Do fundo do mar... Sea bottom

A COIN found in a swamp could help prove a Spanish or Portuguese ship was wrecked on Australia's east coast years before Captain James Cook's voyage.

The coin, found in a snake-infested marsh, could help prove a century-old theory that a Spanish or Portuguese ship was wrecked on Australia’s east coast years before Captain Cook’s famed voyage of discovery.

The find, made by an expedition led by self-funded Brisbane historian Greg Jeffreys, is the first piece of dated evidence among a number of artefacts found in Eighteen Mile Swamp on Queensland’s North Stradbroke Island.

An independent UK expert from Cambridge University has been able to confirm the coin as being dated 1597 for NEWS.com.au from what he could see in this picture.

“If it were the genuine object it does suggest a late 17th century wreck,” the expert from the Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum told NEWS.com.au. “It’s pre-Captain Cook by a long way.”

Mr Jefferys, who is himself waiting to have the piece verified in Europe, hopes the coin will lead him to the wreck first rumoured to be there from witness accounts in the 1890s.

“It’s the first thing that we can date 100 per cent,” he said. “This has the date stamped on it so it has to be a 17th century wreck.”

Legend of the Stradbroke Galleon

Tales include Aborigines in the 1920s finding gold coins in the area with locals claiming to have seen the wreck throughout the years.

There has also been speculation Captain Cook used secret Spanish or Portuguese maps to navigate before he made landfall in Australia in 1770.

“All the evidence points to either a Portuguese or Spanish ship,” Mr Jeffreys said. “It’s not likely to be a galleon - all the eye-witness accounts put it at 30m long so it’s probably a caravel or carrack which were used for exploration.”

The find

Mr Jeffreys said his team was resting on a sand spit after slowly hacking their way through 3m razor grass when a colleague stumbled on the piece.

“He was scratching in the sand and his machete turned up this coin,” Mr Jeffreys said. “It’s one of those fluke things – it’s amazing.”

Mr Jeffreys, an archaeology graduate and historian, has looking for a wreck to support the theories for more than 20 years.

The quest has not been without its disappointments.

In 2002, he thought he’d found muzzles and barrels of cannons from a 16th-century Portuguese or Spanish galleon only to concede days later in the national press that the pieces were actually lifeboat supports from a 19th-century ship.

More recently he has discovered a brass button, a sailor’s blade and a fishing weight in the dense swamp.

World War II military map

The group had gone to the location after a tip-off from the son of a RAAF pilot whose father had flown over the area many times during World War II.

The pilot - Cyril Broome - claimed to have seen the shipwreck in the swamp between 1938 and 1942 while flying training missions and calculated the location on a military map using area landmarks.

Another map published by Shell in the 1920s includes an entry for “Wreck of Spanish Galleon” in about the same location.

Authorities in Queensland have previously expressed scepticism about the claims.

Mexico City - Hurricane Dean's rampage over Mexico's Caribbean coast last week unearthed three rusted 18th century cannons that had lain buried under a sandy beach for decades.

The cannons, around 1.8m long, were spotted poking through the sand on a beach near the arty resort of Tulum after Dean hit on August 21, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) said on Wednesday.

Believed to be from a shipwrecked European galleon, the badly corroded cannons will be put back in to the sea to protect them from faster corrosion onshore and for scuba divers to enjoy, it said.

"People started working to clear up the beach and they found three artifacts that were uncovered when sand was torn away by the strong winds that hit the region," INAH's director in the region, Adriana Velazquez, said in a statement.

She could not be reached directly because of damage to telephone lines from Hurricane Dean.

The cannons appeared just south of the clifftop Mayan ruins at Tulum, which INAH said were left intact by the Category 5 storm's 250km/h winds and lashing rains.

Lying on what is now a bar-lined tourist haven, the cannons were a flashback to the centuries following Spain's 1521 conquest of Mexico, when fleets of Spanish galleons loaded with gold, silver and other New World plunder crossed the Caribbean, often with English, French or Dutch pirates in pursuit.

The cannons are similar to others discovered in past years along Mexico's Caribbean coast and they appear to be more than 200 years old, Velazquez said.

Their bad state of corrosion suggests they were taken out of the sea many years ago and left out in the salty air, she said.

Hidden away among the vast collections of the Bodrum Castle and Marine Archaeological Museum are countless items recovered from sunken trading vessels that shed new light on the ancient world, among them a gold scarab thought to have belonged to Egyptian Queen Nefertiti.

Director Yaşar Yıldız said the museum, which was founded in 1964, held 15,089 historical artifacts of which 1,432 are on display. The artifacts were recovered from sunken trading vessels discovered by local sponge divers and have been reassembled for display and occupy 14 rooms in St. Peter’s Castle in Bodrum.

“The Glass Wreck Hall, where glass artifacts are displayed chronologically, was opened in 1986 with financial support from the Pasabahçe Bottle and Glass Company. The glass artifacts were recovered from a medieval shipwreck, believed to have set sail around 1025 A.D. from southern Syria in the time of the Fatimid caliphs. Its cargo included three tons of glass cullet in the form of raw glass and broken glassware. These are illuminated in the hall by special light bulbs which make it possible to discern all the traces and colors in the glass pieces. Also, a fish tank has been placed in the wall to illustrate how underwater excavation work is carried out,” said Yıldız.

Also on display is the world’s oldest known shipwreck, discovered in 1982 at Uluburun by a team led by the museum’s then director, Oğuz Alpözen. The ship contained a variety of treasures, including copper ingots, pure tin, exotic wooden logs, hippopotamus ivory and precious gems, Yıldız added that all the artifacts had been recovered between 1984 and 1995. “The Uluburun wreck has been excavated and studied by a number of academic teams, including one led by Dr. Cemal Pulak, which helped to determine the date of the wreck to around the 14th century B.C. The ship’s cargo consisted of copper ingots, a good amount of flat glass cullet and sundry items, which are the oldest finds in our museum,” Yıldız said.

The seas surrounding Yassı Island, near Turgutreis, have been the focus of activity for a team led by Professor George F. Bass of Texas A&M University, who worked on a Roman shipwreck dating back to the fourth or fifth centuries A.D. between 1967 and 1969. Yıldız said: “This excavation, uncovered an intact glass jug along with a great number of amphora. The jug is currently on display in the Glass Wreck Hall.”

“Between the years 1977 and 1979, a team from the Institute of Nautical Archaeology [INA], also under the guidance of Professor Bass, worked in cooperation with our museum to excavate a medieval shipwreck at Serçe Limanı, a natural harbor on the southern coast, at a depth of 32 meters. The ship dated from around 1025 A.D carrying glass cullet to some glass factory in the Byzantine Empire, most probably in either the Crimea or lower Danube region. Only 16 meters long and five meters wide, with two lateen sails, the ship had a flat bottom designed for river navigation and had a cargo capacity of 35 tons. We believe that raisins and sumac were being transported in amphorae on the ship along with the three tons of glass cullet. The Serçe Limanı shipwreck yielded what is presently the most accurately dated single assemblage of Islamic ceramic, metal and glassware in existence. This collection has made a major contribution to the more accurate dating of similar artifacts from other medieval Islamic sites and has revolutionized our views on a major period in Islamic history,” he said.

Nefertiti’s gold scarab

Yıldız stressed that the artifacts found in the Uluburun wreck dated to the period between the 13th and 16th centuries B.C. and were indispensable in the understanding of the late Bronze Age.

“Found at a depth of 45 meters, the Uluburun wreck is amongst the small number of wrecks that have been excavated at this depth. The excavations continued for 11 summers, and our divers made 22,400 dives on the wreck. The treasures found included items never found elsewhere. Seals and gems from Egypt and Canaan, and hippopotamus ivory from Africa make this a particularly unique find. However, the discovery that gave the archaeologists the greatest joy was a solid gold scarab which hieroglyphics indicate was once owned by the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti. Scarabs were often carried in those days by sailors as good luck charms. It’s the only scarab belonging to the queen that has survived the millennia.”

Oldest logbook ever found

Yıldız also said that the artifacts found in the ship gave important information about the late Bronze Age. “For us, the most important of these is the oldest logbook in the world. It’s bound in ivory, and we have concluded that it was the captain’s logbook. The log was written on beeswax and the inscriptions have been erased by the water over time. Consequently, we have no information about what the captain of the ship might’ve written in it. But, we guess that he took a note of where cargo was going and to whom,” he ventured.

The sunk U-Boat 33, which was one of the deadliest submarines in the German Navy's fleet during World War I, is threatening to rise from the depths of the English Channel where it met its own end in 1918.

Lying in shallow waters, the wrecked UB-33 has been disturbed by passing vessels, leading to fears that it could break free from the seabed and rise to the surface to pose a new danger to cargo ships, tankers and ferries in the English Channel, the 'Daily Mail' has reported. Currently, the U-Boat 33 is lying 77ft down, but the official minimum clearance depth is 87ft.

A salvage operation has recently been launched to prevent the submarine from hitting any of the hundreds of ships that cross the English Channel each day. The area is directly beneath the shipping lane used by ferries travelling to Calais and Boulogne.

Trinity House, the institution which marks shipping lanes and maintains lighthouses, has temporarily stationed a vessel over the spot to warn ships and planning to gently move the U-Boat 33 to deeper water. "It has been there a long time, but now the wreck has started to move and it is causing concern as it has once again become a danger to shipping," the daily quoted Trinity House spokesman Vikki Gilson as saying.

"We have had divers surveying the wreck and one solution would be to re-set the wreck in a deeper position. It has been a hazardous job for the divers, but their survey is now complete. In the next few weeks, when conditions are right, we are hopeful we can move the boat."

CARNARVON, Australia -- A ROYAL Australian Navy ship has found "nothing of interest" at a wreck site off the West Australian coast that newspapers last week claimed was the resting place of HMAS Sydney.

Navy sources confirmed that HMAS Leeuwin, a hydrographic survey ship with sophisticated scanning and sonar equipment, had completed its sweep through an area off Dirk Hartog Island, 800km north of Perth, and had reported its findings to Canberra last night.

Fairfax newspapers, the Seven Network and The West Australian claimed last week a group of local enthusiasts had discovered the wreck of the Sydney, which went down in November 1941 with all 645 crew.

But inquiries by The Weekend Australian raised questions about the group's claim that the Sydney rests in 130m of water 20 nautical miles off the island.

It is believed the Leeuwin may have detected a vessel about 30m long and four or five metres high. Veterans Affairs Minister Bruce Billson is expected to make an announcement about the find -- or lack of it -- over the weekend.

The vessel may be an old barge that was sunk off the island in the 1940s, locals believe.

Last night, British-based marine salvage expert David Mearns -- who is expected to lead a federal and state government-backed search for the Sydney early next year -- said it was a lesson to all.

"To be blunt, they didn't know what they were doing," he said from Italy. "They made a grave mistake both at sea and in how they dealt with it in the media.

"It serves as a lesson to everybody -- including journalists -- that these things should bedone in a proper and professional way.

"I heard it ended up on the front page of a broadsheet (The Sydney Morning Herald) and I find it amazing they don't check their facts properly, or try to contact experts to get a balanced opinion or verify something as important as this.

"I'm sure the editors will have a lot of egg on their faces today."

Pondering the location of Sydney has been a popular pastime on the shipwreck-littered stretch of Gascoyne coast where the light cruiser and the German raider the Kormoran fought to the death in November 1941.

Marshall Hipper, former deputy shire president of Shark Bay, was told years earlier by the state museum that a bolt his sons Dion and Adrian fished from a wreck on the ocean floor in September 2001 came from a wooden vessel -- not the Sydney.

But the 71-year-old never stopped believing the wreck was the long-lost war grave and he wanted others to believe him too, his widow, Midge Hipper, told The Weekend Australian.

A small group of enthusiasts led by Graham and Phil Shepherd from his home town of Denham believed him, and last Saturday -- seven months after Hipper's death -- newspapers burst into print with celebratory banner headlines, including a front-page declaration in The West Australian screeching: "FOUND".

In the following days, maritime experts expressed their disbelief, as well as disapproval at the certainty with which the group and the media organisations proclaimed their find.

Bruce Teede, 79, of Carnarvon, was one of the locals who scoffed, saying: "Codswallop."

The bombshell announcement forced the federal Government to investigate, and meanwhile postpone more than $2 million in funding for the non-profit HMAS Sydney Search, which was preparing to conduct a deep-sea scan of an area it and many others believe is the most likely resting place of the two legendary warships -- about 150 nautical miles off Carnarvon.

Since 2002, and with the backing of independent experts, HMAS Sydney Search has used decoded German notes and other official sources to decide on the search area, which it will scan early next year.

This week's events angered Mr Billson, whose attempts to have the navy verify last weekend's claims were initially frustrated when the group refused to reveal the co-ordinates.

Leeuwin arrived yesterday at the site where the group was hovering over the wreck. Sources said the men were having trouble getting their equipment powered and asked the navy for help.

But there was a chance their gear could have corrupted the navy's equipment, and the request was refused. The Leeuwin is expected to be in the area for another few days while it examines at least two other wreck sites.

West Australian Museum director of maritime archeology Mike McCarthy told Hipper in 2002 the copper bolt his sons found at the site could not be from the Sydney.

Dr McCarthy said he heard from people who thought they had discovered the Sydney about every six months.

He said he understood the interest because its loss, and the Government's inadequate response over many decades, had an effect on the national psyche.

"We lost boys and men from every city," he said.

The Shire of Shark Bay had known of the wreck for years and had found it to be far smaller than the Sydney -- 30-36m compared with 170m. This compares favourably with the shape and substance of what the Leeuwin has found. The shire is embroiled in a legal squabble with the WA Museum over maritime archeological objects in the coastal fishing town of Denham's new interpretive centre, which the shire wants to keep as it positions itself as the place tourists visit to learn about the Sydney and other wrecks.

Mrs Hipper said her husband, who lived for 33 years in Denham, could never get the media traction for his find the Shepherds achieved.

Last year while in treatment for lung cancer at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Perth, Hipper made calls to regional TV station Golden West Network claiming he had solved the 66-year-old mystery of the Sydney.

"They were promising to come round and interview him but he was slurring his words a little bit and they probably thought 'Silly old thing, doesn't know what he's talking about'," she said.

A group of archaeological experts and Indian Navy divers have conducted the first scientific survey off the Gujarat coast to establish whether or not the ruins on the seabed are of the mythological city of Dwarka, the capital of Hindu god Krishna.

"The area off the Samudranaraya temple at (present day) Dwarka is known to contain structures which have been widely reported and interpreted by renowned scholars. However, no scientific study of the area had been conducted so far," Alok Tripathi of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) told reporters here Friday.

"We found building blocks and collected samples. These have been sent for dating to establish the antiquity of the site," Tripathi, who is the ASI's only marine archaeologist, added.

A 21-member team conducted the survey in January-February. It comprised 10 specialists from the ASI and 11 divers of the Indian Navy. A report on the survey will be presented at a seminar on the Maritime Heritage of the Indian Ocean here Aug 23-24.

"While the ASI has the requisite data and archaeological expertise, the Indian Navy has the necessary wherewithal and expertise for subsurface search, exploration and recovery of artefacts," Rear Admiral, S.P.S. Cheema, assistant chief of naval staff (Information Warfare and Operations), explained of the collaboration.

"Before the excavation, naval divers were indoctrinated by ASI experts on the procedures and method to be followed during the investigation. These included aspects like documentation, controlled digging, and the retrieval, packaging and transportation of samples," Cheema said.

"The idea was to achieve maximum extraction without damaging the environment," he added.

Before commencing diving operations, a specialised naval hydrographic team systematically surveyed the area off Dwarka with the help of multi-beam sonar and side-scan sonar. The navy had deployed its survey ship INS Nirdeshak for this in November 2006.

"This enabled us generate a 3D model of the seabed so we could narrow down the area of search. We initially marked out a 200 metre by 200 metre area and eventually narrowed this down to 50x50 metre area," Tripathi explained.

This is the third time such a joint operation has been undertaken. The first was in 2002 off Bagram in the Lakshwadeep Islands in the Arabian Sea to unearth the remains of the Princess Royal, a British passenger ship that sank in the 19th century.

In 2005, submerged remains off Mahabalipuram in Tamil Nadu were unearthed.

Little Salt Spring ranks as one of the major archaeological sites in the western hemisphere. Even though only 5 percent of the spring has been explored, divers have found artifacts dating back 12,000 years ago.

NORTH PORT -- After thousands of years underwater, a handful of North Port's history resurfaced in a Ziploc bag.

"They don't call it hardwood for nothin'!" said Steve Koski to John Gifford after the two emerged from the Little Salt Spring with a radiocarbon sample last week.

Koski, an archaeologist at Little Salt Spring Research Facility, off Price Boulevard, mumbled this to his teammate while the two were 40 feet underwater. But Gifford, research director for Miami University, was unable to hear as his knife chiseled away at a piece of wood the team believes to be at least 9,000 years old.

Both men spent 30 minutes in the spring Thursday taking two samples from a log nearly 3 meters long. One will determine the age of the wood and the other the species.

"I don't want to get my hopes up, but I'd love for it to be something great, like a totem," Koski said.

Although a totem pole would be impressive in size, Koski has been thrilled to find artifacts that fit in the palm of his hand.

Pointing to a wooden stake a little more than a foot in length resting in a plastic container filled with spring water, Koski picks it up and examines the pointed tip.

"This small wooden stake took 48 minutes to excavate and bring to the surface. Its tip was the only thing sticking out of the sandy clay sediment. Can you believe it's estimated to be 10,500 years old?" he asked. "With this and other findings, we can look at the distribution of the stakes identified and perhaps see why they were carved and what their function might have been."

However, the most interesting fact is that it was found right in the backyard of "our homes," Koski said.

Little Salt Spring is not just another spring in North Port. Not a lot of people even know about it or the unique history it contains. Koski said this spring is one of the greatest archaeological finds in the country.

Located near Heron Creek Middle School, Little Salt Spring is a 250-foot-deep sinkhole on 112.5 acres of property owned by the University of Miami since 1982. The hourglass-shaped spring was first discovered as an archaeological site in 1959 by local divers.

"There is evidence of visitation and occupation from 12,500-6,000 years ago," Koski said.

Working on the slope of the 78-meter basin-like depression, Koski and other University of Miami divers are trying to uncover evidence of previous life.

"We have discovered a wide range of preserved organic materials including wooden stakes, textile fragments (delite), deer remains and bone tools. Because there is no dissolved oxygen in the water, bacteria cannot grow and decompose wood and the other organic materials, offering unique artifact preservation," Koski said.

In June 2005, Dr. John Gifford of the University of Miami/Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and a group of graduate students discovered two Archaic artifacts, estimated to be 7,000 years old. One was a greenstone pendant and the other was believed to be part of a spear-thrower.

Fourteen days out of the year, five to 12 advanced undergraduates and graduate students from the University of Miami come to Little Salt Spring. Students participate in daily underwater excavation at 20-40 feet, as well as surface support activities relating to diving.

Last year, Gifford and his colleagues and students also unearthed two stakes and brought one of the two to the surface, which they estimated was at least 10,000 years old.

"Since 2004, we have found eight wooden stakes and recovered four of the eight. We have removed two of them for radiocarbon dating and we're leaving the other ones," Koski said. "We take a conservation ethic in our work. We wouldn't have the site anymore if we took everything we found."

They are also planning an additional excavation on the 27-meter ledge to uncover extinct Pleistocene fossil remains and 12,000-year-old artifacts that lay there. However, because funding is so limited, researchers are able to perform excavations only once or twice a year, so only 5 percent of the spring has really been explored.

"This is the most important archaeological site in the United States and it's right here in North Port's backyard. This is also the only opportunity in the U.S. for college students to do fieldwork in prehistoric underwater excavation," Gifford said. "We have so much potential to make this site one of the best archaeological facilities, but the funding just isn't there. At this point, we don't even have the most basic necessities like running water."

For more information on group tours or volunteer opportunities, call Steven Koski at 941-423-0835.

ONE of Australia's leading maritime archaeologists has joined a chorus of experts who have attacked media reports that the wreck of the HMAS Sydney had been found off the West Australian coast.

WA Museum Director of Maritime Archeology Mike McCarthy said he had "no faith at all" that the wreck was the Sydney.

In what has been described as a cruel beat-up that falsely raised the hopes of descendants of the 645 Australian sailors who perished, the Shire of Shark Bay yesterday confirmed it had been aware of the wreck for more than five years but had said nothing publicly because it had no conclusive proof it was the Sydney.

Former whaleboat engineer Bruce Teede, who has lived on the Gascoyne coast for 60 years, described as "rubbish" the latest claim that a bunch of amateur historians had found the war ship which sank somewhere off the WA coast in November 1941.

He reckons he has heard every possible theory about the fate of the Australian light cruiser, including that it was destroyed by a Japanese submarine.

Fairfax newspapers and The West Australian ran "exclusive" front-page reports on Saturday claiming that the Sydney had been found.

The latest find, 20 nautical miles off Dirk Hartog Island, is 100 nautical miles inshore from where survivors of the German cruiser Kormoran last saw the Sydney, on fire.

One of Dr McCarthy's many doubts is the size of the wreck, which at 30m is 140m shorter than the Sydney.

"About every six months I hear from someone who thinks they've found it," he said.

The Shire of Shark Bay claimed it has known about the wreck since 2001 when local fishermen dragged a copper bolt from the site using a fishing hook.

Dr McCarthy inspected the bolt and found it was not from the HMAS Sydney and passed on that information "years ago". He said the copper bolt taken from the site came from a wooden boat.

In October 2005, the Shire of Shark Bay conducted its own examination of the wreck site with grappling hooks and sonar equipment. It found the wreck was probably also just 30m long, 140m shorter than the Sydney.

There are hundreds of shipwrecks along the West Australian coast, many of them yet to be formally recorded.

The claims by enthusiast Phil Shepherd that his party had found the Sydney come as a Perth-based ocean surveying company Geo Subsea waits for data on a partial scan of 14,000 square nautical miles of seabed near where the battleship was last seen.

One of Britain's greatest archaeological treasures, the Mary Rose, is facing the biggest threat to its survival since it was raised from the seabed 25 years ago.

In contrast to the towering French warships it faced as Henry VIII's flagship, it is fighting a much smaller, though no less daunting, enemy. Scientists have discovered that bacteria growing on the timbers of the Tudor warship are producing a corrosive acid that could cause the hull to disintegrate.

They believe that the bacteria, together with a chemical reaction involving iron from rusted bolts and nails, is converting nearly two tons of sulphur in the waterlogged wood into sulphuric acid.

They fear that the remains of the 150ft-long ship will crumble to dust as the acid eats away the hard material in the wood as it is dried out.

"We have neutralised a lot of acid but there is the potential for more to be produced," said Mark Jones, the chief scientist at the Mary Rose Trust.

"A lot of the sulphur compounds we are seeing in the wood appear to be bacterial in origin.

"There also seems to be a role for the iron from the fittings and bolts, so we are trying to get rid of the iron particles that have worked their way into the wood."

The Mary Rose sank in 45ft of water off the south coast of England during a battle with the French invasion fleet in 1545, drowning about 500 sailors.

Half of the hull rotted away during the centuries spent on the seabed, but the rest was preserved in layers of silt, which protected the wreck in an oxygen-free environment and prevented marine worms from destroying the timber.

The Mary Rose was salvaged in October 1982 from the Solent, near the Isle of Wight, and is being preserved in Portsmouth.

Ironically, researchers believe that the oxygen-free years set the stage for the current problem, because they favoured rare bacteria - extremophiles, capable of living without oxygen - which gradually generated sulphur in the wood.

Once the hull had been raised and exposed to the air, other bacteria that live off the sulphur and convert it to acid colonised the timbers.

The Mary Rose Trust has launched a bid to secure £20 million of funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund to help build a new museum around the wreck and continue the preservation process.

An extraordinary voyage by a team of archaeologists and historians has begun to solve some of the greatest riddles of the Viking age. On Tuesday, a giant Viking warship, an exact replica of one built nearly 1,000 years ago, will complete a 1,200-mile trip from Scandinavia to Ireland.

Throughout the six-and-a-half-week voyage, experts from Denmark's Viking Ship Museum have conducted experiments into 11th-century life and tested sailing technology. And they have found the famed longships were slower and more complex than thought. The vessel they replicated had been discovered and lifted by archaeologists in Denmark 50 years ago. Research showed it had been built in Dublin in 1042 and scuttled in Denmark 30 years later.

On this voyage, the vessel sailed from Roskilde in Denmark to southern Norway, then across the North Sea (where it was forced by poor winds to accept a tow from its escort vessel to Orkney), then via the Western Isles and the Isle of Man to Ireland. It will arrive in Dublin on Tuesday.

Its occupants found that in the initial sea trials, the hull "bent" back and forth from port to starboard by as much as 80 centimetres. The ship was so flexible that Viking-style wooden nails began to work loose and the structure was in danger of falling apart.

After closer examination of the remains of the original vessel, the 21st-century Vikings realised their 11th-century predecessors had included substantial strengthening timbers for greater rigidity. So an additional large longitudinal timber was added to the replica and deck planks fastened to the cross-beams.

Archaeologists behind the project also said the experimental voyage had showed that the larger warships were almost 20 per cent slower at top speed than scholars had thought.

Finding shipwrecks and having an adventure usually reserved for sea-faring divers is not so far-fetched for western New York, as researchers Jim Kennard and Dan Scoville have discovered.

The duo recently found a 19th century schooner, possibly the oldest found to date, resting at the bottom of Lake Ontario off Oak Orchard Harbor in Point Breeze. According to Kennard, the discovery of the Milan was exciting because the ship is in relatively decent shape for having been at the bottom of a lake for nearly 160 years.

“The masts are still attached to the ship,” he said. “Usually they break off and fall next to the ship.”

Kennard and Scoville have been working together for several years trying to find the Milan as well as discovering other ships in the area. Some of the team’s Lake Ontario finds include the Homer Warren and the Etta Belle. All of these discoveries took years of researching and trying to determine where the ships were located based on reports and old news stories, according to Kennard.

“Trying to find a wreck in Lake Ontario is like trying to find the tip of a pencil eraser in a football field at the rate of two square feet per day,” he said. “You have to be a shipwreck detective to come up with a general area of where the ship is. We’d been searching for (the Milan) for a couple years.”

Once the ship was found in 2005 using a side scan sonar method, Kennard and Scoville began planning their exploration. One of the biggest obstacles the team faced was the depth at which the Milan laid, said Scoville.

“It was too deep to safely send a diver down,” he said. “There are a lot of risks with technical diving and once you reach the bottom, you can only spend 10 or 15 minutes searching the wreck.”

To continue their research, the team needed a way to take pictures and video without placing any lives in danger. Scoville, who was a senior at the Rochester Institute of Technology at the time, said he took the opportunity to create a Remotely Operated Vehicle as his senior project with the help of some of his fellow students.

“The ROV can stay at the bottom taking video for hours a day,” he said. “It was expensive to create at first, but after that it cost a lot less than technical diving.”

According to Scoville, the ROV is a small device with multiple cameras and high-intensity lights attached to it in air-tight containers. The device is attached to a 680-foot-long fiber-optic cable which sends images to a laptop computer. Researchers can operate the device via remote control in the safety of their boat, eliminating the risks of diving.

Upon graduating from RIT, Scoville sold the intellectual properties of the ROV to Henrietta-based company Hydroacoustics, Inc. Scoville now works for the company developing the next generation of ROVs.

With the means to explore the wreck available in summer of 2006, the team began their research. The images sent back by the ROV proved to be valuable as Kennard and Scoville discovered how unique the Milan was to Lake Ontario’s southern shores.

“The ship had a tiller, whereas most ships after 1850 had a wheel and a rudder,” Kennard said. “This gave us a better idea of how old the ship was, which helped us make a better case that this was in fact the Milan.”

Other features helping the team determine they had found the Milan included a scroll bow, which Kennard said is unique to ships of the time period. Kennard said he knew of one other ship, called the Oxford, found in Lake Erie, that had the same type of bow. The ship was built by Asa Wilcox and based on the comparison of bows, the team was able to definitely say the Milan was also built by Wilcox at Three-Mile Bay in 1845, according to Kennard.

“There is no name plate on the Milan,” he said. “Sometimes they paint the name on but it comes off. We sent for enrollment papers that give information on when the ship was built, where it’s been and all the specifics, and this helped us make all these conclusions.”

After releasing the Milan story, Kennard was contacted by representatives of the Salt Museum in Liverpool, N.Y. The museum was interested in the ship because it had been carrying 1,000 barrels of salt when it sank. Kennard said they did not find any barrels of salt because the crew tossed them overboard before abandoning the schooner.

Based on records and the condition of the wreckage, Kennard said the team concluded that the ship had sprung a leak during a voyage in 1849 and the crew changed direction in an attempt to run ashore. The leak could not be found and the crew was forced to abandon ship, letting it sink.

All of the information and images gathered during the exploration allowed team artist Roland “Chip” Stevens to come up with a sketch of how the schooner looks in its current condition. He will also be able to make a rough sketch of what the ship looked like during the four years it was in service, according to Kennard.

“You don’t have photographs of ships like this from when they were built, so being able to bring back images of what they looked like is something special,” he said.

As for the future of the ship, Scoville said the team’s work is basically finished. Any further research would require approval from New York state to do an archaeological survey, which costs much more than anything they have done so far.

“Obviously the more you look the more likely you are to notice things you didn’t see before,” Scoville said. “We’ve concluded our investigation, so the Milan will probably stay right where it is for now.”