HOT NEWS !

By All Hungary News


The legend goes something like this: after the disastrous Battle of Mohács in 1526, the twenty-one-year-old Queen Mary of Hungary fled the encroaching Ottoman army on a caravan of ships headed to Vienna.

But, on her way up the Danube a few ships sank along with their valuable cargo.

It is said that to this day they remain hidden in the murky depths of the river.

Soon, any truth to this story may soon be discovered, or disproved.


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By Ben Sills

Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc.'s 17 ton-haul (15,400 kilograms) of sunken treasure from the Atlantic Ocean came from a Spanish warship and must be returned to the country, a lawyer said after an inspection of the artifacts.

Spain expects the new evidence from the inspection will persuade a U.S. court in Tampa, Florida, to order Odyssey to return the treasure without compensation, James Goold, a lawyer for the government, said at a press conference in Madrid today.

"What Odyssey has done is morally and legally unacceptable," Goold said. The company secretly stripped a Spanish ship of coins and other artifacts then tried to hide them by claiming that it did not know the identity of the ship.''

Representatives of the Spanish government visited Tampa last month to inspect the artifacts recovered from a wreck that Odyssey codenamed "Black Swan." Spain contested the company's claim to the wreck in a U.S. court case in Florida.

By John A.Torres


More Indiana Jones-like mythology fills the state's high security vault than Spanish doubloons or pirate's booty.

Recent media reports, as well as a state legislator's attempt to sell off Florida's salvaged treasure to offset budget cuts, have fueled grandiose images of the public gold holdings.

They're not accurate, says Ryan Wheeler, Florida's chief archaeologist, as the warmer weather and calmer waters of May mark the unofficial start to the treasure hunting season.

"There is a myth that we have all this stuff that we don't show people," he said from his Tallahassee office. "Everyone bought into this notion that we have a secret treasure room."

Wheeler, head of the state's Bureau of Archaeological Research, said the state's estimated $17 million in salvaged gold is usually nowhere near the protected storage area.


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By Rowan Philp


Dieter Noli thought a small bag would be sufficient to hold priceless gold coins from the shipwreck.

Within an hour, he realised he needed to use his Stetson hat.

But by the end of the day, the archaeologist needed a bucket to hold the ship’s treasure, as 2500 coins, minted around 1500AD for Spain’s Queen Isabella, emerged from the Namibian sea bed.

Unearthed by a De Beers mining operation on the Namibian coast this month, the ship — thought to be a Columbus-era Portuguese explorer — has been hailed as the greatest maritime archaeological discovery in Southern Africa.

The unusually large store of gold also represents one of its greatest mysteries since the vessel, which was “armed to the teeth”, was already on its way home, fully laden with an equally mysterious cargo.

Noli, 52, said it was “the most gold ever found at an archaeological site in Africa since the huge find at the Valley of the Kings in Egypt”.

By Dani Cooper

Some of Australia's most important watery war graves could be located for about one-tenth of the cost of finding the HMAS Sydney, the nation's most high-profile naval shipwreck, a researcher says.

Associate Professor Mark Staniforth, a maritime archaeologist from Adelaide's Flinders University, says last month's discovery of the HMAS Sydney, sunk off the coast of Western Australia, is enormously significant for Australia.

But he says the A$4.5 million (US$4 million) the federal government invested for the search is dead money because no infrastructure remains in public hands to do further searches.

Staniforth says if the government spends A$500,000, this could buy a base suite of equipment, including multi-beam echo sounder, sonar sounder and magnetometer.

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By Donna Bryson


The ship was laden with tons of copper ingots, elephant tusks, gold coins — and cannons to fend off pirates.

But it had nothing to protect it from the fierce weather off a particularly bleak stretch of inhospitable African coast, and it sank 500 years ago.

Now it has been found, stumbled upon by De Beers geologists prospecting for diamonds off Namibia.

"If you're mining on the coast, sooner or later you'll find a wreck," archaeologist Dieter Noli said in an interview Thursday.

Namdeb Diamond Corp., a joint venture of the government of Namibia and De Beers, first reported the April 1 find in a statement Wednesday, and planned a news conference in the Namibian capital next week.

The company had cleared and drained a stretch of seabed, building an earthen wall to keep the water out so geologists could work. Noli said one of the geologists saw a few ingots, but had no idea what they were. Then the team found what looked like cannon barrels.

The geologists stopped the brutal earth-moving work of searching for diamonds and sent photos to Noli, who had done research in the Namibian desert since the mid-1980s and has advised De Beers since 1996 on the archaeological impact of its operations in Namibia.

The find "was what I'd been waiting for, for 20 years," Noli said. "Understandably, I was pretty excited. I still am."

By Randy Boswell

She was, at the dawn of the 20th century, a stately ship of dreams for thousands of British emigrants bound for a new life in Canada.

She became a ship of war, transporting wave after wave of Canadian troops overseas to help liberate Europe from the Kaiser's thrall.

Finally, she was the British government's secret treasure ship, packed with 39 tonnes of gold intended for Halifax to pay Canadian and U.S. munitions suppliers at the height of the First World War.

But that was the mission that doomed the SS Laurentic -- along with 354 of her British and Canadian crew -- when the ocean liner dressed in cannons struck a German mine off the Irish coast in 1917, sinking in the North Atlantic with her cargo of 3,211 ingots.

An appeals court has ruled that the U.S. government should have authority for now over a Lake Michigan shipwreck that could be The Griffin, a 17th century vessel built by the French explorer La Salle.

A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati reversed a ruling by District Judge Robert Holmes Bell in a dispute between the state of Michigan and the private underwater exploration company that found the wreckage seven years ago.

Great Lakes Exploration Group LLC wants the federal government to have jurisdiction but to appoint the company as custodian until the courts determine who has ownership and salvage rights.

The company says the French government may want to submit a claim.

The state is seeking title, saying federal law gives it ownership of all abandoned vessels "embedded in the state's submerged lands."