Do fundo do mar... Sea bottom

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East Day
December 30, 2004

Archeologists say that they have found the country's (China) oldest wharf and it is believed to be the starting point of an ancient sea route to Central and West Asia.

The discovery has reaffirmed the widespread belief that the ancient trade route started in Hepu County, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, archeologists said at yesterday's symposium on the nation's marine silk road.

After three years of excavation, archeologists have unearthed a wharf that is at least 2,000 years old in Guchengtou Village, according to Xiong Zhaoming, head of the archeological team.

At the same site, Xiong and his colleagues also excavated relics from an ancient city wall, a moat, some gravel and fragments of porcelain with graphics.

"This is enough evidence to say the village was the site of the Hepu county government more than 2,000 years ago," Xiong said.

According to Han Shu Record, also the history of the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD), the five counties of Hepu prefecture had a population of 80,000 residents.

"We can assume Hepu alone had no more than 20,000 and it was quite natural for the magistrate's office to be located in the commercial hub," Xiong said.

Scholars have been searching for concrete evidence to confirm a statement in Han Shu Record, which said the ancient marine silk road started in Hepu of Guangxi and Xuwen counties in neighboring Guangdong Province.

"The new finding has supported the statement and proven the ancient wharf's role in China's foreign trade more than 2,000 years ago," Xiong said at the symposium.

The two-day symposium has drawn more than 50 archeologists, geologists, historians and geographers from across the country.

Historical records show that foreign trade via the marine silk road dated to the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-24 AD), about 200 years earlier than the inland Silk Road in northwestern China - known as the country's oldest trade route to Central and West Asia as well as Europe.

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North-West Evening Mail
December 27, 2004


FUTURE PLANS: A computer-generated
Submarine Heritage Centre.

A BARROW submarine could end up as a giant work of art instead of a visitor attraction people can explore.

Submarine Heritage Centre Ltd, run by ex-submariners, plans to bring HMS Olympus home to the town to be the centrepiece of a new sub museum.

But officials from Barrow Borough Council are worried that the £5m centre, planned for land close to the Dock Museum, could flop financially.

Talks between the heritage centre and the council last week have resulted in a deal where Barrow council will consider backing the bid for a Heritage Lottery Fund grant to bring the sub the 3,000 miles back from Canada.

In return the SHC would drop its plans for a full-blown museum for now and concentrate on just getting the sub back to the town and erected.

SHC members are preparing a feasibility study for the council. Steve Warbrick, Barrow’s director of regeneration, said: “There is in principle an agreement that the submarine could be sited on land adjacent to the allotments and the Dock Museum.

“We have asked them to do an initial study into just bringing it over with the submarine merely as a piece of art. “They are looking at what the costs are going to be of bringing it here, refurbishing it and preparing the foundations.

“If it looks feasible we would then ask a council committee to agree that it can be located there. “Then the SHC Ltd would do a further study to look at ongoing opportunities once it is there.”

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Taipei Times
By Yu Sen-lun
December 30, 2004

Advertising The east coast county of Taitung is home to beautiful mountains, valleys and beaches and it's also the place to experience different cultures.

Taitung County has become a center of archaeology and famed for the study of Austronesian cultures because it is also home to the National Museum of Prehistory (國立台灣史前文化博物館) and Beinan Cultural Park (卑南文化公園).

Two weeks ago, the museum held an international conference, Austronesian Forum: New Perspective on Museum and Cultural Tourism. Guests from Austronesian-speaking countries New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Northern Mariana paid visits to the museum and exchanged their experiences on preserving Aboriginal culture.

Prior to the forum, the installation ceremony of an 8m-long ancient Palau sailing boat took place in the entrance hall of the National Museum of Prehistory.

The museum made an order for the boat in Palau in September as part of its plan to establish permanent collections of boats from all Austronesian-language countries. According to director Tsang Cheng-hwa (臧振華), the collection will promote the sea-based culture of Austronesian people... (continue)

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BBC News
December 23, 2004


Historic tug boat The Wey is
returning to Milton Keynes.

The last known example of an inland waterways tug boat is to return to the area where it was built in 1924 after a career of duty and adventure.

The Wey was built in Stony Stratford which is now part of Milton Keynes.

Working mainly in conservation work on the River Thames the vessel carried fuel for use in London during WWII.
The boat was made by the Edward Hayes company which delivered vessels all over the world, for use on rivers, inland waterways and lakes.

Originally called the Pat and renamed the Wey in the 1930s, the tug boat spent all her working life on the River Thames and finished her career with the Environment Agency.

Pride of place
More than 300 boats were made by the company. Bill Griffiths, from the Stacey Hill Museum in Milton Keynes, believes the Wey will be an important addition to their collection.

He said: "We're now looking for other historical items associated with the Hayes Company."

She will take pride of place in the museum displayed on a specially constructed plinth.

She was bought by Thames Conservancy in 1935, to assist with the original river inspection scheme.

During the Second World War the Wey was commandeered by the Ministry of Transport to take fuel from Sunbury to Richmond, where it was passed over to London tugs for delivery to the bombed capital.

Pollution emergencies
Due to this war effort her glass was removed from the portholes of the engine house and steel plates fitted, to prevent her from being spotted by enemy aircraft.

Over the last 30 years, skippered by Ken Beard, the Wey's day job with the Environment Agency has included dredging and transporting construction materials and heavy-duty machinery.

However, she has also been involved in many pollution and emergency incidents, and assisted the "Thames Bubbler" in re-oxygenating the river during a major pollution incident several years ago.

Skipper Ken Beard said: "We will be sad to see the Wey go, but are glad to have been able to make such a valuable contribution to the Stacey Hill Museum, and hope that she will continue to provide pleasure to many for years to come."

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The Guardian
By John Vidal
December 23, 2004

Unesco appeals for help as ancient sites face being flooded


The tomb of Cyrus the Great,
at Pasargadae.
Photo: bestirantravel.com

More than 100 of Iran's potentially most important but least examined archaeological sites, including fringes of Pasargadae, the city built by King Cyrus the Great, will be flooded in the next two years according to the UN, which appealed yesterday to international scientists to try to record what they can.

The flooding of the eight-mile Tang-e-Bolaghi gorge because of the construction of a dam will destroy ancient Persia's imperial road which ran from Persepolis to Pasargadae.

The Sivand dam has been planned for 10 years as part of a project to provide irrigation water for farmers in the parched south of the country.

But the speed of its construction and the scale of what will be lost have surprised scientists and the UN.

Iranian archaeologists have pinpointed 129 sites of interest in the gorge, ranging from prehistoric finds to remains of the Qajar monarchy which fell in 1925.

Stretches of the cobbled road have already been unearthed but caves, ancient paths, burial mounds, canals and other sites which have never been excavated will also be lost. There are also legends of a long underground "king's passage".
Unesco said yesterday it was hopeful that the world heritage site of Pasargadae, Cyrus's capital city, renowned for its palaces, gardens and the tomb of the founder of the Achaemenid dynasty, would be only marginally affected.

The city, which was included in Unesco's world heritage site list last year, is less than three miles from the end of the gorge.

It was built on the site where Cyrus defeated Astyages, the leader of the Medes, in 550BC. It has added importance today because it is believed to be the capital of the first Asian empire which respected the cultural diversity of its people.

"We understand that only the buffer zone will be affected by the flooding. There is no immediate physical risk but the site's potential [heritage] value will be shrouded in mystery for ever", said Junko Taniguchi, a Unesco officer in Tehran.

Unesco and Iran have called on international archaeologists to go to the sites and eight teams of Iranian, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish and others are expected to arrive next month. "But they will only be able to do initial research. It is unfortunate but the work is very urgent," said Ms Taniguchi.

Mohammad Hassan Talebian, the Iranian director of the group conducting the "rescue archaeology", said the sites held a wealth of information on Iran's past.

"One clearly sees the unspoken thoughts of past peoples in Tang-e Bolaghi. We are not in a position to say 'don't do that project', but we can delay the construction process," he said.

The dam's opening was planned for next March but the Iranian energy ministry has delayed it to early 2006 to give the archaeologists more time to examine the sites.

Masoud Azarnoush, director of archaeological research at the Iranian Cultural Heritage Organisation in Tehran, was stoical about the flooding of the valley. "We are losing irreplaceable human heritage here but we have to take into account the fate of the country and people as well," he said.

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Big News Network.com
December 28, 2004

U.S. researchers are creating an inventory of World War II-era aircraft and ships lying in a watery grave off the coast of Hawaii near Pearl Harbor.

Dive missions this month by a team from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the University of Hawaii and the National Park Service have documented numerous sites, including that of the Navy's Marshall Mars, a giant flying boat with a 200-foot wingspan that in 1950 was forced by an engine fire to land at sea off Oahu, where it exploded.

Submerged historic wreck sites are like time capsules from our maritime past, said NOAA National Marine Sanctuary maritime archaeologist Hans Van Tilburg. In this case, naval aircraft sites shed light on our technological capabilities both before and during World War II.

The sea floor survey team used sonar to map the area and record images of the crash sites using digital video and still cameras. The results also will provide researchers with more information about loss events and site interaction with the marine environment.

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Oxbow Books
by Nicholas Dixon

The Crannogs of Scotland: An Underwater Archaeology



There are over 30,000 lochs in Scotland and many of these, if not all, would have had one crannog at least (there are lochs with more than ten). This presents a tantalising and very appealing resource for underwater archaeologists.

This well-illustrated and interesting book examines the techniques developed by archaeologists to tackle these watery sites; it also attempts to answer the question of why people would go to so much trouble as to build an artificial island.

The sheer effort, not to mention danger, of such an exercise becomes very apparent here. Another mystery is why modern archaeological literature pays such little attention to these remarkable sites.

In addition to a series of case studies, Nicholas Dixon also discusses the problems of interpreting these sites which were constructed in the Iron Age and through the Middle Ages. He considers the types of finds that have been recovered, including large amounts of organic material such as wood, bone and plant remains.

Much of the book focuses on the longterm excavations of Oakbank Crannog on Loch Tay which have greatly contributed to our knowledge of the design, construction and, possibly, purpose of these challenging but hugely rewarding sites. 191p, 69 b/w illus, 30 col pls (Tempus 2004)

ISBN 075243151X. Paperback. Publishers price GB £17.99, Oxbow Price GB £16.00

Browse other Underwater Archaeology books.

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Ship from The War of 1812.

The USS Carolina was built in Charleston, South Carolina in 1812 at a cost of $8,743.

She displaced 230 tons and was rated at 14 guns. She was 89 feet, 6 inches long on the deck, a beam of 24 feet, 4 inches, and a hold of 11 feet, 4 inches in depth.

Her original armament was twelve 12-pounder carronades and three long nine-pounders. However, other sources indicate that at New Orleans the Carolina mounted ten 6-pounders and two 12-pounders mounted on swivel bases, one each on the bow and stern.

Or, she may have had twelve 12-pounder carronades and two long 12-pounders. Her compliment was 70, all regular navy and mainly from New England.

The Carolina under the command of John D. Henley set sail for New Orleans, and while making making her passage, captured the British schooner Shark.

Arriving at New Orleans 23 August 1813, she began an active career of patrol directed against possible British action as well as the pirates which infested the Caribbean.

On 10 September 1814, Carolina attacked and destroyed the stronghold of the notorious Jean Lafitte on the island of Barataria.

Carolina, with the others of the small naval force in the area, carried out the series of operations which gave General Andrew Jackson time to prepare the defense of New Orleans when the British threatened the city in December 1814.

On 23 December, she dropped down the river to the British bivouac which she bombarded with so telling an effect as to make a material contribution to the eventual victory.

As the British stiffened their efforts to destroy the naval force and to take the city, Carolina came under heavy fire from enemy artillery on 27 December. The heated shot set her afire, and her crew was forced to abandon her.

Shortly after, she exploded. After loss of craft, the naval guns were mounted on shore to continue the fight.

More info here and here.

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The Detroit News
By Chris Sebastian
December 27, 2004

Lexington resident will be inducted into Women Divers Hall of Fame for underwater film work.

LEXINGTON, Mich. -- After three decades of underwater exploration, divers and landlubbers across the world have Pat Stayer to thank for a better glimpse of Great Lakes shipwrecks.

And the diving world is showing its gratitude to the 49-year-old Lexington resident by inducting her into the Women Divers Hall of Fame in March.

Stayer is co-owner of Out of the Blue Productions, an underwater filming business she operates with her husband, Jim. The couple each year help organize the popular "Shipwrecks Remembered" seminar in Port Huron.

The co-author of several books and producer of numerous shipwreck films, Stayer said she's happy to help make the Great Lakes a prominent location for divers worldwide.

But the freshwater lakes weren't always that way, she said.

Stayer learned to dive on her honeymoon in Florida because charter diving wasn't popular in Michigan.
"It wasn't developed up here," she said. "You had to dive off your own boat."

Working with other Great Lakes diving pioneers, she helped discover, map, photograph and videotape shipwrecks frequented by scuba divers.

Stayer gives presentations across the country on what is hidden beneath the surface of the lakes, and she hopes the next generation of divers has an equal respect for the wrecks.

"I'm trying to get people to realize the Great Lakes are there," she said.

Hall of fame member Joyce Hayward, who has filmed shipwrecks and advised on their management, nominated Stayer.

"There are not many of us women who do deep technical diving on shipwrecks in the cold water of the Great Lakes," Hayward said. "The amount of the contributions she has given ... has been extraordinary."

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HonoluluAdvertiser.com
By Bob Krauss
December 27, 2004

Last May I stood on the spot in China with a group from the Bishop Museum where the ancestors of today's Hawaiians may have first adopted a seagoing culture 7,000 years ago. That adaptation took them and other Polynesians across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean to these islands.

We didn't know then that we may have found the launching pad of a language family that reached Madagascar off Africa in one direction and Easter Island off South America in the other. It all started from a small area on the China coast.

Bishop Museum research archaeologist Tianlong Jiao brought back the news a week ago after visiting a site called Tianluoshan. Archaeologists in China theorize that this may be the birthplace of the Austronesian language family of which Polynesians are a part. The Austronesians became the most widely dispersed people on the globe before modern technology.

Excavation of the dig continued after our Bishop Museum party left last May. Among the artifacts found are three canoe paddles from about 4 feet to 6 feet long. Project director Dr. Sun Guoping, of the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Archaeology, said they may have been left at a canoe launching site.

Other artifacts include the bones of deep ocean fish and whales. Both indicate that the people at Tianluoshan were seafarers.

"I would say that this is the area where the Austronesians first encountered the ocean," said Tianlong. "The discovery has caused a sensation in Chinese scientific circles. The provincial and county governments are going to build an archaeological site museum at Tianluoshan. By next year, the site will be under cover."

Tianlong said he has been invited to participate in the dig. The 7,000-year-old paddles and other artifacts will be part of an exhibit he is assembling for the Bishop Museum.

If the site is indeed the birthplace of Austronesian culture it would be where the ancestors of Polynesians first learned their ocean skills that took them halfway around the world. Here is the proposed sequence of migrations:

A people called Hemudu moved down river from the middle Yangtze River area, birthplace of rice culture. They made pottery and planted rice. By 7,000 years ago they had reached the ocean and some became Austronesians, a mobile, maritime people. They moved to offshore islands and down the coast.

About 5,500 to 6,000 years ago, some of them colonized Taiwan. They reached the Philippines about 4,000 or 4,500 years ago and near Oceania in the Bismark Archipelago 3,500 years ago. Some of them formed a culture called Lapita that sailed to Tonga and Samoa where they became Polynesians by adapting to deep ocean space about 2,500 years ago.

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Sun-Sentinel.com
By Suzanne Wentley
December 25, 2004

Somewhere, in the waters off Jupiter Island could be the remains from the shipwrecked vessel that brought Jonathan Dickinson, the Quaker pioneer whose journal taught the nation about the earliest known Treasure Coast residents and environment.

By submitting an application for state historical-preservation funds, officials with the Historical Society of Martin County are hoping they will be able to find the ship and use the new information to further interpret Dickinson's famous journal.

"We're looking for and hoping to find Jonathan Dickinson's ship," said Robin Hicks-Connors, Historical Society president.

"We know we're going to find something. There's never been a survey of the water done in this area."Spurred by recent progress in the society's effort to have another shipwreck, the Georges Valentine, become the county's first underwater archaeological preserve, historical officials said the survey could find other shipwreck sites in south county waters besides Dickinson's Reformation.

Another ship, the Nantwich, also traveled from Jamaica and was reported to have crashed on the near-shore reefs alongside the Reformation in 1696.

The ships are among thousands to have crashed along the state and among scores along the Treasure Coast, which is named for a 1715 shipwreck that spilled gold along the beaches.

But the riches from a potential discovery of other shipwreck sites is purely historical, said Renee Booth, who compiled the grant application for the historical society."It's not going to be like the Titanic under the water," she said.

"But who knows what we may find. It's an educational opportunity, not just locally but for Florida history and international history as well."

By applying for a grant administered by the governor-appointed Florida Historical Commission, the society hopes to receive a $50,000 grant from the state -- matched by in-kind donations from professional underwater archaeologists -- to study about 7 square miles of sea off Jupiter Island.

They're looking there because Dickinson gave coordinates in his journal, although that location could be up to a mile off, officials said. There also is speculation that the ship was burned.

Roger Smith, a state underwater archaeologist, said it's likely there could easily be many shipwrecks discovered in the survey site, even though it would be extremely difficult to prove that one of the ships is, in fact, the Reformation.

"There's a lot of wishful thinking involved in archaeology," he said. "The idea of the survey is to see what's out there."

Professional archaeologists would use modern technology such as sonar and magnetic scanning and digitized navigational charts, as well as historical shipwreck data from Dickinson's journal and state archives.

If the Reformation or the Nantwich is discovered, Booth said, she would use the information to recreate Dickinson's day-by-day experience, as outlined in his journal, for local schoolchildren and tourists.

The journal explains the culture of the Ais Indians, a tribe that has no descendents, as well as the dangers of life as a pioneer.

The Florida Historical Commission, which determines the recipients of the competitive grants, will meet in April. If the grant is approved, local officials will begin the survey in July.

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ABC7News
December 24, 2004

CRANSTON, R.I. (AP) - Rhode Island legend tells of a spectral ship that haunts the waters off Block Island, bursting into flame and sinking into the ocean.

Depending on who's spinning the tale, the islanders involved in the human drama turned out to be heroes - or monsters.

The tales hold that the ship is the ghost of one that wrecked on the island's northern point shortly after Christmas 1738.

Different versions say the vessel's appearance augurs bad weather and appears on the Saturday between Christmas and New Year's.

And while there's good evidence that a British ship, the Princess Augusta, carrying a load of passengers from territory that would become Germany, ran aground on the island on Dec. 27, 1738, there's accord on little else about the incident.

A deposition taken from the ship's crew shortly after the incident - and republished in 1939 - tells of a voyage in which provisions were scarce, half the crew had died, and others were hobbled by the extreme cold. In the document, crew members said a heavy snowstorm drove the ship aground.

A year after the wreck, in another storm, the Palatine - apparently called by that name because it carried immigrants from the Palatinate - reappeared in flames.

In the poet's account, a century after the wreck and plundering, the islanders are still haunted by a blazing ghost ship which appears on some moonless nights. It's not a flattering portrait, and it clearly rankled islanders of the poet's day.

In his 1877 history of the island, Samuel Livermore tried to refute Whittier's version. "Poetic fiction has given the public a very wrong view of this occurrence, and thus a wrong impression of the Islanders has been obtained," Livermore wrote.

He included an 1876 letter from Whittier in which the poet responded to islanders' criticisms. According to Livermore's book, Whittier said he "did not intend to misrepresent the facts of history," but wrote the poem after hearing the story from a Rhode Islander.

Whittier acknowledged that it was quite possible his source "followed the current tradition on the main-land." Livermore instead presented an account by a scholar of his day.

According to it, the ship came ashore on Sandy Point, and once the tide rose, was able to be floated again, and towed into Breach Cove by the islanders. Many fell ill, died and were buried on the island's southwest side.

Today, a marker, installed in 20th century, stands at the site. It reads simply, "Palatine Graves - 1738." It's the only major physical evidence of the disaster.

Charlotte Taylor of the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission said no wreckage has ever been found that could be positively linked to the ship.

Martha Ball, the former first warden of Block Island and a life-long resident, said there's some evidence the ship was repaired and continued on to Philadelphia, its original destination.

Livermore blames the story of the ship's burning and other atrocities on "the testimony of a witch, an opium-eater, and a maniac" and concludes "Dutch Kattern (a passenger who stayed on the island after the wreck and was known as a witch) had her revenge on the ship that put her ashore by imagining it on fire, and telling others, probably, that the light on the sound was the wicked ship Palatine, cursed for leaving her on Block Island."

While Livermore dismissed the story of the islanders' barbarity, he was less willing to write off accounts of the so-called Palatine Light. He noted that an unexplained light was often sighted off Sandy Point by people both on Block Island and on the mainland, and included in his book an 1811 account from a doctor - whom he called a man of standing - who had witnessed a light that resembled a ship ablaze.

More than a century after that account, talk about the Palatine Light remained. "When I was growing up, they used to say of the Palatine Lights that no two people saw it at the same time. And everyone had a story about the Palatine Lights," Ball said.

Ball, who admits she doesn't have much patience for ghost stories, said an uncle who died before she was born was the only one in her family who claimed to have seen the lights. She noted with a laugh that he was the same one who also claimed to have felled six ducks with a single shot.

She believes the legend has hung on as long as it has mostly due to Whittier's work. "I'm not really sure what would be floating around were it not for that poem," she said.

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DelmarvaNow.com
By Bruce Pringle
December 22, 2004

Experts have slightly revised their analysis of artifacts found on a Lewes beach this fall, saying the bricks, pottery and other objects probably date to a period running roughly from 1700 to 1730.

Craig Lukezic, an archaeologist for the state of Delaware, said the new determination was made amid continued inspection of items displayed in recent days by people who gathered them from sands near Roosevelt Inlet.

The artifacts were dredged from beneath Delaware Bay by the Army Corps of Engineers as sand was pumped ashore in September and October. Most of the rare objects were broken in the process.

The Corps of Engineers dug up the sand -- and, inadvertently, the artifacts -- during a project to stabilize the inlet, which is heavily used by recreational boaters and fishermen. The Corps has said its employees spotted the artifacts, but continued to dredge because they mistook them for modern-day trash.

Lukezic and fellow state archaeologist Chuck Fithian earlier had suggested the artifacts might date as far back as 1680 and no later than about 1720. But they altered their estimates after checking thousands of pieces turned in by beachgoers such as Larry McLaughlin.

McLaughlin, supervisor of Lewes' streets department, presented the archaeologists with a variety of pottery last week, as well as a mysterious piece made of brick and metal. Lukezic said the piece might be from a ship's stove.
The artifacts may be remains of one of coastal Sussex County's many shipwrecks.

McLaughlin was among the first to comb the artifact-laden beach, which in recent weeks attracted so many people that the Corps of Engineers taped it off to discourage entry by the public. McLaughlin said he searched "before there was any publicity. That's probably why I found some unique pieces."

Potential injuries
Lukezic and Fithian were on the beach last week, excavating at various spots in an attempt to find where artifacts are most plentiful. Those locations are to be thoroughly searched by the Corps of Engineers, Fithian said.

That search will be conducted not only for the sake of archaeology, but also with safety in mind. Many of the dredged-up artifacts were sliced into sharp-edged pieces that could injure barefoot beachgoers.

"It could be a pretty big problem," Lukezic said. "The Corps is acknowledging it as a problem."

Corps of Engineers spokesman Merve Brokke said a decision has yet to be made on precisely what steps should be taken as his agency and the state continue to deal with the surprising results of the dredging.

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Smithsonian Magazine
by Michael Behar
December 2004

For more than a decade, American Robert Graf has combed the waters of a Seychelles island for a multimillion-dollar booty stashed by pirates nearly 300 years ago.

I've been treading water in a small, man-made lagoon for about half an hour, waiting for Robert Graf to surface. The 49-year-old American treasure hunter has cordoned off this rectangular swath of Indian Ocean in the Seychelles, and now he's somewhere 25 feet below, chiseling off chunks of granite and sucking up sand and grit with a four-inch-wide vacuum dredge.

He's searching for the entrance to a stone vault that he believes contains a pirate hoard—part of what many consider the largest high-seas heist in history—stashed nearly 300 years ago. Back then, locals speculate, the area where we're swimming was dry land, the sea held back by a sand berm later destroyed in a storm.

Graf, a former U.S. Air Force technical instructor, breathes through a 50-foot-long bright pink hose attached to an air tank on shore. He wears a face mask, a tattered wet suit and 26 pounds of lead weight strapped to his waist. Every so often I dunk my head, peering through my mask into impossibly blue water.

At one point a faint shadow glides over the bottom, then vanishes into a dark ravine. Moments later there's a creepy scraping sound, like someone prying open the lid of a sarcophagus.

Graf pops up on the other side of the lagoon. "I have maybe three or four feet to go," he shouts. "But I'm running out of air." The noise I heard was Graf trying to move several granite slabs, which he says appear to have been hewn by hand and stacked in a kind of capstone. He'll be back again tomorrow with a fresh air tank, and the day after that too.

Off and on for 15 years he has been hauling up stone and sand in search of the prize he's confident lies beneath the waters of this rocky beach on Mahé, the largest of the 115 granitic and coralline islands that form the Seychelles.
Historians believe that cached somewhere in this far-flung archipelago are the plunders of Olivier Le Vasseur, aka La Buse, or the Buzzard, a French pirate who roamed the Indian Ocean during the early 1700s.

In 1721, La Buse, along with English pirate John Taylor and their crews, ransacked the Nossa Senhora do Cabo, a Portuguese frigate undergoing repairs near Mauritius, about 1,000 miles south of the Seychelles. The Cabo carried gold, uncut diamonds and church regalia belonging to the retiring viceroy of Goa.

At the time, Goa was a Portuguese colony on the west coast of present-day India. La Buse and Taylor made off with the treasure—then valued at more than a million pounds sterling—and divided the spoils. Most of La Buse's considerable fortune, says Frank Sherry, author of Raiders and Rebels: The Golden Age of Piracy, came from his capture of the Cabo. French authorities caught up with La Buse a few years later near Réunion, a rugged volcanic island south of Mauritius.

In 1730, as he was about to face the gallows there, the pirate is said to have tossed a sheaf of papers into the crowd, taunting his audience with these final words: "My treasure to he who can understand."

When I arrive on Mahé, it's easy to spot Graf in the crowd at the airport. He's the only guy wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the classic pirate ensign—a skull and crossbones. Tanned and fit, the treasure hunter seems relaxed—hardly what you'd expect from someone who has spent a third of his life obsessed with a long-dead pirate. Yet Graf is no laid-back islander. He's in-your-face intense right from the start.

I'd barely heaved my suitcase into the trunk of his rusty compact car when he launched into a breathless retelling of how he'd voyaged some 10,000 miles from his Colorado home, married a Seychellois hotel reservations manager and spent more than $450,000 of his own money looking for a treasure that others have failed to find here for nearly a century.

"In 1923 a rare storm came through the Seychelles," Graf says as we wind through the streets of the capital, Victoria. "It eroded many of the beaches." One particular beach was in Mahé near the home of Rose Savy, a local landowner. Thrashing wind and waves had exposed boulders on her property with mysterious markings.

According to one version of the story, Savy wrote her nephew, who worked at the national archives in Réunion, with news of the discovery. He thought the markings might be related to a set of 200-year-old papers kept in the archives—the papers, it's believed, that La Buse had flung at the crowd before his execution. The nephew sent the papers to Savy. There was a cryptogram and four letters, each thought to offer different clues to the treasure.

Graf, who moved to Mahé in 1984 to manage a satellite-tracking station for a U.S. defense contractor, first learned about La Buse from a magazine article. By then copies of the La Buse papers were in the hands of another treasure hunter, John Cruise-Wilkins, who was resuming work started by his father, Reginald, a British soldier who'd acquired the papers in 1949 from Rose Savy and squandered 27 years looking for the treasure.

Graf agreed to help fund Cruise-Wilkins' project, and the two toiled together in the rocks for four years before Graf broke with his partner over where to search. "Cruise-Wilkins gave me copies of the papers," recalls Graf, "and told me to figure it out for myself." Graf then negotiated an exclusive agreement with the Seychelles government to dig on his own, which he did until 1998, when a license to continue was given to Cruise-Wilkins for two years. In April 2003, Graf once again obtained permission to dig.

Graf says he narrowed his search by trying to reconcile the La Buse papers with the markings on the rocks, which led him to the spot where he constructed his lagoon. "I tried to get into the mind-set of the pirates," he says. "I had this dream, and every single morning for two or three weeks I'd wake up wondering 'What does this single dot on the rocks mean?'"

There were dozens of similarly puzzling clues. La Buse had advised readers to be "fixed by the ecliptic plan," and also wrote: "Let Jason be your guide and the third circle will be open to you."

Kevin Rushby, author of Hunting Pirate Heaven: In Search of the Lost Pirate Utopias of the Indian Ocean, told me that the Seychelles aren't the only place people are seeking La Buse's stash. "Treasure hunters have been scouring Réunion for the treasure for years," he says. "They even sacrifice chickens on his grave there."

Graf isn't daunted. At his excavation site on Mahé, we scramble over weathered boulders that jut from the beach like giant stone fingers. He points out at least two dozen carvings and symbols etched into the rocks. Each of these markings, Graf takes pains to explain, is related to a comment in La Buse's writings.

Later, for four hours back at my hotel, he shows me PowerPoint slides on his laptop, including aerial photographs of the excavation site.

One picture, he says, reveals a sequence of seemingly random holes that mirrors a constellation of stars referred to in one of the letters. That's not the only evidence he might be on the right track. Years ago, Reginald Cruise-Wilkins had found a domino with handmade inlays showing a six and a two not far from the place where Graf is now digging. La Buse's papers, it turns out, contain a reference to the number 62.

Today it's thought that La Buse's share of the Cabo heist could be worth $200 million, but Graf says that figure varies depending on who you talk to. He's heard sums as high as $500 million. "But even if it's only $5 million," he says, "that's still a lot of money." Though under Seychelles law, he tells me, half of any earnings must go to the government. Yet time is running out.

Graf's excavation permit is due to expire in April 2005, and Cruise-Wilkins is standing by, ready for a third assault. "I know what we have to do, and it will be pretty fast," says Cruise-Wilkins, whose home is just down the road from the excavation site. "I was working on a tight budget, but now I have the funding.

Graf was supposed to move out and I was supposed to take over on October 1, but the government's technical adviser visited the site and gave him six more months." Cruise-Wilkins says that his former partner, now rival, is merely stalling and will run out of time before finding the treasure.

As Graf and I stood at the edge of his lagoon after a dive, he insisted that he was closer than ever to a narrow channel that he says will lead him to the vault that La Buse alludes to in his papers. It'll require just ten days of dredging to reach the vault's entrance, he claims. And what if it takes longer?

When I telephone Graf a few weeks after returning to the States, he tells me that the ceiling of the so-called channel has begun to collapse. He'll have to dig out part of the ceiling to prevent a cave-in—a setback that will cost him at least a couple of more months.

In the meantime, he'll have to persuade his wife to hold out a bit longer. "She's sick of it," he says. "She wants to go to the States so I can take a 9-to-5 job. But I won't do it. I've got five different letters that point to the same spot. The treasure has been sitting there for 300 years, and I've only got a couple of feet to go."

Later, getting ready to leave the island, I tell Graf that his story is a bit hard to believe. Then again, by now I've learned that to be a treasure hunter—to slog away for years in the heat, grit and grime—takes a certain amount of blind optimism.

As he starts to drive off, Graf pokes his head out the car window and shouts: "You'll believe me when the treasure comes out of the ground!" Optimism perhaps—or maybe just pirate fever.

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BBC News



A plan to pass off a cannonball as being from the Mary Rose shipwreck and then sell it on the internet for £5,000 has been thwarted by police.

Hampshire officers discovered 14 of the 16lb cannonballs under a barbecue after raiding a house in West Sussex.
They were tipped-off by The Tudor Mary Rose Trust and the Receiver of Wreck.

An expert from the Trust said the cannonballs were probably 18th or 19th Century and recovered from the shores of the county's River Hamble.

A Hampshire Constabulary spokeswoman said two officers from the force's marine unit visited the house of a middle-aged man on 26 November.

"The man led the officers out into the back garden and showed them the shot under his barbecue, " a spokeswoman explained.

"He said they were given to him by a family friend who said they were from the Mary Rose.

"When the man was away, another member of the family, a man aged 25, decided to sell the cannonball on eBay.

"Both men are co-operating fully with police who are trying to determine whether an offence has been committed."

The Trust said it was alerted about the sale by one of the divers who had worked on the excavation and knew that the Trust has a policy that all artefacts from the excavation are kept in the Mary Rose collection, with many of them on display at the museum in Portsmouth.

The Trust contacted Hampshire Police Marine Unit who worked with eBay to find the man.

Most of Henry VIII's flagship was raised from the Solent in 1982 after 437 years under the sea. The site is one of 55 in the UK that are designated under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973.

John Lippiett, chief executive of the Mary Rose Trust, said: "We are relieved that the shot turned out to be nothing to do with the Mary Rose but are not pleased that the vendor tried to pass them off as genuine and even used a photograph taken without authority from our website."

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Times online
By Roger Boyes
December 09, 2004

Divers at the site of one of the worst maritime disasters, a Nazi liner sunk in the Baltic, could end up in prison.


Wilhelm Gustloff.

POLAND has promised to take action against divers who are looting the wreck of the Nazi cruise liner Wilhelm Gustloff, which was sunk off the Polish coast by Soviet torpedoes in the dying days of the Second World War.

In response to protests by Germany, the Polish authorities have agreed to put an end to looting by maverick divers, who are removing everything from ashtrays to chandeliers. Divers caught near the wreck now risk prosecution, a fine or even imprisonment.

The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945, crammed with 9,000 mainly civilian Germans fleeing the Soviet Army, ranks as one of the worst maritime disasters of all time, with more than 7,000 fatalities — well ahead of the better-known tragedies of the Titanic (1,503 deaths) and the Lusitania (1,201).

The wreck has been designated a war memorial and is off-limits to salvage operators. Her location is disguised — Polish navigational charts register her only as Obstacle No 73 — 180ft deep in the soft mud of the Baltic. However, she is easy to find and most of the diving clubs between Gdansk and Kolobrzeg offer trips to the wreck.

The looting has caused deep resentment in Germany, where the Wilhelm Gustloff has become a focus for war remembrance. Germans are lobbying to build a museum or a shrine on the Polish coast to mark the 60th anniversary of the disaster, on January 30.

The new German sensitivity has been stirred in part by a novel written by Günter Grass, the Nobel prize-winning author.

“These divers are nothing better than graveyard hyenas,” Henryk Koszka, the head of the Polish Maritime Authority in Gdynia, on the Baltic coast, said.

Senior Polish officials, aware that the Wilhelm Gustloff could become another source of friction between Berlin and Warsaw, agree. “We have to stop these illegal diving missions now,” a Polish diplomat said.

Enforcing the clampdown may prove difficult, given the significant financial rewards for divers. German collectors will offer €10,000 (£6,888) or more for an ashtray marked with the name of the ship.

The cruise liner served the Nazi Party’s “Strength through Joy” scheme, which rewarded loyal workers with trips around Europe, a pioneer of the modern package tour. Even though she was converted into a hospital ship at the outbreak of war, her contents were branded with the Gustloff insignia.

Local divers have kept some of the prizes. Jerzy Janczukowicz has converted a ballroom chandelier into a table to support his cognac and vodka bottles. He claims that the looting is “about making sure that history does not get destroyed”.

He and a generation of divers are drawn by another elusive goal: to find the legendary Amber Room, the priceless Tsarist treasure, which, according to one theory, was stashed in the hold of the cruise liner for transport to safety in the West. Nobody has found it, but Soviet divers, soon after the Second World War, blew holes in the Gustloff looking for traces of the treasure.

It is not clear exactly how many people died in the icy Baltic waters in 1945. Some 1,200 survived. If the passenger list was the only guide, then 5,348 people were killed, but German refugees were scrambling to get on board and many were unlisted. They included women, children, elderly men and about 1,000 wounded soldiers. The passengers had walked through eastern Prussia ahead of the advancing Soviet Army, driven on by rumours of rapes and atrocities.

The ship’s captain decided to head north, to avoid British aircraft, rather than hug the Baltic coastline. The snow was heavy and the captain ordered the ship to switch on all her lights to avoid a collision. It was thus easy for the Soviet submarine S13 to spot.

The submarine slipped between the Wilhelm Gustloff and the coastline and let off three torpedoes. Within 50 minutes, the once-proud liner had slipped below the surface.

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CDNN
by Chuck Frederick



The deep blue of a clear, cool evening settled over Lake Superior on Oct. 31 as the shipwreck hunters turned their boat for one final pass.

It had already been a huge year. They'd found two wrecks: one a three-masted schooner, the other a steam-powered passenger vessel. The discoveries came after about 12 years of locating nothing but bottom.

The men were hoping for a third. The bulk freighter Robert Wallace was out here somewhere, they knew, just a few miles south of Two Harbors. Footage of its remains would give them a real zinger for a presentation they were scheduled to make in a few days at the Gales of November conference in Duluth.

But their dreams of a third discovery in 2004 were growing as dim as the day's failing light. Their sonar screen held the steady gray of nothingness as they turned across 6-foot waves that rolled their boat and their stomachs.

They steadied the motor one last time for the final pass, after more than six hours on the water. They had already decided Halloween would be their last day hunting for the year. The marina back near Knife Island beckoned.

But a sudden, slight glow at the top of their sonar screen changed everything. The men quickly gathered as the glow became a touch more brilliant and then worked its way down the picture tube.

"It was a bright target, something that didn't look natural to the bottom," said Ken Merryman of Fridley, Minn., one of the four shipwreck hunters. "It was a terrible picture, but we could tell."

"It had the general outline of a ship," said Jerry Eliason of Scanlon, another member of the team. "I said, 'There's something out there. What is that?' "

The Wallace, the men figured. Had to be.

But, of course, they'd made that mistake before.

NOT THE WALLACE
On June 5, about 13 miles south-southeast of Two Harbors, the men's sonar equipment detected the first wreck they found this year. After three follow-up weekend trips with cameras they lowered to the bottom, the men announced they had found the Wallace.

The ore-laden freighter had sunk Nov. 17, 1902, after hitting a log or something else in the water. With Lake Superior pouring into the Wallace's stern, the crew scrambled into a lifeboat and then boarded the barge they were towing, the 218-foot Ashland. The seamen had to be rescued by the railroad tug from Two Harbors, the Edna G.
The wreck the men found didn't turn out to be the Wallace, though.

In August, when they returned to dive to it for the first time, they quickly realized the wooden ship was probably the Thomas Friant, a steam-powered excursion boat that had been remodeled for commercial fishing and hauling cargo. The Friant sank after running into an ice floe and slashing its hull Jan. 6, 1924.

AGAIN NOT THE WALLACE
Believing for a second time they'd found the Wallace, the men lowered their video camera as the Halloween night sky turned an inky black. But the camera refused to work. No images returned to the surface.

"When we went in for the night, we were pretty confident we knew what we had found. The Wallace is what we were looking for, after all," Eliason said. "When we finally got to shore, all the lights were off in the marina. That's how late it was. We were lucky we didn't run aground ourselves."

The men decided they would call their bosses the following morning, take a day off and return to the wreck site with different cameras. To confirm and to begin documenting their find, they said.

"We just had to go back," Eliason said.

The first day of November dawned gray, with temperatures still reaching into the low 40s. About mid-morning, three video cameras lowered to the bottom began to return grainy images of floating silt, a sandy bottom and shapes that hadn't been seen for decades. A railing. A section of hull. The men compare viewing a wreck with a drop-down camera to looking at an elephant with a straw.

But they saw enough to realize the vessel they found wasn't made of wood, as is the Wallace. It was steel. And in its cargo hold they saw railroad rails.

"All of a sudden, a wave of knowing came over us," said Randy Beebe, a search team member and a Northwest Airlines pilot from Duluth. "Oh my goodness."

The only steel wreck unaccounted for in western Lake Superior was the Benjamin Noble, a loss ranking in shipwreck lore not far behind the Edmund Fitzgerald. The Noble went down with a load of steel rails.

That's what it had to be, the men realized.

"The Noble is the Loch Ness Monster, the Holy Grail of shipwrecks, at least in western Lake Superior," Eliason said. "It was always such a mystery. None of us who hunt for shipwrecks expected it would ever be found. There were literally thousands of miles where it could have gone down."

"People have been searching for 60 years," Beebe said. "We're pretty giddy. We still feel like we're going to wake up one morning and it's all going to be a dream."

The Noble's puzzling fate prompted Lake Superior Magazine to offer a $1,000 reward in 1978 to anyone who could locate it.

"It was just so hard to believe that a ship so big and with so much cargo couldn't be found. We wanted it solved," said Cindy Marshall Hayden, a publisher of the Duluth-based magazine and the daughter of magazine chairman James Marshall.

"It was a mystery my whole life," James Marshall said. "Its discovery is a terrific, fantastic story."

A TRUE MYSTERY
The Noble went down in a gale of mountainous seas, according to historical accounts, including Dana Thomas Bowen's "Shipwrecks of the Lakes."

The early spring storm of 1914 included heavy snow, biting sleet, a fog that enshrouded much of the western half of Lake Superior, and winds and waves so severe they caused thousands of dollars of damage to Duluth's Aerial Bridge and to homes up and down Minnesota Point.

The wind gusts also toppled a huge coal-unloading machine inside the Duluth Harbor, its falling wreckage smashing the forward houses of the steamer Champlain, which was tied to a nearby dock.

The Nor'easter came up so fast that the Noble probably received little or no warning as it passed through the Soo Locks on Saturday, April 25. With its 3,000-ton load bound for rail line construction in the western United States, the Noble steamed obliviously toward Duluth.

Three days later, a Duluth police officer reported finding hatch covers bearing the Noble's name washed up on the Park Point beach. Other wreckage washed up in the days that followed. Oars. Life belts. Spars. No bodies were ever found. The Noble's 20-man crew -- including its captain, John Eisenhardt of Milwaukee, on his first and last trip as master of a vessel -- was lost.

What happened to the Noble has been a matter of speculation and debate for decades.

A popular theory was that the Noble sank attempting to enter the Duluth Ship Canal. The crew couldn't see the entry, many believed, because the south entry pier light had been blown out by the storm. Light tenders couldn't relight the antiquated oil lamp because of waves that battered the pier heads, exploding into the icy air.

Conflicting witness accounts, both immediately following the loss and during months of testimony as the cargo owners sought compensation through the courts from the owners of the Noble, only deepened the mystery.

Some witnesses, including a woman on 21st Avenue East in Duluth, claimed to see a boat sink outside the Duluth Harbor. But it's possible they had seen any of four other vessels on Lake Superior during the storm, each one scrambling for safety inside the Duluth Harbor. Squalls of snow suddenly blocked out ships' lights, giving the illusion of vessels going down.

Another witness, aboard a freighter a few miles behind what he believed was the Noble, said in court he saw the big boat turn and then disappear. Based on where the Noble's wreckage was found, his account was probably accurate, Eliason said.

"There's so much confusing history, and you never knew who actually saw it go down or whether anyone really did. And then it was believed to be in such deep water there'd be no way to get at it," said Merryman, who searched for the Noble in 1973 but quickly gave up. "It was the first thing I ever hunted for. You didn't have to hunt long to realize it was a needle in a haystack.

"It really is beat up," he said of the wreckage. "It sank like a rock, and it was crushed when it hit bottom. It seems pretty obvious it was grossly overloaded."

At the Gales of November conference, the shipwreck hunters wowed the crowd. They told about the Friant and about a wreck they found July 30 several miles east of Michigan Island in the Apostle Islands. They've tentatively identified that wreck as the Moonlight, a three-masted schooner lost in a storm in September 1903.

They saved the Noble until the very end. It was their zinger.

"We had quite a season," Eliason said. "Granted, none of the wrecks we found this year were the ones we were looking for, but that's all right. We've decided that being lucky is far better than being good."

SOURCE - Duluth News Tribune

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The Virginia Gazette
By Paul Aron
December 22, 2004

As 2007 approaches, the nation will focus on the three famous ships that carried British settlers to Jamestown. Yet it was another journey to Jamestown, begun two years later, that nearly killed several major figures in the colony.

While some historians credit the later voyage with saving the starving settlement, it ended by almost abandoning the colony altogether.

The tale, one of a shipwreck, castaways, murder, mutinies and mystery, played out off the North Carolina coast and reverberated in Virginia and London, perhaps even pushing the quill of William Shakespeare.

The mission
The Sea Venture left England in June 1609, one of eight ships bound for Jamestown. George Somers was in command. His mission was to bring supplies and settlers to the colony in Virginia.

Somers was an admiral in the British Navy who had defended the Irish coast against the Spanish. He was also a privateer in the Azores and in South America, where he looted Spanish colonies and ships.

In London, he met members of Shakespeare's company, including the famous playwright. He also met members of the Virginia Company and became one of its officers. He invested some of his overseas plunder in the company as it made plans to explore and colonize North America.

So it was that in 1609 Somers set sail from Plymouth Harbor to bring supplies and settlers to the fledgling colony at Jamestown. He commanded the largest fleet to set out for Virginia.

Somers was on board the 300-ton Sea Venture, as were Thomas Gates, who had been appointed governor of the colony, and Christopher Newport, who had already captained three voyages to Jamestown, including the first.

Newport was well aware of the dangers, but he was confident they were leaving early enough in the shipping season to beat any tropical storms.

On June 2, the passengers who boarded included artisans, farmers and a few gentlemen and ladies accompanied by their servants. Among them was John Rolfe, who would later marry Pocahontas.

All told, there were 150 passengers and crew on board. Rather than the usual southern swoop by the West Indies, the fleet followed a more direct route to Virginia. By staying farther north, Somers hoped to shorten the trip and, more importantly, avoid the Spanish. It almost worked.

They were only about seven or eight days from Virginia when on Monday, July 23, the sky darkened.

The storm
Morning brought little light and deafening winds roaring in from the northeast. William Strachey, one of the passengers, described it in his 1610 account, “A True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight.”

The storm, Strachey wrote, “was not only more terrible but more constant, fury added to fury.” The Sea Venture was towing a small pinnace, the Virginia, which seemed as likely to smash into it as to follow it.

Somers decided it was safer to cut it loose. That was the last they saw of the Virginia, and they must have feared they would never see the colony after which it was named.

Even the more experienced travelers were, according to Strachey, “not a little shaken.” Almost everyone on board became wretchedly seasick. Passengers were praying or screaming, but you couldn't hear them.

The wind drowned out other sounds. Somers ordered eight men to try to hold the whipstaff, the lower end of which was connected to the tiller, but it was impossible to steer the ship.

The lever whipped back and forth so quickly that it bruised many of the men and eventually detached itself and smashed into pieces, one of which hit Somers.

The rain kept coming Strachey had been in storms before, in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, but this was different. “All that I had ever suffered gathered together might not hold comparison with this,” he wrote. “There was not a moment in which the sudden splitting or instant oversetting of the ship was not expected.”

The rain kept coming. “Waters like whole rivers did flood in the air,” he added. Worse, the water was coming in from below as well as from above. The Sea Venture had apparently sprung a leak, in fact a lot of them.

By Wednesday, the water had risen nearly five feet, and the crew feared they were as likely to be drowned in the ship as in the sea. Frantically, holding candles above the rising water, they searched for holes, plugging them with whatever was hand, in one case a slab of beef.

Somers quickly divided the crew and passengers into three groups, about 45 men in each, and assigned the groups to sections of the ship. The men took turns bailing and pumping until the pumps gave out. They worked for an hour, gentlemen and commoners, officers as well as crew, then rested an hour.

This went on for three days and three nights, with no stopping to sleep or eat. There was little to eat anyway, since the food and drink in the hold was under water. All told, Strachey guessed, they returned 2,000 tons of water to the sea. They also tossed overboard much of their food and luggage. But the water kept rising, reaching their chests as they continued to bail.

However many leaks they plugged, there were more, or maybe one large one no one could find. St. Elmo's Fire On Thursday night Somers spotted what Strachey described as “an apparition of a little, round light, like a faint star, trembling and streaming along with a sparkling blaze.” It seemed to start halfway up the main mast and then shoot across the ropes toward the ship's sides and, sometimes, back again. This lasted three or four hours. There wasn't enough light to see anything, but passengers and crew alike “observed it with much wonder and carefulness.” By morning, it was over.

These jets of light were known as St. Elmo's Fire, and Somers may have rightly seen them as a hopeful sign. The atmosphere did not usually become so charged with electricity until near the end of a storm.

And Friday morning the skies did clear, and the rain slowed to a misty drizzle. But the water was now 10 feet high in parts of the ship, and the Sea Venture seemed likely to sink within hours. In despair, the men stopped bailing.

They opened what little was left to drink, “taking their last leave one of the other until their more joyful and happy meeting in a more blessed world,” wrote Silvester Jourdain, another passenger, in “A Discovery of the Bermudas, Otherwise Called the Isle of Devils.”

Jourdain's fellow passengers “committed themselves to the mercy of the sea.” Exhausted, most of them fell asleep wherever they happened to be.

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GNN
December 21, 2004

Maritime And Coastguard Agency (National)

The Receiver of Wreck, together with the Mary Rose Trust, issued a warning today to those tempted to purchase objects on the internet auction house eBay, or elsewhere, that are listed as having come from the wreck of the Mary Rose.

The Trust states that such items are highly unlikely to have come from the Mary Rose, and if they are, they will have been acquired illegally. Anyone who sees such an item is advised to contact the Trust to ascertain provenance.

The warning has come as a result of a recent attempt by an individual to sell a cannon ball on eBay for over £5,000 claiming that it had come from the Mary Rose.

The Mary Rose Trust were alerted to the sale by one of the divers who had worked on the excavation and knew that the Trust has a policy that all artefacts from the excavation are kept in the Mary Rose collection with many of them on display at the museum in Portsmouth. The Mary Rose is one of 55 sites in the UK that are designated under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973.

The Mary Rose Trust believed that the items must either be from another source, or have been acquired illegally, and passed the matter on to the Receiver of Wreck who has powers to seize illegally held wreck material and to investigate such matters under the Merchant Shipping Act 1995.

The Receiver of Wreck worked in conjunction with eBay, and with Hampshire Police Marine Unit, who confiscated 14 cannonballs from the premises of the vendor. These were later inspected by Curator of Ordnance at the Mary Rose Trust, Alexzandra Hildred, who confirmed that they had none of the features found on shot from the Mary Rose.

Enquiries into the origins of the shot are still being conducted by the Police Marine Unit and it is believed they are 18th or 19th century in date and were recovered on the shores of the River Hamble.

The Receiver of Wreck, Sophia Exelby said:
"This joint operation shows that the Maritime and Coastguard Agency is willing and able to act on credible information received in relation to offences regarding illegally held wreck material. Although these cannonballs did not ultimately come from the Mary Rose, the principles of investigation and enforcement are the same and will be applied to any other such cases which arise."

John Lippiett, Chief Executive of the Mary Rose Trust said:
"We are delighted that the Receiver of Wreck took swift action to investigate the claim that this iron shot was from the Mary Rose. There should not be any artefacts from the Mary Rose in private hands apart from a few curios made from Mary Rose timber recovered in the 1830s and we would always like to be alerted to any fraudulent or illegal sales.

"We are relieved that the shot turned out to be nothing to do with the Mary Rose, but are not pleased that the vendor tried to pass them off as genuine and even used a photograph taken without authority from our website."

Notes to editors:
* Pictures are available from the MCA Press Office

* It is a legal requirement that all recovered wreck is reported to the Receiver of Wreck. The Receiver of Wreck is responsible for the administration of that part of the Merchant Shipping Act 1995, which deals with wreck and salvage. If you find wreck you should contact the Receiver of Wreck on 02380 329 474 or via email at row@mcga.gov.uk

* The Receiver of Wreck investigates ownership of wreck items. The owner has one year in which to come forward and prove title to the property. If the wreck remains unclaimed after that year it becomes property of the Crown and the Receiver is required to dispose of it. This may be through sale, although in many cases the finder will be allowed to keep the item in lieu of a salvage award.

* Artefacts from wrecks which are designated under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973, must still be reported to the Receiver, even if they were recovered under licence.

* Anyone who is in doubt about whether an item has been reported to the Receiver, or whether a vendor has the right to sell a wreck artefact, should contact the Receiver of Wreck, who will check their records.

* The stunning collection of objects from the Mary Rose is on show in the Museum at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard every day except 24-26 December. The popular website can be found at http://www.maryrose.org

Press releases and further information about the Agency is available on the Web at http://www.mcga.gov.uk

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1841 - USS Mississippi, the first U.S. ocean-going side-wheel steam warship, is commissioned in Philadelphia.

Mississippi-class sidewheel steamer (1f/3m) L/B/D: 229 × 40 (66.5ew) × 21.8 (69.8m × 12.2m (20.1m) × 6.6m) Tons: 3,220 disp Hull: wood Comp: 257 Arm: 2 × 10, 8 × 8 Mach: side-lever engines, 700 nhp, sidewheels; 11 kts Des: John Lenthall, Hartt & Humphries Built: Philadelphia Navy Yard; 1841.

One of the first sidewheel steam frigates ordered for the U.S. Navy, USS Mississippi was built under the personal supervision of Commodore Matthew Perry, formerly commander of USS Fulton II and a strong advocate of steam propulsion. Rigged as a bark, Mississippi was used extensively to test the utility of steam for naval operations. As with all paddle frigates, her greatest deficiency was that the placement of her paddles interfered with the guns, and her engines were vulnerable to enemy fire.

Check for more information here.

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eMediaWire
December 21, 2004

Researcher confirms Plato's assertion that the Florida Plain was once part of Atlantis. Plato not only described Harbor Island (in Tampa Bay) as Atlantis, but gave detailed descriptions of the Florida plain as part of the country.


Florida Plain/Atlantis.

Miami, FL (PRWEB) -- Researcher confirms Plato's assertion that the Florida Plain was once part of Atlantis. Plato not only described Harbor island (in Tampa Bay) as Atlantis, but gave detailed descriptions of the Florida plain as part of the country. His writings have been used to verify the findings that were published earlier.

Here is Plato's description with explanatory notes in parentheses: "The whole country was said by him to be very lofty and precipitous on the side of the sea (ocean), but the country immediately about and surrounding the city was a level plain, itself surrounded by mountains (Appalachian) which descended towards the sea; it was smooth and even, and of an oblong shape, extending in one direction three thousand stadia (330 miles), but across the centre inland it was two thousand stadia (110 miles)...and where falling out of the straight line followed the circular ditch (Indian River).

"The depth, and width, and length of this ditch were incredible, and gave the impression that a work of such extent, in addition to so many others, could never have been artificial.

Nevertheless I must say what I was told. It was excavated to the depth of a hundred, feet, and its breadth was a stadium (600 ft.) everywhere; it was carried round the whole of the plain, and was ten thousand stadia (1,100 miles) in length. It received the streams which came down from the mountains, and winding round the plain and meeting at the city (Tampa), was there let off into the sea (gulf).

"Further inland, likewise, straight canals of a hundred feet in width were cut from it through the plain, and again let off into the ditch leading to the sea: these canals were at intervals of a hundred stadia, and by them they brought down the wood from the mountains to the city, and conveyed the fruits of the earth in ships, cutting transverse passages from one canal into another, and to the city.

"Plato's description of the Atlantis Plain is the same as that of the Florida Plain, which is 110 miles across at its narrowest point. Its length is 330 miles, and the great ditch runs 1,100 miles around the coast to Tampa Bay. The terrain features and waterways can be measured and verified on a topographic map.

Florida also has many archeological sites that can only be explained by the presence of an advanced civilization.

There is much more to this story. Dennis Brooks has rewritten Plato's description of Atlantis in a 48-page book that tells the complete story. The entire story can be read online.

http://www.cramschool.us

We would like to apologize to everyone who went to our website after our first press release and had trouble viewing the pdf file that contained the story.

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Correio da Manhã
December 21, 2004




Os vestígios de um galeão afundado há 300 anos e de um bombardeiro da II Guerra Mundial são as duas ‘jóias’ subaquáticas que os amantes do mergulho podem descobrir ao largo de Faro, no Algarve, a troco de 50 euros.

Estes ‘mergulhos’ são organizados pela Hidroespaço, uma das poucas entidades privadas que, a nível nacional, explora circuitos arqueólogicos subaquáticos, através de um protocolo formado com o Centro Nacional de Arqueologia Náutica e Subaquática (CNANS).

As visitas, possíveis desde Agosto de 2003, ao que resta do avião e do navio – descoberto por acaso há oito anos por dois mergulhadores em lazer – são as mais procuradas da panóplia de locais para onde aquele centro de mergulho organiza saídas.

Os destroços do avião mantêm-se relativamente intactos. No entanto, o mesmo não se pode dizer do navio, do qual ainda só foi descoberto o que se julga ser a carga – peças de artilharia, canhões e ferro.

Os vestígios encontram-se em frente à Barrinha (extremo Oeste da Praia de Faro), a uma milha da costa – cerca de dois quilómetros –, mas a estrutura do galeão em si ainda está por descobrir.

De acordo com Fátima Noronha, sócia da Hidroespaço, o navio faria parte de uma frota de 400 embarcações inglesas e holandesas atacadas por espanhóis no Cabo de São Vicente.

“Supõe-se que os destroços do navio estejam enterrados na areia mas o Governo diz que não há dinheiro para mais campanhas arqueológicas”, lamentou-se a bióloga marinha.

O avião – um B-24 com 36 metros de envergadura e quatro motores – caiu no mar a 30 de Novembro de 1942, em plena II Guerra Mundial. Seis dos seus onze tripulantes acabariam por ser salvos por três pescadores algarvios, um dos quais ainda está vivo.

Os destroços encontram-se em frente à Praia de Faro, a uma milha e meia da costa. As asas e os motores ainda estão relativamente intactos – falta apenas a carlinga –, e já foram encontradas partes da cauda, hélices, peças de metralhadoras, balas.

“Estamos a tentar fazer um pouco de arqueólogos e a fazer buscas para encontrar mais peças, para depois ligá-las todas e fazer um roteiro. Mas está tudo muito disperso”, declarou Fátima Noronha.

Mas nem toda a gente está apta a ‘mergulhar’ nas profundezas da História, principalmente na zona onde está o navio, a cerca de 30 metros de profundidade, cujo mergulho é orientado por um guia certificado.

Lusa

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NewsZap.com
By Darrell Neale



LEWES - Treasure hunters who collected artifacts from Lewes Beach over the last month had an opportunity Thursday to have them cataloged by archaeologists from the state Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs.
The documentation sessions took place at the Zwaandael Museum on Savannah Road in Lewes.

Pottery shards, broken bottles and crockery have been found on the beach following an offshore dredging and beach replenishment effort by the Army Corps of Engineers.

"These shards are like gold," said John Stewart of Ocean View. "They can tell us so much history."

Mr. Stewart and Bill Winkler, also of Ocean View, went to Lewes about three weeks ago after hearing about the discoveries.

"All these items were on top of the sand, the beach was just loaded," Mr. Stewart said. "Red bricks were everywhere."
Mr. Stewart believes the area of the dredging, off Roosevelt Inlet, could have been the site of a shipwreck, an old settlement that is now underwater or a spot once used for unloading ships.

"It might have been a combination," he said.

An area where ships were unloaded seems likely because of the condition of the bricks that were found.

Mr. Stewart said they did not have mortar on them, so they were probably being used for construction or as ballast on the ship.

"Ships used to use bricks for ballast, then they would dump it overboard when they got to their destination," he said.
Joeann Vickers of Rehoboth Beach said she went to the beach at Lewes the week before Thanksgiving to make her discoveries.

One of the pieces of a bottle appeared to have a crest stamped on the bottom.

"I am glad it is important, I am going to make this a donation to the state," she said.

Charles Fithian, an archaeologist with the Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs, said the items found so far have been from the first half of the 18th century.

"Hopefully, we can tighten that down with additional study," he said. "It is apparent they were engaged in some of the early commerce of the area."

He said the site could be a shipwreck or just an area where there was a lot of harbor usage.

Holding a shard, Mr. Fithian said, "These are all interesting clues to the past. The more information we get, the better."

Peter Bon, president of the Lewes chapter of the Archeological Society of Delaware, said members had walked the beach and a grid was made where items were found.

By determining what area had the most artifacts on the top, he hopes discoveries will continue on deeper into the sand.

"Sure enough, there was an area," Mr. Bon said. "But I am not telling where it is."

Mr. Bon said the local chapter formed only about six months ago and its members were surprised when artifacts were found on the beach.

"It is a privilege to work with the state," he said. "Members who were untrained are learning how to preserve finds."
Mr. Stewart said there was good news and bad news about the find, which is suspected to have been pumped ashore in the dredging and beach replenishment project.

"The integrity of the site has been compromised, everything was mixed together and it is difficult to tell what came from where," he said.

"But it is good they found it or it would have laid on the bottom for another 200 years."

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There is a new one-hour long DVD production that came out recently that probably will be of interest to who wants to know more about side scan sonar and magnetometer surveying.

It is entitled "Principles of Sonar and Mag for Underwater Archaeologists and Cultural Resource Managers" by Black Laser Learning, a division ofBarkentine, Inc. Bateaux Below, Inc., a not-for-profit educational corporation that does underwater archaeology at Lake George, New York, provided logistical andscuba support to Black Laser Learning.

For more information check out the web site:_www.blacklaserlearning.com_ (http://www.blacklaserlearning.com)

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The Florida Underwater Archaeology Conference in conjunction with the 57th Annual Meeting of the Florida Anthropological Society announces the call for papers.

Abstracts due by February 10, 2005 Meeting to be held May 13-15, with papers to be given on Saturday, May 14th.

Hosted by the Florida Museum of Natural History and the University of Florida, Gainesville. Information and forms on the Florida AnthropologicalSociety's website: http://www.fasweb.org/

The local contact for any further information will be: Donna Ruhl, ruhl@flmnh.edu, 352-392-1721 x. 493

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CDNN
by Stephen Manning
December 18, 2004


Neta Snook with Earhart.

MAINE, USA -- At 5,000 meters beneath the surface, the temperature of ocean water is just above freezing, oxygen is sparse and currents are relatively calm. In other words, ideal conditions for preserving an airplane that might have crashed into the depths nearly 70 years ago, according to marine explorer David Jourdan, who hopes to answer one of aviation's greatest mysteries _ the fate of famed pilot Amelia Earhart.

Jourdan and his Maine-based company, Nauticos, plan to launch an expedition in the spring using sonar to sweep a 1,000-square-mile swath of ocean bottom west of tiny Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean.

It is the latest in a string of missions to learn what happened to Earhart when she, her navigator and their Lockheed Electra plane disappeared on a flight around the world.

"Things tend to last a time" in the deep ocean, said Jourdan. "Our expectation is the plane will be largely, if not completely, intact."

That is, if the plane is even in the ocean.

There is a host of theories about what befell Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan in 1937 as they made one of the final legs of their widely heralded flight.

Some have searched the sea, believing the plane ran out of gas. Others think she survived a crash landing but died on a deserted island. Another theory is that the Japanese captured and executed her. The conspiracy-minded claim Earhart survived and lived out her life under an assumed name as a New Jersey housewife.

This much is agreed on _ Earhart and Noonan vanished July 2, 1937, as they approached an air strip on Howland Island, roughly midway between Australia and Hawaii. They had taken off from Papua New Guinea, just 7,000 miles short of their goal to make Earhart the first woman to fly around the world.

A fearless flyer, Earhart set a string of altitude, distance and endurance records in the 1920s and 1930s, proving the still-young world of flying wasn't reserved for men. She captivated a Depression-era America eager for heroes, was feted by presidents and was compared to Charles Lindbergh. The press dubbed her "Lady Lindy."

The Navy launched a weeks-long search of 250,000 square miles of ocean around Howland and a nearby chain of small islands. No trace was ever found of the plane.

One of those going along on the Nauticos mission is Elgen Long, a former commercial pilot who has spent 30 years researching the mystery.

Long, 77, of Reno, Nev., believes the answer to Earhart and Noonan's fate lies in their radio communications with a U.S. Coast Guard cutter that was tracking their course near Howland Island. Using Coast Guard radio operator's logs, Long concluded Earhart was perilously low on gas because a headwind was much stronger than she had anticipated.

One of her last radio calls said she had only a half hour of fuel left and couldn't see land.

"We can follow her all the way across the Pacific," he said of the radio records. "She ran out of gas just when she said she was going to."

This is Jourdan's second search of the area west of Howland; a 2002 mission was aborted because of technical problems.

The same general area was searched in 1999 by another mission that found nothing conclusive, but Jourdan said his new expedition, costing about $1.5 million, will use better sonar technology and more accurate information on where the plane may have crashed.

The shortage of oxygen and the fairly still water means a metal airplane likely would not have completely corroded, he said.

Any human remains would have long vanished, but Jourdan hopes to find clues such as Earhart's jewelry in the pilot's seat, or perhaps even Earhart's leather jacket.

"That would be eerie," he said.

If he finds it, Nauticos would plan another mission to raise the plane, which would become the centerpiece of a traveling exhibit on Earhart's life, Jourdan said.

Earhart's stepson, George Putnam, was 16 years old when her plane disappeared. Putnam, now 83 and living in Florida, said he supports the mission partly because it could end the wild speculation about what happened to her. He doesn't mind if Nauticos salvages the plane.

"Let's see what happens," he said.

To Long, it could be his last chance to solve one of the 20th-century's biggest mysteries.

"We need the true story of what happened," he said. "The history we read needs to be correct."

SOURCE - LA Times

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CDNN
by Patrick Symmes
December 19, 2004


Read the story and see more images here.

The steamer Mohawk was a 387-foot workhorse on the weekly run to Havana, carrying freight and discount passengers in both directions. When it sailed out of New York for the last time, on January 24, 1935, the Mohawk had neither fame nor beauty, and it has taken a damn serious beating since then.

The first blow was administered by the Norwegian freighter Talisman, which slammed into the ship a few hours from Manhattan, slicing a deep gash in the bow. It took 70 minutes for the Mohawk to sink, enough time for most of the lifeboats to get away with most of the 164 people aboard, though not all. Forty-five lives ended on that icy night off the coast of New Jersey, and the Mohawk plunged 80 feet and cracked open on the sea floor. For most of the world, the story ended then and there.

But the awkward little ship never had a final resting place, nor any peace. Sitting upright on the silty bottom, the wreck's tallest parts—the bridge and smokestack—were still hazards in the busy New Jersey shipping channels. Soon two tugboats were dispatched to wire-drag the wreck, forcing a heavy steel cable back and forth through the superstructure, snapping the deck plates apart, ripping the bridge from the hull, and scattering debris into the currents. A few years later, in World War II, the Coast Guard pummeled the Mohawk with depth charges; German U-boats had been hiding alongside wrecks in these waters, dodging sonar behind their bulky silhouettes.

With insult heaped on injury, the Mohawk was left to the mercy of the Atlantic. Decade by decade, the ocean shoved, pulled, twisted, flipped, and buried the ruins of the old boat and its rusting cargo of car parts and china. When scuba diving became a mass sport in the 1960s, a few visitors dropped onto the wreckage, but by the 1990s, as technology—advanced GPS, inexpensive side-scan sonar, and nitrox gas mixtures—made it easier to explore wrecks, a new wave of divers began to pick its bones. Hundreds of thousands of certified divers live along the Middle Atlantic seaboard, and nowadays a dozen or more of them can be found crawling over the vessel on any given summer Sunday.

Inevitably, those divers come back up with something: some trophy, some artifact, some souvenir. If they are lucky, or determined, they might find a porthole, bring it up, clean it, and slap it on the mantelpiece. Weekend by weekend, storm by storm, man and the elements are reducing the Mohawk to a memory. This would not concern me in the least, except that my uncle died on the S.S. Mohawk.

HE WAS MY FATHER'S eldest brother, William D. Symmes, a student at Williams College traveling with his geology professor and five classmates. They were scheduled to catch a plane from Havana to the Yucatán for an inspection of Mayan ruins. In the small world of families and acquaintances, January 24, 1935, was a black tragedy. A Massachusetts newspaper headlined a group photo of the six Williams passengers, taken right before they sailed: "JUST THREE RETURN ALIVE."

Time dissolves grief, just as rust undoes the strongest steel, and while the Mohawk slowly broke apart on the ocean floor, a few pieces of its history began to surface again. A chunk of that forgotten past fell into my hands last summer—and then dropped hard onto my big toe, before skittering across the floor and lodging under a sofa.

The item in question was a modest ceramic tile, thick, hexagonal, sharp-edged, about the size of an Oreo, that fell unexpectedly from an envelope stuffed with documents about the Mohawk. I'd requested the paperwork from Steve Nagiewicz, executive director of the Explorers Club in New York, a group as famous for its annual dinner (where else can you dine on tarantula tempura with astronauts?) as for the grand scientific expeditions of its members. But Nagiewicz's interest in the Mohawk was personal, too—it lies just offshore from his New Jersey home. He runs a weekend dive-charter business, and like most Jersey divers, he knows the wreck well.

Over the years he's brought up plates and a few tiles, and it was one of the latter that he slipped into the envelope. Recovering the cream-colored tablet from under the couch, I steeled myself for any number of reactions: sorrow at encountering this touchstone from a tragedy, perhaps anger that this fragment had been rousted from a grave.

I wouldn't have been the first to be outraged at the desecration of a lost ship. Ever since the early 1960s, when wildcat treasure hunters like the late Mel Fisher first pulled gold off Spanish galleons in the Florida Keys and marine archaeologists like George Bass of Texas A&M first sent frogmen down to Byzantine merchant ships in the Mediterranean, the rivalry between scholars and salvagers has deepened.

Commercial salvagers, gold seekers, and souvenir hunters argue that they are rescuing value from the encroaching sea, that anything not removed will eventually be lost for good. Archaeologists counter that salvagers are disturbing vital cultural resources, like pot thieves defiling Anasazi ruins. Governments claim sunken warships as their patrimony. Insurance companies claim a share of lost treasure.

Family members claim that wrecks should be left as undisturbed graves. The result has never been as simple as "finders-keepers," nor as absolute as the legal rulings of dry-footed legislators. But as wreck diving increases, the calls for regulation grow louder: California allows only permitted archaeologists to remove objects from the 1,600 wrecks in its waters, and Wisconsin arrested a diver in 1998 for taking a porthole. In Britain, a group called Wreck Respect is agitating to ban all souvenir diving, everywhere. Last July, Paris-based UNESCO—the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization—promulgated a new international convention defining any shipwreck older than 100 years as a "cultural deposit" and the "patrimony of mankind," subject to restrictions including a total ban on amateur salvage. Lacking any enforcement mechanism, the new policy is toothless.

Most wrecks lie in the shallow waters claimed by sovereign nations, and most maritime powers, including the United States, have refused to sign, claiming the convention contradicts existing laws of the sea.

Emotions are another matter. Turning the tile over in my fingers, I felt vaguely disappointed: It was cold, lifeless, a little bit ugly. The humble reality was that it probably came from the wall of a washroom or the floor of the galley. It wasn't the time capsule I'd hoped for, and it carried no messages from the past. Within days I had called Nagiewicz and arranged for a deeper immersion.

"ABOUT NINE TWENTY, as though from some unknown danger, the room we were in fell into a deadly silence—no word was uttered. Then came the crash." The final moments of the Mohawk were chaotic, according to one of the surviving Williams students. In a 28-page testimonial composed for the college archives, Karl Osterhout described the departure that blustery afternoon from Pier 13 in Manhattan and the crash just hours later.

The Mohawk sailed the day after what the New York Daily News called the "worst storm since 1920"; 17 inches of snow had fallen on the city, and ice still coated the ship's railings. As the vessel rounded Sandy Hook and headed south, the college students had no inkling that the steering system was freezing up. They ate dinner and then sat in the lounge, playing cards.

Osterhout had just dealt a hand to my uncle when they heard a ship's whistle blow, and then silence fell over the passengers. The Mohawk had veered out of its sea lane; everyone seemed to sense some danger approaching. It was the Talisman, which surged out of the night and into the Mohawk's port bow.

"It didn't seem like a big crash," Osterhout wrote, "but there was a sound like splintering wood. At the impact everyone stood up simultaneously. One woman screamed." The Talisman sheared off, drifting but intact, and after gawking at the disappearing freighter the Mohawk's passengers rushed to their staterooms.

Some sensibly put on warm clothing, but many paused to pursue bizarre urges. Osterhout encountered one of his friends sitting calmly in bed, scribbling a diary entry about "exactly how I felt when the crash came." One man stowed two teaspoons in his pockets, dejected that his shipment of antique silver was locked in the hold. Osterhout caught himself obsessively collecting his scattered playing cards.

The Mohawk listed hard to port, then tilted to starboard. The pitching corridors were filled with families hauling steamer trunks, and old women in nightgowns. Falling pots and pans brained the cook. Few members of the 110-man crew were to be found: One officer, Osterhout noted, "tried to make the band play, but the men refused." Passengers stumbled up the gangways and skittered across the snowy decks.

Some of the lifeboats could not be broken out of the ice; people filled others with their luggage, and handed their children out to strangers in departing boats. The lights failed, restarted, and failed again. In the darkness, the geology party became separated. Osterhout heard glass portholes shatter belowdecks, a sign that water was rising fast. He jumped into one of the last lifeboats, landing beside the waiter who had served him dinner.

Even those who made it into the lifeboats suffered severe frostbite during the two-hour wait for rescue, but my uncle didn't make it into a boat. If he did manage to escape the ship, the "suck" that followed the Mohawk's dive would have pulled even a strong swimmer under, and as the downdraft subsided, the debris that rocketed back to the surface would have knocked even a strong man unconscious.

More than a hundred people in lifeboats survived, but the lives of my uncle and 44 others ended quietly, a plunging body temperature leading quickly to exhaustion, then numbness, then blackness.

Two ships picked up the lifeboats and stayed on station until dawn as a formality; the Talisman did too, before being towed into port. When the Mohawk survivors docked in New York, they were thronged by photographers ("MORE SHIP DISASTER PICTURES PAGES 12, 18, 20, AND 21," crowed the Daily News) and the distraught families of passengers. Among them was my grandmother, still hopeful that her eldest son, initially reported to be safe, would come limping down a gangway. A few days later his body was recovered, and William D. Symmes was switched into the column of the dead. Most of the bodies were found, but not all, and the Mohawk began its long residence as a memorial to the lost.

I never knew my grandmother, but I find it hard to think of her on the dock that day, waiting. Things seemed to go wrong for my family after that. Within a few years my grandfather too died; my grandmother passed away shortly after that. My father's remaining brother died in the 1950s, and my father more than a decade ago. The youngest son of the youngest son, I was cut off from this lost generation. In the photos, Uncle Bill seems like a stranger—unfamiliar in the root meaning of that word.

There is an old photo of my father sledding in Central Park on a snowy day, and when I turned it over recently I was surprised to see, in my grandmother's neat writing, that it was taken on January 24, 1935, the day the Mohawk sailed. It was the last day of an old world, the day something broke between the past and present.

WE CRUISED OUT TO the Mohawk before dawn on a calm Sunday, leaving Point Pleasant Beach on Steve Nagiewicz's dive boat, the Diversion II. I sat on the aft deck with eight other divers, sipping coffee amid the odor of diesel fuel as the condos of the Jersey shore shrank away. My companions were members of a local dive club, veterans who teased one another as they squeezed into drysuits and strapped on knives, weights, guidelines, lights, and salvage bags.

There wasn't much time to get ready, since the Diversion needed only 40 minutes to reach the Mohawk; the site is just eight miles out, close enough that you can sometimes smell the cheese fries of Asbury Park when you surface. As word spread that I had lost a relative on the Mohawk, the other divers offered to hold a moment of silence, but when I declined they went right back to ribbing each other and me about equipment ("You call that a knife?").

New Jersey is one of America's epicenters of wreck diving—the state has even created 14 artificial reefs out of sunken ships and scrap—and dive boats here are known for macho hazing. It's a normal defense mechanism as much as anything: Set amid tragedies of the past, wreck diving is also inherently dangerous. Author Bernie Chowdhury's book The Last Dive describes a fatal search for a U-boat in Jersey waters, and the Mohawk itself recently claimed a life, a diver who had a heart attack.

I climbed up to the flying bridge to watch Nagiewicz guide us toward the site. Finding a wreck used to require expert triangulation, factoring in travel time, land bearings, and currents, but now anyone can push a few buttons on a GPS and hit it on the first try.

Stout and bearded, 48-year-old Nagiewicz lived up to his Explorers Club mystique—one of those hale-and-hearty specimens who can have fun at 6 a.m. Working the throttles, he grinned with contentment at the flat sea and clean air, and attempted to rouse me with a string of donuts, quizzing me about my uncle and railing against the UNESCO convention. ("They've gone overboard," he said.) His grin faded as we approached the site and found another large boat anchored over the wreck, with divers already plunging into the sea. Like our crowd, they all carried large mesh bags.

I let the club divers go first, and when their bubbles had vanished I waddled to the railing. Although there were three guides with us, the real authority on deck was Nagiewicz's four-year-old son, Travis, whose self-proclaimed duties included watching out for pirates and "assisting" divers into the water. He shoved me in with gusto, hurling oyster crackers at my bobbing head until I finally slipped under and followed the anchor line into a green void.

The water was thick with particles, limiting visibility to 25 feet—nearly perfect for this murky coast. It was obvious why souvenirs hold such a central place for Jersey divers: Without crystal waters, coral reefs, or exotic species, there isn't much to look at. But even in five feet of visibility, common here, you can feel your way along a wreck, hand over hand, picking up and examining things.

The most successful souvenir hunters on the Mohawk were the diggers, who fanned away at the sandy bottom, groping through silt clouds for something solid. A couple of years ago someone found a pocket watch that way, and last year a crate of china.

As I dropped below 40 feet, the dark brine parted to reveal the Mohawk itself—it was less "cultural deposit" than junkyard, with steel plates and girders strewn randomly across the sea floor. Dropping onto midships, I landed between two massive winches, near what looked like a generator. I spotted a rusting Chevy grill, and a handful of tires.

The sea surge tossed loose cables back and forth over the wreckage; fat blackfish flocked past islands of debris, and dark lobsters ducked under the scrap as I approached. The Mohawk is known as a great lobster dive, but after a few attempts to pry dinner out of a hidey-hole I gave up. Getting a meal here spooked me—like somehow skirting cannibalism.

I swam slowly across the wreck, steadily bumping into other divers; there were enough here to hold a cocktail party. Only near the end of my air supply did I see a ship shape loom out of the dark: an upright bulkhead, with a curving doorway attached. I purged a little air, dropped down, and floated through the opening, wondering if this was the last thing my uncle saw.

I THREW UP SEVEN TIMES during the surface interval, launching coffee and half-digested donuts over the Diversion's port railing and onto this grave site of my clan. Diving squeezes the softer internal organs in unnatural ways, and I've found that even the best dive may be followed by a good puke.

"You're dunkin' those donuts, pal!" the Jersey boys heckled. Divers were crowding in and out of the water. A man staggered up the back ladder, holding a mesh bag. "Whadjaget?" someone asked. The bag disgorged an object, flat and brown, roughly triangular. We all gathered around and examined the trophy, which turned out to be a...stone.

"I thought it was a hinge," the embarrassed treasure hunter muttered, turning bright red. "He's got a rock!" one of his friends cackled. "Good job, a rock!" Over on the other boat, a diver popped up and scrambled on board. "Ooohhh," someone on our boat muttered. "He's got a big bag." We pressed against the rail to watch, but tradition demanded that we scorn the other crew, and no one called across to concede curiosity.
Watching the scene on the Diversion, I realized that whatever the legal or ethical protests, this sort of trophy diving was something larger than my own family's history. By traditions dating back thousands of years, wrecks are the property of whoever can first find and salvage them. "Salvage has been around since things have been lost," Robert Ballard, the discoverer of the Titanic, told me. "If they dropped a coin, they went down to pick it up." As far back as ancient Rhodes, the right to salvage wrecks was detailed in legal codes that rewarded divers for going deep. "The concept of preserving underwater cultural heritage is wonderful," Ballard continued, but the UNESCO convention could "throw out the baby with the bathwater" by severely curtailing serious exploration. "Porthole divers," as he derides them, can't reach deepwater sites—yet.

But cheap robotic submersibles are already sold in dive magazines; it won't be long, Ballard warns, before "some asshole" clips off a piece of the Titanic. He still believes, however, that, with a few famous exceptions, only those wrecks over a thousand years old—not a hundred—should be protected for their rare archaeological heritage.

The Mohawk, of course, cannot qualify for legal caresses from anyone. Lying in the public domain, it isn't old enough to be covered by the UNESCO convention (although, within my lifetime, it will be). With every rivet detailed in existing blueprints, it holds no historic value.

Resting within sight of the Jersey Shore, it has no meaning for ocean explorers. Filled with auto parts and luggage, it has no value for treasure hunters. It has no advocates, except for me, and even I wasn't sure how I felt.

George Bass, the 69-year-old father of marine archaeology himself, told me he'd long ago reconciled himself to the slightly gruesome mixture of souvenir diving and personal tragedy.

Bass lost a distant relative on the S.S. Atlantic, which foundered in Long Island Sound in 1846, but he said it never bothered him that divers had picked the wreck over and brought up the ship's bell. "I always wanted to go see it," he admitted. So it was for me and the Mohawk.

Travis Nagiewicz pushed me into the water again, and I sank down toward the wreck to say a final farewell. This time I'd brought something along with me in the pocket of my dive vest, and it seemed to drag me down toward the ship like a magnet.

The familiar scrap of girders and steel plates emerged from the gloom below me; a wall of steel stuck up from the mud, a section of the graceless hull. When I neared the turnaround point on my air supply, I floated quietly for a moment more, and in the darkness a last tall shape loomed: I thought I could make out a bit of the ship's bridge, 15 feet high, and beyond it a section of the bow still thrusting forward toward Havana. I pushed my fingers through the sand, thinking I might come across some of the old silver teaspoons that Mohawk passenger had left behind.

The water pushed back and forth, and I reached into my vest pocket and looked around for other divers—I didn't want to get ribbed about this later. Then I slipped the tile back into the silt, letting the currents cover it over for good.

SOURCE - Outside Online

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Duluth News Tribune
By Chuck Frederick
December 19, 2004

The search team was still out on Lake Superior this fall when elation over finding a legendary shipwreck gave way to a sobering realization and then to a vow.

Team members decided to do what was necessary to protect the wreck of the Benjamin Noble, a freighter that sank in a wintery gale in 1914. Its 20-member crew died in the disaster.

"We look for shipwrecks kind of for fun, and we do it for the history. But we also respect these sites. And the Noble, it's a grave site. It's different from all the other wrecks we've found in that regard," said diver Randy Beebe of Duluth. "We want to make sure the Noble, and all wrecks, are preserved."

The fear is that unscrupulous or opportunistic divers will visit the Noble, salvage artifacts for profit and destroy history.

Beebe and the rest of the four-man search team have exchanged e-mails and have begun to discuss what they should do to prevent that from happening.

They probably don't have to do much of anything, according to historical and archaeological experts. Federal and state laws already protect shipwrecks. The men don't even have to divulge the locations of the wrecks.

"These guys are working hard to make sure these are preserved. We appreciate that," said Keith Meverden, an underwater archaeologist for the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison. "They're preserving history."

The Abandoned Shipwrecks Act was created by the federal government in the early 1980s. It gives ownership of shipwrecks to the states where they're located. Abandoned property laws, on the books in both Minnesota and Wisconsin, give states additional authority.

In Minnesota, looting a wreck site is a potential gross misdemeanor crime, said Scott Anfinson, the National Register Archaeologist for the State Historic Preservation Office in St. Paul.

Stealing from a shipwreck in Wisconsin can result in the confiscation of boating equipment and other equipment. Criminal charges can be as severe as felonies, Meverden said.

Arresting looters for stealing bells, whistles and even dishes from wrecks doesn't happen often, Anfinson and Meverden agreed. More common is ship owners, cargo owners, insurance companies and others claiming ownership of wrecks through the courts or successfully petitioning for salvage rights.

Listing or nominating a wreck to the National Register of Historic Places can help protect it from personal claims, Anfinson said.

Preparing a nomination for the National Register can cost $5,000 to $10,000. About 10 Minnesota wrecks were placed on the National Register during the 1990s, using some of $250,000 in lottery proceeds. State money isn't available any longer, Anfinson said.

The Benjamin Noble would be eligible for the National Register, Anfinson says. It's an important piece of Great Lakes shipping history, and its wreck site hasn't been disturbed.

Search team members are considering making a claim for salvage rights. If successful, they could donate the rights to a nonprofit like the Great Lakes Shipwreck Preservation Society. They're also discussing the possibility of raising money to have the Noble nominated to the National Register.

"What do you want to gamble on?" asked team member Ken Merryman of Fridley, Minn. "I think we all want the same thing. We all want it to be preserved. The question is, how do you do that over the long haul?"

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The VI th Congress of Phoenician Punic Studies will take place from 26.09.2005 - 1.10.2005, in Lisbon.

Faculdade de Letras. Cidade Universitária.

The VI th Congress of Phoenician Punic Studies aims at bringing together scholars interested in Punic and Phoenician phenomena. We want that the congress be characterized by a lively exchange in many small groups, rather than by formal plenary sessions.

The conference welcomes papers and sessions on any topic.

Nevertheless, we think organized classic session, but other types of presentations, like posters and round table sessions, areencouraged.

1. Registration procedure
All congress participants (paper; round table or poster proposal) are required to register. When you have pre-registered we willsend you information on final registration, payment and accommodation. The pre-registration form should include an abstract (200 -300 words) of the proposed paper.

2.Acceptance of papers
Please send your pre-registered form (to the e.mail: 6congresso@fl.ul.pt <mailto:6congresso@fl.ul.pt> ) as soon as possible, butbefore February l, 2005 at the latest. No individual should present more than one paper. However, individuals can present a secondpaper if they are participant in a roundtable.

Notification of acceptances will occur by March 1 2005. All accepted participants arerequired to handle their final registration and payment before April 1 2005. Your proposal will not appear in the final programunless you have handled your final registration and payment before that date.

Abstracts that are sent in through the electronic form will be available on the Internet with the program.

3. Types of sessions

3.1. Round tables sessions
Gather five or eight speakers who each will present a paper on a related topic and a moderator who will introduce the discussionwith a prepared comment on the papers. Confirm participation and arrangements with these individuals the (date of) exchange ofpapers and the way the session will be conducted.

Submit the proposal for a round table session with the pre-registration form for each individual speaker. The deadline for this isFebruary 1, 2005, but please send your form as early as possible.

3.2. Plenary sessions
Plenary sessions consist on the presentation of papers (15 minutes), followed by general discussion.3.3. Posters sessionsPosters are accepted and a poster session will be held. All of them will be published in the Procedure, the same way as the otherspapers.

4. Publication
The papers given at the Congress will be published in a refereed volume. Authors are encouraged to submit their papers two monthafter the Congress. Details will be announced later.

5. Payment of fees
The Congress fee does not include meals or hotel accommodation. Participants will receive information on hotel accommodation whenare informed about acceptance of their proposal.

The large majority of the participants will be contributing to the Congress as a paper author, or as a round table organizer.

Full fee - Payment in advance - 150€
- Payment on location - 200€

Special student fee - Payment in advance - 50€
- Payment on location - 100€

Therefore we cannot - regrettably - afford to waive the Congress fee for those of us who are a contributing to the organization. Inother words, every participant will have to pay the Congress fee. The Congress fee does not include meals or hotel accommodation. Participants will receive information on hotel accommodation when they are informed about the acceptance of their proposal.

6. Practical advices
The Congress sessions will be held at the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa. Alameda da Universidade. CidadeUniversitária.

Oral presentation (all European languages accepted, in priority: Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, German, Italian) could incorporate transparencies, slides and PowerPoint presentations; however, a preference will be given to the PowerPoint presentations.

Posters should have a maximum size of DIN (841 X 1189 mm) in a vertical portrait set-up. Posters should be arranged during the reception, and they will be on display during the whole congress. A special session poster has been scheduled and the authors arekindly request to be by their posters in order to facilitate de discussion.

E.mail Congress secretariat: 6congresso@fl.ul.pt

Address: Ana Margarida Arruda. UNIARQ. Faculdade de Letras.
Universidade de Lisboa. Alameda da Universidade.
1600-214 Lisboa.Portugal.

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China Daily
December 14, 2004

The Guangdong provincial government has decided to salvage an ancient boat which sank in the waters of this coastal city in the Song Dynasty (960-1279), according to Jing Lihu, deputy director of the Guangdong Provincial Bureau of Culture.

The work will start before 2006. A special task force consisted of archaeologists from Beijing and Guangdong Province has been set up, Jing recently told a press conference in Yangjiang.

The vessel, discovered in the late 1980s by fishermen, has been named Nanhai No 1.

Preparations are well underway, Jing said.

Local archaeologist Wu Jing said the wooden vessel, which is still in good condition, is thought to contain 60,000-80,000 valuable pieces, more than the total number of historical relics that are now in museums in Guangdong Province.

The vessel is 24.58 meters long and 9.8 meters wide. It weighs more than 3,800 tons. The vessel is covered by 2-metre deep silt, Wu said. He believes Nanhai No 1 was made with timber painted or soaked with a special plant oil.
Wu intends the entire vessel to be brought up and put on show in the museum. The ship will be useful in studying ancient Chinese ship building and navigation technologies, Wu said.

Archaeologists removed more than 4,000 artifacts, plus many silver and bronze coins, from only a small part of the boat after a small-scale salvage was launched last year.

Most of the pieces are ancient ceramics and porcelain products produced in east China's Fujian, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces in the Song Dynasty.

Nanhai No 1 is believed to be a merchant vessel that operated between the southern Chinese region and the rest of the world.

The ocean liner sank in the western part of the mouth of the Pearl River while it was sailing to the Middle East and Europe.

Archaeologists estimate there are more than 1,000 sunken ships in waters around Guangdong, which mark the starting point of China's marine silk road.

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Muskegon Chronicle
By Robert C. Burns
December 15, 2004

Student pilot Jonathon Freye of Muskegon was flying low over Lake Michigan when he looked down and saw something that led him to bank his Piper Warrior and make another pass, then several more.

What the then 16-year-old and his flying instructor, Mike Jensen, saw through the calm, clear water that day in September 2003 was a long, dark object which Freye took to be a wooden ship's hull, resting on its side.

Being a licensed scuba diver as well, Freye was uniquely qualified to pursue that theory.

Turns out his first impression was the right one. It was the remains of the 170-foot schooner "Interlaken," which sank just north of Whitehall on Oct. 4, 1934.

The discovery may have given the young Muskegon Catholic Central student some idea of how Robert Ballard must have felt when he first laid eyes on the Titanic in 1985. Except that in Freye's case, the find was purely accidental.

"It was definitely exciting to go from seeing it in the air to actually diving on it," Freye said last week.

"At first it looked like an incoherent piece of wreckage, but then we could see the keel and the bow coming together.

Then if you moved some of the sand away you could see the deck."

The reason no one had seen it before is likely because of wave-induced shifting of the lake bottom. Over time it made the wreck clearly visible, at least temporarily.

But now, as if Mother Nature had replaced a veil over a fleeting glimpse into another time, bottom sand has all but buried the Interlaken's hull once again.

Although it had rather suddenly thrust itself into the present day, the rest of the Interlaken story came much more gradually through months of research.

To Freye and his parents, Doug and Melissa, it was an intriguing mystery that they immediately set out to solve, the way some families might attack a jigsaw puzzle.

To start with, since it was unfamiliar to local divers, more information was needed from the submerged hull itself.

It sits today in 20 to 30 feet of water some 400 feet offshore -- an easy dive for the versatile Jonathon and his father Doug, an experienced wreck diver who took land sightings to triangulate the location.

After they had had time to explore the wrecked hull and gather what data they could, they let the local dive community in on the find. In turn, Dan Bloom, who owns the West Michigan Dive Center in Muskegon, said his shop let the word out -- but didn't broadcast it.

"We kind of kept it hidden," he said. "There are a lot of artifacts and we didn't want things to go missing."

Armed with new information gathered about the wreck, Melissa set to work researching local history records from places like the White Lake Lighthouse Museum, Hackley Public Library, newspaper accounts and the Internet.

What the family eventually pieced together was this:
The two-masted Interlaken was built in 1893 in Algonac. It was owned and operated by A.W. Comstock of Alpena and plied the Great Lakes as part of Comstock's lumber and shingle business.

Further examination revealed that the Interlaken's years as a schooner ended around 1913, when it was converted to a barge. By the early 1930s, the Interlaken was owned by Ira "Jack" Lyons. One reference had it being used as a construction platform during the building of the North Manitou Shoals Lighthouse.

In 1935, the Interlaken had finished its work and was headed to White Lake for the winter, according to an account in The Muskegon Chronicle dated Oct. 4, 1934.

The tug Fred C. Gretling had been towing the Interlaken and a flat scow through heavy seas for some 24 hours when it ran out of coal about four miles north of the White Lake Channel. Although the tug managed to limp into port, the Interlaken sank with four crewmen aboard. They were saved by a rescue party from the White River Coast Guard Station.

The barge, scow and on-board equipment were valued at $75,000. A salvage attempt by the owner eventually failed.
As the Freyes researched the wreck Jonathon had seen from the plane, there was at least one false lead.

At first, local lore and the location of the wreck pointed to another schooner named the L.J. Conway, which sank in 1886. Although the hull was unquestionably that of a 19th-century schooner, the Conway was ruled out because of hull length discrepancies and because more contemporary fixtures were found on board.

Nor was it immediately obvious that the hull was that of the Interlaken, which was classified as a barge when it went down.

It took further research work to determine that the ship that sank in the same general area was but a shadow of the proud sailing ship the Interlaken once was.

An undated photograph from Bowling Green State University's Historical Collection of the Great Lakes shows the Interlaken at dockside with its masts intact but no superstructure to speak of. It had already been converted to a barge, though hardly the kind of thing the word conjures up today.

Freye, meanwhile, is now 17 and looking forward to enrolling in Western Michigan University's College of Aviation.
He wants to be a commercial pilot, and says his dream job would be to work somewhere in the Caribbean, "where I could dive and fly at the same time."

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Boston.com News
By Bill Sargent
December 14, 2004

Last month, a 100-foot strip of peat marsh appeared in the surf off Nauset Beach on Cape Cod. The peat had the hoof prints of oxen and horses and was crisscrossed with wagon tracks that looked like they had been laid down yesterday, though they probably date to the 1700s when the marsh and barrier beach were 800 feet farther out to sea.

This strip of living history is only the latest artifact to be unearthed by the rising ocean. Cape Cod's outer arm is receding at an average rate of 3 feet a year. This year, Nauset Beach lost 6 feet off the fragile dunes that protect its parking lot, less than a hundred feet away.

Waves, wind or particularly high tides are the usual suspects for any particular instance of erosion, but over the long term, it is sea-level rise caused by gradual global warming since the last ice age that is driving this rapid rate of change.

The rising ocean is now acting like a giant archeologist's trowel, inexorably unearthing Cape Cod's human artifacts by turning over the sand and pushing the barrier beach inland. In 1990, it was the remains of a prehistoric Native American Indian village uncovered on Coast Guard Beach in Eastham; in 1863, it was the wreck of the tall ship, Sparrowhawk.

The Sparrowhawk reveals how this erosion manifests itself. In 1626, the Sparrowhawk ran aground on the marshes of Pleasant Bay, protected behind Nauset Beach. The governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony dutifully reported the details to London, and the wreck was then forgotten. During the intervening 237 years, Nauset Beach was pushed 800 feet westward, rolling over the sepulchral remains of the long forgotten wreck.

According to several coastal geologists, the same thing happened this autumn, unearthing tracks laid down between 200 and 250 years ago. Oxen, horse and wagon tracks left in the marsh were buried by sand during winter storms.

In the intervening years, Nauset Beach has rolled over, so the tracks appear incongruously on the ocean side of the barrier beach. Geologists calculated the dates the tracks were laid by comparing beach erosion known to have happened between the time the Sparrowhawk sank and was recovered.

Now that the tracks are exposed, they will probably wash away this winter, the scientists said.

Back when they were put down, most of the town's able-bodied men would be out on the marshes every summer cutting salt hay for their livestock. It was a grueling job. Clouds of mosquitoes and greenhead flies buzzed about the heads of the sweaty men and beasts. Sometimes the oxen were transported to the marshes on shallow draft boats; sometimes they fell into muddy slough ponds.

But the work was worth it. Before the advent of petroleum, having access to a salt marsh was like owning your own oil well. Hay fueled New England's local economies. It was fed to horses for transportation, to sheep for clothing, and to cattle for milk, meat and work. It was the salt hay marshes that convinced the Pilgrims to expand to Cape Cod in the 1600s, and, by the 1700s, Cape Cod and North Shore farmers were shipping hay to Boston to be sold to urbanites in Haymarket Square.

About 10,000 years ago, Cape Cod was a rough pile of rocks and gravel that extended 2 to 3 miles farther out to sea. But the glaciers had retreated, the planet was warming and the oceans were rising. About 2,000 years ago, Cape Cod looked somewhat like it does today, only the sea level was 6 feet lower. The outer arm of Cape Cod had attained its smooth and rounded shape, but Nauset Beach was almost a mile farther east.

By the time the wagon tracks were made, Nauset Beach protected a bay and marsh system that stretched from Eastham south to Chatham. Today that system has been separated into two distinct estuaries, Town Cove and Nauset inlet to the north and Pleasant Bay to the south.

According to Robert Oldale, a geologist with the US Geological Survey, Cape Cod will be almost gone in another 2,000 years at the present rate of sea-level rise. Most of the peninsula's highlands and bluffs will have washed away and its outer reaches will be 2 miles closer to the mainland.

In 5,000 years, all that will be left of Cape Cod is a long thin barrier beach like the present Nauset Beach. The beach will connect what had been Cape Cod to Nantucket, Nantucket to Martha's Vineyard, and the Vineyard to the mainland. The remains of Cape Cod will be a mature barrier beach system protecting thousands of acres of marsh grass, the way the Outer Banks protect the marshes and coasts of North Carolina.

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MehrNews
December 14, 2004

TEHRAN, (MNA) -- A team of Iranian, French, and Belgian archaeologists discovered ruins of eight Achaemenid dams at Morghab Plain near Pasargadae, the ancient capital of Persia in Fars Province, southern Iran, a French member of the team announced here Tuesday.

“Due to the importance of the water supply system and waterworks in Morghab Plain over the ancient times, particularly during the Achaemenid era, our team in a special project began working on the site based on the studies, which had been previously carried out by other archaeologists,” said Remy Boucharlat.

Morghab is one of the ancient plains of Iran, which contains ruins and dates back to several millenniums B.C. For several years, a huge number of people have been living in Morghab whose position was attached great importance due its adjacency to the Pasargadae.

“The dams were spotted by taking aerial photos and making studies during trips to the site. The findings show that the earth dams were built in and after Achaemenid era,” he added.

With eight to 10 meters height, six of the dams have supplied potable and irrigation water and the other two are over 20 meters high, said Boucharlat, who is a University of Lyon archaeologist specializing in Iran.

Boucharlat is the writer of the article “The Persepolis Area in the Achaemenid Period: Some Reconsiderations”, which has been printed in Chapter 24 of the book “Yeki Bud, Yeki Nabud: Essays on the Archaeology of Iran in Honor of William M. Sumner”. The book was published by the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA in 2003.

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Yorkshire Post
Alexandra Wood
December 15, 2004

A REPLICA of a 4,000-year-old Bronze Age boat found near Hull will set sail on the Humber in the new year – close to where the original was discovered.

The plank boat, the oldest of its kind found in western Europe, was one of three discovered at North Ferriby by Hull amateur archaeologist, Ted Wright, between 1937 and 1963.

Yesterday a half-scale replica, named Ferriby I, was unveiled at the Streetlife Museum, in Hull, where it will be used as a local focus for SeaBritain 2005, a celebration of the UK's maritime heritage.

The boat, built in Southampton, has been trialled successfully on the Solent, despite being only half the size of the original.

And it should be launched from the Humber foreshore in January to see how it fares on the perilous waters of a river, where its ancestor ferried people and cargoes in ancient times.There are high hopes that a full-size replica of the boat can be built, possibly at Dunstan's Shipyard in Hessle, near Hull, where sail training ship Sir Winston Churchill was built in 1966.

One of the three shipwrights involved in the construction, Jeff Bird, was at yesterday's launch. He said: "Up to when Ted Wright found the boat we thought they were dugouts but this boat has been made sophisticatedly and complicatedly."

John Davis, former chairman of the local Sail Training Association, worked with Andrew Marr, of Hessle-based Andrew Marr International, to bring the replica to Hull. He said there was already interest from a TV consortium in filming the building of a new full-size boat, adding: "It was always Ted Wright's wish to see a full-scale reconstruction of the ship. The awareness created by the replica and SeaBritain 2005 could yet see this happen."

The half-scale replica was funded by engineer Edwin Gifford, the naval architect who founded the international firm of consulting engineers which bears his name; naval architect John Coates; and Mr Wright's family, following his death three years ago.Mr Marr said: "What we have here is the product of some of the greatest talent in the land." We have brought it here as a practical tool to continue Edwin Gifford's research, but it is by its nature also an icon."

We see it above all as an inspiration and hope it will generate new awareness and a desire to discover more about this fascinating event in our maritime history."

Built in early Bronze Age Britain around 2030 BC, the 16-metre boat used sophisticated techniques and carpentry skills that experts believe would be difficult to match today.The replica's planks are fixed together with polyester rope, rather than the yew stitches – or withies – used to sew the oak timbers on the original.

It is hoped more research can be done on the withies in partnership with the Water's Edge Country Park, at Barton-Upon-Humber.

There are also plans to do more research on the vessel's steering.

The replica boat has carried as many as 10 people, but the original had room for a crew of 70, or a load of 11 tonnes, possibly cattle.It could even have been used to bring over settlers from Holland.

Intriguingly, a boat of the Ferriby type may have been used to transport stones to build Stonehenge, and it may help explain how jewellery from the Mediterranean and coral decorations from the Middle East turned up in the recent Iron Age chariot burial excavations in East Yorkshire. A series of events for SeaBritain are taking place in Whitby, including the arrival in the port of five tall ships from July 19 onwards, who are taking part in the July 25 Tall Ships Race from Newcastle to Frederikstad.

For more details visit www.seabritain2005.com or www.tallshipsraces.com.

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Honolulu Advertiser
By Jan TenBruggencate
December 15, 2004

An undersea aircraft museum lies on the ocean floor off South O'ahu, and it includes representatives of virtually the entire era of the flying boats — from early post-World War I biplanes to World War II PBY Catalinas and a postwar behemoth that sank in 1950, the Martin Marshall Mars.


A University of Hawai'i deep-submersible vehicle,
right, approaches the hulk of an old Navy PD-1
flying boat in waters off Pearl Harbor, where a
virtual undersea aircraft museum has been found.
NOAA/HURL photo

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration yesterday announced a series of discoveries made last week and said agencies are mapping the sea-floor to document the area's collection of ships, planes and other maritime archaeological finds.

"Flying boats had a special significance for Hawai'i and the Pacific islands. They were the only way to get between the islands by air before the development of airports," said marine archaeologist Hans Van Tilburg, of the NOAA National Marine Sanctuary program. "The first interisland air transportation in Hawai'i was in flying boats."

The seafloor region off Pearl Harbor may be better known for its ships, like the Japanese miniature submarine that was sunk an hour before the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. The sub's wreckage was found in 2002.

But there's lots more on a bottom of silt and rock in water 1,000 feet deep and extending several miles from the entrance to Pearl Harbor. The deep water has currents but not a lot of turbulence, and many of the aircraft are in remarkable shape, Van Tilburg said.

Some planes have been wrecked. Some have been taken out and dumped, including at least six former PD-1 Navy bi-plane flying boats. The giant Marshall Mars flying boat sank April 5, 1950, after it landed safely with an engine fire and offloaded its crew before the plane exploded.

Between them, they represent the earliest years of flying boats, and what some might term the pinnacle of the genre.
The twin-wing PD-1 designs date to the 1920s. Van Tilburg said a squadron of them flew as patrol craft out of Ford Island in Pearl Harbor. He has found no records of their disposal, but the fact that their fuselages are complete and that wheels are attached suggest they did not fly to their watery ends and were probably dumped, he said.

PBY Catalinas, which served as Navy patrol, rescue and bombing workhorses during World War II, have also been spotted on the bottom off Pearl Harbor.

During the war, the government was looking for ways to get lots of soldiers and gear long distances to places without airports. Size mattered, and new designs dwarfed the little patrol planes.

The Marshall Mars was one of a half-dozen huge flying boats built by the Martin aircraft firm as cargo and personnel carriers after World War II. It was the same era when Howard Hughes was building his famed Spruce Goose. The Mars planes had 200-foot wingspans — roughly the same as that of a 747.

They were named for the Pacific island groups they served: the Marshalls, Carolines, Marianas, Philippines and Hawai'i. Two Hawai'i Mars planes were built. The second is still flying, hauling water to forest fires in the Pacific Northwest.

George Hutton, of Chipley, Fla., who worked on the planes as a radioman in the mid-1940s, said they were comfortable and roomy.

"It was a big, big, monstrous plane, but it was a good plane. You felt very safe in it. There were several decks and you could go up and down circular stairways," Hutton said.

He said he flew one long mission across the Pacific on the Marshall Mars before its fatal flight, in which it landed in the ocean off Honolulu with its No. 3 engine afire. The crew got off in rubber boats, but the fire spread, and the plane exploded, in full view of folks from Waikiki to Pearl Harbor, Van Tilburg said. The plane sank and was lost until a few pieces were located in an undersea survey in August this year. The main wreckage was found in dives on Thursday and Friday.

The history of the region off Pearl Harbor is being prized from the ocean floor by a collaboration of NOAA's National Marine Sanctuary Program, the National Park Service and the University of Hawai'i's Hawai'i Undersea Research Laboratory (HURL), which operates the twin deep-diving submersibles Pisces IV and V.

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MNSBC
December 16, 2004

In ‘Return to Titanic,’ explorer Robert Ballard revisits the ship, 20 years after discovering its final resting place.

It’s been nearly 100 years since the Titanic sank to the bottom of the Atlantic. Still, the maritime disaster that took more than 1,500 lives continues to fascinate.

Recently Robert Ballard, the man who discovered the ship's final resting place nearly 20 years ago, returned to the site to determine what effect fame has had on the storied ship.

National Geographic followed Ballard back to the famous ship in a television special called “Titanic Revealed.”

His journey is also chronicled in a new book, “Return to Titanic: A New Look at the World's Most Famous Lost Ship.” Ballard was invited on the “Today” show to talk about the book and his visit to the wreck site.

Read an excerpt here.

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Cape Gazette
By Henry J. Evans Jr.
December 15, 2004

In archaeology, theories of how things came to be the way they are can change quickly and that’s what’s happening with ideas on the history and origin of artifacts found on Lewes Beach near the Roosevelt Inlet.

That shift in thinking was part of the discussion at a meeting of the Sussex County chapter of the Archaeological Society of Delaware held at the Zwaanendael Museum Dec 9.

About 30 people crammed into the museum’s tiny space to hear what state archeologists had to say about the recent Lewes Beach finds.

“This is by far the best attended meeting we’ve had. I wonder why?” said Peter M. Bon, president of the Sussex County chapter of the Archaeological Society of Delaware.

Surrounded by the museum’s collection of artifacts from the HMS DeBraak, an earlier discovery found off the coast of Lewes, state archaeologists Chuck Fithian and Craig Lukezic explained that the artifacts found appear to be English and from the early colonial period.

That information perhaps dashes an earlier idea that the materials are from a Dutch coastal whaling settlement, perhaps the lost colony of Swanendael, or a centuries-old trash heap.

“There were no dumps in the early colonial period,” Fithian said. He said the idea of a central trash repository didn’t exist during those times.

This weekend, about 20 volunteers searched the beach just south of the inlet in the area where a U.S. Army Corps’ of Engineers’ dredge deposited material, Lukezic said.

The corps completed work on a beach fill project in October after more than 165,000 cubic yards of sand were pumped onto the beach from sites 2,000 to 3,000 feet off shore.

Lukezic said volunteers who worked on the “controlled surface collection,” came up with more of the same that had been found last week – pottery pieces, bottle fragments and bricks.

“What we wanted to do was check out the patterns on the beach. We sectioned the beach off into 100-foot units,” Lukezic said.

A plot of where the items were found and a description of what was collected will be developed from the volunteer’s work.

“A lot of the artifacts appear to be containers,” Fithian said. He said much of the material appears to be of German or English origin. But so far, nothing with a “maker’s mark” has been found.

Lukezic and Fithian ask that those who picked up artifacts before the beach was closed bring those items to the Zwaanendael Museum to be photographed and cataloged.

There will be two sessions, 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday, Dec. 16, and 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., the same evening.

Archaeologist says artifacts should be placed in a container of fresh, distilled water because if the objects dry out they start to fall apart due to salt crystallization.

Lukezic said the water is 8-to 30-feet deep in the area where the dredge was working when it hit the source of the artifacts.

He said they plan to use resources available to get a better idea of what’s underwater, including 17th century maps and charts of the area.

He said the Army Corps is handling obtaining divers to do an underwater check to see if they can find the origin of the artifacts.

Lukezic said a schedule for the dives has not been set up.

Dan Griffith, state historic preservation officer and director of the state Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs, said he’d also be checking the availability of the University of Delaware’s College of Marine Studies’ vessel and divers, as well as National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration assistance.

Griffith said this incident highlights the need for the state to have underwater archaeological expertise as well as the need for more extensive underwater survey of Lewes’ harbor areas.

Archeological Society member Edward F. “Ned” Heite wasn’t optimistic that the public would ever see whatever’s found in an organized display.

“This brings back an unfortunate memory of the DeBraak. It’s still sitting in a bucket of water,” Heite said of the hull of the vessel. The DeBraak sank in 1798 and its location remained unknown until 1984. Fewer than 100 of the more than 20,000 artifacts recovered from the ship are on display. The ship’s hull weighs several tons and is being kept wet to preserve it for future display.

Griffith said a lack of money is why so few DeBraak artifacts are available for public viewing. He said $3 million has been spent so far in the handling, storage and restoration of DeBraak artifacts.

But excitement about the new finds remains up beat.

“So far, what we’ve seen has been a pretty remarkable collection. This material seems to be earlier than the DeBraak and is totally different,” Fithian said. He said the artifacts were in a “sealed” environment and none of the usual marine growth that can be seen on long-submerged items is visible.

“Much of the material we’re seeing appears to be very closely dated time-wise,” Fithian said. He said the artifacts now look as though they date to the third quarter of the 17th Century up to about 1720. He said the artifacts “get younger” as the dredge material was deposited southward. Fithian said nothing found appears to as early as the period when Dutch settlers were in the area and everything appears to be of English origin.

The amateur archaeologists are sticking with their initial theory that the artifacts were part of a ship’s cargo.
Bill Winkler, founder of the Delaware Marine Archaeological Society, says he believes that a boat ferrying goods from a larger ship to shore might have capsized spilling its contents into the bay and that’s where they were left for the past couple of centuries.

“That could explain why we haven’t seen any ship’s rigging or materials like that,” Winkler said.

Lukezic said the need to shift thinking to adjust to new information goes with the territory of working in archaeology.
“We’ve got all these bricks without any mortar and we’ve got all these containers so it kind of looks like cargo. But I’ll change my mind again tomorrow,” Lukezic said with a laugh.

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Business Wire
December 15, 2004

COSMOS Works(R) design analysis software is helping the internationally known Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution design undersea submersible vehicles for mapping the ocean floor, exploring shipwreck sites, and inspecting networks of pipes and tunnels under the world's cities.

Woods Hole Oceanographic, perhaps best known to the public for the discoveries of the wrecks of Titanic and Bismarck and global research programs involving the human occupied vehicle Alvin and the remotely operated vehicle Jason, also designs autonomous submersible vehicles for universities and government agencies.

Equipped with cameras, lights, and sensors, the submersibles can roam through tight spots such as the holds of sunken ships and around natural obstacles without tethers to hamper their mobility. Woods Hole Oceanographic engineers chose COSMOSWorks from SolidWorks Corporation for its integrated simulation and powerful analysis capabilities.

COSMOSWorks' tight integration with the institutions' SolidWorks(R) 3D mechanical design software creates a single environment that enables engineers to easily switch from design to analysis and back. This lets them analyze their designs and modify them on the fly for maximum performance.

"The ability to create a 3D model, run an analysis, then get the data back into the modeling program without re-entering data saves us valuable time," said Ben G. Allen, a senior engineer in Woods Hole's Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering Department. "COSMOSWorks is intuitive and fast.

We use it to iterate on the design of a specific part to minimize material use and precisely adjust component deflections for assemblies to fit together appropriately."

COSMOSWorks is a 3D desktop design analysis application that simulates how a design will behave under operating conditions. Woods Hole engineers recently used COSMOSWorks to analyze designs for two REMUS series autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV's), one for depths of 100 meters and the other for ocean floor mapping at 6,000 meters.

Woods Hole also used COSMOSWorks to analyze component designs for a submersible used to inspect an aqueduct that supplies drinking water for New York City. Engineers used COSMOSWorks to reduce the vehicles' weight to be strong enough to withstand the pressure at their assigned depths, but light enough to float.

"Ease of use counts even with advanced users like Woods Hole engineers," said Suchit Jain, vice president of analysis products for SolidWorks. "They have the experience and knowledge to master any analysis product out there, but COSMOSWorks is so easy to use that they can get reliable results without investing the time in learning a complicated new application. That makes them more likely to use analysis to optimize their designs, which will save time and money on prototypes and final products."

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution works with SolidWorks-COSMOS reseller R&D Technologies on installation and maintenance.

For more information, visit www.whoi.edu.

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NOAA News
December 14, 2004


Photo courtesy of the U.S. Navy.
View of Marshall Mars showing the size of
the “flying boat” aircraft. Credit “NOAA/HURL".

A watery grave off the Hawaiian coast is yielding answers about World War II-era aircraft and ships. Explorer-researchers from NOAA and the University of Hawaii joined with colleagues from the National Park Service on an ocean mission off the coast of Oahu, Hawaii, to document sites where historic seaplanes, or flying boats, rest on the ocean floor. The joint-agency team surveyed an area around the site of a Japanese mini-submarine that was discovered by NOAA and the University of Hawaii in 2002.

NOAA marine archaeologists conducted two days of survey dives, December 9 and 10, outside of Pearl Harbor. Hans Van Tilburg and Kelly Gleason of the NOAA National Marine Sanctuary Program and LT. Jeremy Weirich of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration conducted non-invasive documentation of known underwater shipwreck and aircraft crash sites of U.S. Navy flying boats dating from as early as the 1920s. They were joined by Jon Jarvis, regional director of the National Park Service and Doug Lentz, Pearl Harbor National Park Service superintendent.

"To create an inventory of historic items, we're using Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory submersibles to systematically explore the ocean off Pearl Harbor," said Weirich. "That inventory will help us make better management decisions."

One seaplane site documented was the Navy's Marshall Mars, a giant flying boat with a 200-foot wingspan that was forced by an engine fire to land at sea off Oahu in 1950, where the seaplane exploded, burned, broke into pieces and sank with no loss of life. The Mars series of aircraft was built to move cargo, primarily between California and Hawaii, and Marshall Mars once carried more than 308 people aloft, a record at the time.

"We really value the partnership between NOAA, the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory and the National Park Service," said Jarvis, "because it combines our expertise in documenting these important underwater resources."

"This survey means a lot," added Lentz. "We're working with NOAA to survey a wider area around the site of the Japanese mini-submarine to determine if there are other resources in the area we want to protect."

When the mini-submarine was discovered in 2002, the four-inch hole in its conning tower was evidence that crewmembers of the U.S. destroyer Ward were right when they claimed to have fired the nation's first shot of World War II, more than a hour before the air attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In February 2004, the Government of Japan agreed that the mini-submarine was now the property of the U.S. government.

"Submerged historic wreck sites are like time capsules from our maritime past," said NOAA National Marine Sanctuary maritime archaeologist Hans Van Tilburg. "In this case, naval aircraft sites shed light on our technological capabilities both before and during World War II. Seaplanes and flying boats played a critical role in Hawaii and the Pacific."


Larger view of the nose of the Marshall Mars resting
upside down on the seafloor. Credit “NOAA/HURL".

George Hutton was a Navy aviation radioman who flew in four of the five Mars seaplanes, including the Marshall Mars. "She was a fine flying boat," he said, "but take off and landing could be a little hairy, depending on the seas." During one port visit, he walked on the Mars wing. "It was like a football field," he said. Hutton was in the Marshall Mars on the first flight of a Mars aircraft west of Hawaii, opening what would become regular routes to the Philippines, and he was thrilled to be in the first Mars seaplane to make a jet-assisted takeoff. In the 1940s and 50s, stories about the Mars seaplanes referred to crewmembers as "Men from Mars," and when an aircraft set a new record for persons aloft, media reported "Mars is Well-Inhabited."

The seafloor survey mission used HURL’s Pisces IV and V research submersibles and at a depth of about 1,400 feet, researchers recorded images of the crash sites, using digital video and still cameras. The three-man submersibles, capable of diving to 6,000 feet, were piloted by HURL's senior pilot Terry Kerby and Pilot Max Cremer. Chris Kelley of HURL used sonar to assist in mapping the sites and in searching for other heritage resources.

Marshall Mars artifacts were first discovered during HURL dives in August 2004. Earlier naval aviation sites in the area have been located, but their identities have yet to be confirmed.

In August, when Kerby and others discovered the nose and keel of what appeared to be a seaplane, Kerby maneuvered the submersible close to the aircraft's nose where the explorers could clearly read the painted word "Marshall." They didn't know what they had until HURL's Steve Price did some research. "Steve showed me the great photo of sailors standing on the wing of Marshall Mars, and the word "Marshall," on the seaplane's nose was exciting to see, and took my memory back to that first day of discovery."

Kerby's excitement was intact on December 9 after a day of exploring. He had just brought the Pisces submersible back to the research ship, and he had new discoveries to describe. "We maneuvered near aircraft debris that was bent and corroded aluminum with traces of dark blue paint. Then we came upon a huge engine, nose in to the bottom. Further on, we saw propellers sticking up, some straight, some twisted, and as we turned the sub, we saw the propellers were attached to a second huge engine that was still on the wing. And then we discovered a third engine. We knew we'd found the main body of Marshall Mars."

The mission results will aid in documentation of aviation crash sites and shipwrecks that will yield information about loss events and site interaction with the marine environment. They will also help confirm the identity and location of submerged cultural resources located within Hawaii's protected marine areas.

"Preservation legislation supports the survey and inventory of these types of sites," Van Tilburg said. "Navy ships and aircraft are specifically protected as state vessels and often as potential wargraves."

The NOAA National Marine Sanctuary Program seeks to increase public awareness of America's maritime heritage by conducting scientific research, monitoring, exploration and educational programs. Today, the sanctuary program manages 13 national marine sanctuaries and one coral reef ecosystem reserve that encompass more than 150,000 square miles of America's ocean and Great Lakes natural and cultural resources.

NOAA's mission includes exploration of the oceans for the purpose of discovery and the advancement of knowledge. Ocean Exploration benefits NOAA and the nation by supporting a program of exploration across many scientific, cultural and technological disciplines, and among many participants. The NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration promotes discovery-based science, collaboration, education and outreach.

The Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory, or HURL, was established by NOAA and the University of Hawaii. Its mission is to study deep water marine processes in the Pacific Ocean.NOAA is dedicated to enhancing economic security and national safety through the prediction and research of weather and climate-related events and providing environmental stewardship of the nation’s coastal and marine resources.

NOAA is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Relevant Web SitesNOAA Office of Ocean Exploration

NOAA National Marine Sanctuary Program

NOAA Reports Discovery of Japanese World War II Submarine

Media Contact:Fred Gorell, NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration, (301) 713-9444 ext. 181

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Kark.com
December 13, 2004

The city of North Little Rock is one step closer to creating a maritime museum, on the banks of the Arkansas River.

Monday night, the city council agreed to purchase two more water vessels, formerly the home of Gator`s Barge and Grill.

The restaurant closed down over the summer after the city did not agree to renew its lease.

North Little Rock Mayor Patrcik Hays says because plans for the msueum are steaming ahead, the city will need some docking facilities along the riverfront.

City leaders plan to purchase the tugboat, "Patriot" and it`s barge, "Shipwreck Mary" for $135,000 from owner Hank Burch.

The city had planned to build docking facilities but construction would cost more than $500,000.

The tugboat was built back in the 1930`s. Mayor Hays says the city may do some renovating to bring it back to its original appearance.

It could be used as a docking facility as well as office space or a gift shop.

"Fifty years after the 2nd World War, we turned our backs on the rivers. Now we`re turning back towards our waterways. This is just one more step, getting closer, because we`re gonna be on the water," explained Hays.

Bringing the tugboat, USS Hoga to North Little Rock is still in the works as well.

After a recent trip, Mayor Hays says the city has completed an agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency and is finishing up and agreement with the US Navy. So they hope to have it here early next year.

The city is also considering bringing in a dinner cruiseboat to go along with the museum, which is still scheduled for opening the first of April.

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News Telegraph
December 14, 2004

Christopher Salisbury, who died on November 27 aged 75, was a Nottinghamshire GP and a leading expert in waterlogged wood.

For more than 30 years, he took a passionate interest in the archaeology of the River Trent, excavating the bottom of gravel quarries along its course while professional archaeologists chose to excavate the former river terraces at the top of the quarries.

Salisbury's approach proved more fruitful, yielding the discovery of Viking and Norman fish traps in the early 1970s. In the 1990s he found the remains of four medieval bridges at Hemington, for which he was named Archaeologist of the Year in 1994 at the British Archaeological Awards; he also won the Pitt-Rivers Award for best amateur project.

Salisbury also discovered a mill, two log boats at Shardlow, and most recently, possibly his most significant find, evidence of a great surface expanse of water at Aston on Trent which makes sense of a complex of ritual monuments that had previously been found there.

Christopher Ronald Salisbury, the son of an electrical engineer, was born at Kenilworth on October 12 1929 and grew up at Royal Leamington Spa. He went to Warwick School and read Medicine at Birmingham University, before doing his National Service with the Royal Army Medical Corps in Hong Kong and in Malaya during the Communist insurgency.

After returning to Nottingham he set up in general practice with his first wife Maxine (née Sunderland), whom he married in 1958. Although a gentle, kind character, he did not believe in prescribing drugs for patients who came to him with no detectable physical symptoms, and he was among the first GPs to warn against the addictiveness of tranquillisers.

Having already begun his work in the gravel quarries, in 1968 Salisbury became a founder member of the Nottingham Historical and Archaeological Society, formed to preserve the city's unique network of man-made subterranean caves. His award-winning photographs of the caves were later used to promote them as a tourist attraction.

His researches in the Trent quarries became widely known over the next 25 years, from his lectures and through the many articles he wrote and illustrated for leading archaeological journals here and in America. Using material he had collected, a Tree Ring Dating Laboratory was founded at the University of Nottingham. His observations of the Trent quarries enabled him to chart and date the river's various meaderings over millennia.

Christopher Salisbury retired as a GP in 1992 to devote more time to archaeology, his knowledge of which he was always happy to share. He was appointed a research associate at the Archaeology Department at the University of Nottingham.

His pet project at the time of his death was the restoration of Fishpond Wood at Owthorpe, a unique system of fish ponds dating from the English Civil War. The ponds had once been part of the estate of Colonel John Hutchinson, who defended Nottingham against the Royalists in 1643, and were described in the memoir of his wife Lucy. Salisbury greatly admired Lucy Hutchinson and heard the rustling of her skirt as he went about his work.

Salisbury's first marriage was dissolved in 1988, when he married, secondly, Hazel Wheeler, a professional archaeologist with the Trent Valley Archaeological Society Research Committee. She survives him, with a son and daughter from his first marriage.

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Foi inaugurada, no Museu da Escola Prática de Artilharia, Vendas Novas, mais uma sala dedicada à temática da primitiva defesa costeira (artilhada) portuguesa, barras do Tejo e Sado, finais Séc. XV- 1640.

O Museu está aberto ao público, gratuitamente, dentro do seguinte horário:

2ª a 5ª feira: 14H00-17H00

Restantes dias: 10h30-12h30; 14h30-17h00

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Space.com
By Bill Christensen
December 10,2004



A robotic fish designed for underwater archaeology, mapping, water cultivation and even fishing has been co-developed by the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Automation Research Institute (of the Chinese Academy of Sciences).

The black-bodied robot fish is about four feet long, and resembles a real fish in both shape and movement. The robot is controlled remotely with a palm-sized control pad. It also has automatic navigation controls and swims at about four kilometers per hour for up to three hours.

The robofish from China is described as being "flexible in action, easy to operate and makes little disturbance to surrounding environment." It has been tested in an underwater search of a sunken warship last August.

This sophisticated robot might be the direct ancestor of the Mitsubishi turbot, the robofish that is the star of Michael Swanwick's 2002 novelette Slow Life. In the story, astronauts gamely explore Titan, one of the moons of Saturn, while doing good public relations by answering constant questions posed for them over the Web. The robofish is used to swim not just in water, but in icy lakes of methane and ammonia.

Consuelo carefully cleaned both of her suit’s gloves in the sea, then seized the shrink-wrap’s zip tab and yanked. The plastic parted. Awkwardly, she straddled the fish, lifted it by the two side-handles, and walked it into the dark slush. She set the fish down. "Now I’m turning it on."

The Mitsubishi turbot wriggled, as if alive. With one fluid motion, it surged forward, plunged, and was gone. Lizzie switched over to the fishcam. Black liquid flashed past the turbot’s infrared eyes. Straight away from the shore it swam, seeing nothing but flecks of paraffin, ice, and other suspended particulates as they loomed up before it and were swept away in the violence of its wake. A hundred meters out, it bounced a pulse of radar off the sea floor, then dove, seeking the depths...

Snazzy Japanese cybernetics took in a minute sample of the ammonia-water, fed it through a deftly constructed internal laboratory, and excreted the waste products behind it. "We’re at twenty meters now," Consuelo said. "Time to collect a second sample."

The turbot was equipped to run hundreds of on-the-spot analyses. But it had only enough space for twenty permanent samples to be carried back home. The first sample had been nibbled from the surface slush. Now it twisted, and gulped down five drams of sea fluid in all its glorious impurity. To Lizzie, this was science on the hoof. Not very dramatic, admittedly, but intensely exciting...

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Delawareonline
By Molly Murray
December 13, 2004


The News Journal/GARY EMEIGH
These pieces of early pottery were found
near Roosevelt Inlet.

Discovery galvanizes interest in archaeology

The shards of colored glass, glazed pottery and yellow brick pumped onto Lewes Beach this fall during a sand renourishment project are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle bearing an image of Delaware's earliest Colonial days.

But state and amateur historians want to do more than solve the puzzle and learn the exact origin of the 300-year-old artifacts.

They also will be sifting for ways to protect other undiscovered troves from Delaware's early recorded history that might remain beneath the Delaware Bay or elsewhere in the Lewes area.

Somehow, they said, they can't allow a repeat of the misadventure that allowed a historic site to be turned into beach debris by a sharp-toothed dredge mining sand to rebuild an eroded shoreline.

State officials and local amateur historians contend there is a need for a comprehensive historical survey of the Lewes area to identify potential historic sites on land and offshore. And more thorough, detailed assessments are needed before similar bottom disturbances by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The last detailed archeological study of Lewes was done in the early 1950s, said Brian Page, Sussex County's historic planner.

As an important commercial center for Colonial-era ships entering Delaware Bay, a thriving fishing port and the site of the first European settlement in Delaware, Lewes is "the cradle for the state," Page said.

The $3.9 million U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project to rebuild Roosevelt Inlet beaches dug into either a 1600s land settlement or an old shipwreck on the floor of the bay about 2,000 feet offshore - an area that may have been above water 300 years ago.

The sand-pumping operation in September and October was preceded in 1996 by a survey using side-scan sonar and a magnetometer that concluded that the site contained nothing significant.

State archaeologists signed off on that survey and the plan to use the dredge site, based on the Corps findings.

But Daniel Griffith, the director of the state Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs, said he was troubled after he reviewed the survey results last week.

"There was one very suspicious target that they missed," he said. "They said it was a cluster of round objects. My suspicion is that what they were picking up were stoneware vessels."

That should have triggered a dive on the site, he said. But that didn't happen, and a second miscue followed once sand pumping started shortly after Labor Day, Griffith said.

Workers misidentified remnants of damaged artifacts as they were piped onto the beach, he said.

"It was obvious to me and I'm a prehistoric archaeologist," he said. Procedures should be in place for work to "stop immediately" for investigation, Griffith said.

Normally, such procedures are in effect, said Robert Dunn, an archaeologist in the Corps' Philadelphia District. But dredge crews thought the survey had cleared the site and a Corps inspector who saw artifacts on the beach thought they were modern-day trash. He contacted the Philadelphia District to report the find but no one told Dunn, the district's only archaeologist.

Previous error
Griffith and other state historians said the Lewes incident is the latest in a series of mishandlings of some of Delaware's most historic sites.

In 1964, an Adena Indian site was discovered during the development of a dirt pit near Frederica. Concerns about damage to that site led to the hiring of a state archaeologist, Griffith said.

The recovery by private treasure hunters of the 18th-century British ship HMS DeBraak in 1984 and 1985 led to concerns about underwater historic areas that attracted national and even international attention. The DeBraak, it turns out, has given historians an unparalleled look at life in the British navy in the late 18th century.

The collection, now in the hands of the state, includes everything from a 40-ton section of the hull to metal spoons etched with the initials of seamen to a delicate glass condiment bottle that once held ketchup.

The DeBraak salvage, which most archaeologists believe was handled poorly because so much was disturbed when the hull was raised, led to passage of a federal law regulating the salvage of historic shipwrecks.

Griffith said the lesson that may come from last week's discovery of what still could be one of Delaware's earliest settlements or the wreck of a ship bringing goods and people to the earliest settlements on Delaware Bay and River, is the need for more detailed work before underwater areas are disturbed.

Lewes Harbor, where there are dozens of shipwrecks, should be surveyed, with wrecks and sites of interest marked for future study, he said.

And "one of the things Delaware ought to be thinking about is establishment of an underwater archaeology person," he said.

Meanwhile, state and federal officials are trying to work out a plan for what happens next at the Lewes site.

Rather than second-guess what could or should have been done, Corps officials say they would like to move forward, secure the beach site and work up a plan to study the offshore dredge location - about 2,000 feet off the beach in front of Lewes Yacht Club near the Roosevelt Inlet.

Corps spokesman Ed Voigt said the Corps would work with state officials on a thorough survey of the site. Planning of that work has already been done.

That work, including sending teams of divers down to the dredge site, will likely give state officials a better picture of whether the artifacts are coming from a shipwreck or a settlement that was once on land.

Initially, state archaeologists including Craig Lukesic and Charles Fithian thought the artifacts came from a settlement that once was on land. They were in near-perfect condition, had no sign of marine growth and didn't smell of salt water. Nor were there artifacts that would typically have been seen from a shipwreck site such as rigging, blocks or copper sheathing that might have protected a wooden hull from damage by marine worms.

But now they aren't so certain. In either case, the discovery gives historians a rare glimpse of early life in Colonial Delaware.

Lukesic said there are few examples of 17th-century artifacts in the state, even though the Swanendael whaling settlement was established in Lewes in 1631.

The discovery has fueled excitement among professional historians, amateur archaeologists and even casual beachcombers.

"Every time you have one of these finds, everybody gets excited," said longtime archaeologist Ned Heite, "My big concern is we are not going to get sustained interest. Let's get excited all the time."

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Delaware online
By Molly Murray
December 13, 2004


Courtesy Permanent Collection of the University of Delaware
A painting by Stanley M. Arthurs depicts the landing of the
Swanendael colonists near Lewes in 1631.

The first clue that something really old was washing up on Lewes Beach was a tiny shard of ceramic pottery.
For state archaeologist Craig Lukesic, it was the green glaze that gave it away.

Lukesic called it "borderware" and described it as pottery made on the border of two counties in England. It was manufactured in the 1600s.

Because there are so few artifacts from Delaware's earliest century of European settlement, Lukesic and fellow archaeologist Charles Fithian got excited.

There was the speckled-brown glazed pottery that looked a little like an old sewer pipe - but wasn't. It turns out these pieces may be fragments from earthenware vessels called Bellarmine jars.

There was the delicate stoneware pottery with decorative blue flowers, swirls and checkerboard patterns, the tin-glazed saltware and hundreds of small pieces of green glass from handblown bottles.

To top it all off, there was yellow brick - a find that pointed to a Dutch settlement.

Over the past week, state historians have concluded that the hundreds of artifacts pumped in during a replenishment project at Lewes Beach date from between 1680 and 1720. That would rule out Delaware's earliest settlement, the Swanendael whaling colony, established in 1631.

But whether from a settlement or shipwreck, the find is still an important one for archaeologists and historians.
The discovery came in the weeks following a $3.9 million U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project to improve the Roosevelt Inlet jetty. Workers pumped excess sand from the inlet and replenished the beach with sand pumped in from a site about 2,000 to 3,000 feet offshore. The pumping started in September and finished in October.

The pottery and glass on the beach might not have attracted much attention in an old community like Lewes, except that there was so much of it.

In Lewes, people dig in their yards and find shards of aged pottery. Artifacts routinely are unearthed when the Lewes & Rehoboth Canal, which opened in 1913, is dredged, said Michael DiPaolo, executive director of the Lewes Historical Society.

Sussex County Historic Planner Brian Page said he found pottery shards poking through the mud and marsh grass when he visited Green Hill Light in Lewes' Great Marsh five years ago. He thinks they were from the 18th century.
"Exactly what it was, I have no idea," he said.

But Page said there was enough of a concentration of artifacts to look like a settlement of some type.

In the 1938 book "Delaware: A Guide to the First State," Lewes is described as being to Delaware what "Plymouth is to Massachusetts and Jamestown is to Virginia." It was a seat of colonial government under three flags: the Dutch, then the Swedes, then the Dutch again and finally the English.

All the while, the small community at the entrance to Delaware Bay was an important stopover for merchant ships on a trade route that linked Europe with the West Indies and settled areas along the East Coast.

Plenty of questions
The discussion of how to protect Delaware's undiscovered historic sites is ongoing, as historians eagerly try to nail down just what the Corps dredge contractor scooped up from the bottom of the bay.

Some still think it is from a land settlement from the 1600s, though probably not from Swanendael.

Fithian, the state archaeologist, said what happened to the 28 Swanendael settlers is still a mystery.

The men were part of a commercial whaling venture financed by the Dutch West India Company.

The settlement, like other Dutch trading colonies, was not intended to be permanent, said Christian J. Koot, a fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware. Koot is studying Dutch-English trade in New York and the West Indies.

He got excited by the Lewes discovery when he heard yellow bricks were found on the beach. Yellow bricks are typically a sign of Dutch settlement.

But what remains a mystery to state archaeologists is why there are so many of them on the beach and why they are an unusual size - slightly bigger than what would have typically been used by early Dutch settlers, Fithian said.

Dutch traders set sail from Europe to the West Indies to trade European goods for tobacco and salt. They sailed north along the Atlantic Coast with stops in what are now Delaware, Virginia and New York, then followed currents to Newfoundland. Ultimately, they headed east to the Netherlands.

For the settlers left to set up the Swanendael colony in Lewes, life would have been harsh, and they would have shared the area with the Siconese Indians, according to the Lewes Historical Society. Friction between the groups proved to be the undoing of the colony.

By one account, trouble with the Indians began when one of the Siconese was thought to have stolen a metal coat of arms from the settlement, Fithian said. In the end, all the Dutch settlers were killed.

Capt. David Pietersen DeVries, who brought the settlers to Lewes in 1631, came back the following year and found the remains of the colonists and their animals. The settlement had been burned. DeVries buried the remains and returned to the Netherlands.

In 1638, the Swedes established Delaware's first lasting settlement in what became Wilmington, landing in the Kalmar Nyckel. The Dutch resettled the Lewes area in about 1660, but the British flag flew over it soon thereafter as a result of a peace treaty.

If the artifacts are not from an early Dutch colony, they could be from a shipwreck from a similar time. Koot said it would not be unusual to find a wide variety of artifacts on a sunken ship from other European countries, including Germany and England.

Page, the Sussex County historic planner, said that while there are records of the various settlements in Lewes, the last detailed survey was done in the early 1950s.

"The whole area needs to have a historic survey," he said. "Lewes is the cradle of our state."

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Delawareonline
By Molly Murray
December 10, 2004


The News Journal/GARY EMEIGH
A piece of dredged-up brick, believed to be Dutch made,
was found Thursday on the beach near Roosevelt Inlet
at Lewes. It came from an off-shore site.

Suspected age of fragments would rule out Delaware's first settlement of Swanendael

State archaeologists surveyed the beach near Roosevelt Inlet for a second straight day Thursday, picking up fragments that may be part of one of Delaware's earliest European settlements.

Among the finds are green bottle glass, distinctive yellow bricks that appear to be Dutch and a fragment of a clay pipe bowl marked with tiny dots called rouletting.

They now know the artifacts, pumped in during a beach restoration project that ended in October, are very old. They probably date to a period from about 1680 to no later than 1720.

"We always wanted to find a site like this," said state archaeologist Craig Lukesic. "Though it's not how we wanted to find it."

Because the artifacts were pumped in during the dredging project, most are broken.

A bread loaf-size piece of granite on the beach, the end of which was severed in a fresh, clean cut, showed state officials just how powerful the dredge can be.

If 1680 proves to be the earliest date of the artifacts once the survey is complete, that would rule out the discovery of Delaware's first settlement, the 1631 Swanendael whaling colony.

But even if the finds don't turn out to be from Swanendael, they are still very early and are rare in a state with few artifacts from its 17th-century past, according to state historians.

Even as state archaeologists picked up bits and pieces from the beach Thursday, they pointed to the many questions surrounding the find.

Among them are which of the many early settlements of Lewes the artifacts came from, how the settlement ended up under 8 feet of water about 2,000 feet off today's beach and how state and federal officials will survey the half-mile long beach area that is covered with 8 to 10 feet of pumped-in sand.

In addition, late Thursday night, Daniel Griffith, the state historic preservation officer and director of the state Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs, said it also is still possible the artifacts may be from a shipwreck.

Initially, state officials had ruled out that option because they found no blocks, no rigging or other pieces of ship hardware that would be expected at a disturbed shipwreck site.

Griffith said a state beach expert told him Thursday that wave action near the entrance to Delaware Bay would have made a land settlement 2,000 feet off the modern-day shore unlikely.

Officials still are trying to determine how they will survey the site just off the beach to see what, if anything, remains at the bottom of Delaware Bay.

"What's on the surface is probably a small part of what's here," said Daniel Griffith, the state's historic preservation officer and director of the state Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs.

Griffith said he is optimistic that the cutterhead dredge used to pump sand onto the beach from about 2,000 feet offshore only touched a part of what may be an artifact-rich site.

One hope is that the artifacts came up at the end of the project when sand-pumping was nearly complete, Griffith said.

Army Corps of Engineers archaeologist Robert Dunn said it appears the artifacts were covered with sand, silt and mud, perhaps buried as deeply as three feet beneath the bay bottom. That may be one reason they are so well-preserved, he said.

State officials such as Lukesic, Griffith and archaeologist Charles Fithian are dating the site based on specific, unique items they found. A green-glazed pottery called borderware is one clue because it was made in the 17th century.
Odd-sized yellow bricks are a sign of Dutch occupation, Fithian said.

The small pipe bowl fragment also appears to be Dutch.

The Swanendael settlement was financed by Dutch investors under the Dutch West India Company. Their purpose was to establish a whaling colony. The 28 settlers were killed by Native Americans.

Swedes, Dutch and English settlers also established colonies in Lewes.

While the mixture of pottery and glass appears to point to a late 17th-century settlement, there is no clear indicator that links the artifacts to a particular group of settlers.

The site was discovered in the weeks after a $3.9 million project to improve the Roosevelt Inlet jetty. Workers pumped sand that had accumulated in the inlet, as well as sand from a site just off the beach, onto the beach to replenish it. The pumping started in early September and concluded in early October.

In the weeks that followed, beachcombers started finding fragments of glass and pottery - rare finds on a beach where treasure hunting typically involves pebbles, seashells and the egg cases of marine creatures such as skates and whelk.

On Thursday, the stretch of beach was closed to the public to give state and federal officials a chance to assess what is there and plan how to survey it. State officials also are asking people who collected artifacts to turn them in so they can be catalogued.

Lukesic said the artifacts are unstable and will deteriorate unless they are conserved. They should be soaked in fresh water as soon as possible to begin removing sea salts, Fithian said.

"If they are not treated, they will disintegrate in time," he said.

Griffith said state officials are working with the Army Corps of Engineers to come up with a plan to dive on the dredge site. They would like to dive during the winter when visibility in the bay is better, he said.

The state also plans to work with local, amateur archaeologists to begin a detailed site survey on the beach.

Peter M. Bon, president of the Sussex Chapter of the Amateur Archaeology Society, said the group is ready to help.

Bon said he visited the beach a few days ago and met a couple who were picking up artifacts. Bon said he worried that fragments from Delaware's past might end up on a picture frame for sale at a craft show if something wasn't done.

At a meeting Thursday night, members of the society who had collected artifacts brought them in. Among the finds were more fragments of glass and pottery and a decorated metal spoon handle, a candle stick holder and a crushed tea pot. Most of the pieces also dated from the late 17th Century, Fithian said.

On Thursday, Caroline Whalen-Strollo, an amateur archaeologist from Bethany Beach, walked the shoreline and picked up pieces of pottery and glass that she said she plans to turn over to the state.

"People don't know what they have," she said. "This history belongs to all of us. ... No one correlates it's their heritage they are losing."

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Egypt online
December 11 , 2004

The Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) will embark within few days on carrying out an emergency project to rescue the ancient sun boats, dubbed "Cheops" in the Giza pyramids area.

The boats have been badly affected by the strong sun, especially by the ultra-violet rays which damage the organic components of the wooden hulls.

SCA Chairman Zahi Hawas said the sun Boats Museum displays, among others, a boat which is the only one of its kind in the world. The museum's glassy windows allow the sun to penetrate directly into the body of the boat, a matter that exposes the ship to damage. Other museums in the world have only small windows that do not allow the sun rays to penetrate inside, he said.

The SCA has conducted a scientific study proposing a set of measures to preserve the boats. One of these measures is to cover the large windows with a treated plastic material that mitigates the impact of the sun rays and allows slight lighting inside the museum.

The rectangular boat pits found on the south side of the Great Pyramid were discovered in 1954, covered by huge limestone slabs, containing the dismantled remains of two Royal Boats.

It is thought that these boats transported Cheops (Khufu)'s body to his (Greater) Pyramid, since it was a common practice to bury all items connected with the Royal Funeral, close to the' final resting-place of the King.

One of the boats made up of 1,224 separate parts was reconstructed by being stitched together using ropes made of vegetable fibers. After its reassembly, the boat measuring 43.3 (142ft) long is now housed in the Solar Boat Museum next to the pyramid.

The boat pits could have been symbolic transport mechanisms for the King's ascent to the heavens -westwards with the setting sun and eastwards with the rising sun.

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Timesunion.com
By Wilson Ring, Associated Press
December 9, 2004

Lake Champlain Maritime Museum divers explore 19th-century boats discovered by a DEC sonar scan.

MONTPELIER, Vt. -- A team of scuba divers from the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum has explored three underwater shipwrecks in the Hudson River that the lead diver describes as significant archaeological finds.

Two of the three wrecks, a canal boat and a sloop found in the river in Nyack, within sight of the Tappan Zee Bridge, were carrying coal. The third vessel, possibly a schooner, appeared to have been abandoned, said Maritime Museum Director Art Cohn.

"It's an extraordinary selection of North American shipwrecks that had not previously been studied," said Cohn, who has charted and explored shipwrecks on Lake Champlain for the past 30 years.

All three Hudson River wrecks date to the 19th century, he said.

The wrecks were spotted by a sonar scan of the river between New York City and the Capital Region that was conducted by the state Department of Environmental Conservation. That survey was meant to map fish habitat, said Cohn.

"They reached out to us with the idea that we would try to see if our tried and true techniques of measurement could be applied to these shipwrecks in these conditions," Cohn said. "It worked better than any of us could hope. It opened up a body of objects and information that has previously not been accessible."

The current on the river is fast and the water is brackish, an environment that makes it more difficult for such wrecks to survive.

Cohn said the wrecks were relatively well preserved because they were mostly buried in the mud.

The Hudson River project is being spearheaded by the Marine Sciences Research Center of Stony Brook University on Long Island. It was sponsored by the state DEC and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

Cohn said museum officials would be working with the sponsoring agencies to try to decide what is to be done with the Hudson River wrecks, both those that were explored this year, and the other wrecks that have not been explored.

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Fredericksburg.com
By Ryan McGinnis
December 9, 2004

REVIEW

American history, Disney style, with 'National Treasure'
With a great story line, Disney is back on top in the box office with "National Treasure." It's one of the better movies recently coming from Disney that isn't animated--the best since "Pirates of the Caribbean."

The story starts in 1976, when a young Benjamin Franklin Gates is told the story of a great treasure, sought after for centuries.

The movie flashes forward to present day. Gates (Nicholas Cage) is on an expedition with Ian Howe (Sean Bean), looking for a fabled shipwreck--which holds a clue to find the treasure.

When they discover that the map to find the treasure is on the back of the Declaration of Independence, the two men begin a deadly rivalry--one trying to steal the document, the other, Gates, trying to save it.

As Gates races to protect what he calls "the most important document in the world," he faces danger from Howe and disbelief from the outside world.

The overall plot of "National Treasure" presents a typical Disney good vs. evil premise, with a slew of big-name actors--Cage, Bean, Jon Voight and, for "Pulp Fiction" fans, a small part played by "The Wolf" himself, Harvey Keitel.

Sadly, Disney's writing department falls short. Character development is a flaw here.

Cage's character seems ultimately too perfect--he knows seemingly every detail of American history, and is a former Navy SEAL as well.

It's as if they were trying to make the next generation of superheroes both physically strong and history majors.

Still, if viewers can distance themselves from the poor characterization, "National Treasure" is an entertaining movie. It compiles the traditional treasure-hunting story and American history.

In the mood for an easy-to-follow movie that has frequent action-suspense scenes and keeps you guessing about the treasure? "National Treasure" is for you.

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Minerva Magazine
Review by Sean Kingsley



Edited by Carol V. Ruppé and Janet F. Barstad
Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 2003
881pp, 124 b/w illus.
Hardback, £124

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At 881 pages and over 2kg this massive undertaking is more doorstop than handbook. Nevertheless, the editors are to be congratulated in managing and controlling a huge body of geographically wide and chronologically diverse material, with 48 chapters herded into three broad sections.

The first offers a highly truncated, but engaging potted history of underwater archaeology (Janet Barstad thoughtfully tries to drag us away from the time-capsule term by calling shipwrecks ‘human history in a bottle’) and an invaluable and highly accurate reference timeline by John Broadwater for marine exploration from 480 BC to 2001.

Section 2, ‘The Geography of Underwater Archaeology’, is the beef of this sandwich and leads us a merry dive across the USA, South America, and the Caribbean, through Europe and the Mediterranean, to the East, Australia, and Africa.

Entries are concise, focusing on traditions of maritime heritage management, key sites and research, maritime museums, and technological developments.

For an up-to-date analysis of the state of play in underwater archaeology this section is highly informative (written by the leading specialists), although several scholars seem to suffer from head-in-sand syndrome by deliberately ignoring the work of colleagues toiling in similar countries and regions.

Section 3, ‘Issues in Underwater Archaeology’ looks at current legislation, technology, and government agencies, but ends up being far too specific to America, which is of course meaningless within a Mediterranean milieu.

For the uninitiated, this handbook is a first-class, undaunting introduction to underwater archaeology, enabling the reader to grasp the current situation rapidly and accurately.

For the specialist its importance lies in its accessibility to work conducted across the globe, of which it is often difficult to keep abreast.

Make no mistake, underwater archaeology is now a massive subject and a source of critical primary data.

For Professor George Bass, ‘the most important archaeological discoveries of the first half of the 21st century will be made underwater’ (p. 804).

Certainly the most sensational are likely to emerge from the deep blue sea, but, as Bass concurs, perhaps the time has arrived when the very term marine archaeology should be abandoned in favour of period specialisation.

After all, if we are excavating wrecks of the 5th century BC, 1st century AD, or 14th century AD, technically we are simply Classicists, Romanists or medievalists.

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The Center for Field Studies at George Mason University is happy to announce it will offer an undergraduate level course entitled Exploring Historical Underwater Archaeology.

This semester long course offers students the opportunity to learn the techniques and tools used to document and record submerged cultural resources.

Students will investigate several shipwrecks in the Washington, DC area. NCLS 395 is a 3-credit course that will meet on Tuesday evenings from 7:20 to 10:00 PM starting January 25, 2005.

A non-credit option is available for this class.

For more information about this course contact CFS@gmu.edu or call (703) 993-1740.

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Transport Amphorae and Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean

Acts of the International Colloquium at the Danish School at Athens, September26-29, 2002, edited by Jonas Eiring and John Lund (Monograph of the Danish School at Athens Vol. 5).

Details, including table of contents and brief description, can be viewed here.

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Delaware online
By Molly Murray
December 9, 2004


The News Journal/GARY EMEIGH
This toy soldier, one of three found on the shore at Lewes,
may be 300 years old. The soldiers were found by amateur
archeologist Bill Winkler, of Ocean View.

Thousands of broken artifacts, perhaps from Delaware's first village, found at Lewes.

A long-lost whaling settlement from the early colonization of Delaware in the 1600s may have been discovered - and ravaged - this fall by a federal dredging crew pumping sand from the floor of the Delaware Bay onto a beach near Lewes.

The Army Corps of Engineers replenishment operation definitely hit something in the silt about a half-mile off the beach on the southeast side of Roosevelt Inlet.

Some local history buffs think the pottery shards, glass and other artifacts recently discovered littering the rebuilt beach come from a shipwreck.

But state historians who have examined the relics said they think they come from an early settlement - a community established by Europeans on land that long ago became submerged as the sands shifted in and around Cape Henlopen.

Some think it could even be the very first Dutch foothold in what became Delaware - the whaling village Swanendael, established by 28 Dutch settlers who lasted a year before being killed by Native Americans.

If the artifacts do come from Swanendael, "that would be a huge deal," said E. Michael DiPaolo, executive director of the Lewes Historical Society.

And one that would infuriate historians who long have searched for any trace of the colony.

Amateur archeologist Bill Winkler, of Ocean View, said he was outraged that a historic site was disturbed by a beach renourishment project. The artifacts were badly damaged in the dredging process, he said.

"It's devastating," he said.

The Lewes discovery came in recent weeks as beachcombers started finding hundreds of pieces of broken pottery, glass and other artifacts on the beach, prompting state officials on Wednesday to close to the public the half-mile stretch of sand near the inlet for a detailed survey of the site.

A dive team probably will go off shore to see what remains at the dredge site. State officials also are asking people who may have collected artifacts from the beach to turn them over to the state so a detailed catalog of the artifacts can be compiled.

Pumping completed
The renourishment of the Lewes beach was part of a $3.9 million Army Corps of Engineers project to improve the jetty at Roosevelt Inlet, limit sand shoaling in the inlet and restore the storm-damaged beach.

Starting just after Labor Day weekend, a corps contractor started pumping 11,000 cubic yards of sand from the inlet and 165,000 cubic yards of sand from an underwater site about 3,000 feet off the beach on the southeast side of the inlet, said Merve Brokke, a spokesman for the corps. The work was finished in early October.

"There's no doubt in my mind our dredge hit a buried site about 2,000 feet off the beach," said Robert Dunn, district archeologist with the corps in Philadelphia.

Dunn and Craig Lukesic, an archeologist with the state Office of Historic Preservation, visited the beach on Wednesday and began looking at the artifacts that are mixed amid the sand.

"Right now, the beach is just littered with thousands of pieces," said amateur archeologist Mike Bullard, of Lewes, who also spent several hours on the beach.

Lukesic said he thinks the artifacts came from a small whaling settlement that probably was built right along the Lewes shoreline. Some of the pieces may have been from a trash pile, he said.

"Archeologically, we don't have much from 17th-century Delaware," he said.

If the site turns out to be the Swanendael settlement, the timing would be perfect for Lewes, which will celebrate it's 375th anniversary in 2006, said DiPaolo, of the Lewes Historical Society.

"This is our Roanoke Island," he said, referring to an early "lost colony" in North Carolina. In 1587, over 100 British settlers arrived on the island on North Carolina's coast and established the first English settlement in America. Within three years, they had vanished.

John C. Kraft, a geologist and expert in the movement of sand at Lewes and Cape Henlopen, said the shoreline in the 1600s would have been far different from how we see it today. Cape Henlopen, for instance, would have been more rounded.

Kraft said several years ago he used a map of Swanendael drawn by one of the settlers to try to pinpoint its location. He said it is possible the offshore dredging site could be Swanendael, but calculations he made several years ago did not place the site so far off the modern-day beach.

"It's not impossible," he said. "We never have known quite the scale" of the early Dutch map.

A marker along the Lewes and Rehoboth Canal near the College of Marine Studies commemorates the colony. It is a few hundred feet landward of Roosevelt Inlet, which was dug in the late 1930s.

If the site is Swanendael, it could be significant for the state.

DiPaolo said that the establishment of the Swanendael site by the Dutch gave William Penn the legal grounds he needed to claim the land - a claim hotly disputed by Lord Baltimore.

"Without this colony, the state of Delaware would not exist today," he said.

Shipwreck theory
But not everyone is convinced the artifacts are from Swanendael - or any land settlement.

Winkler said he is convinced the artifacts are from an old shipwreck because he found what he described as ballast stones among debris on the beach that included three toy soldiers, a crumpled pewter tea pot and broken pottery.

Bullard, who wrote a book on a schooner that foundered off Indian River and has become known as the China Wreck, said he would like to get permission to dive at the dredging site because he also thinks the find is a shipwreck.

Bullard said he found similar artifacts on Lewes Beach in 1999 and heard that three ship's anchors had been recovered from the area by commercial fishermen at about the same time.

"Hopefully, the dredger didn't destroy the wreck," he said.

The Delaware Bay and Atlantic Coast are a graveyard for hundreds of small and large ships. Some wrecks are well documented, but others were never recorded.

In his dive guide to Shipwrecks of Delaware and Maryland, author Gary Gentile lists dozens of wrecks ranging from World War II submarines to the British Brig Debraak, which sunk in a sudden windstorm off Cape Henlopen in 1798.

Because there are so many wreck sites, state and federal officials take special steps to try to avoid them when they look for sand sites for beach renourishment projects.

Dunn said corps officials did not anticipate the most recent discovery because they had hired a consultant to survey the site in 1996 with a magnetometer, which detects metal, and side-scan sonar. Nothing unusual was identified, he said.

Dunn said he now thinks he knows why - "you wouldn't see it." A settlement, unlike a ship, would not have had much metal that would be picked up with a magnetometer.

"It would have had such a faint signal, it wouldn't have had shipwreck characteristics," he said.

The site also was probably covered by more than a meter of silt, sand and mud. And there were no records of a historic site or shipwreck in the area, he said.

"We knew there was a whaling settlement somewhere along the coast," Dunn said. "We had no idea it was that far out."

Once the dredging started, no one on the crew was looking for artifacts because they didn't expect to see any, Dunn said.

A corp inspector noticed some pottery shards coming onto the beach with the sand and water and reported it to the Philadelphia District office. But no one told Dunn of the discovery because they assumed it was modern-day trash.

Historians and archeologist said items that have been found are green glazed pottery, known as "borderware" that dates from the 1600s, and fragments of earthenware called Bellarmine Jars that were used to hold liquids. They also found fragments from square, green glass bottles that would have been common in the 1600s.

Lukesic, the state historian, said that the artifacts don't have barnacle scars or smell of sea water, and the edges are sharp. That indicates they were recently broken, probably by the dredge and the trip through a pipe to the beach.

"These artifacts are not waterworn," he said. "They obviously have been ripped from some intact environment."

Lukesic said state officials want to figure out what happened at the site, and work with the corps to minimize damage to the offshore site. Lukesic and DeBraak archeologist Chuck Fithian plan to attend a meeting of a local amateur archeology society tonight at 7 p.m. at the Zwaanendael Museum in Lewes.

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Boston.com
December 7, 2004

FRAUD DETECTION
A group of Danish scientists is about to unfold a 40-year-old controversy over a map that's either a genuine 600-year-old antique or a clever fraud.

Yale University acquired the Vinland map, which shows part of the east coast of North America before the arrival of Christopher Columbus, in 1965.

Scholars initially concluded it was a valuable lost Viking document, although questions over the age of the parchment and the ink quickly arose, and the debate has never ended.

Last week, specialists from the Royal Library in Copenhagen visited the map to examine it and two medieval volumes to which it was once bound.

''It would be of great importance if this map proved to be a genuine map," said Jorgen D. Simonson, a Danish businessman with a penchant for Viking-era artifacts, who is funding the research. ''But there've been too many -- let's call it forgeries -- in the States."

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No âmbito da assinatura do Protocolo de Cooperação entre o Município de Cascais / Museu do Mar - Rei D. Carlos e o Instituto Português de Arqueologia / CNANS, realizar-se-á no amanhã, dia 09 de Dezembro, pelas 18.00 h no Museu do Mar - Rei D. Carlos a Cerimónia de assinatura do Protocolo.

Esta Sessão será procedida de uma conferência subordinada ao tema "A Valorização do Património Arqueonáutico do Concelho de Cascais", proferida pelo Dr. Francisco Alves, Director do CNANS.

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The Tims of India

NEW DELHI: Culture Minister Jaipal Reddy said on Monday that excavation conducted so far at nine sites has not revealed any trace of the lost river Saraswati.

He also made it clear that the UPA government has not extended the sanction for the project given by the NDA government.

During Question Hour in the RS, Reddy, giving a progress report of the Saraswati River Heritage Project launched by the NDA government, said that though the project report was prepared in September 2003 envisaging a cost of Rs 36.02 crore, it was later reduced to Rs 4.98 crore.

According to Reddy, six sites were taken up for excavation after the project was sanctioned while three sites were being excavated earlier. But so far only remains of Harappan and pre-Harappan times have been discovered.

Reddy also promised to look into suggestions for a comprehensive study of the Saraswati river through remote sensing and archaeology only after the current excavations get over.

CPM leader Nilotpal Basu wanted to know who was behind the Saraswati project and whether the central advisory board of archaeology's permission was taken.

Reddy said the idea was mooted by a committee headed by the then culture minister Jagmohan which later took the advisory board’s clearance.

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Chinaview.cn

BEIJING, Dec. 6 (Xinhuanet) -- Chinese scientists say they have produced a submarine for underwater archeological research, as well as for underwater photography, seabed maps drawing and sea rescue.

The Beijing Morning Post reports the sub is 1.23 meter, or about 4 feet long, operates at a speed of up to 1.5 meter per second and can work for two to three hours.

Earlier this year, the submarine successfully helped archeologists study an ancient warship in south-east Fujian province.

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Cook County News-Herald
By Joan Farnam


Fourth grade teacher Jana Larson
dressed in a diver’s suit and students
had a chance to see how it worked.
Dave Cooper, an experienced
underwater archaeologist who is an
archaeologist for the National Park
Service, led the class. He can be seen
in the background.

Fourth graders in Deb Waage and Jana Larson’s classes explored the mysteries of underwater archaeology recently and in the process discovered something about Grand Marais history as well as developed new detective skills.

And, if talking with a few of the students about the class is any indication, the kids just loved it. Sylvia Frazer, Clay Johnson, Cecilia Schnobrich, Justin Goldstein, Kieran Scannell and Colin Everson couldn’t stop talking about all the things they had learned in the shipwreck class taught by Park Service archaeologist Dave Cooper.

Cooper, the fourth graders said, was a 41-year-old underwater archaeologist who had dived in 80 wrecks and had spent a total of 1,000 hours underwater in his lifetime.

“He’s been everywhere,” Kieran said. Cooper said he told the students about some of shipwrecks he has explored around the world and in Lake Superior, including two in the Grand Marais harbor — “The Elgin,” a 150-foot schooner that broke up right in the harbor during a bad storm in 1906 and the steamer “Liberty,” which burned and sank in the harbor in 1919.

He also dived to see “The America,” the ship that plied the waters along the North Shore during the early years and played a crucial role in Grand Marais history.

“The America” sank off Isle Royale, the students said, but, like all shipwrecks in Lake Superior, it is well preserved. “Lake Superior is so cold, it helps preserve ships,” Sylvia said.

The students did more than study marine history, too. They also about learned about the physics of diving as well as the research methods used to analyze shipwrecks, Cooper said.

In that exercise, students explored (in the dark, with flashlights) a mock shipwreck set up on a classroom floor and tried to figure out what happened, the age of the vessel, the people on board, the type of ship it was — all based on clues from the artifacts. They did it, too. “It was neat,” Justin said.

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Wouwt.com

The Missouri River near Vermillion, South Dakota and Obert, Nebraska is currently at its low ebb. With years of drought to compound the low levels, the river has revealed the wreck of a steamship that sank more than a century ago.It must have been a grand sight, steamships carrying supplies and people up the Missouri River.

We know the journey was dangerous, 250 or more vessels shipwrecked. With the Missouri low, the river has revealed one of its ghosts, the skeleton of a steamship believed to have sunk 134 years ago.

Delighted historians and scientists are studying the wreckage. "The sides of the vessel are visible, you can see them under the water," said University of South Dakota Prof. Larry Bradly. Now that the wreckage is visible, experts have surmised why it sank.

There are tree trunks jutting from the river, known as snags, and steamboat captains knew they were treacherous. Hiding just under the surface of the water, they would rip big holes in the bottom of steamboats.

An enormous inverted oak tree is at the front of the hull. It's believed to have sealed the boat's fate. "It's as if the shell collapsed, the back broke, and it fell just like that," said University of South Dakota Prof. Brian Molyneaux.Scientists hope to determine exactly which steamship this is, possibly the Morrow, a military vessel, or the North Alabama, which was headed to Montana and sank October 27, 1870.

Nearby, on the Nebraska side of the river, steamships used to get wood from a man named Wieseman. A memorial to his five children who were killed by Indians still stands. "That's one of the landmarks we use to estimate this was the North Alabama, because the reference was it was above Wieseman's wood yard and below Bow Creek," said Bradly.

The mighty Missouri current long ago carried away the ship's cargo. The steamship's remains are being studied and photographed, but excavation is nearly impossible.

Soon the river will take back what it took more than a century ago. "When the water rises, we won't see it again and give somebody, another generation, the experience we're enjoying today," said Paul Hedron with the National Park Service, which is exploring what it can do to protect the wreck until the river rises again.

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News Observer

An Army bomber sank a German sub just off the Outer Banks in 1942. Now that the wreck's location has become widely known, a scramble is on to protect it from looters.


Fish and a diver, right, swim around the encrusted conning
tower of the wreck of the German submarine U-701 off the
North Carolina coast. Divers have stripped artifacts from
the sub, which the German government considers a war
grave for at least five crewmen.
Photo by Paul Hurdy for the News & Observer

By Jerry Allegood, Staff Writer

HATTERAS -- Sixty-two years ago a German submarine prowled the Hatteras waters. Its mission: Sink anything afloat.

U-701, commanded by a 29-year-old orphan from Hamburg named Horst Degen, was carrying out the Nazi plan to sever besieged Britain from its lifeblood of American war materiel. But on July 7, 1942, an Army bomber caught the U-boat cruising on the surface and sent it to the bottom, 22 miles east of Ocracoke Inlet.

At least five crew members made the U-701 their crypt. Now, with the wreck laid bare by shifting sands, the ship is a target again.

Souvenir hunters have stripped artifacts from the U-701 and have tried to enter the sub, which the German government considers a war grave. Sport divers and the U.S. government are trying to protect the site.

Joseph Schwarzer, executive director of the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum at Hatteras, said the U-701 should be afforded the respect the United States expects for its own hallowed ground. "How would we feel if someone tried to dig up Normandy?" he said, referring to D-Day memorials in France.

In World War II's early years, German submarines operating in "wolf packs" terrorized America's Atlantic coast, often sinking freighters within sight of shore. The U-boats -- unterseeboots, in German -- were responsible for sending 360 merchant ships to the bottom in what came to be known as the Battle of the Atlantic. One Navy account estimated that in just the section of ocean off the coast of North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland, U-boats caused the deaths of more than 800 seamen.

America retaliated by deploying sub-chasing ships and mounting continual air patrols.

U.S. forces sank at least four U-boats off the North Carolina coast. American depth charges sank the U-576 about 20 miles east of Ocracoke, but its wreckage has not been located.

The Coast Guard cutter USS Icarus sank the U-352 near Cape Lookout, and the destroyer USS Roper sent U-85 to the bottom near Nags Head.

Divers have stripped both the U-352 and the U-85. But only recently has the location of the U-701 become widely known, and that has spurred efforts to keep it from suffering the same fate.

Sunk off Ocracoke
After its commissioning in July 1941, the U-701 made three war cruises. It ranged from German U-boat bases in Kiel, Germany, and St.-Nazaire, France, through the North Sea, once operating so near Iceland that crew members later told interrogators they could see snow-covered cliffs.

On the third cruise, Degen and his crew, part of a wolf pack of 11 subs, headed for America.

Armed with 14 torpedoes and a deck gun, the U-701 was assigned the mission of placing mines at Hampton Roads, Va., then hunting off North Carolina. By one account, it sank nine ships and damaged five others on that cruise.
On the afternoon of July 7, 1942, patrolling Army pilot Lt. Harry Kane -- who later lived in Kinston -- spotted the boat as it cruised on the surface off Cape Hatteras.

"Airplane, there," shouted first naval lieutenant Konrad Junker, according to an account that Degen gave Navy interrogators.

As the U-boat dived, Kane swooped down and dropped depth charges that heavily damaged the stern, killing some of the crew.

"You saw it too late," Degen told Junker.

"Yes," Junker replied.

Of the 43 crew members, 33 escaped the sinking. A Navy report in 1942, based on interviews with survivors, described a harrowing ordeal in which the men struggled to stay afloat over two days.

Degen said the survivors faced exhaustion, hunger and thirst in the sea. At one point, a lemon and coconut floated by. "Each man received a swallow of coconut milk, a piece of the meat and everyone had the opportunity to suck the lemon," Degen told Navy interrogators.

Before dawn, two more men drowned. "The stronger saw their comrades drown one by one," the report said. "Some went mad before dying."

The captain and six others were rescued after a Navy blimp found the men and dropped a life raft with food. The men, flayed by the harsh sun, were picked up by a seaplane and kept as prisoners of war.

"Thus we escaped the 'reaper' to whom we had already given our hand," the captain said in the report.

The rest of the crew was dead.

Finding U-701
In the years after the war, Degen, who became an engineer in civilian life, corresponded with divers and U-boat enthusiasts. But the location of the U-701 remained a mystery for nearly five decades.

Uwe Lovas, an amateur diver and wreck buff from Fredericksburg, Va., hunted for the U-701 for years. He found it in 1989. He recalled that his brother, Ron, went down first and wasn't sure what the tubelike object was.

Lovas, 44, said he was so excited he began hyperventilating and jumped in the water without his mask. When he calmed down, he saw the distinctive outline of the ship in 120 feet of water. Damage to the stern and the open hatches where the crew escaped matched accounts of its sinking.

"It was surreal," he said.
He kept the location secret, partly out of deference to Degen, whom he befriended after he notified the captain of his find.

Lovas said the U-701 was in "basically pristine condition" when he and his brother first dived on it 15 years ago. He said he gave Degen, the captain, some small objects from the ship but otherwise left it intact.

Because the submarine is near the Gulf Stream in strong currents, he said, it is often covered and uncovered with sand.

Other divers found the wreckage earlier this year, apparently after Hurricane Isabel in September 2003 shifted sands that had helped hide it.

Tampering begins
Salvage hunters have already been at work, according to Craig Cook, a Virginia physician and promoter of the preservation effort. He said divers reported in the summer of 2004 that a periscope was missing, some deck fittings had been removed and someone had tried to enter the sub through the conning tower.

A spokesman for the German Embassy in Washington, who, by custom, declined to be identified, said his government is trying to determine what can be done to protect the U-701. The German government has investigated what the spokesman called an "alleged intrusion" of the site.

Steve Pike, a U.S. State Department spokesman, said the German government has expressed concern but has not filed a complaint or protest. He said federal officials were considering options for protecting the wreck, but he could not discuss possible actions.

Jack Green, a spokesman for the Naval Historical Center in Washington, said federal legislation passed in October aims to stop such tampering with military shipwrecks and aircraft. He said the new law brings together policies already in effect and provides additional protection.

The new law allows archaeological research permits and provides enforcement measures. Under the law, the government can fine a violator $100,000 a day.

The law covers U.S. ships and aircraft, but regulations against disturbing wrecks could cover foreign vessels if a government requested action. They would apply to U-701 if Germany requests protection.

Green said that it's impractical for federal agencies to "hover over" any wrecks far out at sea, but that the government can take action when incidents come to light.

Schwarzer, the museum director, said the law's stiffened penalties may deter looting. "It has gone from a soft 'wish you wouldn't do that' to 'If you do that, we can make your life miserable,' " he said.

Lovas said he was shocked to hear that the location of U-701 had been widely distributed and was disappointed to see evidence of tampering when he dived on the wreck last summer.

"It was something we had left untouched all these years," he said.

The tide turns
"Degen believes that U-boat successes in American waters cannot continue at the original tempo," a Navy officer wrote in an intelligence report on U-701. Degen was correct: The summer of 1942 was the peak of Germany's success with its submarine campaign.

By 1943, the American war machine's production was outstripping Germany's ability to sink ships. And advances in intelligence and technology allowed convoys to avoid submarines and enabled sub hunters to find them. Of the 39,000 German submariners in World War II, 28,000 died.

In May 1943, German navy commander Admiral Karl Donitz, whose youngest son died on U-954, withdrew his submarines from the Atlantic.

The Battle of the Atlantic was won. The evidence lies on the ocean floor, 22 miles east of Ocracoke Inlet.

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MDJ online
December 6, 2004

The wreck of the SS Republic off the coast of Georgia is a virtual gold and silver mine.The sidewheel steamer, once a Confederate and then Union warship, sank about 100 miles from the Georgia shore in October 1865.The Republic had sailed from New York bound for New Orleans, reportedly carrying $400,000 in specie at 1865 face value.

It was a prize worth pursuing, but not until 2003 did treasure-hunting Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc. locate the shipwreck lying 1,700 feet deep in the Gulf Stream. The company won title and ownership of the wreck, its cargo, the gold, silver and other treasure.

Last week, Odyssey announced it had completed inspecting and excavating in the main area of the wreck.More than 51,000 gold and silver coins have been recovered, including $20 Double Eagles, $10 Eagles, silver half dollars and quarter dollars, most of them minted between the 1840s and 1865. Estimated retail value should exceed $75 million, according to Odyssey. In addition, more than 13,000 artifacts, including 6,300 bottles, have been recovered.

The coins recovered so far represent only about 25 percent of the total gold and silver that research indicates the Republic was carrying, according to Odyssey.

Now the focus shifts to the debris trail created when the ship broke apart in sinking to the ocean floor. Greg Stemm, co-founder of Odyssey, said in a statement last week that searchers had not found the purser's safe or any other safe.

"It leads us to theorize that it may have fallen off when the main deck cabins, which we believe housed the purser's office, were detached from the main deck," he said. "We hope that we can follow the debris field to the spot where all the artifacts from those main deck cabins should be lying." He said some "interesting artifacts" have already been found in the debris field, adding: "Now we plan on following them like a trail of bread crumbs."

This improbable saga began in 1853 when the ship was launched as the SS Tennessee, 210 feet long by 34 feet wide, driven by one huge piston that powered two 28-foot iron sidewheels. The ship could carry 100 passengers and 5,000 barrels of cargo.

After her early days shuttling between Baltimore and Charleston, the Tennessee made a successful transatlantic voyage, then was sold twice, first outfitted to haul California Gold Rush miners and then engaged in taking soldiers of fortune to fight in Nicaragua.

When the Civil War started, the Confederate Navy impounded the Tennessee and used her as a blockade runner. She was captured by the Yankees, then after being damaged in a gale, was sold to a New York shipper that renamed her the SS Republic.

On the last, fateful voyage from New York, the Republic stalled without power in a hurricane and went down on the afternoon of October 25, 1865, taking her treasure to the bottom of the Atlantic.

But only for 139 years.

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Concord Monitor online

By SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
December 04. 2004

In a lagoon in the Indian Ocean, somewhere 25 feet below the surface, Robert Graf is chiseling off chunks of granite and sucking up sand and grit with a four-inch-wide vacuum dredge.

Graf, a 49-year-old American treasure hunter, is searching for the entrance to a stone vault he believes contains a pirate hoard - part of what many consider the largest high-seas heist in history - stashed nearly 300 years ago.

A former U.S. Air Force technical instructor, Graf breathes through a 50-foot-long bright pink hose attached to an air tank on shore. He wears a face mask, a tattered wet suit and 26 pounds of lead weight strapped to his waist.

Off and on for 15 years, he has been hauling up stone and sand in search of the prize he's confident lies beneath the waters of this rocky beach on Mah_De, the largest of the 115 granitic and coralline islands that form the Seychelles.

Historians believe that cached somewhere in this archipelago are the plunders of Oliver Le Vasseur, aka La Buse, a French pirate who roamed the Indian Ocean during the early 1700s.

For the December issue of Smithsonian magazine, Graf launched into a breathless retelling of how he'd voyaged some 10,000 miles from his Colorado home, married a Seychellois hotel reservations manager and spent more than $450,000 of his own money looking for a treasure that others have failed to find.

"In 1923 a rare storm came through the Seychelles," Graf says, "It eroded many of the beaches." One particular beach was in Mah_De near the home of Rose Savy, a local landowner. Supposedly, the storm exposed boulders on her property with mysterious markings. The markings might be related to a set of 200-year-old papers, which La Buse is believed to have flung at the crowd before his execution.

Graf, who moved to Mah_De in 1984 to manage a satellite-tracking station for a U.S. contractor, first learned about La Buse from a magazine article. By then copies of the La Buse papers were in the hands of another treasure hunter, John Cruise-Wilkins, who was resuming work started by his father, who'd acquired the papers in 1949 from Rose Savy and squandered 27 years looking for the treasure.

Graf agreed to help fund Cruise-Wilkins' project, and the two toiled together in the rocks for four years before Graf broke with his partner over where to search. "Cruise-Wilkins gave me copies of the papers," recalls Graf, "and told me to figure it out for myself." Graf then negotiated an exclusive agreement with the Seychelles government to dig on his own, which he did until 1998, when a license to continue was given to Cruise-Wilkins for two years. In April 2003, Graf once again obtained permission to dig.

Graf says he narrowed his search by trying to reconcile the La Buse papers with the markings on the rocks, which led him to the spot where he constructed his lagoon. "I tried to get into the mind-set of pirates," he says, "I had this dream, and every single morning for two or three weeks I'd wake up wondering 'What does this single dot on the rocks mean?'"
Today it's thought that La Buse's share of the Cabo heist could be worth $200 million, but Graf says that figure varies depending on who you talk to. He's heard sums as high as $500 million. "But even if it's only $5 million," he says, "that's still a lot of money." Uunder Seychelles law, he says, half of any earnings must go to the government. Yet time is running out. Graf's excavation permit is due to expire in April 2005, and Cruise-Wilkins is standing by, ready for a third assault.

Graf insists that he is closer than ever to a narrow channel that he says will lead him to the vault La Buse alludes to in his papers. However, when the so-called ceiling of the channel begins to collapse, Graf says he'll have to dig out part of the ceiling to prevent a cave-in - a setback that will cost him a least a couple of more months.

In the meantime, he'll have to persuade his wife to hold out a bit longer. "She's sick of it," he says. "She wants me to go back to the states so I can take a 9-to-5 job. But I won't do it. I've got five different letters that point to the same spot. The treasure has been sitting there for 300 years and I've only got a couple of feet to go."

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CDNN

BORDEAUX, France (30 Nov 2004) -- A plan to save the famous ship of Captain Cousteau, the Calypso, from rusting away was on the rocks on Friday, due to a potentially intractable quarrel in the late explorer's family.

Calypso, a converted US minesweeper, has been rusting for the last six years in La Rochelle harbour on France's Atlantic coast whither it was towed after sinking in Singapore harbour in 1996.

Hopes it would have a new lease of life were boosted recently, when US company Carnival Corporation agreed to buy it and gave it a new USD 1.3 million (EUR 1 million) overhaul by turning it into a museum.

Then, when owner Loel Guinness, of the famous Irish brewing family, agreed to sell the ship to the Cousteau family, for a symbolic one euro, the ship seemed home and dry.

But now a long-standing family feud has reared its head again, which a lawyer for Guinness said could scupper the rescue attempt.

If they "want to drag it out, it could last two years, and by then the ship will have sunk," Fabrice Goguel, the lawyer, told reporters.

The problem has arisen because an association - COF - set up by Cousteau and involving the son from his first marriage, Jean-Michel, is refusing to hand over the document needed to tow the ship from France.

This has been seen as an apparent attempt by Jean-Michel to scupper the rescue plans of his mother in law, Cousteau's widow Francine, with whom he does not get on.

Cousteau, who died in 1997 aged 87, was an undersea explorer, photographer, inventor of diving devices, scuba pioneer, writer, television producer and filmmaker.

Cousteau, with his trademark red wool cap, became a household name through his television series "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau."

Previous attempts to refurbish his famous boat have been frustrated by differences between the Cousteau Society, an association chaired by the widow Francine, and Guinness, whose grandfather bought the boat in Malta in 1950 and put it at Cousteau's disposal.

SOURCE - AFP

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25-26 February 2005

The Holyhead Maritime Museum, Anglesey, Wales, is inviting submission of papers for the above conference being held in Holyhead on 25-26th February 2005.

Those who wish to contribute or require more information, please contact M. Bowyer on 01248351898 or 01407764374 or e-mail: mikenemo@onetel.net.uk

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5-10th January 2005, York, England.

http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/arch/SHA2005/SHAwelcome.htm

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8 - 11th December, 2004

To be held at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and jointly organised by the Department of Anthropology, University of Auckland and the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.

The objective of this conference is to bring together researchers actively engaged in the study of islands and island societies throughout the world to define common ground, to compare approaches, perspectives and the results of recent research, and to promote the investigation of the archaeology of the world's islands.

web: www.arts.auckland.ac.nz /ant/islands/index.htm

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CDNN

MOREHEAD CITY, North Carolina (1 Dec 2004) -- Researchers trying to recover artifacts from the wreckage of a vessel believed to be the flagship of the pirate Blackbeard have won grants worth $245,000 to pay for their work, state officials announced Tuesday.

The Golden Leaf Foundation has awarded the Queen Anne's Revenge Shipwreck Project $145,000 to save fragile items or those that could be threatened because of storms and to conduct research in new areas.

The state Legislature gave the project $100,000 to pay for conservation of the artifacts at an East Carolina University laboratory.

The grants came just before a two-year grant from Save America's Treasures expires in December.

The money will pay for preparation of a detailed plan for recovery and artifact handling in the field and in the conservation lab.

"We anticipate starting an expedition for major recovery in early summer to further explore the site and recover tens of thousands of artifacts," said project director Mark Wilde-Ramsing. "After that, staff will begin intensive work in the lab cataloging, sorting, processing and or storing recovered materials."

The shipwreck was discovered in 1997 and items recovered from it have been displayed at the N.C. Maritime Museum in Beaufort and been part of a traveling museum tour.

The Queen Anne's Revenge Shipwreck Project is administered by the Office of Archives and History in the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources.

SOURCE - Herald-Tribune

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StonePages.com
3 December 2004

When Jak MacDonald picked up a pebble on a beach, he had no idea he was holding an artefact shaped by a craftsman 4,000 years ago.

The six-year-old, from Broughton Astley (Leicestershire, England), stumbled upon a Neolithic axe head while on holiday in Pembrokeshire. Jak was looking for pebbles to skim in the sea when he came across the flat stone.

He was about to try it out when his mum's partner noticed the unusual shape. They took their discovery to Leicester's New Walk museum, where staff contacted Leicestershire's archaeological department.

Later, Jak found out his prized skimming stone was an axe head crafted before 2000 BCE.

Jak said: "It's a good job I didn't skim it. It would have gone for miles, but I'm glad I kept it. All the other stones were round but this one was really flat. I fell on the floor when mum told me what it was."

Wendy Scott, finds liaison officer for Leicestershire County Council, examined the axe head after it was sent to her from New Walk museum.

She said: "It just goes to show how easy it is to stumble across archaeology. I'm not 100 per cent sure, but it's the right shape for an axe head from the neolithic. It's probably made of a hard stone such as granite.

These small axes would have been for a range of activities, including chopping down trees."

Source: This is Leicestershire, Leicester Mercury (27 November 2004)

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Yankton.com
By Randy Dockendorf


Thanks to continued lower discharges
of the Missouri River, more has become
visible of the final remains of a 19th
century steamboat which sank near Goat
Island. Researchers are scurrying to take
advantage of historic low water levels in
studying the boat. However, the window
of opportunity will start closing today
(Thursday) as the Corps of Engineers
raises the discharge from the recent
9,000 cubic feet per second (cfs) to
10,500 cfs.
-- Courtesy Photo

CEDAR COUNTY, Neb. -- A grand ghost of the Missouri River has emerged from her watery grave to give modern-day explorers a clue to her past.

Researchers are taking advantage of the lowest Missouri River levels in about 30 years to learn more about a 19th century steamboat that sank more than 130 years ago near present-day Goat Island.

The National Park Service and two University of South Dakota anthropologists teamed up Wednesday to explore the remains of an exposed hull. Based on historical records, the steamboat sank in the 1860s or 1870s.

However, a debate exists on which one of two possible steamboats this might be, said Paul Hedren, superintendent of the Missouri National Recreational River.

"Some call it the Morrow, others think it's the North Alabama," he said. "It's part of the conversation among archaeologists and historians about what they ought to do. They want to give the boat a proper name and purpose."

Because of the rise and fall of the river, the steamboat has become visible several times since its sinking, Hedren said. After the river fell this past year, the water was expected to rise again and submerge the boat for decades.

However, water discharges at Gavins Point Dam near Yankton have remained at 9,000 cubic feet per second (cfs), offering an unprecedented chance to learn more about what remains of the boat, Hedren said.

"This boat was not supposed to be seen for another 20 to 30 years," he said. "We have a unique window of opportunity with the water this low."

But the window will start closing today (Thursday), as the Corps plans to raise its discharge to 10,500 cfs. In turn, the water will claim more of the boat.

"One of our men thought the discharges would go up to 11,000 cfs very soon, which would leave us with half of what we were looking at (Wednesday)," Hedren said. "Then it will go to 13,000 cfs, and the whole thing will be submerged."
That's why officials must act immediately, said Larry Bradley, who teamed on site Wednesday with fellow USD anthropologist Brian Molyneaux.

"We are looking at aerial photos or physically mapping it with surveying equipment," Bradley said. "There is a good chance one of the government agencies will have divers. They have people who are used to working under adverse conditions."

Bradley said he and Molyneaux have visited the site several times. However, the low water levels -- teamed with unseasonably warm temperatures and no ice or snow -- have created prime exploration.

"We have already started our work with 3-D images, re-creating the hull," Bradley said.

The USD officials literally walked the plank Wednesday, Hedren said. "One of the guys from USD walked and counted planks from stem to stern," he said.

In the 19th century, steamboats carried commercial items to the Northern Plains, Hedren said. The upstream journeys served early settlements like Yankton as well as the military and passengers headed for the Montana gold rush, he said.

"There is the local legend that any boat was a gold carrier," he said. "Records suggest that when the boat went down, no lives were lost, and they immediately salvaged everything."

However, gold was not likely part of the load, Bradley said. "It wasn't a treasure trove. There was no big cargo," he said.

As for the boat's identity, Bradley said he leans toward the North Alabama, which was built in 1864 and reportedly snagged and sank Oct. 27, 1870. The Morrow was believed lost in 1861, he said.

Historical sources say the North Alabama fits the Goat Island boat's dimension of 160 feet long and 32 feet wide, Bradley said.

"The North Alabama reportedly sunk in a specific location, which fits where this occurred. The snag is more than likely," he said. "The records said it sank in October, when the river level was low and before they regulated the river."

The North Alabama was captained at one time by Grant Marsh, who later -- as captain of the Far West -- brought back survivors from the Little Big Horn. However, Marsh was not captain of the boat during the 1870 wreck, Bradley said.

Steamboat travel was dangerous at any time because of the river's wild conditions, Bradley said. "It was so dangerous that a good trip up from St. Louis would pay for the boat. But there was no other way to get materials up there," he said.

The current activity is focused on research, not on any plans to remove the boat, Hedren said.

"We have no plans to raise it, because then it would utterly disintegrate," he said. "There is no practical way of preserving a water-soaked timber and allowing it to dry. It would flake up and powder up in your hands."

While the boat contains no gold, the research has turned up a wealth of insight into boat-making of the 19th century, Bradley said. Fortunately, the hull has remained upright rather than upside-down, he said.

"It's a remarkable feat, how they built one of these things," he said. "A lot of these boats carried 30 people or more, but there are reports that some of these vessels could carry hundreds of passengers."

The sunken boat, which reportedly weighed 269 tons, was made of oak and built by hand, Bradley said. The boat-makers used four-inch planks, a foot wide and 60 feet long. The hull was close to three inches thick.

"In Yankton itself during that time period, they pulled these boats out of the water with something called Œways'," he said. "They were able to pull up to 300-ton vessels out of the water. All they had were a few horses and a few steam engines."

While detailed plans don't exist for the sunken boat, Bradley said watercraft of that era were massive. The feat becomes even more amazing in light of the limited tools available at that time, he said.

The boatmakers of that time also showed incredible patience compared to today's standards, Bradley said.
"People's concept of time -- they would think about it in much different ways. Immediate gratification was getting something within a month," he said with a chuckle.

Records indicate the Missouri River dropped to similarly-low levels in 1906 and 1934, Bradley said. The current historic water levels have brought out people seeking to take advantage of the exposed boat, he said.

"The big problem is that people tend to look at these boats as some sort of resource or souvenir," he said. "I have heard reports that pieces of the boat were sold on eBay. There was an ad in the Sioux City Journal selling some of the metal parts."

Federal law protects submerged boats in navigable water, and federal agencies watch the site, Hedren said. People should limit themselves to a close-up view of the boat's remains, he said.

"At 9,000 cfs, the river is as low as it's going to get," he said. "It's a brilliant opportunity to see a little piece of 19th century Americana."

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ShipwreckWorld.com


LMC-6 Landing Craft.

Ontario-On-The Lake, NY - The US Coast Guard boat, which sank in a storm December 1, 1977, has been located by local divers, Jim Kennard and Dan Scoville.

While on route from Oswego to Niagara, the 56-foot Coast Guard cable boat experienced 6-foot waves and winds of 50 mph as it approached Nine Mile Point on Lake Ontario. The boat, a converted landing craft (LCM) with an open deck, was taking water over the gunwale faster than the 3-man crew could pump it out. The Charlotte Coast Guard Station dispatched its motor lifeboat to the scene where it found the 50-ton cable boat listing to its port side.

They removed the crew and took the boat in tow, but a wave parted the line and the cable boat sank several miles east of Nine Mile Point and offshore from the community of Ontario-on-the-Lake. It was reported that the US Coast Guard intended to salvage the sunken vessel the following week. The US Coast Guard website relating the historic details of their Charlotte Station also mentions that the boat was salvaged and returned to service.

During the past year Kennard contacted friends, Bob Bristol and Tom Mulhall, both of whom were involved the following day in the search effort for the sunken Coast Guard boat.

They believed that the reported salvage operation actually never happened. Bristol was living at Ontario-on-the-Lake in 1977 and could directly view the area of the lake where the boat went down. Utilizing the search information provided by his friends, Kennard and Scoville located the final position of the ship and were surprised with what they found.

The Coast Guard cable boat landed stern first and has remained that way, never coming fully to rest on the bottom. Being a converted landing craft, it had more weight concentrated in the rear causing it to remain upright on its stern. Over the years, 12 feet of the cable boat have sunk into the bottom.

The lake currents have created an 8-foot crater completely surrounding the vessel, and it is now leaning over at an angle of 45 degrees. The cable boat is completely covered with zebra mussels, two inches thick in some places. On one occasion, a large quantity of Lake Bass was seen congregating around the shipwreck.

The sunken Coast Guard cable boat can potentially provide an interesting local shipwreck for Rochester area recreational SCUBA divers and an excellent location for area fishermen. Kennard and Scoville plan to release the location of the shipwreck site in the near future on their website: www.shipwreckworld.com.

About the exploration team
Jim Kennard has found over 200 shipwrecks during the past 30 years and explored the Great Lakes, Lake Champlain, NY Finger Lakes, and the Inland Waterways. Using his experience as an electronics engineer, he built the side scan sonar system used to locate many of the undiscovered ships that sank in those waters. His discovery in 1983, with partner Scott Hill, of a unique horse powered ferryboat in Lake Champlain was featured the October 1989 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Dan Scoville is an experienced cave and "technical" diver. He utilizes custom gas mixtures of oxygen, helium, and nitrogen to dive to depths of over 300 feet. Scoville is the owner of StealthDive, a Rochester New York based company, specializing in the manufacture of underwater lighting and SCUBA diving accessories.

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Isle of Wight County Press
By Martin Neville

Archaeologists say the discovery of a mesolithic hearth off the Island is of potential international importance.

The discovery was made by chance during a routine inspection along a mesolithic site off Bouldnor, near Yarmouth.

The hearth, or oven pit, contained burnt flints and clay nodules, which are thought to have been used to boil water for cooking.

Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology is hoping to gather funds for a full investigation of the newly discovered site.

"The hearth is cut into the landscape so we know it's part of that landscape," said Garry Momber, trust director.

"Another area of interest, two metres to the west of the hearth, is what appears to be a mishmash of timbers.

"We are not sure what this is yet, it could just be a bunch of roots but it happens to be very close to where the cooking area is.

"At similar sites in the Baltic the hearth is the centre of a settlement so perhaps these are the remains of structures.

There is nothing like this in the UK. "The site, which thousands of years ago would have been above sea level, is the most significant of several prehistoric finds within the rich archaeological landscape in the western Solent.

Last month, divers made another exciting discovery in the form of a piece of birch tree which had a piece of burnt flint stuck in it. It is believed to be between 8,500 and 10,000 years old. "That piece of flint didn't get there by accident," said Mr Momber, speaking at the trust's annual public lecture on Thursday last week. "It has been hammered into the side of the timber.

When we talked about this in the office, we tried to think of a reason why someone would do that. "There could be a whole ream of reasons why it's there. "But that is the essence of archaeology.

What was it used for? What is it telling us about the past? "It's only by careful excavation and recording of the site that we are able to actually put it into context and try to relate what we have found to the landscape.

"The problem is, we have only spent around two hours on the site, which is being eroded away. "These things are so delicate everything is going and we are in a position where we need to go back out and find out more and rescue and record what's down there before it's gone for good."

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The Journal
By Tony Henderson

Work has started on a bid to turn back the tides of time and build up a picture of life on Newcastle's waterfront more than 800 years ago.

Archaeologists are digging on the site of what will be a new apartments block at Tuthill Stairs on Newcastle Quayside.

The Tyne Wear Museums team hopes to track back the development of a series of waterfront quaysides as land was gradually reclaimed outwards from the natural cliff face into the river.

The Tyne was then the centre of commerce and growth for Newcastle as ships arrived and left with valuable cargoes.

Riverside land for wharfs and buildings was at a premium and it is hoped the dig will show what sort of material was used for reclamation - ballast from incoming vessels or domestic and industrial waste from the town.

A small trial dig on the site has already unearthed timber dating from 1137.

But with the archaeologists digging back 17 metres from today's Quayside pavement the existence could be revealed of earlier waterfronts.

The dig could even uncover evidence of a Roman guard point for the fording and bridging point across the Tyne which was on the site of the present Swing Bridge.

Steve Speak, senior keeper of field archaeology at Tyne Wear Museums, said that as well as providing building plots, reclamation of land would have forced water through an increasingly narrow channel and this would have scoured and deepened the river.

"This in turn would have allowed bigger ships to use the river which would then have needed bigger and better quayside services and the sequence would have been repeated," he said.

The reclaimed land would have been reinforced with timber and stone walls and it is hoped the dig may show what sort of buildings were erected on the new land.

A dig at Stockbridge ahead of development behind the Newcastle Crown Court building on the Quayside revealed remains of medieval industrial workshops.

"This waterfront areas was deemed to be of such extreme value that it was enclosed within the medieval town walls but it is a period about which we know very little," said Mr Speak.

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TAMPA, FL - December 3, 2004 - Odyssey Marine Exploration, Inc (AMEX:OMR), has posted an updated status report on the SS Republic project on their website at http://www.shipwreck.net/ .

The update includes details on work done to date on the shipwreck site and reports from Project Manager, Tom Dettweiler.

Odyssey has completed the inspection and excavation on the main area of the shipwreck site. During this inspection and archaeological excavation, Odyssey has recovered over 51,000 gold and silver coins and nearly 13,000 artifacts.

The coins recovered to date represent approximately 25% of the face value of the specie believed to be on board.

Odyssey's next steps include the survey and excavation of the debris trail.

Research suggests that the top deck of the SS Republic broke away as the ship was sinking and Odyssey believes the additional coins believed to be on the ship when it sank may be found in the debris trail created when the ship broke apart as it sank to the ocean floor nearly 1,700 feet deep.

"Based on our research we still believe that there was $400,000 in specie that went down with the ship, which, if correct, means we've only recovered about 25% of what should be down there." commented Greg Stemm, Odyssey co-founder.

"Since we have not found the purser's safe - nor any safe, for that matter, it leads us to theorize that it may have fallen off when the main deck cabins, which we believe housed the pursers office, were detached from the main deck.

We hope that we can follow the debris field to the spot where all the artifacts from those main deck cabins should be lying. We have already found some really interesting artifacts in the debris field - now we plan on following them like a trail of bread crumbs.

It will be interesting to see what we find." The project update also includes a partial gold coin population report detailing the gold coins conserved and graded by Numismatic Conservation Services (NCS) and Numismatic Guaranty Corporation (NGC) through September 16, 2004.

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The Virginian-Pilot
By Scott Harper
December 1, 2004


The NS Savannah rests among the Ghost Fleet on the James River off Newport News.
CHRIS TYREE PHOTOS/THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT

NEWPORT NEWS — It was hailed as a monument to peace, an optimistic symbol during the Cold War that nuclear power did not have to be all about mushroom clouds and fear.

The NS Savannah was the world’s first nuclear-fueled passenger and cargo ship. It remains one of four atomic commercial vessels ever to have sailed the seas. It is a National Historic Place.

Long, lean and white, with architectural lines resembling a yacht, the Savannah was proposed by President Eisenhower under the “Atoms for Peace” program. His wife, Mamie, launched the experimental giant at a patriotic ceremony in July 1959.

During its short career in the 1960s, it traveled to dozens of foreign and domestic ports – Yorktown in ’61 , Norfolk in ’62 – drawing crowds of curious onlookers and dignitaries intrigued by its Hollywood luxury, its high technology and its idealism. Among the onboard amenities: a heated swimming pool, a movie theater, a ballroom and lounge, a beauty parlor.

These days, though, the Savannah is not as regal. Rust eats at much of the decking. The pool is empty and grimy. A veranda sprouts moss and weeds where passengers once played shuffleboard and sunned themselves.
Its pearly white paint is peeling and faded – along with its promise and acclaim.

Measuring 596 feet long and costing $80 million to build, the grand old lady today bobs quietly in the middle of the James River, lashed to another atomic relic, the Sturgis , an Army barge-turned-floating nuclear power plant.

The two orphans are separated from the 85 other reserve ships in the federally managed James River “Ghost Fleet,” nicknamed for its eerie loneliness and perpetual creaking, off Fort Eustis in Newport News.

After 10 years of riding out storms and decaying with age, the Savannah finally is receiving some attention.

Congress, for the first time, has allocated money to begin the ship’s decommissioning. The $2 million is part of the omnibus spending bill that Congress approved two Saturdays ago.

The government overseer of the Ghost Fleet, the U.S. Maritime Administration, has a five-year, $25 million plan to remove the defunct nuclear reactor still within the Savannah’s belly and purge all remaining equipment, hoses and gaskets tainted with radioactivity.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is required to inspect the ship once a year, to ensure no harmful radiation is leaking and to check if the Maritime Administration is following proper protocol. In its latest report, filed in November 2003 , the nuclear agency found “no safety concerns or noncompliance of NRC requirements.”

Incidental radiation released through cracks and into the surrounding public “were well below limits,” the report said.

A group of former shipmates and maritime history buffs already is banding together, hoping to raise money to take over the Savannah once government workers have scrubbed it clean. Group members want to spruce up the vessel, preserve it and perhaps turn it into a museum somewhere. They figure it will cost at least $20 million to do so.

Joe Seelinger, a group leader who worked on the Savannah as a nuclear engineer in 1964, toured his old office and home Nov. 22.

“I love coming aboard her,” Seelinger said after reaching the main deck by climbing metal boarding stairs. “But I hate to see her in this condition.”

Bird droppings cover much of the deck, giving off a pungent odor. The air inside is stale, the floor brittle. Once-glorious staterooms have been ransacked, as dirt and dust and mold collect on ripped blue couches and plastic-covered chairs.

The ’60s decor still is comically apparent: a round orange couch here, an art deco clock there. But age and neglect have taken their toll; the couch is faded and smudged, the clock stopped and broken.

Some steel doors are sealed for safety reasons, and many of the high-profile spaces within the ship – the dining hall and movie theater, for example – are preserved with dehumidifiers, which attempt to stave off decay from the moist, salty air of southeast Virginia.

The Maritime Administration arranged the tour last week after media outlets requested access to the ship months ago, when word first surfaced that Congress was poised to finally finance the Savannah’s retirement.

President Bush, in his 2005 budget, requested the $2 million installment to get the decommissioning started. He is expected to sign the spending measure without delay.

Work should begin in the spring or summer, officials said, mostly a study and calculation of all that must be done to purge the ship of its nuclear past.

“Mitigating events,” such as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and increased concern about domestic terrorism targets, along with the availability of radioactive disposal sites, were prime reasons for moving ahead now, said Erhard Koehler , a senior technical adviser with the Maritime Administration who is heading the project.

To Koehler, a naval historian and architect as well, the Savannah deserves to be saved.

“Arguably, it is one of the most important ships, historically, ever built,” he said during the tour. “It certainly is one of the most aesthetically pleasing.”

There is a chance the Savannah might be scrapped. While officials say there are no dismantling plans now, Ghost Fleet ships deemed obsolete, such as the Savannah, are all destined for the salvage yard.

Congress has mandated that all junk vessels in reserve fleets across the country be scuttled by September 2006. Lawmakers two weeks ago approved $21 million next fiscal year to keep the effort going.

But the Savannah’s maritime significance, the public interest in the ship and its standing as a National Historic Place all lend support to its retention, officials said.

“The ship was an ambassador to the world at a time when everyone had questions about nuclear energy,” said John Jamian, deputy director of the Maritime Administration, adding that it “would be a real shame” to see the vessel scrapped.

The Savannah’s legacy has been debated for years. When it was laid up for good, in 1972, the ship had become a symbol of government excess to fiscal conservatives on Capitol Hill. They pointed to the $2 million-a-year subsidy needed just to keep the vessel operating.

Because it was neither a full-fledged cargo ship nor a full-fledged passenger cruiser, some experts have said the Savannah was doomed to fail from the beginning. After labor disputes sidelined the vessel only a year after its launch, one article called the Savannah “our merchant marine’s biggest white elephant.”

Another camp argues that such criticisms miss the whole point. They say the Savannah never was intended to make money but rather was a show pony, a demonstration project, to prove that nuclear power could be used peacefully and for moving commercial ships.

Eisenhower hoped the innovation would launch a revolution in shipbuilding.

“I am confident that the ship will be the forerunner of atomic merchant and passenger fleets, which will one day unite the nations of the world in peaceful trade,” the president said in a speech in 1956.

Ike, of course, was wrong.

Only three other nonmilitary ships have been built with nuclear reactors since the Savannah – one German, one Russian, one Japanese – as petroleum and diesel engines continue to rule the merchant fleet.

Still, other experts are not giving up on nuclear propulsion in commercial ships. They note that it took decades in some cases for a new technology to take hold of the global fleet, and they point to the first Savannah, the namesake of the nuclear-powered Savannah, as proof.

In 1819, the steamship Savannah became the first vessel of its kind to cross the Atlantic, going from Savannah, Ga., to Liverpool, England, in 29 days. Yet it took another 60 years for steam energy to surpass sail power.

The nuclear reactor aboard the Savannah is sealed inside a huge steel containment area and surrounded with concrete barriers. A thick, steel door, now rusting at its bolts, guards the way into the reactor room.

“Caution Radiation Area” is emblazoned on the door, just below a small circular window that allows visitors to peek inside.


Aboard the Savannah, a shuffleboard court crumbles, its tiles pulled
to pieces by weeds, weather and neglect.

According to its application to the National Historic Places register, the ship was designed to hold more than 10,000 gallons of liquid radioactive wastes. The wastes would be off-loaded at a licensed facility on land or could be discharged to a special barge, the Atomic Servant, built as a companion to the Savannah.

While the reactor remains on the ship, all uranium oxide fuel has been removed, as was the radioactive water from the primary cooling system. At a congressional hearing on the Savannah in 1976, scientists declared the containment area safe.

In its first year of operations, though, about 115,000 gallons of radioactive wastes were released into the sea, a problem corrected by modifying valves where leaks were occurring, according to the historic places application.

Still, contamination experts were stationed at each port of call, and some nations were nervous about allowing the Savannah to dock, fearing an accident.

After the ship was deactivated of its nuclear core in 1971, it was presented to the city of Savannah a year later as part of a proposed Eisenhower Peace Memorial. But money problems stalled the project, and the memorial was never built.

The ship was transferred to the Patriots Point Naval and Maritime Museum, near Charleston, S.C., in 1981. It had been tied up nearby for the previous five years, waiting for its new home to be completed.

The museum had wanted to convert the Savannah into a restaurant and resort, sort of how the Queen Mary has been renovated as a tourist spot in Long Beach, Calif. But sponsors could not raise enough money for repairs, and the state and federal governments were unwilling to pay.

“We needed a subsidy, and it just never happened,” said David Clark, the museum’s exhibit superintendent.

In 1994, when the Maritime Administration and Nuclear Regulatory Commission wanted to pull the ship out of the water to repair the bottom, the museum “kind of let the agencies know they could keep her,” Clark said. “She was costing us a lot of money in upkeep.”

It was then the Savannah joined the Ghost Fleet . Since then, the Maritime Administration has been cited for minor infractions by the nuclear agency , most recently in 2001, for failing to abide by an earlier order to have an emergency radiological expert on call.

The agency also has faulted the administration for failing to perform and document an adequate annual inspection of primary and secondary radiation systems, and for not keeping emergency response kits on board the Savannah. The violations have since been corrected, according to inspection reports.

“A lot of ships kept me awake at night,” because of potential problems, said Nuns Jain, a Ghost Fleet supervisor. “The Savannah, though, is not one of them.”

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Channel NewsAsia
By Farah Abdul Rahim



SINGAPORE : Some 400 pieces from the Tang cargo treasure will be exhibited in Singapore in June. They are part of 60,000 pieces that were salvaged from what is believed to be the oldest shipwreck found so far in Southeast Asia.

On show is a replica of the boat which carried Chinese ceramics and even gold. It was on its way to the Middle East, but never made it there as it hit a reef between Sumatra and Borneo.

The treasure stayed under the sea till 1998 and was salvaged by German Tilman Walterfang. The pieces were painstakingly restored over five years at the cost of millions. Each piece tells its own story - like a jug which could not be salvaged due to monsoon rain, but was later looted by pirates.

Finally, Mr Tilman bought the piece back for an undisclosed sum. These are just some of the displays that will be on show in Singapore come June. But Sentosa Leisure Group, which is organising the exhibition, has not decided if the event will be held on the resort island or otherwise.

Mr Alvin Chia, Assistant Director (Attractions Development) of Sentosa Leisure Group, said: "A collection of this importance transcends beyond Sentosa. It is more a product for the nation than for Sentosa. "Therefore we want to bring it out to the masses, whether it stays on Sentosa or if it is brought out for exhibition outside sentosa is irrelevant.

"We now see ourselves as able to develop attractions beyond Sentosa Island and we want to be more open to manage attractions outside of Sentosa."

The reassurance from Sentosa is that when the exhibition comes to town, it will be accessible and affordable to all - from the man-in-the-street to students - so they can also go back in time and check out the Tang cargo treasure. - CNA

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News24.com
01/12/2004

Washington - The wreck of the doomed luxury liner Titanic is being lost to sightseers who are "loving it to death", said Robert Ballard, the explorer who discovered it in 1985.

Ballard spoke on Tuesday at the National Geographic Society in Washington, where he is an explorer-in-residence, as part of his campaign to have the wreck protected by international treaty.

Ballard led an expedition to the Titanic to assess the condition of the ship after nearly two decades of visits by salvagers, scientists and tourists. He said the visits have accelerated the ship's deterioration, plundered important artefacts and left trash at the site.

"We're not opposed at all to people visiting the Titanic. We're just opposed to people loving it to death," he said.
The Titanic hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage and sank on the night of April 14-15, 1912.

Only 711 of the 2 200 passengers and crew aboard the British luxury liner survived. Many who died were well-known figures on both sides of the Atlantic, including wealthy businessmen John Jacob Astor and Bejamin Guggenheim.

Remained undisturbed
The sinking, still one of the worst maritime disasters, captivated public attention from the start, and has been the subject of numerous books and films, including the 1997 James Cameron film Titanic.

The wreck remained undisturbed 3 600 metres below the ocean's surface until Ballard and French explorer Jean Louis Michel discovered it on September 1, 1985.

Ballard refused salvage rights to the wreck, saying he preferred it be preserved as a memorial to those who died. "Unfortunately, admiralty law would not permit it," he said.

A US court in 1994 granted salvage rights to Atlanta, Georgia-based RMS Titanic Inc, which has brought up some 6 000 artefacts from the wreck since 1987, some of which have been sold at auction.

The US Supreme Court in 1999 cleared the way for expeditions bringing tourists to photograph the site. The trips cost about $30 000 per person.

'Wired with robot video cameras'
In June, the United States signed an accord aimed at protecting the wreck from souvenir hunters and undersea tourists, joining with Britain, Canada and France in new efforts to preserve it.

Under the agreement, the Titanic would be designated as an international maritime memorial. Britain signed the accord in November 2003 and it becomes effective once two countries sign it.

Ballard said he hoped France and Russia - which leases many of the submersibles used on sightseeing trips to the wreck - will also soon sign the deal.

RMS Titanic has said its salvage operations are the only way to preserve valuable Titanic memorabilia from eventual disintegration. Ballard however said the wreck would be relatively stable if it was not disturbed as much as it has been.

The damage, detailed in Ballard's new book, Return to Titanic, written with journalist Michael Sweeney, includes holes in the deck and crumpled crew cabins from collisions with submersibles. He also notes that the crow's nest where the fatal iceberg was first spotted, is now missing.

"Clearly it was knocked off," he said.

Ballard's plan calls for the wreck to be wired with robot video cameras that could beam live images to computers worldwide without risking damage to the wreck.

"The only way that vision is going to happen is if you stop destroying it," he said.

Ultimately, he said he would like to find a way to clean and paint the wreck to stem further deterioration.
"Crazy? You heard it here," he said with a laugh.

Edited by Ilse Arendse

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BBC News


A section of the boat has already been reconstructed.

Archaeologists are planning to build a copy of an ancient boat found in Dover and sail it from Britain to France.

The £200,000 project is intended to demonstrate how the boat might have been used thousands of years ago.

The boat is one of the best preserved examples of a coastal vessel from the bronze age and was found in a chance discovery in 1992.

Funding is now needed and the project could attract EU money thanks to a partnership with French museums.
The bottom of the boat was discovered during roadworks in the town.

It was found in a water filled shaft and although it has been studied intensely at Dover museum, the only way experts say they can find out more about it is to build this replica.

'Remarkable feat'
Finding the right materials will be a vital part of the project if an accurate test can be carried out.

The original would have been made using yew tree timber, bees wax, and moss, and then all stitched together.

It was made over 3,600 years ago and John Iverson from Dover museum described it as " a remarkable feat of engineering."

The project is expected to take three years to complete and after the crossing, it is hoped that the boat will go on tour in Britain and France.

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IOL



Bordeaux - The ship Calypso, from which Captain Jacques Cousteau conducted expeditions made famous in cinema and television documentaries, got a new owner and new lease of life on Tuesday when Loel Guinness sold it for a symbolic one euro (R7).

The buyer, United States company Carnival Corporation, has said it will give the boat a new $1,3-million (R7-million) lease of life.

Guinness, who hails from the famous Irish brewing family of the same name, "took a decision (to sell) when he saw the project was serious", his French lawyer Fabrice Goguel said on Tuesday.

Calypso, a converted United States minesweeper, has been rusting for the last six years in La Rochelle harbour on France's Atlantic seaboard where it was towed after sinking in Singapore harbour in 1996.

"The ship is be refitted
at a yard in the Bahamas"

Carnival Corporation has said it would finance plans to restore Calypso, which is expected to be moored in the Bahamas as an exhibit.

Cousteau, who died in 1997 aged 87, was an undersea explorer, photographer, inventor of diving devices, scuba pioneer, writer, television producer and filmmaker.

He co-invented the aqualung, developed a one-person, jet-propelled submarine and helped start the first manned undersea colonies.

The ship is be refitted at a yard in the Bahamas at an estimated cost of $1,3-million, with work expected to be completed by the end of 2005.

Cousteau, with his trademark red wool cap, became a household name through his television series "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.

"Previous attempts to refurbish his famous boat have been frustrated by differences between the Cousteau Society, an association chaired by the late explorer's widow Francine, and Guinness, whose grandfather bought the boat in Malta in 1950 and put it at Cousteau's disposal.

Calypso with the Cousteau crew aboard sailed the seven seas before sinking in Singapore harbour in 1996. It was raised and towed to La Rochelle in 1998. - Sapa-AFP

Calypso page from the Cousteau Society.

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The Daily Astorian
By Tom Bennet

Wreck found in ‘Graveyard of the Pacific’ wasn’t the one they expectedNever take anything for granted in the Graveyard of the Pacific.

Last summer, James Delgado and a crew of professional divers from the National Geographic television program “Sea Hunter” came to Astoria to film the wreckage of the British sailing ship Isabella, lost inside the mouth of the Columbia in 1830.

Delgado, executive director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum in British Columbia, Canada, and a leading expert on North American shipwrecks, has been studying the wreck almost since its discovery in 1986, and it figures prominently in a book chronicling his work on famous sunken vessels around the world.

A funny thing happened during the Sea Hunter project, however. Delgado and his crew discovered that the bones at the bottom of the river didn’t belong to the Isabella at all. He now believes that the wreck is that of the American steamship Great Republic, which ran aground on Sand Island south of Ilwaco, Wash., in 1879.

The Sea Hunter TV episode will still air sometime next year – but with a new ending.

“You work with the available information you have, and you can be wrong,” said Delgado, who shared this latest twist in the shipwreck saga recently at the annual trustees dinner at the Columbia River Maritime Museum.

The available information all seemed to point to the Isabella in 1986 when the wreckage was found just south of Sand Island by a local diver freeing a snagged fishing net. The next year, Delgado dove to the site himself and came away convinced, by the wreck’s apparent size, age and location, that it was most likely the long-lost vessel.

There was also what Delgado called the “smoking gun” – a small, square opening cut in the hull right where the Isabella’s log says a carpenter made a hole to drain water out of the ship during salvage operations after the vessel grounded.

“Everything fit for the Isabella,” he said.

On camera
It was considered a significant find. A cargo vessel carrying supplies to the Hudson’s Bay Company outpost at Fort Vancouver at the time of its sinking, the Isabella is considered an important link to the Pacific Northwest’s early history. And as one of the first recorded wrecks at the mouth of the Columbia, it also helped give the notorious area its nickname, “Graveyard of the Pacific.”

That’s why Delgado and crew returned to the Columbia River this summer to film the wreck for “Sea Hunters.” But even as he and his partners were recording footage for the program, they were noticing clues that didn’t add up.

In recent years, the tides and currents have been washing away sand from around the ship’s bones, uncovering more of the wreck and revealing hidden features that raised questions about the vessel’s real identity, Delgado said. Those clues were much more evident this summer.

First was the sheer size of the wreckage, which was much more expansive than when he first saw the ship 17 years ago and which seemed too large for the 80-foot Isabella, Delgado said.

“I was particularly struck by how much structure was there,” he said. “What we thought was the entire area of the wreck turned out to be only one-half or one-third of it.”

The divers also found attached to the hull several massive cast-iron bits that would have been out of place on a modest cargo vessel like the Isabella. The same went for the iron strapping discovered on the interior of the hull that was usually only found on warships or steam-powered vessels.

Even that “smoking gun” betrayed him. The divers found a second identical hole in the hull that had no explanation if the ship was, in fact, the Isabella.

“Something was very definitely wrong,” he said.

Science steps in
With all these red flags, Delgado decided a more conclusive test was needed. He collected wood samples from the wreckage that were sent to a lab in Wisconsin for analysis. The findings: American yellow pine, something that definitely would not have been found on an early 19th-century British ship.

“OK, well then, we know it’s not the Isabella. The question is, what ship is it?” Delgado said.

Several ships wrecked near Sand Island over the decades, but the size, metal fittings and type of wood all point to the Great Republic, he said. The side-wheeler was 376 feet long – four times bigger than the Isabella – and would likely have carried iron reinforcing bands inside its hull to help support the weight of its engines and hundreds of passengers.

Staff from the Columbia River Maritime Museum, which helped sponsor the Sea Hunter project, also dug up old records of shipwrecks, including eyewitness accounts, that pinpointed the Great Republic’s location and described its last hours.

“But there’s no smoking gun,” Delgado said. “What I can say is that it is definitely not the Isabella, and is probably the Great Republic.”

Eleven died
The wreck of the Great Republic is a dramatic story in its own right. The vessel was carrying more than 1,000 passengers and crew members en route to Portland from San Francisco when it crossed the Columbia bar at high tide just after midnight on April 19, 1879. The night was clear and the water calm, but as the ship proceeded the pilot failed to heed the captain’s warnings as it steamed closer and closer to Sand Island, and with a jolt the vessel ran aground.

The falling tide left the ship stranded, and with a storm approaching the captain had the 896 passengers removed and ferried to Astoria on local boats. The crew stayed on board to try to re-float the vessel, but the storm-driven waves began breaking up the hull, and as they abandoned ship. The last boat to leave overturned, casting 14 men into the water. Eleven died.

The stricken vessel was soon pulverized by the waves, but parts of the wreckage remained visible at low tide for many years. Soldiers at nearby Fort Canby reportedly used the ship’s rusting boilers for artillery practice.

Delgado said the Great Republic has its own place in history. Launched in New York in 1867 by the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, it was part of the first generation of steamships built specifically to serve the Far East trade, carrying passengers and cargo between the west coast and Japan and China. The Great Republic eventually proved to be unprofitable on the trans-Pacific route, and had been sold and put to work on the West Coast at the time of its demise.

It’s the first project in his career, which includes dives to the Titanic and U.S.S. Arizona, involving a case of mistaken identity, Delgado said. But “unless you find a bell with the ship’s name on it,” proving a wreck’s identity can be iffy, he said. During past dives to the wreck, he and other researchers were careful not to remove pieces of the vessel, excavate sand or do other potentially damaging work that might have tipped them off to the ship’s identity earlier.

“You try to be as cautious as you can,” he said.

Good process
CRMM executive director Jerry Ostermiller, who has dived to the wreck several times himself, said the new discovery is a testament to the scientific process, and a credit to Delgado’s willingness to let the facts speak for themselves despite his years of involvement with the wreck.

“It’s hard to be invested emotionally in something for so long, and have to restate your position,” he said.

As for the Isabella itself, Delgado believes it has likely vanished, swept away bit by bit by in the decades after its sinking.

The sand bar where the Isabella wrecked is not the Sand Island of today, or even the island that claimed the Great Republic 39 years later. The shifting river channel pushed the island northward between the 1830s and the 1870s, and the Isabella likely would have been left exposed to the strong river current, Delgado said.

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The Seattle Times
By Erik Lacitis
Seattle Times staff reporter


Matt McCauley, right, and Jeff Hummel
at McCauley's Mercer Island home in 1984,
after the two hauled up the remains of a
Curtiss SB2C-1A Helldiver bomber.

The latest secret from the bottom of Lake Washington showed itself at midmorning this past Halloween Day, appearing as glowing bronze sonar images on a monitor.

The two divers who had been methodically surveying the lake on their aluminum workboat just north of Kirkland knew they'd hit the jackpot: a World War II torpedo bomber that had gone down in a training exercise over the lake in 1942.

By the next weekend, Crayton Fenn and John Sharps had dived 200 feet to the wreck and videotaped what they then would announce was the heavily damaged — it's in several pieces — remains of a Grumman TBF-1 Avenger. They were rightfully proud.

"It's thrilling. You're the first person in the world who ever made a dive on it," said Sharps, 31, a Microsoft manager.

"It's the thrill of exploration, of solving its mystery."

For most area residents, Lake Washington is known for what it shows on its surface: two floating bridges crawling with cars at rush-hour, partying crowds at the annual hydroplane races, sailboats, water-skiers, beautiful vistas with of Mount Rainier in the background.

Crayton Fenn helped find a torpedo bomber.

But to some two dozen divers, with a hard-core group of maybe a half-dozen, it's what lies at the bottom of the 18-½-mile-long lake that fascinates them: scores of boats, planes and what once was garbage but now would be collectibles.

Most of the divers are associated with three local nonprofit groups that have documented the various treasures at the bottom of Pacific Northwest waters.

With sonar-equipped rigs and high-intensity lights that cut through the pitch darkness at lower depths, they revel in finding artifacts.

"Lake Washington is like a time machine. It's almost like being Indiana Jones. It's an incredible thrill," said Matt McCauley of Kirkland. In 1984, at age 19, he and a buddy gained notoriety by using their ski boat to pull up a discarded Navy bomber at the northeast corner of the lake near Juanita Point.

"You can find old bottles from as back as 1870," McCauley said. "The last person who touched it was living when Native Americans were still on the embankment of the lake. You feel a compulsion to show it to everybody."

From garbage to collectible
At the bottom of Lake Washington, there are seven documented military aircraft, all Navy planes once based at the old Sand Point Naval Air Station. Local experts such as Fenn and Bob Mester, who use specialized sonar equipment to locate sunken historical treasures, said there are 100 to 300 vessels at the bottom, maybe more.

They include a 55-foot passenger steamer, a 137-foot schooner, a surplus 136-foot minesweeper and all kinds of other craft, from drag boats to sailboats.

Mester remembered a spring day in 1991 that he dived down 140 feet off of Sand Point and saw a Lockheed PV2-D Harpoon patrol bomber that had sunk in September 1947, when it went out of control during takeoff.

"There you see this fully armed World War II combat aircraft, its nose stuck in the bottom. The guns are pointing to the surface as if ready to fire right in front of you. You can touch the wheels in the tail and they spin perfectly," Mester said.

"And here it is, all in the middle of a recreation lake with Jet Skis above you and people fishing."

The bottom also holds 18 wooden coal cars, which went down in January 1875, when a stern-wheeler rounding Mercer Island was a hit by a windstorm (back then, coal from Newcastle was shipped to Seattle, with much of it then going to California). The coal cars sit 195 feet down just south of the middle of the Evergreen Point Bridge, many of them upright.

"They are still filled with coal, although the coal flakes in your hand when you pick it up," said Mark Tourtellot, 51.

At age 9, he began diving off Richmond Beach. Now he's co-owner of Fifth Dimension Dive Center in Issaquah and on the board of directors of Submerged Cultural Resources Exploration Team (SCRET), a nonprofit group that documents wreckage found in Pacific Northwest waters.

In his store, Tourtellot showed off items he has collected from the bottom of the lake, such as a J.G. Fox & Co. glass root-beer bottle from the early 1900s, found in 40 feet of water off of Leschi.

Then, he said, when ferries took passengers from Mercer Island to Seattle, it was common for Eastside residents to take their garbage and use wooden boxes or burlap bags and dump it into the lake. The old garbage now is a collectible.

The state Department of Natural Resources says it's OK for divers to take photos of such artifacts but not to touch or move them. But it acknowledges it's not equipped to enforce a state law saying treasures abandoned 30 years or more become untouchable state property.

The state did go after a Kirkland man who was eventually convicted of stealing a history of sorts in the early 1990s from the bottom of Lake Washington: trees that had sunk either when being transported from logging mills or that had been part of an ancient forest that ended up in the lake after landslides 1,000 to 3,000 years ago. The salvager had hired divers to cut the trees and bring them to a barge.

The Navy doesn't want its old planes brought up, either because they are gravesites containing human remains or because of fears about pillaging.

In 1985, the Navy did lose one court battle with McCauley and Jeff Hummel, then 20, who had brought up a Curtiss SB2C-1A Helldiver bomber a year earlier from 150 feet near Juanita Point.

The two had heard stories that the Navy would take useable parts of planes that had been in accidents, torch the planes for training in fire drills and then dump them in the lake. They decided to go looking for the wreckage.

"We and our friends took a 17-foot ski boat, a fish finder and sidescan sonar, and the plane showed up," McCauley remembered. The group pulled a 15-foot wing section and 10 feet of fuselage onto a boat ramp, and then towed it to McCauley's driveway. McCauley and Hummel thought they might break even on their efforts by selling the plane to a museum or collector.

Mostly, though, it was about the excitement of the search, and the find. "You feel like you've found a galleon full of treasure," McCauley said. "You're swimming on this eerie, muddy bottom, and all of a sudden you see a wall of burnt aluminum sticks": parts of an old fighter plane.

The judge ruled in favor of the two divers, telling the Navy to "back off a little" in its quest to protect planes it had junked. That plane and four other discarded hulks that McCauley, Hummel and fellow divers later brought up ended up with Minnesota and Pennsylvania collectors.

McCauley, 40, no longer dives as frequently; now that he's a husband and father, his wife isn't keen on 200-foot underwater explorations.

But a diver such as Mester, however, who has explored the lake more than 100 times in the past decade, isn't about to give it up. His three adult children also are divers. It never gets boring for him.

"The visibility is limited, maybe five, six, 10 feet," he said. "Another 10 feet, and it's all new."