Do fundo do mar... Sea bottom

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The Independent
By Oliver Duff
May 29, 2006


A fisherman and a novice diver may have made a remarkable discovery in British waters close to the Sussex coast - the wreck of the famous 17th-century warship, HMS Resolution.

The Culture Minister David Lammy will announce today that the remains have protected status, in a bid to deter rogue divers from raiding the site while archeologists confirm whether it is the 70-gun vessel sunk in the great storm of November, 1703.

Three divers from Eastbourne made the remarkable discovery on 17 April last year when they were asked to clear some trapped lobster pots for local fishermen. The discovery has been kept secret until now, while English Heritage and the Government discussed how best to protect it.

"It was unbelievable," said Paul Stratford, who first donned scuba gear just four years earlier. "We went down there expecting to get some fishing junk and found a huge anchor. Visibility was poor but we kept finding cannon after cannon. We have been fishing and then diving in this area since we were kids, so were astonished to find this in our bay. It feeds your imagination about what else might be down there."

A preliminary survey at the site, nine metres below sea level, about one-and-a-half miles offshore in Pevensey Bay, found at least 45 guns and the timber hull. It identified the well-preserved remains of a large warship dating between 1600 and 1800 and "likely" to be the Resolution.

"This is a hugely significant find," said Adrian Barak of the Nautical Heritage Association, whose trust owns the wreck. "We can't say it is definitely Resolution but it is almost the exact right place. It is remarkable that this wreck hadn't been discovered before. It may be that the seabed was moved by winter storms which uncovered it."

Mr Lammy has designated the warship under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973, banning diving within 100m. There are 58 protected wrecks in UK waters.

Built in Harwich between 1665 and 1667, the Resolution, some 121ft long and weighing 885 tons, sank in the legendary 120mph "perfect hurricane" that ripped across the south of England during the night of 26 November 1703. "No pen could describe it, nor tongue express it, nor thought conceive it unless by one in the extremity of it," wrote Daniel Defoe of the storm. Coastal towns such as Portsmouth "looked as if the enemy had sackt them and were most miserably torn to pieces".

At least 8,000 sailors were swept overboard to their deaths as hundreds of merchant and Royal Navy ships were sunk, many returning from helping the King of Spain fight the French in the War of the Spanish Succession. The Resolution was blown across the Solent, hitting the Owers Banks, before the crew could raise a scrap of sail and round Beachy Head. Captain Thomas Liell tried unsuccessfully to beach her in Pevensey Bay, but the crew had to abandon ship, and made it ashore.

A fisherman and a novice diver may have made a remarkable discovery in British waters close to the Sussex coast - the wreck of the famous 17th-century warship, HMS Resolution.

The Culture Minister David Lammy will announce today that the remains have protected status, in a bid to deter rogue divers from raiding the site while archeologists confirm whether it is the 70-gun vessel sunk in the great storm of November, 1703.

Three divers from Eastbourne made the remarkable discovery on 17 April last year when they were asked to clear some trapped lobster pots for local fishermen. The discovery has been kept secret until now, while English Heritage and the Government discussed how best to protect it.

"It was unbelievable," said Paul Stratford, who first donned scuba gear just four years earlier. "We went down there expecting to get some fishing junk and found a huge anchor. Visibility was poor but we kept finding cannon after cannon. We have been fishing and then diving in this area since we were kids, so were astonished to find this in our bay. It feeds your imagination about what else might be down there."

A preliminary survey at the site, nine metres below sea level, about one-and-a-half miles offshore in Pevensey Bay, found at least 45 guns and the timber hull. It identified the well-preserved remains of a large warship dating between 1600 and 1800 and "likely" to be the Resolution.
"This is a hugely significant find," said Adrian Barak of the Nautical Heritage Association, whose trust owns the wreck. "We can't say it is definitely Resolution but it is almost the exact right place. It is remarkable that this wreck hadn't been discovered before. It may be that the seabed was moved by winter storms which uncovered it."

Mr Lammy has designated the warship under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973, banning diving within 100m. There are 58 protected wrecks in UK waters.

Built in Harwich between 1665 and 1667, the Resolution, some 121ft long and weighing 885 tons, sank in the legendary 120mph "perfect hurricane" that ripped across the south of England during the night of 26 November 1703. "No pen could describe it, nor tongue express it, nor thought conceive it unless by one in the extremity of it," wrote Daniel Defoe of the storm. Coastal towns such as Portsmouth "looked as if the enemy had sackt them and were most miserably torn to pieces".

At least 8,000 sailors were swept overboard to their deaths as hundreds of merchant and Royal Navy ships were sunk, many returning from helping the King of Spain fight the French in the War of the Spanish Succession. The Resolution was blown across the Solent, hitting the Owers Banks, before the crew could raise a scrap of sail and round Beachy Head. Captain Thomas Liell tried unsuccessfully to beach her in Pevensey Bay, but the crew had to abandon ship, and made it ashore.


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What's being called the Brick Wreck will soon have a positive identification if researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, the state and University of West Florida get their way.

Researchers have determined that a 78-foot cargo ship in Marathon waters was built somewhere between 1820 and 1830 and was hauling a heavy load of bricks when it likely ran aground and sank about a mile off Marathon shores.

For three weeks now, crews have been taking photos, video and measurements, drawing everything they see to scale, and comparing its design to other cargo ship's of the same era.

Roger Smith, state underwater archaeologist with the Florida Division of Historical Resources, says video and photography are low-tech tools compared to pencils, paper and measuring tools.

“Those are still the scientific recording devices,” he said.

Smith explained the importance of the artifacts found recently on the wreck.

“The bricks on this site are quite a bit larger than the bricks we're used to seeing today,” he said. “They're about twice the size. That'll help too, the dimensions of the bricks, and plus we've got some diagnostic artifacts - ceramic and glass that are really instrumental because we're able to trace the manufacturer of those pieces and have a window. There's one particular piece that we collected that we've been able to narrow down to a 25-year period, and that's pretty good.”

The shard he refers to is from blue willowware, a design that originated in Asia but gained popularity in the states in the 1800s. Each pattern is specific to a manufacturer, and that's how the timeframe was established.

Unique to the wreck's location is the consistency of the ocean bottom, only 14 feet below the surface. The silt is so fine it acts almost as clay, he explained, essentially cementing the wreck in place. Researchers believe the wreck was covered until storms within the past decade turned the bottom over, exposing the ship's skeleton.

Also unique is the design of the craft itself, said John Broadwater, program coordinator for NOAA's Maritime Heritage program as he flipped through a book of cargo vessels from Florida and the Carolinas. No matches could be found.

“These timbers that make up the frame of the ship are just almost butted up side to side,” he said, “And normally ... typical structures had spacing. They were just separators to stiffen the planking. [This wreck] is more heavily built than most anything I've looked at. We can't think of any parallels that are this heavy. It almost seems like it was made this way to carry extra heavy loads, like the bricks.”

The order of the day Tuesday was to collect samples of the planking and bricks scattered around the site for more analytical research. Finding out what kind of wood the ship was made from may provide insight to where it was built.

“We already know that bricks were coming out of the Carolinas and the Panhandle of Florida,” Smith said. “During this period, those bricks were being transported down the coast of Florida, both sides, to the Tortugas and Key West to build the big coastal forts.”

Fort Jefferson and Fort Zachary Taylor, Smith said, are the largest masonry buildings in the western hemisphere.

Brian Adams, a brick mason's son from the Pensacola area, is covering the research for his master's thesis.

“This is the fun part,” he said, “After that it's sitting and looking at papers and old records” in Tallahassee and Key West.

Though an ID is the holy grail of such a project, Adams won't consider his work a failure if the site remains simply the Brick Wreck.

“I definitely want to find out where it came from,” he said. “But you never know. Things happen and it might not be possible. I'll do my best.”


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The Divester
By Willy Volk

May 25, 2006

In a sense, any dive site that boasts a shipwreck is an underwater museum. Frozen in time, a wreck is a snapshot of maritime technology. However, more than just a glimpse at a ship's engineering, underwater archaeologists are able to learn about the culture that used it; reconstruct ancient shipping routes; or unravel some of history's mysteries. Even in the best case scenario, though, most sites only have one or two wrecks, which most people wouldn't call a "museum."

However, there are a number of places where harbors have flooded, or entire cities have dissolved into the sea, allowing history buffs, scuba divers, or average tourists to travel into the past and see what life was like "back then." The real beauty of underwater museums, though, is that while "regular" museums remove ancient artifacts from their resting sites, submerged museums preserve them, intact, and in context.

1 - The most recent entrant into the world of underwater museums is in the Mediterranean. In Israel's coastal city of Caesarea -- the site of "Herod's Harbor" -- visitors can inspect what was once one of the biggest and most sophisticated ports of the Roman Empire. Originally opened for business in 10 BC, the submerged harbor now rests in about 20 feet of water, and the museum itself covers some 18,580 square feet. With waterproof maps and an instructor to guide them, divers and snorkelers can swim among the 36 exhibits -- from sunken vessels, to giant anchors, to marble columns -- by following ropes tied between poles stuck in the sea floor.

2 - Located off Alexandria, Egypt, the Underwater City of Cleopatra dates to 300 BC. Resting both inside and outside the harbor, the city crumbled into the sea after several earthquakes. Sitting between 15 and 45 feet of water, adventure-seekers can see ancient wrecks, sunken sphinxes, broken columns, a hieroglyph-covered obelisk, and thousands of granite blocks around Pharos Island (check out this great video of Pharos). If you're interested, Divernet has an excellent summary of the sites, as well as some of the potential hurdles they must overcome.

3 - The Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, boasts the Shipwreck Trail, which features 9 shipwrecks spread across several miles, so you're not going to see all the wrecks at one go. Diving conditions vary from easy dives in shallow water to deeper dives of l00 feet or more. For each of the 9 wrecks, divers can access an underwater guide indicating the mooring positions; a history of the ship; a site map; and potential marine life. For people in the UK, the Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology has set up a similar, 20-foot-deep archaeological trail off the Isle of Wight, which allows divers to move between numbered stations on the sunken HMS Pomone, a 38-gun frigate.

4 - The Spanish galleons Guadalupe and Tolosa sank in the Dominican Republic's Samana Bay during a hurricane in 1724. Undiscovered until the 1970s, the wrecks lay undisturbed for centuries; however, in the 1970s, they were removed for safekeeping. Recently, though, Indiana University students and faculty carefully returned the ballast stones, cannons, cannonballs, ceramic pieces and one anchor to the site. Currently resting in 12 to 15 feet of water, the quarter-acre site is easily accessible to snorkelers and divers.

5 - The main portion of China's new Baiheliang Underwater Museum was completed recently. When fully constructed, the museum will protect the 18 fish figurines and more than 30,000 characters of poems carved over the past 1,200 years to measure the water level in the Yangtze River during low water seasons.

As an added bonus, I'll throw in Bimini's Bimini Road. While not by any stretch of the imagination a "museum," some people think that Bimini Road is part of the Lost City of Atlantis. Personally, I've dived this site a few times, and while it doesn't look like much, the idea that you might be visiting an ancient, submerged city is overwhelmingly cool. And Bill Keefe, who runs tours to the area, spins an intriguing yarn.


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Boston Herald
By Gabriel Leiner
May 26, 2006


Earl King of Norton “hit the jackpot” with a compass he salvaged from the wreck of a U-boat, but the German government may be gunning for the sunken booty.

The former firefighter said an appraiser just told him the gyrocompass he removed from the submarine U-853, sunk off Block Island in 1945, is worth tens of thousands of dollars. (He wants to keep the actual figure a secret for now.)

“I’m not keeping it in my car anymore, that’s for sure,” King added.

He came upon his waterlogged treasure on July 4, 1973, with a dive partner. Both men ventured out to the wreck and King cut loose the compass from inside the vessel and lugged it to the surface.

The U-853 is the only documented World War II sinking of a German submarine close to the New England shore. The Navy caught up to the sub a day after the Germans torpedoed a U.S. ship. All hands, about 60 men, perished.

Now the wreck is back in the news thanks to an eagle-eyed appraiser.

“I brought it in and the appraiser told me, ‘You hit the jackpot,’ he blew my mind,” said King.

King said he has written to the German embassy to see if they’ll bid on this golden compass.

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The Eagle
May 24, 2006


A Texas A&M University professor has received a special commendation from the Texas Legislature for his "pioneering work in shipwreck excavation."

James Arnold III of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, based at Texas A&M University, received the commendation earlier this month. The resolution said that Arnold "has been at the forefront of efforts to research, discover and preserve the archaeological heritage of Texas," and that he should be recognized for "his efforts to preserve our state's past for future generations."

Arnold has been the Texas State Marine Archaeologist for 22 years and has participated in finding several shipwrecks in the Gulf of Mexico. He also helped pass the Abandoned Shipwreck Act of 1987, which gives states the right to title of abandoned shipwrecks in their coastal waters.


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Triumphantly re-launched last year as a monument to Victorian shipbuilding, IK Brunel’s ss Great Britain has now won the £100,000 Gulbenkian Prize for Museum of the Year 2006.

The prize, announced at a ceremony on May 25 at the Royal Institute of British Architects, recognises the hard work that has gone into preserving the world’s first great ocean liner and bringing it to life with the sights, sounds and smells of a 19th century voyage to Australia.

“Each of our shortlisted museums and galleries could have been a deserving winner,” said Professor Lord Robert Winston, Chair of the Gulbenkian judges, “but ss Great Britain got our unanimous vote for being outstanding at every level.”

“It combines a truly groundbreaking piece of conservation, remarkable engineering and fascinating social history,” he said, “plus a visually stunning ship above and below the water line. Most importantly, the ss Great Britain is accessible and highly engaging for people of all ages.”

Launched in 1843, ss Great Britain was the world’s first iron-hulled ocean-going ship. After nearly 100 years of service she was left to decay off the coast of the Falklands as a floating warehouse, only to be salvaged in 1970 and returned home to Bristol, where she has since sat in dry dock.

However, the corrosion of her magnificent iron hull continued apace until the innovative conservation project completed last year at a cost of £11.3 million. Now visitors can walk round the hull, enclosed in a glass sea with a giant humidification system halting further corrosion. One of the judges described the impact of the hull as ‘visual poetry’.

Above the water line, each aspect of the interior as it would have been for passengers in the 1840s has been reconstructed – from the spartan functionality of third class berths to the opulent First Class Ladies’ Boudoir.

The ship and Dockyard Museum charting her story now receive the prestigious title of Museum of the Year, £100,000 and hold the trophy for one year – an enamelled silver bowl by Vladimir Böhm. The trustees plan to put the prize money towards rebuilding the forward masts and completing the presentation of the ship in her original form.

The judges praised all the shortlisted museums, describing The Collection: Art & Archaeology in Lincolnshire as a major new cultural asset for Leicester and the county; commending London’s Hunterian Museum for imaginative presentation of controversial material; and recognising the new Underground Gallery at Yorkshire Sculpture Park as a superb addition to one of the best sites to see contemporary sculpture in the open air.

Shortlisted museums will all receive a plaque to display as well as framed citations from the judges, who included historian and broadcaster Dan Snow and journalist and writer Ekow Eshun.
The Gulbenkian Prize is the biggest single arts prize in the UK, funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. The prize is given annually to the museum or gallery that exhibits the best innovation or project, regardless of budget. Last year’s winner was Big Pit, the National Mining Museum of Wales at Blaenafon and in 2004 Charles Jencks’ Landform at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

For more information on the Gulbenkian Prize see the website.

SS Great Britain, Bristol
Great Western Dock, Gas Ferry Road, Bristol, BS1 6TY, England
T: 0117 926 0680
Open: The ship is open every day except Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. 10am to 5.30pm, April-October. (Last entry 4.30pm) 10am to 4.30pm, November - March. (Last entry 3.30pm)

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Daily India
May 25, 2006


SOUTH HAVEN, Mich. -- A search has resumed in Lake Michigan for a near-forgotten Northwest Airlines DC-4 that crashed in a storm 56 years ago and took 58 lives.

Underwater archeologists and amateur historians have embarked on a mission to find the wreckage of Flight 2501 in 200 feet of water about 18 miles northwest of Benton Harbor, The Chicago Tribune reported.

On June 23, 1950, 55 passengers and a crew of three took off from New York's LaGuardia Airport bound for Seattle but encountered stormy weather over the lake and crashed.

Body parts, a fuel tank float, blankets, shredded arm rests and small wooden pieces from the 93-foot-long plane were about all that was recovered from Lake Michigan beaches for several days.

The aircraft had no data or voice recorders and an investigation concluded the plane either broke up or the crew lost control in turbulence.

Searchers this week finished scanning the lakebed with high-tech equipment, and divers hope to return to specific sites on Saturday, the newspaper said.

The search is being financed by Clive Cussler, author of underwater adventure fiction that has sold more than 100 million copies.


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The Honolulu Advertiser
May 24, 2006


Federal authorities say they will survey an area off Wai'anae starting next week to assess dangers posed by decades-old munitions lying on the ocean floor.

The military will decide what to do about the weapons in Ordnance Reef, as the area is known, after the study is finished, said Christopher Rodney, a spokesman for U.S. Army Pacific.

He said the military won't retrieve the weapons during the survey because the two-week project is designed to study, not clear, the area.

An Army analysis of archived records earlier this year concluded over 2,000 conventional munitions were lying in Ordnance Reef, a spot off Poka'i Bay. Chemical weapons are not believed to be among them.

Chemical weapons dumping sites are believed to be farther from shore, and at greater depths, than Ordnance Reef.

Hawai'i residents have grown increasingly concerned about weapons deposited off local shores after news reports last year said the Army had dumped chemical munitions in at least 26 locations off the coasts of 11 states over several decades.

The military identified two locations off Hawai'i where it deposited 2,600 tons of mustard gas, cyanogen chloride, hydrogen cyanide and lewisite from 1944 to 1946.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is leading the Wai'anae study, due to start Sunday and last for two weeks, at the request from the Defense Department.

Researchers will use underwater mapping technology and submersible robots to look for the weapons over 5 square nautical miles. Robots and divers will collect water, fish and sediment samples.

"This survey is specifically designed to identify what's out there and do the best assessment if there are any threats to the environment and the people off the Wai'anae coast," Rodney said.

He said concerns expressed by the Wai'anae community to Thad Davis, the Army's deputy assistant secretary for the environment, about Ordnance Reef in part precipitated the survey.

David met with Wai'anae residents in March. At that meeting, he also said chemical weapons dumped off Hawai'i's coast didn't pose an immediate threat to the health and safety of the people of the Islands.

He added that the military had no plans to remove the weapons. Members of Hawai'i's congressional delegation, however, have asked the military to survey and remove the weapons.

Davis told Wai'anae residents that the military made chemical weapons during World War II so it would have retaliatory capability if such weapons were used against the U.S.

The military dumped the weapons in the ocean because that was deemed safer than open burning or land burial, Davis said.

It's designed to explore the depths of large bodies of water—and one recent weekend, that's exactly where it was found: searching the depths of the deep end of Judson Pool in Rochester Institute of Technology's Gordon Field House and Activities Center. (As the adage goes, every journey begins with a single step.)

A team of RIT engineering majors built the explorer, an underwater remote-operated vehicle, or ROV—and it has been described as one of the most ambitious student projects ever at RIT. This spring and summer, the device will be used to explore century-old shipwrecks resting on the bottom of Lake Ontario and the Atlantic Ocean—giving human explorers their first glimpses of some all-but-forgotten vessels lost to the seas.

The nine-member RIT team is led by Dan Scoville, a 2005 RIT graduate who has located and explored three "virgin" (previously undiscovered) shipwrecks in Lake Ontario in the past five years. Scoville, who personally backed the ROV project financially, now has his sights set on two undisclosed Lake Ontario shipwrecks (one is an 1800s-era schooner—the names and precise locations of the vessels won't be revealed until this fall) and, working with the Undersea Research Center at the University of Connecticut, the steamship Portland, which sank off the coast of Gloucester, Mass, in 1898.

Some of the fewer than a thousand ships lost in Lake Ontario have been discovered and salvaged, while others are in water too deep to explore, Scoville says. That leaves a small number—perhaps a dozen—in the 100-to-400-foot-depth range in the area from the Niagara River to Oswego accessible to explorers such as Scoville. But they're not easily found, Scoville says. Even after they're located, they can't be salvaged because those between the shores of New York and the international line are considered state property.

"We do it because we love doing it," says Scoville, an electrical engineer with Hydroacoustics Inc. and a scuba diver for about 10 years. "When you find one, it's neat. It's a really cool experience.

Little device makes a big splash

The small, 60-pound, battery-powered ROV, designed and built over two quarters, is equipped with up to four removable video cameras, four high-intensity lamps (serving, in essence, as headlights), a navigational compass, a timer, and sensors to measure depth, pressure and temperature. Four variable-speed motors enable vertical, forward and reverse movement and turning maneuverability. RIT students custom-built most circuit boards, wrote the software and created the graphical user interface used to control the device. All components are housed in watertight canisters (using 88 seals); a lightweight aluminum frame is rugged and modifiable.

The explorer is controlled by a joystick attached to a laptop computer that communicates with a microprocessor (the ROV's "command center") via a 680-foot-long fiber-optic cable. A human at the controls sees what the ROV "sees" through live video streaming and sensor readings.

The device is capable of diving at about two feet per second to a depth of 400 feet—about twice as deep as a skilled scuba diver can descend. A foam top helps achieve neutral buoyancy, enabling the ROV to remain level while underwater. A 100-minute battery life allows it to stay underwater longer than human divers. Future enhancements may include the addition of a mechanical arm and extended diving capability—perhaps enabling the explorer to reach Lake Ontario's maximum depth of about 800 feet.

Building the ROV cost the RIT team about $15,000, including $10,000 from sponsors. An equivalent commercially produced underwater ROV would cost $20,000 to $50,000, Scoville says. He describes the members of his team as not merely students, but skilled, practicing engineers.

"I lucked out with a really good team," he says. "We were told it couldn't be done."


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Pacific Islands Report
May 24, 2006


KOROR, Palau (Palau Horizon) – Rolling Waves Ltd., the owner of the yacht Lionwind, has paid Palau US$40,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by the local Attorney General’s Office after it was discovered that Lionwind crew members had taken artifacts from some shipwrecks in the Palau lagoon.

The Attorney General's Office said after obtaining a search warrant to search the yacht, six artifacts were recovered from the Lionwind by police.

[PIR Editor's note: According to PIR files, five divers who were crewmembers on the Lionwind pleaded not guilty to the 29-count criminal charges filed by government prosecutors ranging from damaging historical site or cultural property, to violation of the Palau Lagoon Monument Act, grand larceny, malicious mischief, possession or removal of government property, conversion of public funds and property, improper removal territorial waters and conspiracy (See story).]

The artifacts were reportedly taken from four different Japanese vessels that were sunk in the Palau lagoon during World War II combat.

The vessels are the Amatsu, the Choyu, the Ryuku, and the Maru.

The Palau Lagoon Monument Act provides that the Japanese vessels sunk in the lagoon and the contents of those vessels are to be preserved.

The law sets a maximum fine for the removal of an artifact at US$1,000, so the maximum fine for the six artifacts found on the Lionwind is US$6,000.

According to Attorney General Jeffrey Beattie, this made it difficult to obtain the US$40,000 settlement.

Beattie said, "The sunken Japanese vessels and artifacts are part of Palau’s historical heritage. Divers come to Palau from all over the world to dive these wrecks. Once they are gone, there is no way to replace them. We need to amend the Lagoon Monument Act to provide for stiffer penalties for the removal of these kind of artifacts because a US$1,000 fine is not much of a deterrent."

Beattie noted that approximately 66 Japanese vessels were reportedly sunk in Palau during World War II.

Separately, the Attorney General's Office filed criminal charges relating to the wreck looting against the captain of the Lionwind, two crewmembers, and a local dive guide.

Assistant Attorneys General Erin Johnson and Christopher Hale are prosecuting the criminal cases.

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FresnoBee.com
May 21, 2006


SAN FRANCISCO - An aging schooner that has withstood a shipwreck and dry rot will soon be ready for its next mission: tourist attraction.

The 111-year-old sailing schooner C.A. Thayer has been rebuilt from the keel up. The project, which cost between $12 million and $15 million and has taken two years, is one of the largest and most complicated restoration jobs on a wooden vessel in U.S. history.

The 219-foot Thayer will return to the Hyde Street Pier in San Francisco this summer.

"She is almost like a new ship," said William Elliott, general manager of Bay Ship and Yacht Co., the contractor handling the restoration.

The Thayer is the last of roughly 200 wooden wind-powered schooners that hauled lumber on the West Coast. The Thayer carried some of the lumber that rebuilt San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire.

It was retired roughly a half-century ago and started to fail in the 1980s while it was being used to teach children about sailing.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation named the Thayer as one of America's 10 most endangered landmarks more than a decade ago.

Elliott said more than 100,000 hours were spent on the rebuilding and another year's worth of upgrades and repairs will be needed when the ship docks this summer.

"It is very, very labor intensive," Elliott said. "We took it apart piece by piece and then put it back together, so that when someone steps aboard in the year 2050 it will be the same ship as it was when it was built in 1895."


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SALEM, Ore. — Seven years after the New Carissa ran aground on an Oregon beach, the legal battle over removal of the shipwreck has ended with a $22.1 million settlement.

Oregon's State Land Board, headed by Gov. Ted Kulongoski, voted unanimously Tuesday to accept a proposal from the owners, Green Atlas Shipping, to end their appeal of a $25 million jury award in 2002.

It will be up to the Legislative Emergency Board in September to approve removal of the rusting stern of the wood-chip freighter, the last remaining chunk of a 660-foot ship that broke apart during the attempt to drag it free in 1999.

The New Carissa snapped in half during efforts to burn off its engine fuel, sending the fuel into Coos Bay and contaminating oyster beds. Salvage crews battled fierce winter weather to tow the bow section to sea but lost it when a cable snapped, sending it back to shore and causing more pollution. It was eventually towed back to sea and scuttled by a Navy torpedo.

The stern, cut down to a skeleton, has sunk deep into the sand and rides the surf every day, posing a potential hazard at low tide when beachcombers can go right up to the hull.

Kulongoski said he will urge the emergency board to approve $19 million earmarked under the settlement for removal of the stern.

The remaining $3.1 million will pay for legal costs.

Louise Solliday, director of the Department of State Lands, said the state will seek a contract contingent on emergency board approval so that salvage crews can plan to remove the ship next year in the summer when weather and sea conditions will allow the dangerous work.

There have been suggestions that the shipwreck be left alone as a potential tourist attraction.

But the governor said he was concerned about the potential liability of leaving the shipwreck in place and with sending a message to shipping companies that the state would not tolerate similar wrecks in the future.

State Rep. Arnie Roblan, D-Coos Bay, was a high-school principal when the New Carissa ran aground, drawing international media attention that brought a circus atmosphere to the small port city for weeks.

Roblan said he was happy with the settlement and can turn to other issues, such as cutbacks in the commercial-fishing season that may force many out of business.

State Sen. Jeff Kruse, RRoseburg, echoed many who attended the land board meeting when he praised the settlement. "Oregonians value the beauty of our coastline and we expect shipwrecks to be removed," Kruse said.

"This is something that should have been brought to a conclusion long ago. It is time to haul the rusty hull off the beach."


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Roman-era ruins lie beneath Mediterranean, top archaeologist says
CAIRO, Egypt - Authorities have given the go-ahead for the underwater exploration of what appears to be a Roman city submerged in the Mediterranean, Egypt’s top archaeologist said Monday.

Zahi Hawass said in a statement that an excavation team had found the ruins of the Roman city 20 miles (35 kilometers) east of the Suez Canal on Egypt’s north coast.

Archaeologists have found buildings, bathrooms, ruins of a Roman fortress, ancient coins, bronze vases and pieces of pottery that all date back to the Roman era, the statement said. Egypt’s Roman era lasted from 30 B.C. to A.D. 337.

The excavation team also found four bridges that belonged to a submerged castle, part of which had been discovered on the Mediterranean coastline in 1910.

The statement said evidence indicated that part of the site was on the coast and part of it was submerged in the sea. The area marked Egypt’s eastern border during the Roman era.


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The Kansas City Star
By Thomas Peele
May. 19, 2006


WALNUT CREEK, Calif. - Obsolete ships anchored in Suisun Bay have decayed so much that the U.S. government sometimes pays more to scrap just one of them than it spends in a year to maintain the entire fleet, federal documents show.

Hazardous materials including asbestos, PCBs, lead paint, mercury, chromates, toxic tin and arsenic are omnipresent in the fleet.

What makes the ships expensive to get rid of also makes them dangerous. The vessels, many of them World War II relics, must be made safe enough to stay afloat for the 45-day tow to Texas scrapping yards.

One environmentalist called the fleet a "ticking time bomb." An engineer familiar with the ships questioned whether some of them can survive the trip to Texas.

U.S. Maritime Administration officials insisted the ships are safe, but for more than a year, they have stalled release of hull testing data the Contra Costa Times requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

That data is critical to assessing a ship's stability, engineers said. Some obsolete ships in the national inventory have hulls so weak that a hammer blow could rupture them, a federal report states.

But none of the ships in California waters is that weak, the acting director of the U.S. Maritime Administration and other bureaucrats insisted last Friday. They had come from Washington, D.C., to lead a tour of the vessels.

They spoke as they crunched through piles of lead-laced paint chips that had flaked from badly rusting walls.

"Not one ship has sunk," said administration spokeswoman Shannon Russell. She and others insisted the vessels are strong enough to survive the 5,000-mile trip to Texas.

The ships are "an immediate environmental threat," U.S. Department of Transportation investigators found nearly six years ago. Since then, the ships have decayed further, environmentalists and ship engineers said.

"Every day, they get worse," said Raymond J. Lovett. "Suisun Bay is the next problem waiting to happen." Lovett is the technical director of Ship Recycling Institute in Philadelphia and a chemist who specializes in hazardous materials.

"The condition of some of the ships is pitiful," he said.

The fleet continues to "pose potentially costly environmental threats to the waterways ... where (they) are stored," states a congressional report released last year.

After bumbling for decades and missing congressional deadlines to scrap reserve fleets in California, Virginia and Texas, the U.S. Maritime administration is attempting to accelerate its ship disposal. The agency is a branch of the federal transportation department that maintains National Defense Reserve Fleets.

Now, the vessels have decayed so badly that it is costing more than $1 million each to send some of them to scrapping yards, and environmentalists and engineers worry about ecological disasters.

The last five scrapped Suisun fleet ships cost $4.97 million to make them seaworthy enough to tow to Texas scrapping yards. The Wabash, a World War II tanker, cost $1.4 million. The administration budgeted $1.2 million in fiscal 2006 to maintain the Suisun fleet.

Seven more ships are scheduled for removal from the fleet by the end of the year.

The administration will miss by years a Sept. 30 congressional deadline to get rid of reserve vessels. A 2005 report by a government watchdog agency ripped the administration's inability to manage ship disposal.

Program leaders failed to develop a comprehensive scrapping plan and instead made decisions on a ship-by-ship basis that Government Accountability Office auditors said were overly bureaucratic. The leaders also did not grasp the difficult environmental and legal hurdles facing them.

In a letter to the administration dated May 10, U.S. Reps. Ellen Tauscher and George Miller, both California Democrats, asked for a briefing on the program and its expected failure to meet the Sept. 30 deadline.

Congress did not give the agency enough money to meet the deadline, said the former acting head of the Maritime Administration.

The first priority has been to remove ships in Virginia's James River that are in worse condition than those in California, said John Jamian, who resigned his post May 2. The administration has removed 50 Virginia ships in the past six years.

Jamian said the Suisun fleet "is in pretty good shape," but he did not discuss specifics.

The administration failed to release documents related to more than half the Suisun fleet sought by the Times in a March 2005 Freedom of Information Act request. Those documents would show hull condition and other safety factors. An administration lawyer said the request would take more months to process after the unexplained delay.

The request "fell through the cracks," Russell said

Records show that 57 of the older Suisun vessels contain more than 3.3 million gallons of low-grade fuel oil. Most of it is likely congealed into a tarlike goo.

The still unrevealed hull data is critical to assessing many of the risks of the ships and the oil they carry, Lovett said.

"The older the ship, the thinner the hull," he said. "You have to know specifics."

In addition to not releasing documents, the administration refused for more than a month to allow Times journalists to tour the Suisun fleet. It relented last Friday after Russell and acting administration head Julie A. Nelson flew from Washington to California.

The view from a small boat the group took into the restricted fleet zone revealed several older vessels listing under the weight of water in their hulls and dozens of badly rusted ships covered with thick chips of flaking paint.

The Clamp, a World War II rescue ship, appeared badly decayed. Wood could be seen behind peeled away steel at the waterline. Fleet superintendent Joe Pecoraro said there was steel behind the wood and that the ship was not in danger.

It is "inevitable" that lead paint and possibly other contaminates fall into the bay, said Frank X. Johnston, the administration's western regional director. He said little can be done other than to monitor the ships with flooding alarms and visual checks to make sure they stay afloat.

Maintenance crews use an electrical charge to slow rusting.

As of May 12, 77 ships were anchored in Suisun Bay, according to inventory documents.

Fifty-one of them are in some stage of being readied for disposal, a process that includes reviewing their historical significance.

Twelve belong to the Navy, Coast Guard or government science agencies. The Defense Department holds six in reserve for military use. Six others are held for historic reasons or possible donations as museums.

Only two Suisun ships belong to the Ready Reserve Force, a fleet of cargo ships that can be quickly activated for war or national emergency.

Twenty-seven of the ships sailed in World War II, including the battleship Iowa and the tugboat Hoga, which survived the Pearl Harbor attack. Another 39, mostly merchant marine and military cargo ships, were built between 1950 and 1969. The other 10 were built between 1970 and 1987.

"It's a junkyard out there, a ticking time bomb," said Saul Bloom, director of a San Francisco environmental group, Arc Ecology. He has watched and researched the Suisun fleet for years.

"I have no confidence in (the maritime administration's) processes for being environmentally responsible," Bloom said. A reserve fleet mishap is as inevitable as an earthquake, he said. "It's not a question of if but when."

The administration did release a few documents that show asbestos and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, on more than 30 Suisun ships. Engineers said it can be safely assumed they are present in nearly all the vessels.

Some of the asbestos has decayed to the point where it is friable - the dustlike stage where it can lodge in the lungs, reports show.

"PCBs are of particular concern" and asbestos is omnipresent, according to a 1994 Halliburton Corporation environmental analysis of obsolete ships.

PCB reports for individual ships showed no leaks, but most of the testing was done 10 to 15 years ago. The toxic materials are in everything from doors to duct tape to cables and transformers, from which they can sweat or leak.

"There are no PCBs leaving the ships. There is no asbestos leaving the ships," Russell said. "The administration is dedicated to the safe disposal of these ships."

The PCB reports show "vast quantities" of the carcinogen, said Chein Kao, an Arc Ecology scientist who analyzed the reports.

"We are talking about a process of decay in the sea environment, like rusting, that occurs more quickly than on land," Kao said. There is "the potential for release with very high concentrations going into the bay."

Five spills have been reported at the Suisun fleet in the past 15 years, the largest being 30 gallons of oil, said Russell, the administration's spokeswoman. All appropriate spill prevention and emergency plans are in place, she said.

Last year, the administration increased the water it removes from the ships and dumps into Benicia's sewer system, pumping out more than 45,000 gallons in July, city records show. City tests on the water before it went into the sewers found no contaminates exceeding safe levels.

The testing showed high levels of sodium. Russell said the water was accumulated rainfall. She wrote in an e-mail that "we do not believe sodium levels in the sewer water are from our ships." The water came directly from the ships and was tested before it went into the sewers.

Lovett said the sodium indicates that bay water could have entered the ships, a sign of hull decay.

"There aren't too many other sources of sodium in the marine environment other than salt water," he said.

The West Coast has no active ship scrapping yards.

That means the vessels must be prepared for a 45-day voyage to Texas through the Panama Canal, a roughly 5,000-mile journey.

Two World War II-era gasoline tankers towed from Suisun Bay to a Texas scrapping yard last year were in such poor shape that engineers who prepared them for the voyage made bets on whether they would sink.

It cost taxpayers more than $2.5 million to dispose of those tankers, the Wabash and Nemasket. At least their steel was recycled. The administration recently spent $2.85 million to remove PCBs and other hazards from three other ships so the Navy can tow them out in the ocean later this year and sink them for target practice.

An engineer familiar with Suisun ships said it is ridiculous for them to be more than 80 percent prepared for recycling only to sink them at a time when the world is struggling to preserve natural resources and steel is selling for as much as $400 a ton. Ships in Suisun range on gross weight from less than 2,000 tons to more than 37,000 tons.

"I have a real problem about seeing steel go to the bottom of the ocean when it can be recycled," said Werner Hoyt, the engineer who often prepares Suisun ships for towing. "Copper and nickel are getting $3 a pound. Aluminum is $1 a pound. Come on."

The administration is close to awarding nearly $4 million in contracts to take four decrepit World War II Victory-class ships from California to Texas for scrapping. People familiar with those ships fear that strong Pacific waves could tear apart their hulls and send them plunging to the bottom.

A similar Victory ship nearly sank 12 miles off southern Florida in December 2001 when a hull patch came off and the ship flooded while under tow to a scrapping yard. It had 57,000 gallons of oil aboard.

The hulls of the four Victories have decayed along the water line and bolt heads have rusted off. Heavy seas could flex "the hulls enough that they could pop," Hoyt said.

He and John E. Gibbons, a ship recycling consultant, exhaustively reviewed the Red Oak Victory, a ship of the same class. It was taken from Suisun Bay in 1998 and partially restored in Richmond, Calif., where it serves as a floating museum.

"It was the pick of the litter out there," Gibbons said, and it still had hull degradation around the waterline of about 50 percent.

The report concluded that Suisun Victory-class ships had decayed so much that they would be extremely dangerous to tow in the ocean and costly to make safe.

The Coast Guard must OK the ships before they can be moved. "We have to approve a dead-ship tow" after reviewing safety plans, said Capt. Gerald Swanson.

Despite the Victory ships' badly rusted condition, most of the decay is "cosmetic," said Curt J. Michanczyk, manager of the administration's ship disposal program.

The Victory ships have "a huge problem with the thickness of the hulls. They are very, very thin," Lovett said.

The administration has waited too long and fumbled too many chances to safely recycle the ships, said Bloom of Arc Ecology.

"When you deal with the Maritime Administration at the level of these ships, it's like Alice in Wonderland," said Bloom of Arc Ecology. "Everything is through the looking glass. Nothing is as it should be."

A 2001 report shows that three of the four Victory ships soon to leave for Texas could have more than 180,000 gallons of fuel oil in their tanks.

Russell would not provide updated figures or discuss how much oil the individual ships carry. She cited what she called national security concerns.

Revealing the ships' fuel loads could make them a terrorist target, said administration lawyer Christine Garland.

The Victory ships will be towed through the Pacific Ocean, the Panama Canal, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico at five to seven knots. Captains could seek shelter from storms in safe harbors along the route, but the seas are unpredictable and the ships old and weak.

"That's the thing about the Pacific," Lovett said. "The Pacific has a knack of being a little rough."

There is little monitoring of the fleet's effect on the Suisun Bay environment.

Russell said that "various local and state agencies" such as the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board and the California Department of Fish and Game monitor the fleet.

But California Public Records Act requests to those agencies turned up no documentation of testing, and spokespersons for those agencies said they are not done. The California Department of Toxic Substance Control also said it had no record of correspondence with the administration about the fleet.

"We have no records of any contacts with the Maritime Administration," Stephen Morse, the water board's assistant director, wrote in an e-mail.

The absence of outside environmental monitoring "is extremely troubling," said Richard Gutierrez, of the Basel Action Network, a Seattle environmental group. It joined with the Sierra Club to sue to stop the Maritime Administration's disposal of ships in foreign markets.

"They are just a risk by sitting there," Gutierrez said. "PCBs can leach. Asbestos can crumble. These are big issues for the environment and the community."

"We have done nothing to determine the legacy of contamination in Suisun Bay," said Gibbons. He has analyzed ship recycling for the National Environmental Education Training Center in Pennsylvania. It receives Defense Department funding.

"What is leaching into the bay? There is flaking lead paint. There are other paints and hull coatings that are flaking," Gibbons said. "There should be adequate sampling surveys around these ships to see what contaminants are in the water."

Lovett said the administration has a long record of not providing information from which such determinations can be made.

"They are just totally not forthcoming," he said. "Everything they seem to handle and they handle ineffectively and inefficiently."


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The Seattle Times
May 19, 2006


SALEM, Ore. — A proposed settlement to end an appeal of a $25 million jury award against the owners of the New Carissa shipwreck will be considered next week by the Oregon State Land Board.

The New Carissa ran aground just offshore from Coos Bay in February 1999. Efforts to free the wood-chip freighter failed and attempts to burn off its engine fuel broke the ship in half, spilling oil into the bay and its oyster beds.

The bow of the 660-foot ship was eventually towed to sea and scuttled with a torpedo from a Navy submarine. But the stripped-down remains of the stern still are stuck in the sand at a state beach on the North Spit of Coos Bay.

In November 2004, a Coos County jury found the ship's owners guilty of negligent trespass and awarded the state $25 million to pay for removal.

But the $25 million award is in an escrow account awaiting an appeal to the Oregon Court of Appeals by the ship's owners.

The land board will meet in executive session Tuesday to discuss the settlement proposal, followed by a public session. If a settlement is reached, it will be offered as a motion followed by a vote, said Julie Curtis, board spokeswoman.


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People's Daily
May 18, 2006


BERLIN: Some 500 treasures retrieved by divers from ancient Egyptian cities that disappeared under the Mediterranean Sea centuries ago are on display in Berlin.

The exhibition titled "Egypt's Sunken Treasures" marks the first time the artefacts from the legendary lost cities of Herakleion and Canopus, and a submerged part of the port of Alexandria, will have been seen outside Egypt.

They are between 1,200 and 2,700 years old and disappeared in the eighth century AD when the cities were submerged by an earthquake or another natural disaster, sinking to the seabed near Alexandria.

Spending thousands of hours under water, a French-led team of archaeological divers brought to the surface gold jewellery, coins, heads of sphinxes and the biggest statue of Hapy, the god of the Nile, ever found in Egypt.

It stands tall next to the two colossal statues, also in red granite and both nearly five metres high, of an Egyptian king and queen just as it did in the temple of Heracles.

The exhibition also features pieces from Greek, Roman, Muslim and early Christian cultures found in the sunken cities, proving that they were a cultural and religious melting pot in the Mediterranean.

Distinctive Greek and Egyptian features merge in a marble head of the god Sarapsis and a range of likenesses of the Ptolemaic rulers, attesting to the cross-pollination between the cultures.

"This is an archaeological discovery on a par with that of Pompeii," said Gereon Sievernich, the director of Berlin's Martin Gropius Bau museum where the exhibition will run for four months before moving to Paris.

The excavation team, led by French marine archaeologist Franck Goddio, spent a decade diving to bring the treasures to the surface from the ancient cities and 14 shipwrecks scattered around them.

They used magnetographic equipment especially made by the French Nuclear Agency to scour the depths of the Nile delta and the Mediterranean, a task bedevilled not only by the lack of accurate information about bygone times but also by modern-day pollution.

Their time under water proved that the existing maps of Alexandria's ancient harbour which housed the royal quarter where Julius Caesar, Marc Antony and Cleopatra stayed and had also disappeared under water were incorrect.

They also discovered that the cities of Heraklaeion and Thonis, described respectively in Greek and Egyptian texts, were one and the same place.

This was proved by black granite stele, found in the temple of Heracles, from the reign of Pharaoh Nectanebo I.

The most spectacular find on Canopus, a Roman playground founded at the time of the Trojan War, was missing pieces of the Noas of the Decades the world's first astrological calendar of which the top was found in 1776 and was long on display in the Louvre museum in Paris.

With the different pieces assembled, it is now shown in almost complete form in the Berlin exhibition, which will move to the Grand Palais in Paris on December 8.

Source: China Daily


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20 de Maio



Programa

15:00 Inauguração de placas toponímicas dedicadas a Cristóvão Colombo

Local de encontro: Cruzamento da Av. Paul Harris com a Rua José Manuel Paula Franco (Ameijeira Verde)


16:30 Salão Nobre dos Paços do Concelho - Conferência "Cristovão Colombo e os Portugueses" - Prof.Doutor Francisco Contente Domingues

Lançamento do Livro "Relação das antiguidades dos indios", de Frei Ramón Pané, com desenhos da pintura Eduarda Coutinho

Entrada Livre/Oferta de um exemplar do Livro


21:00 Centro Cultural de Lagos - Projecção do filme "1492 - A conquista do paraíso" e debate


Mais informações em 282 767 818

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The Daily News
By Patricia Smith
May 16,2006


ATLANTIC BEACH — It hasn’t been off the ocean floor for nearly 300 years. But once it is, it will be going on display.

After underwater archaeologists raise a cannon from the Queen Anne’s Revenge shipwreck site Wednesday, it will be on public display for one hour — noon to 1 p.m. — at Fort Macon State Park.

“If you don’t see it then, you won’t see it for awhile,” said QAR Project Director Mark Wilde-Ramsing.

At least not the real McCoy.

A replica of the cannon is featured in the foreground of a QAR shipwreck display at the newly renovated North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores, which opens to the public Friday.

Following the viewing, the real cannon will be taken to the QAR Conservation Lab in Greenville for a 3- to 4-year cleaning and preservation process.

To expose the rusting iron to the air for more than an hour would risk harm to the artifact and any identifying maker marks on it, Wilde-Ramsing said.

“Normally it would be wrapped up and go right back into water,” he said.

But it is also important, Wilde-Ramsing said, for the public to get a chance to see how the cannon looks right after it comes up from the sea. It will give people a better understanding of why the conservation aspect takes up 90 percent of the time and cost of underwater archaeology, he said.

“They don’t come up clean and pristine,” Wilde- Ramsing said.

This cannon, a six-foot-long weapon that probably fired a four-pound cannonball, has a number of other, smaller artifacts stuck to it in a concreted shell, Wilde-Ramsing said.

“It’ll be interesting to look at,” he said.

The cannon will be raised from the southeast margin of the main artifact pile near a cluster of five other cannons, two large anchors and tons of ballast stones.

It will be the ninth cannon raised from the wreck site since it was discovered in November 1996 by the Florida-based research company Intersal.

Archaeologists believe the 18th Century shipwreck may be the Queen Anne’s Revenge, the pirate Blackbeard’s flagship that ran aground in Beaufort Inlet in 1718.

The cannon can be seen from noon to 1 p.m. Wednesday in the fort parking lot at Fort Macon State Park. In case of inclement weather, retrieval and display of the cannon will be delayed until Thursday, Wilde-Ramsing said.

State underwater archaeologists plan to wrap up the two-week diving expedition at the site on Saturday.


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students in 1960 is on display at the State Museum.

$42 million facility could be one of S.C.’s most expensive, least studied
Officials who want to build a $42 million museum for the Hunley submarine in North Charleston haven’t done feasibility, site and market studies that experts say are crucial to knowing whether the project will work.

And, if the dwindling numbers of visitors to other, smaller Hunley exhibits are any gauge, it’s possible the mostly taxpayer-supported museum might fail to draw sufficient visitors and wind up being a white elephant.

It would be an expensive white elephant.

At $42 million, the future Hunley museum will be among the most costly in South Carolina, above the $16 million Columbia Art Museum but below the $70 million Charleston aquarium.

A state panel called the Hunley Commission has chosen a site for the museum whose star attraction would be the Confederate sub. The site is on a portion of the former Navy base in North Charleston, less than a mile from where the Hunley hangs in a sling in a tank of water at a conservation laboratory.

To build the museum, officials are counting on aid from the city and hefty infusions of state and federal taxpayer dollars.

But no market studies have been done, according to Freedom of Information Act requests filed with the Hunley Commission, the Friends of the Hunley foundation and the city of North Charleston. And visitors at other Hunley exhibits are not turning out in the numbers expected.

Sen. Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston, Hunley Commission chairman and the museum’s biggest promoter, declined to answer questions about the museum. In the past, he has said — apparently without any studies to support it — that 1 million people would visit a Hunley museum in its first year.

Experts say no big museumlike facility should be built without in-depth market studies. Such studies would test the viability of a location, a project’s cost versus its expense and the appeal of the subject matter, most importantly.

“This is like investing in a stock. How could you possibly invest in a stock without doing due diligence?” said Harry Miley, a state economist who headed the S.C. Board of Economic Advisors for eight years after being appointed by the late Gov. Carroll Campbell.

“If you asked a real estate developer to put up a $42 million project without doing a feasibility study, it would look very odd,” Miley said.

Already, a $3 million Hunley exhibit in one of the state’s hottest tourism markets — complete with a full-scale Hunley replica and a gift shop — has failed.





In December, the Hunley exhibit at Myrtle Beach’s Broadway at the Beach closed two years into an anticipated 15-year run. Broadway at the Beach is a 350-acre tourist Mecca that draws 12 million people a year.

“For us, in our market, it had limited appeal,” said Pat Dowling, spokesman for Burroughs & Chapin, the company that owns Broadway at the Beach. Dowling declined to discuss attendance figures.

Two years ago, Hunley promoters and Burroughs & Chapin officials said the Myrtle Beach exhibit would attract up to 500,000 people a year.

But that exhibit, too, opened with no marketing studies to see whether tourists would actually visit.

Meanwhile, the number of tourists visiting the Hunley lab is falling off. Half of the lab’s approximately 276,000 visitors went through by 2002, the first year it offered consistent tours. The 48,000 visitors in 2002 slid down to 37,000 in 2005, despite a climb to 41,500 in 2004, when the burial of the Hunley’s crew increased interest.

Officials at five other museums in Virginia and North and South Carolina told The State that professionally commissioned, detailed studies are essential before launching a museum project.

A few years ago, before going ahead with an $18.5 million expansion plan for an observatory, planetarium and IMAX theater at the State Museum in Columbia, museum officials did a feasibility study and learned an IMAX wouldn’t pay for itself.

“It said we couldn’t support an IMAX, so we backed off on that,” museum director Willie Calloway said.

Such studies ideally are done by academics who use sophisticated research techniques and who have “no political or business ties” to the project to be studied, said Michael Johnson, an expert in feasibility studies and location analyses at the Carnegie Mellon business school in Pittsburgh.

North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey acknowledged no market studies have been done for a Hunley museum. An attraction as special as the Hunley will draw enough visitors to get the museum launched, he said. After that, the right kind of marketing and advertising will take care of the rest, he said.

In North Charleston’s vision, the Hunley would have its own museum. It beat out sites in Mount Pleasant and downtown Charleston that would have made the Hunley part of existing museums and cost much less.

But critics say a lack of market studies is just one potential drawback to putting a $42 million museum in North Charleston.

Others shaping up are:

• Fundraising limitations

• Traffic woes

• Crime

• The politics of the Confederacy.

FUNDRAISING

The Hunley project has struggled to raise private dollars.

The Hunley hasn’t proved to be the kind of project that prompts many major gifts from corporations and wealthy individuals. Originally, Hunley supporters said big donations would pay for much of the project.

In February 1998, Warren Lasch told the Hunley Commission his goal was to raise $15 million in private funds. That money would go toward the Hunley’s raising, preservation and a fledgling endowment, Lasch said.

From 1998 to 2005, Lasch headed the Friends of the Hunley, a fundraising foundation that also oversaw the excavation and preservation of the Hunley. The foundation was created by the Hunley Commission to handle day-to-day Hunley affairs.

From 1998 to 2004, Lasch’s foundation attracted $4.8 million in contributions, falling far short of $15 million, according to foundation audits and IRS records. During the same time, the foundation spent $1.1 million for professional fundraisers, according to those records.

The Hunley foundation disputes some of The State’s numbers. Foundation spokeswoman Raegan Quinn, for example, said the organization has received about $10 million — not $5 million — in cash, equipment and donated services. That total was not apparent in The State’s reading of Hunley audits and IRS statements.

The fundraising failed to hit the $15 million goal despite having professionals doing the job and despite widespread publicity on the Hunley — a television movie, a front-page story on The Wall Street Journal and statewide television specials.

But North Charleston is helping out.

Summey said the city is donating $50,000 a year toward the Hunley’s preservation. And the city has $3 million in hand to move forward with the museum’s design, he said.

TRAFFIC, CRIME

The traffic woes in North Charleston are only going to grow, critics say.

The former Navy base where McConnell and North Charleston officials want to put the Hunley museum is in large part an abandoned industrial complex with no easy access from interstate roads.

The I-26 corridor, while nearby, suffers from severe congestion during morning and evening rush hours. And, in recent months, plans have been firming up for the State Ports Authority to build a port just two miles south of the proposed museum.

To accommodate the port, the state plans a $300 million, 1.8-mile access road from I-26. Once the port is in operation, and the road is built, that area will see over time 6,500-plus extra truck trips a day, according to a 2005 study by the U.S. Corps of Engineers.

“It will be a catastrophe — the worst traffic congestion in South Carolina — gridlock,” said Dana Beach of the S.C. Coastal Conservation League, a group tracking the development.

Phoebe Miller, North Charleston’s mayor pro tem, said the new port is located on the old Navy base’s southern edge, while the museum is at the north end. “I don’t think we’ll feel the impact.”

Another problem that might diminish the lure of a museum in the city of 84,000 is crime.

For two years in a row, North Charleston has ranked in the nation’s top 50 cities for crime, in a survey by Morgan Quitno Press, a Kansas research firm. North Charleston ranked 42nd last year and 22nd in 2004. (Charleston last year ranked 116th; Columbia, 49th.)

Miller said crime isn’t as big a problem as some people think.

“Oh, but we get a bad rap!” she said. “In my neighborhood, we keep the doors open. We’re safe. We have good police.”

Summey said since he became mayor 11 years ago, North Charleston’s police force has increased from 170 to nearly 300 officers. Three years ago, he said, the city’s crime rate ranked it 12th-worst in the nation on one study.

“We are dealing with the issues,” he said.

POLITICS OF THE CONFEDERACY

Politics, too, might limit the appeal of a museum.

Hunley Commission members — most of whom belong to the Sons of Confederate Veterans — insist on flying the Confederate flag in front of a Hunley museum, according to commission minutes.

That could rekindle the bitter debate that racked South Carolina during the 1990s over whether to fly the Confederate flag atop the State House dome.

Already, black leaders like the Rev. Joe Darby of Charleston are vowing that if the Confederate flag flies at the publicly financed Hunley museum, they will do all they can to keep schoolchildren away from it.

Despite all that, Hunley supporters insist attendance would be strong.

“Yes, this (the Hunley museum) will probably be the premiere (sic) tourist attraction in South Carolina,” McConnell said in a 2004 letter to state lawmakers.

The state’s largest tourist draw is Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia. It gets more than 850,000 visitors a year.

ELSEWHERE

Other states with major underwater finds have put their wrecks in existing museums rather than build new ones.

In Virginia, the turret of the Monitor, the first ironclad battleship — also from the Civil War era — will go into a $30 million new wing of a maritime museum in Newport News, officials said.

Before deciding to build the wing, officials did about $500,000 worth of market and feasibility studies. Those professional studies were “essential” in developing a realistic idea of whether people would visit the exhibit, said maritime museum public relations director Justin Lyons.

In Texas, another major underwater find — a French ship called the La Belle — is undergoing about 20 years of preservation in a laboratory. When that is finished, it will be exhibited at the state museum in Austin.

One person who is surprised at the growth of the Hunley project, especially a proposed $42 million museum, is former Sen. Larry Richter, R-Charleston.

In 1996, Richter co-sponsored the McConnell bill that established the Hunley Commission, giving it the authority to find a home for the Hunley.

Richter said he always assumed the Hunley would go in an existing museum — not a new expensive one.

“In tough times like these, we have to use the assets we have as opposed to expanding our asset base,” Richter said.

WHY NORTH CHARLESTON

What a Hunley museum might lack in national name recognition it could make up for in the sub’s sheer mystique.

What the Hunley has going for it, according to McConnell, is the secrecy in which it was developed, the mystery of how it sank and the story of how a gold coin found on board had stopped a bullet that might have otherwise killed the Hunley’s commander at the Battle of Shiloh.

McConnell envisions the museum as an expensive, world-class facility.

“To do it right, you have to have a state-of-the-art, world-class facility,” McConnell said during a Feb. 12, 2004, Hunley Commission meeting. “Not only will it be a great world attraction, but it will be an asset to the taxpayers rather than a burden, but it takes money.”

He has said, for example, he wants computer-enhanced “virtual reality” experiences so visitors will feel they actually are on the Hunley.

And he plans a Hunley replica that will take people on a water voyage into the Cooper River.

The riverfront city of North Charleston had plenty of Lowcountry competition in its bid to be the Hunley’s home.

But it offered what the other cities did not: lots of land and a large incentive package.

Weeks after the Hunley was discovered in 1995, McConnell had the General Assembly pass a resolution saying the “remains of the Hunley” should go to Patriots Point museum in Mount Pleasant “for enshrinement.”

Patriots Point, a state-run waterfront museum, has a collection of naval ships, including the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier and two submarines. And, with 275,000 visitors last year, it is one of the state’s major tourist destinations.

In the site’s favor is its location just off U.S. 17, the coastal roadway traveled by millions of tourists each year.

Several years later, The Charleston Museum near downtown Charleston and the city of North Charleston became interested in the Hunley.

For years, The Charleston Museum had displayed a Hunley replica and kept the sub’s memory alive in a city visited by millions of tourists each year.

North Charleston became interested after the Hunley was raised in August 2000 and placed in a lab at the old Navy base.

In February 2004, after lobbying from all three cities, the commission chose North Charleston. And it made that recommendation to the Legislature, which by law has to sign off on a site.

The reasoning: North Charleston offered $13 million in incentives, including lots of land. It was, McConnell said, the best financial package.

Under North Charleston’s plan, the state will pay $7 million; the federal government, $9 million; and North Charleston and Charleston County together, $18.9 million. Foundations and grants are expected to pay $6.9 million.

State money for the museum has not been secured. Summey said the private sector and local government could pay more, if they need to.

Hunley Commission member state Rep. Kenny Bingham, R-Lexington, said in a recent interview that one reason he and most other commission members were impressed by the North Charleston proposal was its choice of architect. Ralph Appelbaum, who designed the U.S. Holocaust Museum, is world-renowned.

“With him, visiting the Hunley becomes an experience,” Bingham said. “If it’s just the Hunley sitting there, that is not going to draw people again and again.” Moreover, Bingham said, the North Charleston site is on the water, and the city has a special tax district that allows it to raise money for the museum.

A SURPRISE TO SOME

In March 2004, the state Senate, where McConnell is president pro tem, quickly approved the North Charleston site.

In the House, Rep. Chip Limehouse, R-Charleston, who represents the Patriots Point museum area, got the museum resolution bottled up in a committee.

Limehouse thinks North Charleston is isolated from traditional tourist centers and would attract few visitors. He said he stalled the resolution to provoke a public debate.

“When you build a shopping mall or motel, you have a market research study,” Limehouse said in a recent interview. “They look at things like demographics and traffic count.”

McConnell, reacting to Limehouse, wrote a letter to all House members, criticizing Limehouse.

Later, someone slipped the museum resolution into a budget measure. It quietly passed both legislative chambers in 2004.

Limehouse, told by The State recently that the General Assembly had approved of North Charleston, said he thought the measure had died in 2004. He’s not sure lawmakers knew they had not only selected a site but had signed off on a free-standing, more expensive museum.

The mayors of Charleston and Mount Pleasant say their cities are still good candidates to exhibit the Hunley.

Mount Pleasant Mayor Harry Hallman said the state already has one major naval museum — Patriots Point — so why build a second one just for the Hunley?

Charleston Mayor Joe Riley said more people will see the Hunley if it is at The Charleston Museum.

“People don’t have unlimited time, and our location is in the thick of things,” Riley said.

But Summey wants North Charleston to be a major tourism destination and “get a piece of tourism pie.” Besides the Hunley museum, the city is planning a $7 million firetruck museum.

The Hunley museum won’t be a moneymaker, Summey said.

But “it is going to be something that adds to the quality of life, the quality of perception of our greater Charleston area.

“It’s just going to be in North Charleston.”

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Asbury Park Press
By Joe Pike
May 15, 2006


BEACH HAVEN — The spring has been rough for Deborah C. Whitcraft.

The 51-year-old lost her father unexpectedly to a stroke, she lost her bid for a third full term as mayor last week and she recently found out that her husband's cancer has become active again.

But there's light at the end of the tunnel, or rather light at the end of Dock Road, for Whitcraft.

That's because her dream of building a museum on 528 Dock Road, celebrating the history of the Jersey Shore, appears to be coming to fruition.

The Museum of New Jersey Maritime History, a project that Whitcraft, her husband, Jimmy Vogel, and ex-husband, Robert Yates, have been working on for about the last two years, is scheduled to open as early as July 4 weekend, Whitcraft said.

"I need this now more than ever," she said. "It's the only thing keeping me going. I had a lot of things come down on me at once, but the museum and my husband's health are the only things I care about now. This is my dream and it's finally going to happen."

But that dream was also a source of attack by several of her opponents in the May 9 nonpartisan election, she said. Whitcraft, who was vying for one of the three-open seats on the three-member Board of Commissioners, received the fourth-highest number of votes behind local businessmen Tom Stewart and Mike Battista and Long Beach Township Police Sgt. Tony E. Deely.

ABOUT THE MUSEUM

A registered nonprofit facility, the Museum of New Jersey Maritime History will house a large collection of nautical antiques, accounts and photographs of New Jersey shipwrecks, historical documents relating to the establishment of the U.S. Life-Saving Service, a research library, theater, Internet cafe, computer database, and recovered shipwreck artifacts.

In several candidates' campaigns, Whitcraft was accused of building the museum only to get a tax exempt status, she said.

That's because the museum includes two third-floor apartments with panoramic views, one for herself and her husband, and a second for her ex-husband.

"When I went door to door, people kept asking about that," Whitcraft said. "I think residents were starting to believe everything my opponents were saying about me and the museum. I couldn't believe it. I thought it was silly. I'm going to be paying the same property tax as I do now. I'm not exempt. I'm doing this because this is my dream. I'm doing this for the people of Beach Haven and the rest of the Jersey Shore."

Victorian in appearance, the three-story building and its parking lot would cover a 12,399-square-foot tract. The public will be charged no admission fee, and the museum would be classified as nonprofit, with funds for its operation to be sought through public grants and private donations, Whitcraft explained.

An environmental watchdog group, Alliance for a Living Ocean, has accepted the mayor's invitation to move its office and gift shop to the future museum rent-free, she said.

A lecture hall would host guest speakers, groups and experts to give talks on the Shore's history and its natural environment.

"What she is doing and what she has done to try to get this place open really shows her dedication and her love for Beach Haven, the Jersey Shore and everybody living in it," said former alliance President Joan Koons. "I feel bad for her that people tried to use the museum against her. She has nothing but good intentions."

But those intentions were both time consuming and pricey for Whitcraft, and both her husband and ex-husband.

Whitcraft, former owner of Black Whale Cruises, said she used her own wealth as capital to finance the museum's plans and eventual construction.

Planned exhibits for the museum include one on the ill-fated Morro Castle that ran aground off Asbury Park in 1934, and another on the U.S. Life-Saving Service, founded in Stafford in 1871. The lifesaving service was one of the precursors to the Coast Guard (the Revenue Cutter Service the other). Other exhibits would detail infamous shipwrecks off Long Beach Island, surfing, and the perils of early deep-sea diving, to name a few.

"We have been waiting a long time to see this place ready to go," said Larrell Brown, also a former Alliance president. "It seemed like it would never happen and now it's right around the corner from opening."


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Spiegel
May 10, 2006


Workers digging a railway tunnel under the Bosporus Strait have uncovered the remains of a major Byzantine harbor that archaeologists say is a trove of relics dating back to Roman Emperor Constantine the Great.

The tunnel, when it's finished, will end in a shining new railway station, the largest in Turkey -- a train and subway link surrounded by a 21st-century shopping center. Modern Turkish planners, though, weren't the first people in history to imagine the spot as a transport hub. The $4 billion tunnel project has uncovered a fourth-century harbor under the slums of Yenikapi, on the European side of Istanbul, and archaeologists excavating the area say it's a trove of relics dating back as far as Constantine the Great.

Chief archaeologist Metin Gokcay and his team have found preserved leather sandals, hairbrushes, candle holders, mosaics, massive anchors, eight ships and the remains of a pier and stone harbor jetties. "We've found lots of things that tell us about the daily life of the city in the fourth century," Gokcay told the BBC. "I've done many digs in Istanbul, but there are many things here I've never seen before."

The Roman emperor Constantine moved his capital from Rome to Byzantium in 330 AD and renamed the city Constantinople. (Later it became Istanbul.) It grew into the busiest trading center in the eastern Mediterranean. "The ships from here carried the wine in jars and amphorae from the Sea of Marmara," a nautical archaeology expert named Cemal Pulak told the London Guardian. "The cargoes of grain came in from Alexandria. This was the harbor that allowed the city to be."

This paradise for archaeologists has been hell for engineers who want to finish the tunnel by 2010. The modern vision is to ease boat, bridge, and street traffic in Istanbul, which has a population of 12 million, by linking the European and Asian sides of the city with a rail service that can move over a million passengers a day under the Bosporus Strait. The Marmaray tunnel will be the deepest underwater tunnel in the world, built to withstand earthquakes up to 9.0 on the Richter scale. So far the project has been on schedule. But the Yenikapi site will be its focal point, and the archaeologists can't say when they'll be finished.

"It's true I lose sleep over this," Marmaray Project Manager Haluk Ozmen told the BBC. For now, the excavation has only held up work at Yenikapi, but it might hold up the whole tunnel. "The dig is the only thing that can delay the Marmaray project. That's why we're working 24 hours a day to meet our deadline. Everything is in the hands of the archaeologists now."

Relic-excavation has already lasted four months too long, from the planners' point of view. But Ismail Karamut, director of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, isn't impressed by arguments about malls and bridge congestion. "This city is 2,800 years old and here we're digging right in the middle of a living city," he said. "It's not like excavating on a mountainside. The transport people can't start until we're finished. And maybe they'll have to change their project depending on what we find. We've told them we can't give them a deadline."


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