

By GREG HARMAN, THE SUN HERALD

GULF OF MEXICO - Even as a tropical storm buffeted the waters above, rocking the research vessel HOS Dominator earlier this month, scientists examining a string of shipwrecks settled on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico were busily prying loose secrets from the dark below.

Hundreds of vessels lie silently settling into the desolate Gulf floor.

They date back to Spanish and French exploration of the New World. But this team focused its recently completed 18-day research expedition on a string of ships torpedoed by German U-boats during World War II. In all, the Nazis sank 56 vessels, mostly oil tankers, off the southern coast of the United States, most in just a few months of 1942.

"Each wreck has something new and unexpected on it," said Jack Irion, chief of the social sciences unit of the U.S. Mineral Management Service. "The Robert E. Lee, for example, had a small cluster of some of the ship's lifeboats that are still intact on the seafloor."

One of the most dramatic findings came after the underseas explorers were struck by the lack of debris surrounding one freighter, the Alcoa Puritan, about 100 miles south of the Mississippi Coast.

While other wrecks had contained telegraph poles and other scattered equipment, the area around the Puritan's resting place was stark, said Rob Church, project manager for C&C Technologies, the company contracted by the MMS to run the mission.

After scouting to the north, the team found an anonymous heap about 3,000 feet away. There lay a mess of Alcoa debris, including a chair and part of a cargo crane. Also amid the wreckage was an expended brass shell casing from a 10.5 centimeter deck cannon on the U-507, which is believed to be the first U-boat ever to enter Gulf waters.

"Alcoa Puritan really has almost that appearance of sort of the ghost ship," Irion said. "It's a rather spectacular shipwreck, sort of evocative of what you see from films like 'Titanic.'

The shell casing proved too valuable to leave behind. The team recovered the artifact and will donate it to Texas A&M University for preservation.

"It allows us to recreate the steps of how the chase took place between the U-boat and the cargo freighter and then where they actually caught up with him and sank him," Church said.

Viewing the images relayed back from an unmanned submersible, the team also was awed by thickets of white corals covering the Gulfpenn, an oil tanker sunk on May 13, 1942, as it attempted a voyage from Port Arthur, Texas, to Philadelphia.

The corals were found to be an important fish habitat for the likes of slimeheads and scorpion fish, said Will Patterson, a marine fisheries ecologist at the University of West Florida.

Patterson said he was anxious to get the fish back to shore to try to determine how old they were, since relatives of these lesser-known specimens, such as the orange roughy and rockfish, are known to live as long as 100 years.

One of the original concerns of the group - the potential for hazardous cargos harmful to the marine environment - appeared to be dispelled.

Core samples around the wrecks suggested there is no leaking of oils or fuels.

"Many of these vessels burned rather furiously when they were first torpedoed so we suspect very little of the original cargo is still onboard," Irion said.

Due to a tropical storm's passage to the northeast, the crew examined one final ship known to be further to the west before ending their expedition on Sunday (August 22).

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Photograph courtesy of U.S. Mineral Management Service.
A 3.7 mm deck gun aboard the German WWII sub U-166,
which was sank in the Gulf of Mexico in 1942 and was found
in 2001.

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Aug. 20, 2004
Associated Press

CAPRI, Italy - Archaeologists exploring the bottom of the sea off the island of Capri have found the wrecks of three ancient ships that once plied the Mediterranean between Rome and northern African colonies.

Culture Minister Giuliano Urbani took a mini-submarine tour Thursday to see the latest additions to Italy's rich archaeological heritage, which were found earlier this month.

The wrecks were found off the island in the Gulf of Naples at a depth of about 430 feet, said private TV Canale 5, showing underwater footage of the finds on Friday.

A starfish rested on piles of amphorae, the slender terra cotta storage containers the ancient Romans used to transport goods, and colorful fish darted through the openings between the relics.

Archaeologists said one of the wrecks, from the 1st century, had been transporting goods on the route between Rome and what is now Tripoli, Libya.

A second ship, also from the first century, sank with a load of the containers, which were typical of those used to transport fruit, while the third vessel, from the 4th century, was laden with similar vases containing a popular condiment of the time based on a kind of fish sauce.

The underwater expedition also found ships from medieval times as well as more recent wrecks from World War II.

"For decades, we've been thinking about mapping the bottom of our seas for archaeological purposes, but today you can do it with new technologies," the Italian news agency ANSA quoted Urbani as saying.


Another news article.

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On 6 June 1944, a unit of 29 amphibious tanks launched from Allied ships to attack the Nazi-held Normandy beaches - only two made land. Brett Phaneuf went in search of those lost beneath the waves for almost 60 years.

In 1997 I travelled to Cherbourg in Normandy with fellow underwater archaeologist Robert Neyland, intent on collecting images of the CSS Alabama - a Confederate privateer sunk off the coast during the American Civil War.
Although bad weather made that impossible, providence smiled, allowing us several days to tour the World War II landing beaches used in the Allied invasion of Nazi-dominated Europe.

Standing at Point du Hoc - the imposing 100-foots cliffs scaled by American troops on 6 June 1944 - we could not help but wonder what remained of the enormous D-Day invasion fleet beneath the waves below us.

The naval operation mounted on D-Day was without question the most massive in the history of war - but in the 53 years since the invasion no underwater archaeological research had been carried out.

Lost history

Instead, the undersea record of that momentous event had been subjected to decades of erosion, and the clearing of any shipwreck which might prove a hazard to marine navigation.

Faced with the continued loss of this historical record, my Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University, in cooperation with Robert's Naval Historical Centre's Underwater Archaeology Branch, embarked upon the first archaeological reconnaissance of the area in the summer of 2000.

Using state-of-the-art remote sensing, detection and imaging equipment, our goal was to determine the location of landing craft, artillery, ships, ordinance and any other equipment lost during the fighting to establish a toehold in occupied Europe.

By mapping the sites we hoped that the shroud of confusion that has surrounded the history of the invasion could be lifted and a detailed history of the losses close to shore could be written.

Soon innumerable magnetometer anomalies - deviations in the earth's magnetic field due to the presence of a massive, ferrous objects - were detected.

Tank find

Perhaps most intriguing was a collection of vehicles assumed to be Sherman tanks, located at a considerable distance offshore at Omaha Beach.

We assumed these were most likely the remnants of a unit of ill-fated amphibious tanks assigned to support the US infantry in the first wave of the invasion.

These so-called Duplex Drive tanks of the 741st Armoured Battalion were launched from landing craft four kilometres from the beach. Fitted with large canvas skirts round the upper portion of the vehicle, the DD tanks were designed to float low in the water - appearing to the enemy as nothing more menacing than a rubber boat.

The entry of this first group into the rough seas proved disastrous. The tanks were intended to operate in seas with a one-foot swell, yet on D-Day the waves rose six feet.

High waves

The heavy seas swamped 27 DDs, sending them to the sea floor.

As a child I regularly played on a Sherman tank in my local park in Hamilton, Massachusetts - the hometown of legendary tank commander General George Patton.

Later in life I opted for military service to help meet the cost of my college education, joining the tank corps. The chance to return to Normandy to survey the DD tanks resting on the seafloor proved irresistible.

In 2001 and 2002, we collected nearly 30 hours of underwater video. There resting on the seafloor we saw the machines, some upright, some on their sides, and several with turrets detached and lying close by.

Once all the tanks were located, studied and filmed - and having interviewed the 10 survivors of the assault - we began piecing together the most accurate history of their tragic part in the invasion.

It seems as if the tanks were sent into the sea 6,000 yards out, as planned, but in a decision which didn't take the conditions into consideration.

Swamped

Furthermore, the landing craft carrying them were drifting away from the target beach - forcing the tanks to set a course which put them side-on to high waves, thus increasing the amount of water splashing over and crumpling their canvas skirts.

Two tanks - skippered by men with enough peacetime sailing experience to know not to turn their sides to the waves - actually made it to the beach.

I had been widely believed the other tanks sunk almost immediately on leaving the landing craft, but our work showed some had struggled to within 1,000 metres of dry land.

In fact some of the sinking tanks had had time to radio following units with a warning not to launch so far out - undoubtedly saving both lives and tanks vital to the battle.

Given the conditions on D-Day and the clumsiness of the tanks it is little wonder that the 741st met the fate it did, but that they launched at all is a testament to the courage and determination of Allied troops in the face of daunting odds and grave danger.

Link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2016280.stm

http://www.seagrantnews.org/news/20010601_dday.html

http://www.accessnoaa.noaa.gov/aug0701/dday.html

http://www.histarmar.com.ar/HYAMNEWS/HojaInformativa/HojaInf000.htm

http://www.moaa.org/magazine/June2004/f_neptune.asp

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A legislação sobre os achados fortuitos em Inglaterra difere um pouco da nossa. Lá, os achadores devem declarar todo e qualquer achado ao Receiver of Wreck, que por sua vez tratará de fazer a avaliação do artefacto e decidir se o mesmo é importante para o Estado.

Em caso afirmativo, o Estado tem de pagar o total do valor do achado ao achador, ao contrário do que acontece em Portugal onde o achador apenas tem direito a 50% do valor venal do achado.

Caso o Estado não tenha interesse na peça o achador é livre de fazer com ela o que bem entender, inclusive vendê-la.

Mais sobre a legislação portuguesa, aqui:

http://www.ipa.min-cultura.pt/cnans/lei/


Diver finds gold on Whitby shipwreck

Andy Jackson from Scarborough Sub Aqua Club reported finding a bottle full of gold filings to the Receiver of Wreck, after a dive on a wreck believed to be the Ellida, in Runswick Bay near Whitby, Yorkshire.

The unconfirmed find, which is believed by a jeweller to be the scrapings of gold worth up to £3,000 at current prices, was found in a sealed bottle with a porcelain stopper, close to the wreck.

The wreck that Jackson was diving is believed to be that of 1,124 ton Norwegian steamship Ellida, which was sunk by German submarine UB41 in Runswick Bay on April 19 1917. The wreck was found by Jackson and his dive buddy Carl Racey last year, and they are still working to positively identify her.

The Runswick Bay wreck is the right dimensions, with the correct age and type of fixtures, and the same engine and boiler arrangements as the Ellida. There is substantial damage to the stern, consistent with being hit by a torpedo.

As the bottle was found in the silt close to the wreck, it may or may not be related. There are no reports of any valuable cargo on board Ellida, and Jackson has speculated that the find could have been somebody's personal nest egg that was lost in the sinking.

Scarborough Sub Aqua Club is one of the oldest BSAC branches, with a proud history of treasure-finding and a colourful, controversial reputation for its wreck-finding activities.

Link:

http://www.divernet.com/news/stories/goldwreck040604.shtml

http://www.scarboroughsubaquaclub.net/members/live/content/photos/artifacts/artifacts.html


Ellida (1917)

This 1124 ton Norwegian steamship was torpedoed and sunk by German submarine of Runswick Bay on April 19 1917.

Details of ship were: Built Bergen 1901, Dimensions, 229ft long by 35ft beam. Engines 3cy 16, 25 and 43.

The approximate position for this wreck is 54 33 00N 00 37 00W.

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BHP Billiton is proud to be involved in bringing to Australia an outstanding exhibition of ceramics and stoneware from a 15th century shipwreck discovered off the coast of Brunei Darussalam.

The exhibition was opened in Canberra on 3 August by the Hon. Alexander Downer MP, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Australia, and His Royal Highness Prince Mohamed Bolkiah, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Brunei Darussalam.

“The exhibition gives us a special insight into Brunei Darussalam as a leading maritime trading nation in the late 15th century”, said Don Argus, Chairman BHP Billiton.

“As Australians, it provides us with an opportunity to learn more about, and engage with the people of Brunei.
“For BHP Billiton, sponsoring this exhibition demonstrates how we as a global resources company seek to contribute to the communities in which we operate. This contribution includes extending the understanding between cultures.”

The Brunei Shipwreck discovered in 1997, some 22 nautical miles off the coast of the Sultanate, is the most important discovery in the country’s archaeological history.

The shipwreck site, which had been undisturbed for more than 500 years, yielded 14,000 artefacts along with vital information about the economic and social history of Brunei Darussalam.

BHP Billiton would like to acknowledge the continuing support of His Majesty the Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan of Brunei Darussalam, The Minister of Culture, Youth and Sports, YB Pehin Dato Haji Hussain bin Pehin Dato Haji Yusof, the Brunei Museums Department, TOTAL and the Australian High Commission Brunei Darussalam.
Lost for 500 years...SUNKEN TREASURES of BRUNEI DARUSSALAM opens at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, on 4 August and remains on view until 4 October 2004.

Link:

http://www.bhpbilliton.com.au/bb/newsCentre/newsAtBhpBillitonDetail.jsp?id=News/2004/News@BHPBilliton040804.html

http://apaaf.eciad.bc.ca/english/Brunei_Proposal_html/q6_a.html - Brunei Shipwreck Project

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/listseason/28.html#2801

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Landmark ship 'faces collapse'

By Martin Redfern
BBC World Service

That landmark of maritime Greenwich,
the Cutty Sark, is in danger of total collapse,
say her custodians.

Rotten wood and corroded metal are placing the entire ship in jeopardy, they told the BBC.

In the Discovery programme on BBC World Service this week they describe an ambitious restoration plan, involving computer modelling and electro-chemical techniques to halt the corrosion.

"She was the fastest ship of her day, a grand ship, and a ship that will last for ever," wrote Captain Moody, first Master of the Clipper Cutty Sark.

She was indeed fast, holding the record (prior to construction of the Suez Canal) for the fastest passage from Sydney to London - a remarkably speedy 67 days.

And she was certainly grand, with the sleek lines of a luxury yacht rather than the cargo vessel she was. But it now seems that, without help, she will not last forever.

Iron clad
The Cutty Sark was launched in 1869 at an interesting time for naval architecture. Iron was beginning to play an important part in ship construction, replacing the all-timber construction of the past.

Soon, steel plate would make it possible to build entire hulls out of metal. But for a few years, ships had a composite structure. The Cutty Sark is one of only three such composite ships left in the world, with a frame of wrought iron clad in wooden planking.

Since 1954, Cutty Sark has remained in a special dry dock at Greenwich, visited by generations of school kids.
But 50 years out of water has done the Cutty Sark no good.

The waterproof caulking between her timbers has deteriorated and without the all-round support of water she has begun to settle.

Worst of all, her iron frame is badly corroded. Many bolts are missing altogether and some of the iron struts look more like lace work than structural components.

Elegant overhang
Richard Doughty, chief executive of the Cutty Sark Trust is particularly worried about the stern of the ship, which is built out into an elegant overhang.

"Our fear is that the stern will drop and there's a risk that the planks of the hull could come away and you could have a total collapse like a house of cards.

"We are afraid that, if we don't act soon, there could be a catastrophic collapse of the ship, perhaps in four or five years time," he said.

The Cutty Sark Trust has applied to the Heritage Lottery Fund for support in a major restoration project. The first stages are already underway.

Professor Chris Bailey at the University of Greenwich is developing a computer model of the ship, a so-called finite element model, that should show up the stresses in each component and reveal the critical areas.
As Chris Bailey says: "we can try a dismantling the ship in different ways in the computer to see if it collapses. With the real thing we have no second chance.

Simply removing and replacing all the damaged components would be the easy option, says Richard Doughty. Many parts have deteriorated badly and, he says, "if we were to replace them all we would end up with a replica rather than a restoration."

biggest worry
The biggest worry is the iron frame. Even if critical parts were replaced, corrosion in the rest would continue.
Over the years, first sea water and then London rainwater has seeped through the deck, washing salt down to the iron frame.

The grain structure of the wrought iron means that it is porous to chloride ions in salt so they are within the metal, no amount of washing will remove them and the corrosion will continue.

The answer may be electrolysis. In a bath of an inert solution such as sodium carbonate, an electric current can draw the chloride ions out.

For that to work, the iron frame itself becomes the negative electrode and a stainless steel or titanium positive electrode or anode draws the negatively charged chloride ions towards it.

Peter Lawton of the Hampshire County Council Museums Service has already tried the technique on a World War One ship, the M 33.

That was a major project but comparatively simple as the vessel was all steel. When he tried it on a test sample of Cutty Sark iron and timber, it produced a stinking black slime. This could have been caused by microorganisms from the wood that became active as the conditions changed.

Kilogram of salt
So scientists from Portsmouth University were called in to help.

Under the direction of Dr Sheelagh Campbell, they have now devised a process in which a small amount biocide is added to the electrolyte. They have tested it in a small area towards the stern of Cutty Sark and successfully removed half a kilogram of salt.

It would be a near impossible job to perform electrolysis on the entire iron frame of the Cutty Sark.

The plan is to concentrate on the most critical, complex and corroded part along the keel. Even that would involve filling the hull up to the lower deck with electrolyte and, to balance the pressure, probably flooding the bottom part of the dry dock with Thames water.

The alternative would be to remove all the planking which would simplify the electrolysis but be a real test for Chris Bailey's structural model.

Once restoration is complete, the ultimate plan is to display the Cutty Sark in a striking new way. Instead of sitting in the dry dock supported by numerous props and stays, it would be suspended in a Kevlar cradle on a cantilevered steel frame disguised to look like the surface of the sea.

From above it would appear to be sailing high seas once more, whilst underneath visitors could walk beneath the hull to a new exhibition area.

Richard Doughty and his colleagues are hoping for more than £20 million to make all this possible and preserve our maritime heritage.

The situation of the Cutty Sark in December 2002.

City of Adelaide. Another clipper at risk.

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Far Eastern Economic Review
INTELLIGENCE
Issue cover-dated August 19, 2004

As it tussles with Australia for a greater share of offshore oil and gas reserves, East Timor may soon be able to lay sole claim to other marine treasures--old shipwrecks.

Foreign Minister Jose Ramos Horta told the REVIEW that local fishermen had found two shipwrecks at unspecified locations off the north coast of East Timor.

One is said to be a Dutch vessel, while the second is a French boat from the 17th or 18th century that is believed to have sunk during a naval engagement with a Portuguese ship.

Timorese officials do not know if there is any treasure on board, but they believe it is worth retrieving goods of historical, artistic and archaeological interest from the two wrecks. "A salvage agreement is being entered into with an internationally recognised company," another senior official says, adding only that the firm is from Germany and wants to work on the French vessel.

East Timor has a fascinating and rich early maritime history with the first Europeans, Portuguese traders, landing in 1511 in search of sandalwood.

Link:

http://www.feer.com/hg76dkg75jg/0408_19_p008intell.html

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Managing the Marine Cultural Heritage
29-30 September 2004
Portsmouth Historic Dockyard


Conference Aims

Recent decades have witnessed an expansion of archaeological activity under water and in the coastal zone. This work has raised awareness of the potential and importance of the resource. There has also been a realisation of the threats to this material from human and natural action, sea-level rise and erosion, increased development, industrial extraction, exploitation of marine resources and sporting activities which are all contributing to damage and loss.

This period of relatively rapid change has increased pressure on governments, heritage groups and agencies, coastal zone managers, diving groups and other users to formulate an approach to managing the maritime cultural resource. Initiatives in some areas of the UK have highlighted potential models and routes for site types or situations. However, other countries are considerably further advanced with their approaches.
The conference aims to inform those involved in managing the submerged cultural resource of trials, developments or best practice models from around the world

The objectives are four-fold:

i. To convene a range of international experts.

ii. To present a series of papers on examples of managing submerged archaeology in themed sessions.

iii. To provide a forum for discussion and exchange of ideas and approaches.

iv. To publish the proceedings and disseminate to a wide audience.

View the official link.

More about Portsmouth.

Further information at info@magconference.org.uk.

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Patricia Smith

DAILY NEWS STAFF, August 18,2004

MOREHEAD CITY - Experts say the pirate Blackbeard likely removed any booty on board the Queen Anne's Revenge before the ship sank in Beaufort Inlet in 1718. But state archaeologists working with the shipwreck believed to be the Queen Anne's Revenge are still looking for golden treasure - Golden Leaf Foundation treasure.

The Queen Anne's Revenge Project is seeking $244,000 from the nonprofit organization to retrieve more artifacts from the shipwreck site next year.

"It's time to do some more major recovery," said QAR Project Director Mark Wilde-Ramsing.

The project for the past two years has focused on preserving cannons and other items already brought up from the site off Carteret County. In the absence of designated state appropriations, the project has survived on a $350,000 Save America's Treasures grant from the National Park Service.

"It will not last beyond the first of the year," Wilde-Ramsing said.

Also, the QAR project has nearly finished the lab work on items already retrieved, including six cannons.
"All of them are scheduled to be finished up this spring and come on exhibit," Wilde-Ramsing said.

The Golden Leaf Foundation receives money from a court settlement against tobacco companies and issues grants for economic development projects, giving priority to those counties formerly dependent on tobacco.
Wilde-Ramsing said the application argues that the recovery of artifacts from the shipwreck site will, once again, peak interest in the pirate and draw more tourism to the area.

The project, part of the Underwater Archaeology Branch in the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources, applied to the Golden Leaf Foundation around the first of August, but will not know if it will receive money until sometime in November, Wilde-Ramsing said.

In the meantime, the QAR project plans to move forward with Dive Down, a program that will allow limited recreational diver access to the shipwreck site.

Authorities are still working through specifics but are looking at offering a two-day diving certificate program consisting of on-site dives and lectures.

'It's not just focusing on the archaeological remains, but also looking at the geology of why it's exposed and the biology of what's growing on it," Wilde-Ramsing said.

Tentative plans call for the program to start this fall with some of the state's dive business operators, then to open up next year to the general public, charging around a $500 fee, he said.

The program will also have to be run by a non-profit organization, such as the Friends of the North Carolina Maritime Museum, because the state agency cannot legally charge for site visits, Wilde-Ramsing said.

The project received $2,250 last year from the Carteret County Tourism Development Authority for a feasibility study on the idea. This year the TDA awarded $4,000 for promotional materials.

Link:

http://www.jacksonvilledailynews.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Template=/GlobalTemplates/Details.cfm&StoryID=24856&Section=News - The News

http://www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/qar/ - The project website.


History

In June, 1718, a ship called the Queen Anne's Revenge ran aground about one mile offshore of the small port town of Beaufort, North Carolina. For over a year, it had sailed the waters of the Caribbean and along the Eastern Seaboard, as the flagship of the notorious pirate known as Blackbeard! Efforts to pull the ship free failed, and she eventually listed and settled into the shoaling sands.

For 278 years, the remains of the QAR lay covered by the sands of the Atlantic.

In 1996, after hurricanes and nor'easters scoured the sands away, divers from Intersal, Inc., searching for other shipwrecks around the inlet found the wreck site.

Since then, the North Carolina Division of Archives and History, in a coordinated and long-term research project, has conducted underwater archaeological investigations at the site of Blackbeard's Flagship.

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Em finais de Setembro vai realizar-se em Valladolid a XII Reunião
Internacional de História da Náutica e da Hidrografia.

Podem fazer o download do programa e ficha de inscrição em:

http://www.ars-nautica.org/


___________

International Commission for the History of Nautical Science and Hydrography

XII International Reunion

"Science and the Sea"
Castillo de la Mota. Medina del Campo (Valladolid- España)
20 - 23 September 2004

Programme and participation form - download pdf (54Kb)

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The HMS Sussex may be the most valuable shipwreck in history; salvagers will soon find out
By Pierce Graham-Jones

One February day in 1694, the bloated body of a British admiral washed up on the limestone shores of Gibraltar, clad in only his nightshirt. Francis Wheeler had been at the helm of the HMS Sussex, an 80-gun warship that was leading the Royal Navy to the Mediterranean to battle the French in the War of the League of Augsburg. But just one night out of Gibraltar, a tempest swept up off the North African coast, tossing the newly christened ship in a violent easterly wind. With the ship heading straight for the rocky Spanish coast, the captain desperately tried tacking into the wind. But he could not prevent the sea from rushing into the gun ports. The Sussex, along with 12 others in the fleet, sank half a mile to the ocean floor.

Only two men lived to tell of the catastrophe. And it was not until centuries later that the full story of the Sussex came to light. In 1995, a researcher uncovered papers revealing that the admiral had been on a secret mission: He was carrying 1 million pounds sterling to deliver to the duke of Savoy, an ally of Britain, to keep him from folding to French bribes. Today, those gold and silver coins are worth up to a billion dollars, making the Sussex potentially the most valuable shipwreck in the world.

This fall, the commercial salvage company Odyssey Marine Exploration is set to begin the first excavation of the Sussex. The dig will be the deepest ever of a colonial ship, and it may yield the largest hoard of marine treasures in history. But perhaps more important for the future of shipwreck exploration, it is the first of its kind to be done in partnership with a federal government. Under a novel agreement, the British government is giving Odyssey permission for the dig; in return, Odyssey will pay for the project, split the booty with the government, and give the government first dibs on artifacts for study or display.

A year in the making, the contract addresses a stubborn philosophical rift between academic archaeologists and commercial salvors. Archaeologists contend that profit seekers can't be trusted to protect precious artifacts and that wrecks should be left undisturbed as underwater museums. "Commercial exploitation of underwater cultural heritage . . .," says the International Council of Monuments and Sites, "is fundamentally incompatible with the protection and management of the heritage."

Graveyard. Yet, sunken ships are hardly a scarce commodity. There are more than 3 million shipwrecks littering the ocean floor, the United Nations estimates, and many are deteriorating fast. "When was the last time you dropped a screwdriver in the ocean and found it a week later?" asks Pat Clyne of Mel Fisher Enterprises, a salvage company. "I mean, was it in perfect condition? The ocean has a way of returning things back to nature. So . . . preservation in situ . . . makes no sense whatsoever."

Greg Stemm, the cofounder of Odyssey, believes that differences between commercial salvagers and archaeologists can be overcome. The equation is simple: The archaeologists know shipwrecks, and the commercial salvagers have the money and the equipment to excavate them. Just finding a wreck like the Sussex, says Stemm, requires the kind of money public institutions typically aren't willing to spend.

The search for the Sussex began in 1995, when an anonymous researcher approached Odyssey with an ancient and intriguing letter. It was from the French diplomat to Italy, informing his government of the disaster: "The Admiral Ship of England . . . was lost in the storm. . . . There was on the ship a million Piastres of which 800,000 were for the Duke of Savoy . . . ." Researchers began canvassing English, Spanish, and American archives for more information; confident the document was authentic, they turned their search to the sea.

Odyssey explorers combed 400 square miles of the Mediterranean, using side-scan sonar, bathymetric surveys, and remotely operated vehicles. Out of 418 possible targets--including some wrecks over 2,000 years old--they discovered only one with cannons, a distinguishing feature of the Sussex. Ten years and more than $1 million later, they had found their spot.

Odyssey's agreement with the British government is notable for the degree of archaeological rigor it demands. Among other provisions, the company must keep a team of government-appointed archaeological observers on board. Odyssey will keep 80 percent of any treasure proceeds under $45 million, 50 percent of everything between $45 million and $500 million, and 40 percent of any returns above $500 million. Or it could end up with nothing.

Pot of gold. In their willingness to take that risk, the Odyssey researchers join a long line of starry-eyed explorers, from weekend amateurs scouring the Great Lakes to controversial pioneers like Mel Fisher, who kicked off a treasure-hunting boom with his discovery in 1985 of a Spanish galleon bearing about 300,000 silver coins.

It is fair to say that the practices of some of these early salvagers were far from archaeologically sound. But the balance has swung, says Ken Vrana, an archaeologist with for-profit Admiralty Corp. "Now most corporations, at least those that are publicly traded or high profile, know that they better be doing their work according to archaeological best practices . . . or they're not going to survive in the long term."
Still, there are no regulations governing archaeological practices in international waters. In 2001, 87 countries ratified proposals "to protect the underwater cultural heritage . . . increasingly threatened by pillage and destruction." But, because of disputes between developing countries and important maritime nations, they failed to give the measures the force of law.

Many government officials say that commercial salvors should play a role in excavating marine treasures. "We . . . are not against someone making an honest dollar . . .," says Robert Blumberg of the State Department. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which recently helped protect the HMS Titanic site, is also encouraging partnerships between salvors and archaeologists. "Private commercial ventures are the potential for the future," says Ole Varmer, a NOAA general counsel. "And instead of continuing to fight with them, let's see where we can build bridges."


Faced with foundering on the rocky Spanish shore, the captain chose to tack into strong winds--a fatal error.ILLUSTRATION BY TOM FREEMAN

Follow a HMS Sussex discussion here: http://archaeology.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://lists.asu.edu/archives/sub%2Darch.html

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CSS Nashville
(later Thomas L. Bragg, CSS Rattlesnake) Commerce raider (1f/2m). L/B/D: 215.5 × 34.5 × 21.9 dph (65.7m × 10.5m × 6.7m). Tons: 1,221 tons. Hull: wood. Comp.: 40. Arm.: 2 × 12pdr. Mach.: side-lever engine, sidewheels. Built: Thomas Collyer, New York; 1853.

A 1221-ton side-wheel steamer, was originally a passenger steamer built at Greenpoint, New York, in 1853.

She was seized by the Confederacy at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1861 and converted to a lightly-armed cruiser.

Nashville made one combat cruise under the Confederate Navy flag, starting in October 1861. She captured and burned the sailing merchantman Harvey Birch in the English Channel on 19 November, and spent some time at Southampton, England. Returning to American waters early in 1862, she captured and burned the schooner Robert Gilfillan on 26 February.

Two days later, she ran the blockade into Beaufort, North Carolina, remaining there until mid-March, when she went to Georgetown, South Carolina.

Sold to private interests and renamed Thomas L. Wragg, she operated as a blockade runner, but was hindered in this employment by her deep draft. After arrival near Savannah, Georgia, she was sold again in November 1862, to become a privateer under the name Rattlesnake. On 28 February 1863, while still in the Savannah area, she was destroyed by the monitor USS Montauk.




RUSS BYNUM
Associated Press

http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/news/politics/9402508.htm

RICHMOND HILL, Ga. - Barely visible from the massive dirt mounds that shielded Fort McAllister from the guns of Union ironclads, four squarely spaced posts jut from the Ogeechee River along the salt marsh.
Signs warn passing boaters - "Submerged Object" - with no hint of the Civil War shipwreck that lies on the riverbed 30-feet below.

The CSS Nashville, the first ship commissioned by the Confederacy in 1861, sank off Fort McAllister near Savannah on Feb. 28, 1863, under fire from the ironclad USS Montauk.

The Nashville is the only Confederate blockade runner known to exist in Georgia waters. Though divers from 1960 to 1983 salvaged artifacts ranging from 10-foot engine rods to brass lanterns, the state this fall will start its first archaeological survey of the wreck with an eye toward preserving it.

"I've been trying to get this for 20 years," said Danny Brown, manager of Fort McAllister State Park. "She's been pilfered pretty much her entire underwater life. As for whatever's still in the wreck, historically and archaeologically speaking, she's still a treasure."

Built in 1853 as a passenger and mail carrier, the Nashville wasn't one of the Civil War's technological marvels on par with the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley or the iron-armored USS Monitor.

But the Nashville made history when the Confederacy commissioned the 1,221-ton steamer as its first warship in 1861 and it became the first vessel to fly the Confederate flag in international waters.

The Nashville was later reassigned as a privateer, a mercenary ship given license to raid enemy cargo vessels, and as a blockade runner that outran Union ships into Southern ports to deliver arms and export cotton.
In its less than two years of war service, the Nashville so frustrated the Union Navy that Rear Adm. Samuel Francis Du Pont, commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, declared it "a thorn in my flesh."
"Her escape ... would absolutely have shaken stocks in Wall Street," Du Pont wrote the day after the Nashville sank.

Last month, the Georgia Historic Preservation Division won a $39,996 grant from the National Park Service for an underwater survey of the Nashville and other war relics along nine miles of the Ogeechee River.

It will be the first major project for underwater archaeologist Jason Burns, who previously helped recover the Hunley in South Carolina, since he joined the Georgia Department of Natural Resources this year.

Using boats with high-tech gear such as side-scan sonar, which uses acoustic waves to capture detailed images of submerged objects, Burns hopes to get the most accurate picture of the Nashville's condition since the last divers saw it up close 21 years ago.

"It's never been archaeologically evaluated before," said Burns, who plans to begin work in the next two months. "We're not exactly sure what we're gonna find. How much impact did the salvage have on the shipwreck itself? Is the sand covering the wreck up, or is it completely exposed?"

Fort McAllister was built to protect a backdoor route to the Savannah port, and its earthen fortifications proved strong enough to hold off Union ironclads pursuing the Nashville in January 1863.

But the Nashville - by then renamed the Rattlesnake - ran aground while retreating from an attempt to run the Union blockade a month later. Cannon fire from the Montauk burned the Confederate ship to the waterline.
Judy Wood, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers archaeologist and maritime historian who has catalogued records of 1,100 shipwrecks in Georgia, says that if any deserve to be studied, it's the Nashville.

"We can conclusively say this is our one and only blockade runner. It probably is one of the most significant wrecks in Georgia," said Wood, who has researched shipwrecks in the state over 20 years.

One of the Nashville's most important features to naval historians is its side-levered steam engine - an innovation that kept the machinery used to turn the ship's paddle wheels lying horizontally within its hull. Other engines had parts extending vertically through a ship's deck - making them a vulnerable target for gunfire.

"There are very few steam engines from the Civil War period surviving anywhere in the world," said Kevin Foster, chief maritime historian for the National Park Service. "Of the side-levered engines from the Civil War period, the Nashville is the only one that I know of."

Burns said his six-month underwater survey will determine if more of the Nashville should be salvaged. Fort McAllister already has on display a number of pieces raised over the past four decades.

The state hired divers in 1960 to use dynamite to remove engine rods that posed a hazard to boats at low tide. A private expedition from 1978 to 1983 raised furnace doors, cannonballs, wrenches and other tools. Four years ago, a group of crabbers stumbled onto the ship's rudder.

Part of a 1,700-acre state park, Fort McAllister has had its dirt-mound fortifications, canons and ammunition magazines on public display for 40 years. But to Brown, the park manager, that's only half the story.
The rest remains beneath the Ogeechee River.

"The Union fleet never knew we were here until they chased the Nashville and bumped into us," Brown said. "So the Nashville and Fort McAllister are very much together in this."


Links:

http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-us-cs/csa-sh/csash-mr/nashvill.htm - History and several paintings

http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/ships/html/sh_063000_cssnashville.htm

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By Max Uphaus,
Naval Historical Center Public Affairs

WASHINGTON (NNS) -- This summer, scientists under the direction of Dr. Robert Neyland, head of the Naval Historical Center's (NHC) Underwater Archaeology Branch, carried out investigations of two historically significant 19th-century naval craft.

An international group of researchers working under the NHC have uncovered new operational details that may provide a clue to the loss of the world’s first successful combat submarine, H.L. Hunley, while another archaeological team conducted a survey to locate the wreck of the anti-slave trade schooner USS Alligator.

Hunley scientists made their discovery while removing the layer of concretion that covers the interior and exterior sections of the Civil War-era boat.

“As we dig inch by inch into the concretion, we get closer to the final clues that will help solve the mystery of why the Hunley disappeared,” said Sen. Glenn McConnell, chairman of the South Carolina Hunley Commission.

Once a layer of the concretion was removed, an integral series of valves and pumps, connected by a pipe running from the forward to the aft ballast tank, was exposed. The configuration suggests that the submarine’s pump system may have had a dual purpose. Scientists knew the pumps were used to control the water level in the ballast tanks, which enabled the submarine to rise or dive while in operation. The complexity of the pump system is leading scientists to believe it also served as a bilge system that would have allowed the crew to remove water from inside the submarine in the event of an emergency.

Depending on the valve setting and pump position, Hunley scientists may be able to tell if the crew was desperately trying to remove water from the crew compartment or trying to pump water out of the ballast tanks to gain buoyancy the night that it vanished Feb. 17, 1864.

“Only archaeological detective work will answer the questions of what were the Hunley crew’s actions during their last moments and...why the sub never returned from her mission,” said Neyland.

The remaining concretion still covers a majority of the pump system and has not been further removed, because it protects the submarine from corrosion as it awaits conservation treatment.

Scientists are hopeful that once they can safely excavate and x-ray this key aspect of the submarine’s internal pump mechanisms, it will reveal what the crew was doing in the last moments of their voyage.

Hunley, a Confederate boat, sank USS Housatonic off of Charleston, S.C., on the evening of Feb. 17, 1864 - the first time in history a submarine sank a surface ship. After signaling to shore that the mission had been accomplished, the submarine and its crew of eight vanished.

Lost at sea for more than a century, Hunley was located in 1995. The hand-cranked vessel was raised in 2000 and delivered to the Warren Lasch Conservation Center, where the NHC, in partnership with the South Carolina Hunley Commission, is supervising its protection and study.

In search of Alligator, NHC Underwater Archaeology (UA), together with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, surveyed Alligator Reef and Shoal, Fla. Alligator, launched in 1821, was one of only five Navy schooners designed to interdict slavers and pirates, which would make it a very rare and valuable discovery.

“USS Alligator is one of the Navy’s most significant shipwrecks,” commented Neyland. “Alligator’s mission was to enforce a U.S. law prohibiting the slave trade on U.S. merchant ships, and it did its mission well.”

Until recently, historians believed that the schooner’s wreck site had been identified, but in 1995 and 1996, archaeologists found discrepancies between that shipwreck and historical accounts, invalidating this idea.
Because dozens of ships foundered on the reef during the same historical period as Alligator, its accurate location has not been easy to determine.

Based on historical data, including contemporary charts and maps and the ship commander’s own estimate of the vessel’s position the day before it sank, UA plotted a high-probability search zone of one square mile. The scientists then conducted a remote-sensing survey, using a magnetometer in an attempt to detect the iron ballast that Alligator was known to be carrying when it went down.

Early in its brief but eventful career, Alligator mounted two patrols off of West Africa. “Its first mission founded a colony for former captives and slaves, which is today the nation of Liberia,” said Neyland. “The crew of Alligator boarded slave ships...and freed the captives, delivering them to the new colony.”

Alligator spent 1822 in anti-piracy operations near Cuba, where, though badly outnumbered, it won numerous victories and liberated captured American ships. The schooner ran aground in November on what is now the Alligator Reef, its crew abandoning and scuttling it on Nov. 23 to prevent pirates from salvaging it.

“Hunley and Alligator were different ships with entirely different missions,” Neyland pointed out. “However, both represent a previously forgotten part of U.S. history, which is now being revealed through science and underwater archaeology.”

For related news, visit the Naval Historical Center Navy NewsStand page at www.news.navy.mil/local/navhist.


Hunley - Digital image made using Vulcan laser system.




Links:

http://www.rc-submarines.com/id111.htm - Hunley photo page

http://www.islandbase.com/albums/ahistory.html - USS Alligator resumed history

http://www.newbernsj.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Template=/GlobalTemplates/Details.cfm&StoryID=13309&Section=Local - (Article) The hunt for the Alligator

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/07/0712_040712_ussalligatorsub.html - (article)

http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/breaking_news/9388371.htm - Virtual Hunley exhibit

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1928 - (Agosto) - Mergulhadores italianos resgatam do fundo do Mar Mediterrâneo, ao largo de Belle Isle (França), a caixa forte do navio belga Elizabethville, que continha um conjunto de diamantes avaliados em 40 mil libras esterlinas.

O navio havia sido afundado em 1917 pela marinha alemã durante a Primeira Guerra Mundial.

Estima-se que a carga do navio valeria mais de 2,500,000$ US, tendo sido recuperados cerca de 500,000 $ US.

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In 1917 The Belgian Ship Elizabethville, sank off Belle Isle (France) carrying a cargo of treasure valued in excess of $2,500,000 US.

In August 1928, Italian divers recovered the strong hold of the ship, where it was stored 40.000£ pounds in diamonds. Some $500,000 US of the cargo has been brought up by divers.

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Um óptimo exemplo da colaboração de mergulhadores amadores com arqueólogos, associações e instituições ligadas à arqueologia náutica e subaquática.

Talvez um dia em Portugal esta colaboração possa ser mais efectiva.

AP State News

When they scuttled the 268-foot steamer Canobie in Lake Erie 80 years ago, everyone assumed her useful life was over. They were wrong.

The Canobie and four other shipwrecks, all in a 20-square-mile area in Lake Erie, are the focus of a program announced Wednesday by Mercyhurst College's Archaeological Institute and Erie's Bayfront Center for Maritime Studies to map and record the wrecks.

By doing so, researchers want to draw attention to underwater preservation efforts, develop a history curricula for students, attract new divers and inventory items to prevent looting.

Twenty-five years ago, looting wasn't as much of a problem in Lake Erie, which Mercyhurst officials say is the final resting ground of more wrecks than any other freshwater location in the world.

There are thousands of them _ wooden package freighters, three-masted barkentines and schooners _ that became victims of the lake's fast-changing weather, shallow waters and once-crowded channels.

The problem was getting to them. Pollution had made the wrecks, most of which date from the 1800s and 1900s, hard to get to and difficult to see.

Lake Erie has been cleaned up considerably over the last two decades in part because of the powerful filtering mechanism of the invasive zebra mussel and the actions of state and federal regulators.

Now, on a good day, a person can see the Canobie in 15 feet of water from the deck of a boat, said James Stewart, executive director of the Bayfront Center.

"It's fabulous diving," he said.

Part of the problem with good diving, however, is the potential for looting.

That potential is one reason for the research being done this summer by Mercyhurst and the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University, said Kurt Carr, chief of the division of archaeology and protection for the state Historical and Museum Commission.

By drawing recreation divers to the sites and perhaps even creating a kind of underwater museum at some wrecks, scavengers could be thwarted.

Smaller, more fragile items may even be removed and placed under glass in Erie's Maritime Museum.
"To protect them, we need to know where they are," Carr said, explaining that other states, notably Michigan and Vermont, have had similar programs that are successful.

Researchers hope to secure additional funding that would expand the project beyond the initial 20-mile area.
While some of the Lake Erie wrecks have been mapped before, Carr said little has been done with that information since the 1980s.

Paid for in part with a grant from the state Coastal Zone Management program, the effort will see researchers use sonar devices to map the area. Divers, including three Erie-area teenagers currently getting lessons, will then explore the wrecks, using underwater cameras to get an image of what is below the surface.
"A shipwreck is an instant picture of culture, of industry," said Jim Zurn, a trustee at Mercyhurst who approached the INA about the project.

"At the instant that ship went down it entered a microcosm of society at that instant," Zurn said.
The Institute of Nautical Archaeology, which was founded in 1972 as a nonprofit institute, has already excavated some of the most significant underwater archaeological sites in the world, including numerous shipwrecks in the Mediterranean.

Institute researcher James Coombs will oversee a staff of seven Mercyhurst students who will map, research and record the shipwrecks.

The project's initial phase will last 12 months.

Links: http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=8286859&BRD=2212&PAG=461&dept_id=465812&rfi=6

http://mai.mercyhurst.edu

http://www.goerie.com/bcms/

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By ELLIOTT MINOR
Associated Press Writer

ALBANY, Ga. (AP) — Archaeologists have been digging up pottery, stone tools and other artifacts in Georgia for years, but until recently there was no coordinated effort to locate the historic treasures submerged along the coast and in rivers and streams. Georgia has joined at least eight other states, including Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina, in launching a state-funded underwater archaeology program.

As the state’s first official underwater archaeologist, Jason Burns is organizing a network of divers and historians to identify the state’s submerged relics, including 2,000 shipwrecks. “When you think of underwater archaeology, it’s not just shipwrecks,” Burns said. “We’re interested in everything from submerged prehistoric sites, to docks, piers and wharves.”

Before moving to Georgia, Burns helped with the recovery of the Civil War submarine H.L. Hunley from the harbor in Charleston, S.C., and helped study the Confederate Sloop CSS Alabama, sunk by a Union warship near Cherbourg, France, in 1864. From a helicopter, he has already spotted the outline of a sunken vessel in the Flint River near Albany, one of many that navigated the river’s treacherous shoals and bends during the 1800s when waterways were the major routes for passengers and supplies were pouring into what was then the American frontier.

Burns is working with Albany’s Thronateeska Heritage Museum, which traces the history of southwest Georgia, to locate and identify more submerged sites. Tommy Gregors, the museum’s executive director, has documented at least 14 ships on the Flint, including several paddle-wheelers that were built at a local shipyard. “This is a story that has really not been explored as much as it should have,” Gregors said. “With the coming of trains, people forgot about the ship traffic up and down the Flint.”

The West Georgia Underwater Archaeological Society, another group that Burns is working with, has been studying submerged bridges and steamships in West Point, located on the Chattahoochee River north of Columbus. The divers have located the supports for a covered bridge built in 1838 by Horace King, a former slave who became one of the South’s leading covered bridge builders. “There’s a lot under the waterways of Georgia that we’ve lost and don’t know about,” said Charles Kelly, the society’s president. “This is a good opportunity to protect things that are there.”

Bob O’Daniels, an underwater bridge inspector for the Georgia Department of Transportation, said divers and historians in northwest Georgia are forming a group to study submerged artifacts, including a steamboat in the Coosa River near Rome. They’ll also search for relics beneath the Etowah and the Oostanaula rivers. Cities like Albany, Rome, Augusta and Columbus may seem landlocked in this age of interstate highways, piggyback rail cars and over-the-road trucks, but in the 1800s, they were heavily dependent on paddle-wheelers and some even had shipyards. Hawkinsville and Abbeville, southeast of Macon, were shipbuilding centers on the Ocmulgee River, and at one time 40 steamboats plied the Coosa River from Greensport, Ala., to Rome, Burns said.

Other states have had active underwater archaeology programs for years, but until last year Georgia had no system for locating and preserving submerged relics. Although Georgia has a relatively short coastline of around 100 miles in length, it “matches up in terms of importance” with other Southern states, said Erv Garrison, a University of Georgia archaeology and geology professor.

“We’ve got some really fine shipwrecks and coastal habitation sites that go back into prehistory,” he said. “We’ve got stuff in the rivers. We’ve got more than enough to keep someone busy for a long time.” Garrison has helped with the recovery of guns and other items from the CSS Georgia, which sits in pieces at the bottom of the Savannah harbor. He has located submerged tools left by hunters about 10,000 years ago, when Georgia’s coast extended about 13 miles farther east. He’s helped excavate a prehistoric American Indian site on Skidaway Island, some of it under water.

Organic materials, such as wood, bone and fur, tend to deteriorate on land, Garrison said. “But if you’re very lucky in underwater archaeology, the mud silt and clay will preserve bone,” he said. “You’ll get the perishable materials. That fills in a lot of blanks.”

Burns, who works for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources’ Historic Preservation Division, said one of his goals is to raise awareness of the state’s maritime history. “Once you know about it, you can protect it,” he said.

http://waterfront-news.com/html/archaeology.htm

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The Mystery of the M1

The M1 was the pride of the British Navy. She was Britain's most advanced submarine, a 100 metres long and weighed 2,000 tons. It was fitted with it's own massive artillery gun that could hit targets that were 20 miles away, a reminder to the world that Britain still ruled the waves.

However, in 1925, she went missing on a routine mission in the English Channel and the crew of 69 men were lost. Able Seaman Sales went ashore, just hours before she sailed, as he had just learned that his mother had died. He was the only 'survivor' of the M1 crew. In the Board of Inquiry that followed the disappearance, it was believed that the SS Vidar had been involved in a collision with the sub.

There was unexplained damage to the bow of the ship and fragments of naval issue paint were also found there. However, the exact cause and location remained a mystery.

It is a mystery which has fascinated former Navy diver, Richard Larn. He has spent the last 15 years of his life searching for the wreck. It wasn't an easy task for there are more shipwrecks per square mile in the English Channel than anywhere else in the world. Last year, he finally pinpointed the M1 thanks to a sonar fish which bounces signals off the seabed.

The M1 lay at a depth of more than 70 metres which is out of reach of most divers. Consequently, the diving team had to use a mixture of gases to survive the extreme pressures at this depth. They confirmed that the wreck was the M1 thanks to the distinctive footholes in the conning tower.

The investigation of the divers and, then later, a remote submersible, found that the gun had been ripped off the sub in the collision with the Vidar. The weight of the gun, hanging over the side of the sub, destabilised it and the sub went down to the seabed in freefall. The control areas of the sub were flooded which meant that the crew couldn't lift the sub off the seafloor.

The great depth meant that there was no possibility of escape. The M1 is an official War Grave and protected by the 'Military Remains Act' 1986. Divers may not enter such wrecks or, in any way, disturb them.

Link: http://db.bbc.co.uk/history/archaeology/marine/m1.shtml


Supergun Submarine (M1) located 74 years after tragic loss.

The British submarine, M1 which uniquely carried the firepower of a battleship was discovered 35 miles south-east of Plymouth at a depth of 81 metres by diver and submarine expert, Innes McCartney and boat skipper Grahame Knott.

M1 disappeared with her entire crew of 69 while submerged on exercise on 12th November 1925. Her loss remained unexplained until the collier Vidar entered Stockholm on the 19th. She reported being in collision with a submerged object off the Devon coast. Investigation of her damaged bows showed traces of a rare paint which had been used on M1. Navy divers and survey vessels searched for M1 for a month before abandoning hope of locating her.

HM Submarine M1 was developed toward the end of the First World War. Unique in the history of submarine design, she and her sisters M2 and M3 were fitted with 12 inch guns from a scrapped battleship.

This gave the M-Class the ability to sneak-up on shore installations and surface vessels, rise to the surface and deliver a formidable blow from very short range. No merchant vessel was expected to survive a hit from M1.

M1 was completed before the war ended, but not employed in combat because the Royal Navy feared that Germany could copy the design. The U-boat war against British commerce might have taken a grave turn for the worse if such deadly weapons had been employed against Britain s merchant marine.

After the war, the M-Class submarines were used experimentally in developing a range of new submarine technologies. M3 was converted into a minelayer and later scrapped in the 1930s. M2 was converted into the world's first submarine aircraft carrier. She carried a miniature stainless steel-framed seaplane. M2 was also lost in tragic circumstances in January 1932.

Over the last 74 years, stories of the location of M1 have surfaced from time to time. None had ever been substantiated until 18th June 1999 when Innes McCartney's diving team returned with video evidence definitely confirming that M1 had at last been seen again.

For wreck hunters, McCartney and Knott, the location of M1 has been the culmination of over a year of detailed research. Archival records and local information from trawlers and other sources were used to narrow down a search area. M1 turned out to be the first target on their list to dive - successful research indeed.

In 1998, Innes McCartney located and dived the submarine Affray and has identified the final resting place of several U-boats, including the first operational submarine to be coated in rubber.

Of the wreck itself, McCartney says, "I knew it was M1 as soon as she appeared out of the darkness at 75 metres. She is upright and generally in good condition. However, she is festooned with 74 years worth of lost trawler nets. These were a major hazard to the diving team.

"M1 is a massive spectacle to behold, towering above the seabed by more than 5 metres. Her 12-inch gun has fallen away onto the sand. We suspect that it was struck during the collision with Vidar. The main damage to M1 is on the starboard side, forward of her huge bronze conning tower. This was a genuinely unforgettable dive".

Diving to such great depths requires the use of special helium/nitrogen/oxygen mixtures and is fraught with complexities. Few UK-based diving teams are able to employ this technology.

The position of M1 will remain a closely guarded secret in an attempt to prevent it being visited by souvenir hunters. She is a war grave, covered by the protection of the Military Remains Act, 1986. Mr McCartney's diving team did not interfere with the wreck in any way, returning after over 90 minutes of decompression with the only video footage of the wreck.

Link: http://www.hillbeck.plus.com/sa/Dits/Articles/m1.htm

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'The Bay Was Packed With Ships'

By Hideko Takayama
Newsweek

Aug. 16 issue - Kublai Khan was a conqueror of boundless appetite. When Japan refused to obey and pay tribute to the Mongolian ruler, he was outraged. Twice during the 13th century he sent massive fleets to invade Japan, possibly trying to seize its stored gold. Each time, though, the khan's aggression was repelled not by the Japanese military but by sudden storms that killed most of the invaders and destroyed their ships. The Japanese dubbed these storms kamikaze, or divine wind.

That's the myth, but what exactly happened in the high seas more than 700 years ago? Archeologists have been trying for decades to nail down the specifics. From which direction did the kamikaze blow? How strong was it? For that matter, how big were the Mongolian ships? And how did they manage to sink? Now, more than seven centuries after the fact, Japanese archeologists are finally getting some answers. Artifacts uncovered in an expedition that ended last week tell more about the battles that took place off the coast of the tiny island of Takashima at the mouth of Imari Bay, 1,000 kilometers southwest of Tokyo.

Digging up the sea bottom to salvage the pieces from the Mongols' invasions is a difficult task, to say the least. Excavations that started in the 1980s, now led by Kenzo Hayashida, archeologist and president of the Kyushu and Okinawa Society for Underwater Archaeology, managed to uncover many ceramic jars used for containers. In recent years his team found Mongolian pottery-shelled bombs, swords, large anchors and a bowl with Chinese characters that belonged to a 100-man unit under a commander named Wang. In July his team of scientists and divers worked on a site about 70 meters from the shore and 13 meters below the surface of the sea. By pumping water through a hose and suctioning up the sand, they found human-skull parts, animal bones, timbers from the ships and an anchor rope.

Hayashida and his crew fell short of finding an intact ship. The reason: shipworms most likely have reduced these once mighty vessels to shards. "It is like having 4,000 different sets of puzzles," says Randall Sasaki, a graduate student in the nautical-archeology program at Texas A&M University who was a member of Hayashida's team. "Those pieces were put in a blender of sea and were mixed together. It is difficult to figure out which piece goes to which ship." Judging by the hundreds of wooden pieces the team turned up, as well as those from earlier expeditions, Hayashida thinks that some of the ships of the Mongolian fleet could have been 40 meters, and made in Chinese or Korean ports.

Today the island (population: 2,800) is covered with lush green pine and sweet-acorn trees, and the fishermen pride themselves on their tasty blowfish. It's hard to imagine that this bucolic island was the site of two of the biggest and most devastating sea battles in history. Experts say that some 40,000 soldiers aboard 900 wooden ships attacked northern Kyushu in 1274 and killed virtually Takashima's entire population. For some unknown reason, the fleet left after two weeks and was destroyed by the divine wind on its way back home. In the second invasion, in 1281, 140,000 soldiers arrived in 4,400 ships. When the typhoon hit Imari Bay that summer, about 3,000 ships and 100,000 soldiers are believed to have vanished under the sea.

Shinji Takano, archeologist with the Nagasaki Prefectural Board of Education, thinks that the fleet gathered in the bay to let the typhoon pass. A study of a Southern Sung dynasty military ship excavated in China, which may have been similar in design to the Mongolian ships, shows that a wind of nearly 200kmh would have been enough to destroy the ships. Takano thinks that a mega typhoon wind blew from the south to the shore. "The bay was packed with their ships. They must have tied their ships to one another to stay together," he says. The strong wind and high waves probably crushed them, and they sank.

Hayashida's expedition is hardly the last word. So far his team has not covered even 1 percent of the battleground. If he can find the money and manpower to continue his work, we can expect a lot more details to unfold about the Mongolian invasion attempts.

© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5635132/site/newsweek (the news)

http://www.h3.dion.ne.jp/~uwarchae/english-index.htm (Kyushu and Okinawa Society for Underwater Archaeology)

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Segundo o relatório de actividades de 2003 do Centro Nacional de Arqueologia Náutica e Subaquática (CNANS): http://www.ipa.min-cultura.pt/cnans/actividades/2003/


PC/FA

Em 1868 foi desenhado e construído para a “Abardeen Line”, por Bernard Waymouth e Walter Wood, um clipper de 948 tn., de construção compósita (tabuado de casco em madeira e cavername em ferro), que foi baptizado com o nome de Thermopylae.

O seu tipo de construção e a forma do casco procurava combinar a capacidade de carga com a velocidade, essencial para efectuar a longa viagem da rota do comércio do chá entre a China e Inglaterra, sendo o “gémeo” do célebre Cutty Sark, hoje exposto em Greenwich.

O advento dos navios a vapor e a abertura do canal do Suez um ano depois da sua construção relegou o Thermopylae para as rotas do comércio da lã na Austrália e posteriormente para o comércio do arroz e madeira no Canadá.

Em 1896 o Thermopylae foi vendido à Marinha de Guerra Portuguesa, sendo então rebaptizado de Pedro Nunes e objecto de alteração e transformação em Navio-Escola.

Decidido o seu abate por o casco de madeira se encontrar em mau estado, em 1897, altura em que foi desarvorado e transformado em pontão, o navio acabou os seus dias utilizado como alvo e torpedeado, afundando-se a 13 de Outubro de 1907, por ocasião de um exercício naval durante um festival marítimo na baía de Cascais, na presença da família real.

A evolução subsequente dos princípios e critérios relativos ao património cultural subaquático, o crescimento do interesse público sobre este tema, assim como o advento do mergulho amador, voltariam entretanto nas últimas décadas a trazer à actualidade o caso do navio Pedro Nunes, transformando-o num mito em incessante crescimento devido à prolongada ausência de localização visual dos seus destroços.
Muito recentemente a tutela desta área do património cultural recebeu a informação de que estes vestígios tinham sido identificados em mergulho, assistindo-se desde então a um crescendo de interesse pela visita ao local.

Os destroços visíveis distribuem-se numa área com um comprimento de cerca de 70 m por 10 m de largura, centrada num ponto com as seguintes coordenadas geográficas: 38º 40’ 45’’ N e 009º 23’ 55’’W (datum europeu). O que resta do navio apresenta-se muito deteriorado, com o tabuado exterior do casco solto do cavername em ferro.

Torna-se assim imperativo assegurar simultaneamente a fruição pública deste singular documento do património cultural subaquático assim como as condições que garantam a sua melhor preservação, atendendo a significado cultural do mesmo, à sua fragilidade e desprotecção perante o mergulho menos avisado e, justamente, ao seu potencial lúdico, turístico-cultural e pedagógico-educativo.





Links:

http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/ships/html/sh_091000_thermopylae.htm

http://www.bruzelius.info/Nautica/Ships/Clippers/Thermopylae(1868).html (his story in dates)

http://www.histarmar.com.ar/Promare/Promaretp.htm (in Spanish)

http://www.red-rooster.co.uk/ships/thermop.htm

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By Lacey Sheppy

Shoreline Beacon — A recently excavated Southampton beach shipwreck is not the Weazell. Ken Cassavoy, the marine archeologist heading the project, originally thought the remains belonged to a merchant schooner called the Weazell that was lost in the area in 1798.

Cassavoy released a statement last weekend saying the wreck is not the Weazell but might be a naval vessel instead. “I’m disappointed the wreck probably is not the Weazell, but that’s what archaeology is all about,” said Cassavoy. “That’s why we undertook the excavation, so we could better understand exactly how the ship was built and to try to find artifacts that would confirm the identity.”

About 30 British and American military buttons were found during the course of the excavation. In a press release Cassavoy stated, two of the British military buttons appear to be from a regiment not formed until after the Weazell was lost. Other artifacts examined have been identified as four large cannon balls, musket balls, two gun flints, a musket bayonet and parts of two guns or muskets.

The excavation also provided ship construction information which indicated the vessel was probably built to the specifications of a naval contract. “My colleagues (Stan) McClellan, (Leslie) Currie and (Patrick) Folkes are all very excited by the new findings,” said Cassavoy. “They believe a naval vessel of this very early period on Lake Huron is a rare find and probably of greater historic interest than a merchant ship.”

Although Cassavoy said more research is needed before the ship can be properly identified, marine historian Folkes believes the wreck may be the General Hunter. The General Hunter, a British naval brig, was built in 1806 and captured by the Americans in the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813. The ship was said to be converted to a U.S. merchant vessel and the name shortened to Hunter. Records show that in 1816, the brig was wrecked on the eastern shore of Lake Huron 100 miles north of the entrance to the St. Clair River.

While that puts the wreck in about the right location, Cassavoy said the group won’t make an official identification until after all the artifacts are carefully examined.“Until the list of all potential shipwreck candidates, including the Hunter, are fully researched, the project will not make any official statement concerning the possible identity of the ship,” he said.

http://www.shorelinebeacon.com/story.php?id=112217






Historial do projecto: http://www.chantryisland.com/Summary%20Weazell%20March%202nd,%202004.htm

http://www.chantryisland.com/

http://www.trentu.ca/news/daily/archive/021210KenCassavoy.html

http://www.brucecounty.on.ca/museum/southamptonshipwreck.htm (plenty photos / Muitas fotos)

http://www.nps.gov/pevi/HTML/battle.html

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http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/527.htm

Indiana University faculty and students have helped leaders in the Dominican Republic establish the world's first underwater shipwreck museum.

Charles Beeker, director of the Office of Underwater Science in the IU School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, and Geoffrey Conrad, director of IU's Mathers Museum of World Cultures, recently returned to Bloomington after spending a month with a group of IU students to help establish the Caribbean museum. The work was part of a field research project that included the IU International Programs Office.

The 1724 Guadalupe Underwater Archaeological Preserve was dedicated at a ceremony involving Beeker and Tony Raful, the Secretary of Culture for the Dominican Republic.

The Spanish galleons Guadalupe and Tolosa sank in Samana Bay during a hurricane in 1724. The IU group worked with representatives of the Dominican Republic Ministry of Culture and La Romana Bayahibe Hotel Association to utilize artifacts recovered from Samana Bay in the 1970s to establish the underwater preserve adjacent to Viva Dominicus Beach and Viva Dominicus Palace at Bayahibe on the Caribbean island. Included in the museum are 18th century ballast stones, cannons, cannonballs, ceramic pieces and an anchor.

"The site is in 12 to 15 feet of water, so it is readily accessible to snorkelers and divers, allowing visitors the opportunity to see an actual 18th century shipwreck in an underwater museum setting," Beeker said. "This is the first underwater shipwreck museum in the world created for the public benefit." Recognizing the historical and recreational value of the new underwater museum, Project AWARE Foundation and the hotel association financially supported the project, Beeker said.

In conjunction with creation of this underwater museum, IU received approval for further underwater archaeological investigations in the Dominican Republic with the Office of Underwater Cultural Heritage. "We want to involve several IU schools and students to help establish a series of underwater park sites that would include historic shipwrecks and fresh water springs used by the Native-American Taino prior to the arrival of Columbus," explained Beeker, who has directed IU Underwater Science projects in the Dominican Republic since 1993.

For more details on this project, contact Beeker at 812-855-5748 or cbeeker@indiana.edu. The IU Underwater Science Program's Web site is at http://www.indiana.edu/~scuba.


An earlier pioneer project of an underwater shipwreck museum in Portugal - Océan (1759)

l'Océan. French admiral flagship. Sunk in 1759 at the coast of Algarve, Portugal. Discovered and looted in the 1960s. What was left, was excavated by Francisco Alves in 1984 and 1991. The wreck site now consists of impressively large iron anchors, cannon and concretions. It's open for recreational divers as an underwater shipwreck museum. A very large model of the ship can be seen at the Musée de la Marine, Paris.



Nos anos sessenta do século passado mergulhadores locais descobriram nas imediações da praia da Salema (Budens, Vila do Bispo), a trezentos metros da costa, os destroços de um navio de guerra, que no final dessa década e no início da seguinte foram objecto de resgate. Na ocasião, à excepção de dois fragmentos de bocas de fogo de bronze, que deram entrada no Museu de Marinha, as peças mais valiosas recuperadas foram vendidas em hasta pública.

Na década seguinte, os vestígios ainda subsistentes neste local, foram identificados pelo arqueólogo Jean-Yves Blot como tendo pertencido ao navio-almirante francês Océan, de 80 canhões, varado e incendiado a 18 de Agosto de 1759, na sequência dos combates travados com uma esquadra inglesa, no que constituiu um dos episódios da Guerra dos Sete Anos.

De 1981 a 1992, o sítio do Océan foi objecto de intervenções arqueológicas de registo e salvamento por parte do Museu Nacional de Arqueologia, tendo aí tido lugar, em 1984, a primeira campanha de arqueologia subaquática realizada em Portugal.

Em 1993, o Museu Nacional de Arqueologia e a associação cultural Arqueonáutica Centro de Estudos montaram no local dos destroços do Océan um Itinerário Arqueológico Subaquático, com as mais expressivas peças ligadas entre si por cabos (“fios de Ariane”). Estas peças foram legendadas através painéis explicativos, ficando a maior âncora do sítio assinalada à superfície por uma bóia de grandes dimensões para facilitar a localização e a visita do sítio por mergulhadores amadores. O Itinerário Arqueológico Subaquático Océan foi uma iniciativa pioneira na Europa atlântica, que se revestiu de assinalável sucesso, mas acabou por não ter sequência.

Reconhecendo-se no entanto que esta iniciativa pode constituir uma infra-estrutura essencial no âmbito de uma política de gestão sustentável do património cultural subaquático, dada a sua valência turístico-cultural e pedagógica-educativa, o Centro Nacional de Arqueologia Náutica e Subaquática propõe-se efectuar anualmente, durante a época estival, a respectiva montagem e desmontagem, facultando assim a qualquer mergulhador uma visita assistida – sem guia – a este incomparável sítio arqueológico subaquático do barlavento algarvio.

http://www.ipa.min-cultura.pt/cnans/actividades/2003/anexo3.htm

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By ANNE HEYMEN
Features Editor

A shipwreck off Crescent Beach might become the first underwater park in northeastern Florida if the team of divers from the St. Augustine Lighthouse Archeological Maritime Program (LAMP) is successful in satisfying all the requirements set forth under the Florida's Shipwreck Preserves Program.

On July 3, 1918, the U.S. Corps of Engineers' dredge vessel Florida encountered a storm off Daytona Beach. When the vessel began listing, the captain gave orders to abandon ship. Three of the 13 crew members perished. Wreckage washed ashore between Crescent Beach and Matanzas Inlet.

The steam-powered paddle wheel, originally launched in 1904 and rebuilt in 1908, measured 152-feet-long, 29.9 feet in breadth with 7 feet of depth.

The wreck currently sits relatively intact in protected waters about 15 feet off the bottom on a north/south orientation. Its position is about a mile and a half east, parallel to the Crescent Beach 207 Bridge. The remains, 130 feet of preserved hull, are approximately 29 feet, 8 inches across. It is covered in hard and soft corals and is home to numerous species of fish and at least two nurse sharks.

July 6, almost 86 years to the date of the demise of the ill-fated ship, a team of divers led by archeologist John W. Morris III, executive director of LAMP, began initial mapping of the site. LAMP's aim is to develop it into an underwater park as part of the Florida Archeological Preserves. Morris hopes to obtain sufficient documentation about the ship and the site to be able to nominate it as the first underwater park in northeastern Florida.

Lt. Col. Steve Muskett and two LAMP staff members, Robin Moore and Kim Eslinger, joined Morris. The mapping process also serves as an educational experience for Nicole Tumblesome, a University of Florida student who is an intern in the program.

Muskett, who earlier this year returned from a tour of duty in Iraq, teaches at Nease High School. He is credited with starting the local Marine Archaeology Research Center for high school students interested in learning basic archaeological methods and research skills, with a hands-on underwater experience. Four students who were in that program while in high school are participating in the mapping process. The four, all who are now in college, include Laura Black, B.J. Strawn, Jena Shockley and Peter Osterrieber.

Morris emphasized that throughout the process there will be no digging or recovery operations. The dives will be for observation purposes only and will include fish identification and counts by species.

"The waters around St. Augustine are protected as a marine archaeological preserve by the State of Florida. That makes it illegal to salvage anything from sunken vessels in our waters," he explained.

Morris cautioned that it could be up to two years or longer before the process is completed. If successful in satisfying requirements for the underwater park designation, the site would be marked by a buoy. It then would become a living museum in the sea. An underwater plaque interprets each designated park. Brochures and laminated underwater guides would become available from local dive shops.

This could become a haven for snorkelers and scuba divers and a boon to local dive shops. It could also open the door to a whole new tourist attraction in the area.

"The visibility won't be as good as in the Keys," Morris advised, "but it should still be a great place for local diving."

The dredge Florida is not the only sunken ship off Crescent Beach. The Isis, a private steam yacht launched in 1902, was originally owned by the wealthy Spaulding brothers, John Taylor and William of Boston. Isis became a naval vessel during World War I and was decommissioned in 1919 at which time the ship was used for survey work. On Jan. 20, 1920, the Isis was taking soundings near the submerged Florida, preparatory to placing a warning buoy in its area, when she ripped a hole in the ship's bottom. The captain decided to beach the vessel about 150 yards offshore. In doing so he probably saved the lives of the 45 crew members.

Before salvage efforts could begin, another storm hit the St. Augustine area. The wreck of the Isis broke up and was abandoned.

And there she lies -- 1.09 miles northwest of the dredge Florida off Crescent Beach. While LAMP is interested in the sunken wreck, it is not being considered as an underwater park, "because," according to Morris, "the Isis is in an impact zone where the waves break. It's not a safe dive location."

There are currently nine underwater parks designated as Florida Shipwreck Preserves, and one, the Regina, is pending designation. The locations and ships include:

Boynton Beach: Iron hulled barque Lofthus wrecked in 1898.

Bradenton Beach: Irish built steamer Regina sunk in 1940 (pending designation).

Fort Pierce: Spanish Plate Fleet, Urca de Lima went down in 1715.

Islamorada: Galleon San Pedro lost in a hurricane in 1733.

Key Biscayne: The racing yacht Half Moon downed in 1930.

Panama City: The merchant steamer SS Tarpon, lost in a gale in 1937.

Pensacola: The Spanish American War-era battleship USS Massachusetts was scuttled for target practice in 1921.

Pompano Beach: Steamship SS Copenhagen, wrecked in 1900.

Port St. Joe: Once a patrol gun boat, the Vamar sunk in 1942.

Suwannee River: Paddlewheel steamboat City of Hawkinsville sunk in 1920.

For details on each of the parks go to www.flheritage.com and click on Archaeological Preserves.

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The following press release was issued by National Geographic today: Post-Civil War Treasure Ship Reveals Its Secrets In September National Geographic.

Bound from New York to New Orleans in October 1865, the SS Republic, carrying 59 passengers, 500 barrels of freight and thousands of gold and silver coins, sank in a hurricane some 100 miles off the coast of Georgia.

After a tenacious 12-year research effort, the wreck was located last year, 1,700 feet below the ocean surface, by Tampa, Fla.-based Odyssey Marine Exploration, Inc (AMEX: OMR).

National Geographic documents the Republic's final journey, the search for the wreck and the amazing treasure the ship is yielding in the magazine's September 2004 issue.

"Treasure Ship Meets Perfect Storm," by Priit J. Vesilind with photographs by Jonathan Blair, tells of the harrowing experiences of the ship's passengers on that fateful last voyage, mostly through the letters of passenger William T. Nichols, and of the determination of shipwreck explorers, Odyssey co-founders Greg Stemm and John Morris, to find the Republic and recover the bounty of coins it contains.

Archaeological excavation of the Republic is continuing, and recovery operations have already netted more than 50,000 coins, including thousands of gold eagles, double gold eagles and silver half dollars, nearly all dating between 1838 and 1865. The collection contains some of the finest-known examples of U.S. gold coins from the period. The coins recovered to date should exceed $75 million in retail value. The face value of the coins recovered represents about 25 percent of the "$400,000 in specie" that research indicates was on board the Republic when it sank.

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Mais novidades e fotografias das escavações que estão a decorrer no sítio de naufrágio do Mary Rose.


By David Fuller
BBC News Online, Portsmouth

It is an underwater jigsaw puzzle - complicated by the fact that the picture on the box bears little resemblance to reality.

A team of marine archaeologists has been working for weeks to find and recover the lost front section of the Mary Rose from beneath metres of silt in the Solent. Every new find on the dive site has the potential to change our understanding of Henry VIII's sunken flagship.

The only contemporary drawing of the Mary Rose has already been found to owe more to artistic licence than historical fact.

Only when all the wreckage has been traced, recovered and measured will the team begin to know for sure what the pride of the Tudor king's navy looked like.

When the first sign of the bow of the ship was first found last May, it was described as "the most important maritime archaeology find in England in the last 20 years".

Finding the missing link
It has been a huge operation, with no-one knowing what, if anything, would be found beneath the silt.

"It's very exciting and unique - there isn't another bow of a Tudor warship around," maritime archaeologist Christopher Dobbs told BBC News Online.

"It is a unique ship from a revolutionary period of warship design - nothing else from the period has been found - and these are the final pieces of the jigsaw."

Mr Dobbs has been working on the Mary Rose project since 1979 and was part of the original team which oversaw the recovery of the main section of the vessel.

He was under the water while the famous shots of the warship surfacing on its yellow cradle - seen by an estimated 60 million people - were taken over 20 years ago.

"To actually go out to the site and dive and find things again and remember those amazing times from 1982 is very exciting - to be discovering things again.

"You never know what you're going to find - we could have found very little - but buried deep in the silt we are getting timbers that are in pristine condition."

The archaeologists have been putting in dives of up to two hours, 60 feet down on - and below - the sea floor. "It's been hard work, some dives are 100 minutes of hard digging," Mr Dobbs said.

The missing bow section was missed during the excavations 20 years ago, because it was just 20cm outside the search area. The main bow timber has turned out to be at least twice as long as expected, leading to speculation that the vessel could have been longer than previously thought.

"We have a puzzle on our hands now to work it out - and we won't know for sure for some time," said David Childs of the Mary Rose Trust.

With visibility excellent, the diving team has found 40 new timbers, including 10 of the timber ribs making up the lower part of the bow.

Some of the timbers have been brought to the surface to be held in conservation tanks, while many of the larger items are marked and catalogued before being reburied in the silt.

They will be recovered at a later date when they can be properly stored.
The team is still looking for the final piece in the Mary Rose puzzle - the heavily fortified forecastle.

It is not known what forecastle looks like - but the team hopes the way it broke away from the vessel means it will have been preserved almost intact.

The first picture of the Mary Rose was painted in 1547, two years after the vessel sank, probably overloaded, as she sailed from Portsmouth. The artist painted all her cannon on one side of the vessel, and also gave her an extra deck.

"Let's call it artistic licence - it was a propaganda drawing - showing the might of the king," said Mr Childs.

The three-week dive will end on Friday, and only then will the jigsaw puzzle begin in earnest.



A stone cannonball is revealed in the
silt - additional evidence that there
were guns in the bowcastle.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/hampshire/3552860.stm

See more images here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/04/uk_mary_rose/html/1.stm

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ST. PETERSBURG, August 10 (RIA Novosti) - Sea archaeologists came on the "Opland", 18th century Swedish frigate, lying in the Vyborg Bay bottom of the Gulf of Finland, Rear Admiral Konstantin Shopotov, Rtd., said to Novosti. He is manager and research supervisor of the Baltic Memory society's maritime archaeological expedition.

The "Opland", of 44 cannon, was found at a 13 metre depth in the vicinity of the Paasluotta shoal, site of the Battle of Vyborg, in which the Russian Navy routed the Swedish, June 22, 1790. The find crowned two years' dogged search, says Admiral Shopotov.

The frigate hull, nose and stern were found at sizeable distances from each other, washed apart over the centuries in the sandy sea bottom. The expedition also came on deck gun-carriage fragments, a stock of munitions, and many parts of copper bottom plating, all scattered over a vast area. The "Opland" had been an excellent warship, prove the finds-suffice it to mention the expensive copper plating, which spectacularly increased speed but was rarely afforded in the navies of the time.

One of the most impressive finds, a 160 pint copper wine or beer bowl, in a fine state of preservation, has been taken to the Maritime Archaeological Museum.

The "Opland" has been photographed, and its video footages made. Detailed studies are starting.

The last of the Swedish ships wrecked in the Battle of Vyborg has been recovered. "Now, we can re-create the battle down to the smallest detail, and so revise its historical coverage. Five warships were found in the Paasluotta area alone. As we can now assume, they lost their bearings in an abortive breakthrough to meet their doom," reasons Admiral Shopotov.

This summer is the Baltic Memory's 15th expedition. The society has found, examined and registered more than twenty sunken ships since it was established. Five of them were Swedish warships that met their end in the Battle of Vyborg-the battleships "Loviisa Ulrika", "Hedwig Elizabeth Charlotte" and "Enikhetten", the galley "Ertros" and the hermaphrodite brig "Dragoon". A cargo sailer with a freight of granite blocks, wrecked early in the 18th century, was found in the Vyborg Bay last year.

The Maritime Archaeological Museum, in the Vyborg Castle commandant's headquarters, has received a majority of Baltic Memory finds. They are among the most spectacular exhibits of the museum, which is celebrating its 10th establishment anniversary this year.

Vejam o link aqui: http://en.rian.ru/rian/index.cfm?prd_id=160&msg_id=4696559&startrow=1&date=2004-08-10&do_alert=0


The Swedish-Russian Sea Battles of 1790

http://www.abc.se/~m10354/mar/russ1790.htm

http://www.neva.ru/EXPO96/book/chap5-4.html

http://www.algonet.se/~hogman/battles_1700a_eng.htm

http://www.zum.de/whkmla/military/18cen/russwed178890.html

http://www.balticsww.com/baltic%20sea%20shipwrecks.htm

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O Mercure, uma corveta da Marinha francesa de Napoleão, foi afundado em Fevereiro de 1812 junto ao Cabo Tagliamento, depois de uma batalha de 40 minutos com o Weasel, um navio de guerra Inglês.

Em 2001, pescadores locais recuperaram uma peça de artilharia nas redes. Este ano, uma equipa da Universidade de Veneza está a realizar tabalhos arqueológicos no naufrágio.


Leiam a notícia: http://news.newkerala.com/world-news/index.php?action=fullnews&id=5709

Rome, Aug 3 (IANS)

Scuba diving archaeologists have begun excavating a Napoleonic battleship that was sunk in a battle almost 200 years ago from a lagoon near here, Xinhua reports.

The Mercure, a lightly armed French navy "corvette", was sent to the bottom of the sea off Cape Tagliamento in February 1812 after a 40-minute battle with an English battleship called the Weasel. It was discovered by chance in 2001 when local fishermen found one of its cannons caught in their nets.

Most of the ship's hull is still in one piece, along with much of the deck and eight cannons. The wreck is the only known example of a Napoleonic corvette and local experts are keen to discover details about its construction and equipment. The first underwater studies of the wreck were scheduled to begin Monday.

The scuba-diving archaeologists include four students from the ancient sciences department of Venice's Ca' Foscari university. The battle in which the Mercure sank came towards the end of the 17 years of French control over Venice.

Although Napoleon had conquered the city, he was unable to establish his supremacy at sea, where England continued to be the dominant sea power, even in the Mediterranean.

The results of the Mercure excavation - including artefacts and video footage of work done underwater - are expected to be collected together and put on show in a public exhibition next year.





Náufragio do Mercure.

Vejam no Blog: http://veniceblog.typepad.com/

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O arqueólogo Shelley Waschmann, do INA e da Universidade Texas A&M, encerrou a campanha de duas semanas de prospecções com ROV e submarino no Mar Egeu, perto do Monte Athos, no local onde Heródoto relata que se perdeu uma frota Persa de 300 navios durante uma tempestade .

Um dos objectivos da expedição era encontrar vestígios de trirremes que se perderam no desastre.

Leiam a notícia: http://www.thebatt.com/news/2004/08/05/News/Seein.The.Aegean-697465.shtml

Seein' the Aegean
Researchers discover ancient fleet in expedition

By Andrew Burleson


In June, a multinational expedition, led in part by Shelley Wachsmann of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M, finished a two-week survey of the seas near the Mount Athos Peninsula in Greece.

The expedition conducts surveys in the Aegean Sea annually. The researchers were searching for the wreckage of an ancient Persian fleet, which sank in that area about 429 B.C. According to the writings of Herodotus, nearly 300 ships and 20,000 soldiers perished in a storm. Wachsmann said the goal of the Persian War Shipwreck Survey is to locate remains of ships that sank in Greek waters during the period of conflict between the Persian Empire and the city-states of Greece in the fifth century B.C.

Among the naval disasters that occurred during this war were losses of fleets due to storms and battles at sea."We are taking Herodotus at his word and are trying to locate remains of fleets of great historical and archaeological significance. Ideally, we would like to find remains of one, or more, triremes (oared ships with three banks of rowers on each side).

No triremes have ever been found to date," Wachsmann said.The 2004 expedition was conducted from May 28 to June 10th. During this time the researchers traveled into the sea aboard the R/V Aegeo of the Hellenic Center for Marine Research, and deployed its Thetis submarine and Max Rover. The Max Rover covered approximately 150 kilometers of seabed down to 600 meters depth using video imaging and sonar, while the Thetis submarine conducted daily dives to examine targets and raise artifacts, Wachsmann said.

The expedition made several discoveries, locating ceramic containers dating back to the Greek classical period and to the Byzantine Empire.The researchers also uncovered more recent cargo, including a collection of salt-glazed pottery that likely dates back to the eighteenth or nineteenth century, Wachsmann said."The most interesting artifact was a 'sauroter,' which is a pyramidal-shaped bronze butt-spike of a Greek infantryman's (hoplite's) spear. This was made of bronze so that when stuck in the ground it would not rust. The spearhead was made of iron and leaf shaped. We found the suaroter inside a jar at a depth of about 100 meters, in an area where previously local fishermen had brought up two Classical period bronze helmets," Wachsmann said.

Wachsmann's study is one of many conducted by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology every year, said Donny Hamilton, president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology. The Institute of Nautical Archaeology is a private non-profit entity, not part of the A&M System; however, the two work closely together with A&M providing facilities and the INA providing research, Hamilton said."The INA is the most renowned of all entities that conducts nautical archaeology, we do more research than anyone else in the field," Hamilton said, "really this is the center of the world of nautical archaeology."

As an additional benefit to the A&M campus, all the excavators in the Institute, including Wachsmann, teach in the anthropology department at A&M. Junior biology major and history enthusiast Faegen Lee is excited about the implications of the institute's research, "I think the INA is a great organization in that it allows us to understand ourselves by looking at history from another perspective," Lee said The Aegean expedition will renew its study next year.

For 2005, the team plans to widen its search to include sites from a Persian invasion of Greece in 480 B.C.



The Max Rover is being lowered into the Aegean Sea
from the R/V Aegeo of the Hellenic Center for Marine
Research. The rover covered 150 kilometers of seabed
to a depth of 600 meters during the research expedition.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Ragusa, August 6

The wreck of a Byzantine ship whose period is datable between the third and the fourth century after Christ, was found on the seabed of Ragusa by Carabinieri underwater squads of Messina. The ship is a few metres under the water on "Circe's sandbanks", in front of Marina di Marza's coast, near Ispica. Ragusa's superintendence will make some researches after summer, because in this part of sea there are now many tourists. The area is now delimited and will be controlled by Carabinieri to avoid thefts or damages.

http://www.agi.it/english/news.pl?doc=200408061729-1138-RT1-CRO-0-NF11&page=0&id=agionline-eng.oggitalia

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Duas décadas depois da recuperação do navio favorito de Henrique VIII, o Mary Rose, os arqueólogos encontraram madeirames correspondente à parte da proa enterrados a apenas 20 cm do limite anterior da escavação.

Ainda não se sabe se as madeiras vão ser recuperadas, tratadas e colocadas junto do restante navio musealizado.

Vejam a notícia completa aqui:

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=548812

____________________________________________________________________________________

Mais um navio baleeiro Basco encontrado em Red Bay...

Another 16th century galleon found at Red Bay Harbour

Tourism, Culture and Recreation Minister Paul Shelley today announced an exciting new find associated with the underwater archaeological resources at Red Bay, Labrador. What appears to be another 16th century Basque galleon — a trans-oceanic whaling ship — was recently discovered in Red Bay Harbour, the fourth vessel of its kind to be located there.

"This most recent discovery is significant and contributes to the rich history and culture that makes Red Bay unique, both to this province and the rest of Canada," said Minister Shelley. "The discovery adds to the ever expanding inventory of significant archaeological resources in the province and represents another piece of history that ties Newfoundland and Labrador to Europe."

Discoveries like the newest galleon are made possible through a successful collaborative approach by all levels of government to protect and present the heritage of Red Bay. The Town of Red Bay, through its environmental protection policy, is committed to protecting the abundant cultural resources found within its boundaries. The town works with the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador, who are responsible for the protection of provincial resources on behalf of the people of the province, and with Parks Canada who, on behalf of all Canadians, manages Red Bay as a national historic site.

It was during a periodic review being conducted by Willis Stevens and Peter Waddell, members of Parks Canada’s underwater archaeology unit, to determine the status of the submerged cultural resources at Red Bay that this most recent find was made. The team was in the harbour last week to monitor wrecks that were previously located when the new discovery was made 25-35 feet below the surface.

Stéphane Dion, Minister of the Environment, said that as part of its management commitments to the national historic site, Parks Canada is proud to continue its research and monitoring efforts at Red Bay. "This work will ultimately mean that the significance of Red Bay can be appreciated by Canadians of today and tomorrow."

Until the 1970s, not much was known about the historical role Newfoundland and Labrador played in helping to meet Europe’s demand for whale oil. A highly lucrative commodity, whale oil was sought after for everything from lighting lamps and making soap to fabricating furnishings and fashions.

Minister Shelley said that Dr. Selma Barkham’s study of records from the Basque region of southern France and northern Spain contributed to revealing that the Basque had carried on a large-scale whale fishery in the Strait of Belle Isle during the 16th and early 17th centuries. They established at least 16 shore stations along the south coast of Labrador and Quebec’s lower north shore. Red Bay, or ‘Butus’ as the Basques called it, became one of the largest and most used of these stations because of its deep water and sheltered harbour.

At the peak of the Basque whaling period, dozens of galleons, each with a crew of 50 to 75 men, would cross the ocean each spring in pursuit of the large numbers of bowhead and North Atlantic right whales.

Fourteen seasons of archaeological research, conducted by Memorial University of Newfoundland under the direction of Dr. James Tuck, and Parks Canada under the direction of Robert Grenier, uncovered thousands of artifacts that paint a picture of the hard conditions surrounding the life and work of the 16th century Basque whalers in Canada. They included tryworks (or ovens) where the whale oil was processed, the remains of cooperages and a cemetery where 140 whalers were buried.

As a result of Parks Canada’s underwater archaeological program, the remains of nine Basque ships and boats were found, including one batel, five chalupas and three galleons. The first galleon, located in 1978, is believed to be the San Juan. The vessel was raised piece-by-piece, recorded and returned to the harbour where it had been preserved for so long. The San Juan was loaded with 800 to 1,000 barrels of oil when its anchor broke and it sank in Red Bay Harbour during a storm in 1565.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has found the underwater archaeological work conducted at Red Bay to be an inspiration in this field and used the outline of the San Juan to be the sole and permanent symbol for heritage ship wrecks around the world. The UN adopted the image for use in a logo to represent its convention for the protection of submerged cultural heritage. Red Bay was also placed on Canada’s tentative list earlier this year for future consideration by the international body for World Heritage Site status.

Minister Shelley said the collection of Basque ships and boats found at Red Bay are considered by archaeologists and historians to be the world’s best-preserved examples from the period. "They have contributed greatly to our understanding of the evolution of ship design and construction during the 16th century," he said. "It remains to be seen what the newest, and fourth galleon to be discovered, will tell us about this fascinating piece of our provincial and Canadian history."

Media contact:

Tansy Mundon, Tourism, Culture and Recreation, (709) 729-0928
Robert Grenier, Chief, Underwater Archaeology Unit, Parks Canada, (613) 990-7103


O primeiro navio baleeiro basco a ser encontrado... em 1978.

San Juan

San Juan was a Basque whaler lost in Red Bay, Labrador, in 1565. Owned by Ramos de Arrieta y Borda of Pasajes (de Fuenterrabia), she was part of the Basque fleet that sent as many as thirty ships a year in the mid-sixteenth century to work the Strait of Belle Isle whale fisheries between Newfoundland and Labrador. According to documents filed in Spain and archaeological evidence gathered in the 1980s, San Juan was apparently loading barrels of oil for the return to Spain when a strong north- erly wind drove her onto the rocks near Saddle Island. Whether anyone was lost with the ship is unknown, but another whaler, La Concepción, embarked most of the crew together with what supplies could be salvaged from the ship. In addition, according to Simon de Echaniz, "the outfitter of the ship, Joannes de Portu, returned to Red Bay the following year in another ship ... and took all the barrels that he could from the lost ship and sent them back to Spain and other places."

In 1978, government archaeologists located the wreck in Red Bay, near one of three known encampments that the whalers used during the whaling season. Parks Canada began excavation the next year. Finds on the site included barrel staves and tops, the jawbone of a whale (apparently stowed in the hold at the time of the sinking), the ship's capstan, fragments of ceramic pottery, and pieces of the ship's pump and pump well. Between 1979 and 1984, archaeologists carefully disassembled the remains of the ship for conservation and study ashore. These included approximately 3,000 individual timbers comprising 44 ceiling planks, 210 exterior planks, 230 futtocks, 50 floor timbers, and other structural and miscellaneous elements. At the same time, archaeologists from the University of Newfoundland have been studying the nearby Basque whaling station found on Red Bay.

Tuck & Grenier, "Sixteenth-Century Basque Whaling Station in Labrador." Waddell, "Disassembly of a Sixteenth-Century Galleon."

http://15804427.home.icq.com/BasqueRedBay1.html

http://paisvasco.galeon.com/

http://www.wordplay.com/tourism/basque.html




Part of the San Juan
discovered at Red Bay,Canada
© Parks Canada

Maritime Archaeological Conference: 7-9 August 2004 Wild Coast Sun, KwaZulu Natal, SOUTH AFRICA

This is the first call for papers focusing on Portuguese maritime history, the Portuguese ship, maritime archaeology or trade, trade routes and trade goods during the Carreira da India Period, (approximately AD 1500 to 1700). If you are interested in presenting a paper, you are asked to provide a title and an abstract of your topic for approval by the conference programme committee. This conference will focus on Portuguese Maritime history, associated shipwrecks and trade during the Carreira da India period.Topics will include:

The Portuguese ship

Trade routes and trade goods (especially Chinese porcelain)

Maritime archaeology as a discipline

Maritime archaeology: South African Heritage Resouce Agency [SAHRA], the National Shipwreck surveyand legislation

SA Shipwreck projects: São João, São Bento, Nossa Senhora De Los Milagros, [Grosvenor, Oosterland ea.]

Search and survey of wreck sites

Artefact preservation and conservation and the role and state of

Museums and preservation facilities in South Africa. (What is available and what do we need – a plan of action for SouthAfrica).

International projects


The Conference proceedings will take up two full days, 7 and 8 August, 2004. On the following day, 9 August, we plan to unveil a monument, in the form of a Portuguese Padrão, at the wreck site of the São Bento at Mzikaba in the Mkambati Nature reserve . This event will serve to commemorate the stranding of this particular Portuguese trading vessel here some 450 years ago. It is hoped that the Portuguese Ambassador to South Africa will attend the unveiling, together with local leaders in the Portuguese Community


First CPNS Maritime Archaeology Conference

SATURDAY: 7 AUGUST 2004 Convenor: Dr. Valerie Esterhuizen
08h00-08h30 Registration of Conference Delegates

08h30 – 08h45 Opening and welcoming

08h45 – 09h15 Guest SpeakerMr Ernest Booi, Chairperson; East Coast Tourism Board

SESSION 1: TRADE GOODS AND TRADE ROUTES

MORNING SESSION
09h15 – 09h45 Monique CrickDirector, Oriental ceramics: Collection Bauer, Switzerland From the Carreira da India to the gate of China: Porcelain in the Portuguese trade

09h45 – 10h15 Maria Pinto de MatosDirector: Casa Museum Anastáçio Concálves, LisbonChinese trade porcelain associated with the Portuguese market.

10h15 – 10h30 Questions and discussion

10h30 – 11h00 Break: Tea and refreshments

11h00 – 11h30 Jean MartinOriental Ceramic Society, London. The Chinese porcelain trade of the Jiajing and Longqing periods. The development of the ‘Kraak’ and the ‘Transitional’ style.

11h30 – 12h00 Prof. Peter LamDirector: Art Museum, Chinese University of Hong KongDating Chinese porcelain of the 16th and 17th centuries. Addressing the problem from an Oriental perspective

12h00 – 12h30 (Speaker to be Announced)

12h30 – 13h00 Dr Valerie Esterhuizen[Topic to be announced]

13h00 – 14h00 Lunch

AFTERNOON SESSION
14h00-17h00 Trade Ceramics workshop – round table discussion group

20h00 Gala-event: Portuguese cultural eveningDinner and ‘traditional dress’Guest speaker:The South African Portuguese community – “Shipwreck survivor till 2005”* Originally planned for Monday 9 Augusts was to erect a permanent, inscribed granite Padräo at Mzikaba to commemorate to the loss of the Sao Bento 450 years earlier. Unfortunately we needed more time for lectures and it has been decided to postpone the function till late 2004 or during 2005. A suitable location overlooking the actual wrecksite will be identified and the necessary permissions from Government and local tribal authorities will be obtained. Original program wording:**A sermon and function is to be held at Mzikaba (Mkambati Nature Reserve), where the São Bento was lost during 1554. The loss of this ship 450 years ago will be commemorated by unveiling a commemorative symbol or padrão at the site. A dignitary from the Portuguese Embassy, ideally the ambassador, dr. P. Barsosa, has been invited to officiate by unveiling and dedicating the monument. The local community of Mzikaba will be involved. The Chief of the AmaPondo, mr. Serbus Jokhawa, will be invited to be present during unveiling of the monument. The local school will participate by delivering a performance of singing and dancing. A long term educational and environmental program with CPNS and the local schools will also be launched with this occasion.


SUNDAY 8 AUGUST Convener: Dr. Paul Brandt
8h00-08h30 Registration of Conference Delegates

08h30 - 09h00 Opening by Mr Patric Mashabane, SAHRA board member and chairperson, SAHRA Gauteng

SESSION 1: MARITIME TRADE ROUTES Chairperson – Dr Paul Brandt
08h30 – 09h00 Dr Paul BrandtCentre for Portuguese Nautical Studies (CPNS): An introduction

09h05 – 09h35 Prof. A.E. DuffeyCurator Art Collections, University of PretoriaThe pre-colonial trade off the East coast of Kenya and South Africa

09h40 – 10h10 Prof. Andrie MeyerArchaeologist and CPNS DirectorThe mysterious trade routes to Mapungubwe and Thulamela

10h10 – 10h25 Questions and discussion

10h25 – 10h55 Tea/Coffee and Refreshments

SESSION 2: MARITIME TRADE GOODS Chairperson – Mr John Gribble
11h00 – 11h30Dr Valerie EsterhuizenPortuguese Shipwreck and Survivor sites: Porcelain trial leads the way

11h35 – 12h05 Mr Jaco BoshoffMaritime Archaeologist: IZIKO museumsThe Slave trade and Africa: The role of Portugal in the establishment of the slave trade

12h10 – 12h40Dr Paul BrandtPortugueseTrade during the ‘Carreira da India’

12h40 – 13h00 Questions and Answers

13h00 – 14h00 LUNCH

SESSION 3: MARITIME ARCHAEOLOGY Chairperson Dr Valerie Esterhuizen
14h00 – 14h45 Mr George SchwartzNautical Archaeology Program, Texas A&M University, USAConstruction and Development of the 17th Century Portuguese Caravel

14h50 – 15h50 Dr. Tiago Miguel d' Oliveira Xavier Conde FragaNautical Archaeology Program: Texas A&M University Nossa Senhora dos Martires, an early 17th century Indiaman lost at the mouth of the Tagus River, Portugal

15h55 - 16h30 Jaco BoshoffMaritime Archaeologist: IZIKO MuseumsNAS Maritime Archaeology courses for South African sport divers

16h30 – 17h00 Questions and Answers

17h00 Tea/Coffee/Refreshments/Cash BarInformal discussions with International visitors

SUNDAY EVENING 19h00 – 23h00 (By invitation only)
CPNS, SAHRA, SA Museums, INA and the way forward for South African Maritime Archaeology: Portuguese Shipwreck and Survivor sites


MONDAY: 9 AUGUST Convenor: Dr PD Brandt

SESSION 1: MARITIME ARCHAEOLOGY Chairperson Dr Tiago Fraga
08h00 – 09h00 Dr. Tiago Miguel d' Oliveira Xavier Conde FragaNautical Archaeology Program: Texas A&M University. Santo Antonio de Tana. a Portuguese Frigate that sank at the coast of Kenya in the late 1600's

09h05 – 09h35 John GribbleMaritime Archaeologist: South African Heritage and Resources AgencyThe South Africa National Underwater Heritage Survey

09h40 – 10h10 Dr. Tiago Miguel d' Oliveira Xavier Conde FragaNautical Archaeology Program: Texas A&M University. “And you call yourself an Maritime archaeologist” –Sport diver vs Archaeologist –how and where do we meet

10h10 – 10h40 Questions and Answers

10h40 – 11h10 Tea/Coffee/Refreshments

SESSION 2: LEGISLATION and PRESERVATION Chairperson Mr Jaco Boshoff
11h10 – 11h40 John GribbleSouth African Legislation and its implications for salvage/excavation operations on Portuguese shipwreck and survivor sites off the South African coast

11h45 – 12h45 Mr Steven ValentineMaritime Archaeological artifact preservation

12h45 – 13h15 Questions and Answers

13h15 – 14h15 LUNCH

SESSION 3: SALVAGE and EXCAVATION Chairperson Prof Andrie Meyer
14h15 – 14h45 Mr Charly Shapiro Nossa Senhora dos Milagros: A new find, the pre-disturbance survey and possibilities for the future

14h50– 15h20 Mr Chris AuretSão Bento, 1554. The ship and its fate at Msikaba. Excavation report

15h25 – 16h00 PaulBredasdorp Shipwreck MuseumCape Agulhas, its shipwrecks and the Bredasdorp Shipwreck museum

16h00 - 16h30 Dr Paul BrandtSouth Africa Portuguese Shipwreck Artifact collections: Status Quo

16h30 – 17h00 Questions and discussion


http://www.cpnssa.org/

Novas escavações no sítio de naufrágio do navio do séc. XVI Mary Rose.

Depois da recuperação e musealização de uma boa parte da estrutura do navio de Henrique VIII, agora, obras e dragagens perto do local obrigaram a novas prospecções no sítio arqueológico.

Espera-se encontrar mais partes do casco assim como inúmeros artefactos.


Divers Probe Tudor Flagship
By Ben Mitchell, PA News

A three-week exploration of the Mary Rose wreck site was under way today to establish how much of King Henry VIII’s flagship remains at the bottom of the sea.

The Ministry of Defence is funding the excavation as part of its survey work on the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour where the Tudor warship lies. A geophysical survey was completed last year by the MOD to examine the suitability of the area for a proposed channel to be dredged to enable the next generation of Royal Navy aircraft carriers to access Portsmouth naval base. A deeper and more direct route may be required for the new ships which, when they enter service in eight years’ time, will be more than twice the size of the current Invincible-class carriers, according to a Royal Navy spokesman.

During dives which took place last year for the survey, a huge stern timber described as the missing jigsaw piece in the construction of the Mary Rose was discovered. This year the Mary Rose Trust, which is co-ordinating the current excavation, is hoping to find further timbers from the bow area of the sunken ship.

Trust chief executive John Lippiett said: “The dive last year was very successful but left us tantalisingly close to uncovering what could be an essential part of the Mary Rose. “This year we intend to return to the bow area and excavate to find the extent of the timbers that may still lie under the mud.“Both archaeologists and the MOD are anxious to know the results.” The Royal Navy spokesman added that it was in discussion with English Heritage and Wessex Archaeology about further investigative diving once a final decision on a route for the new aircraft carriers was made.

The diving operation, which began last weekend and is due to be completed on August 14, is being transmitted live on television screens inside the Mary Trust Museum in Portsmouth’s Historic Dockyard.


O link oficial:
http://www.maryrose.org/


O Livro:
Sealed by Time: The Loss and Recovery of the Mary Rose, by Peter Marsden
http://www.oxbowbooks.com/bookinfo.cfm/ID/35511/Source/GoogleAds/Location/DBBC/CFID/6011844/CFTOKEN/40615870



The Mary Rose as depicted on the Anthony Roll
© Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge

Willie Drye
for National Geographic News
July 30, 2004

In a few weeks researchers will begin scouring the Florida seafloor for a 177-year-old shipwreck—and the resting place of dozens of slaves who drowned in chains. Despite its drama, the story of the Guerrero remains little-known. Around 7 p.m. on the evening of December 19, 1827, keeper John Whalton was tending to his lightship, a sort of mobile lighthouse. He was anchored a few miles off Key Largo when, he said later, "I saw the flash and heard the report of seven or eight guns." Whalton was about to witness the tragic ending of a desperate chase in the waters off what was then the U.S. Territory of Florida. The Guerrero, with hundreds of Africans enchained in its hold and crewed by 90 Spaniards who were little more than pirates, was fleeing the Nimble, a British warship that was enforcing the international ban on slave trade...

Leiam o resto (vale a pena) aqui:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/07/0730_040730_guerrero_slaves.html#main

Em Julho de 2004 arqueólogos subaquáticos e voluntários encontraram artefatos e provas daquele que será o mais antigo naufrágio conhecido no Alasca.

O Kad'yac pertencia à Russian-American Co. e viajava com uma carga de gelo embarcada em S. Francisco, quando em Março de 1860 embateu num escolho não registado nas cartas náuticas, vindo a afundar-se em consequência. Diz a lenda que tamanho infortúnio se deveu à quebra da promessa do capitão do navio de antes do início da viagem prestar homenagem a um santo ortodoxo .

Vejam anotícia: http://www.blogger.com/app/post.pyra?blogID=7689671

E os links: www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2004/s2270.htm

www.dnr.state.ak.us/parks/oha/kadyak/kadyakindex.htm

www.news.ecu.edu/releases/kadyak.html