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By Sarah Robinson - The Weston Mercury

Historians have been identifying the remains of a vessel which was found in Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong.

The ship is believed to have been the HMS Tamar, a Royal Navy depot ship which was built in 1897. But it was scuttled during World War Two to prevent it falling into the hands of invading Japanese forces.

The only identifiable object found amid the wreckage of the vessel was a small oval brass plate attached to some baggage – and its owner lived in Bleadon.

The plate was owned by Sergeant Edgar Charles Goodman, who was born in Bristol in 1885. His parents Henry and Julia Ann Goodman were both from Bleadon, and they returned to the village after Edgar’s birth.

Edgar joined the Royal Marine Light Infantry in 1901 when he was 16 years old, though he claimed to be 18. After a number of postings, he ended up on the HMS Thistle in China.

Based on his service record, it became clear the plate was lost some time in 1914, during World War One, and was only discovered this year near the final resting site of the HMS Tamar.

Stephen Davies, a fellow at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, discovered the plate. He said: “With the outbreak of war on August 5 Edgar was shifted, along with the crews of 12 other gunboats, to the recommissioned pre-Dreadnought battleship HMS Triumph at the time which was about to take over from the Tamar as the nominal depot ship.

“He took part in the siege of Qingdao in September to November 1914 and then, after the Triumph had been refitted, went with her to the Dardanelles.”

While on board the HMS Triumph during World War One, Edgar would have regularly been in action. Mr Davies said he was likely to have been captain of a 7.5-inch gun and was on board a Royal Navy ship which had fired and been hit by the most shells of any of the navy’s vessels in the war up to that point.

The Triumph was the lead ship in the invasion force made up of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps during the Battle Of Gallipoli.

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From Subsea Worldnews

A diver who failed to correctly declare where he found historic cannons dating back to the 1600s has pleaded guilty to fraud in excess of £46,000.

Vincent Woolsgrove from Ramsgate in Kent, said he had found three 24lb cannons off North Foreland which were originally from the City of Amsterdam.

The cannons were originally part of a battery of 36 produced in Amsterdam to protect the city in the early part of the 17th century and assigned to Dutch ships during the first Anglo-Dutch war in 1652 – 54.

Woolsgrove was originally awarded the title of the three cannons as the Maritime and Coastguard Agency was unable to prove at that time that they were property of the crown.

The cannons were sold at auction to an American buyer for a sum in excess of £50,000 and are now part of a private collection in Florida.

However, a joint operation in 2011 by the MCA, Kent & Essex police and Historic England (formerly English Heritage), found fresh information about heritage crime.

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By Helene Cooper - The New York Times

On Dec. 3, 1794, a Portuguese slave ship left Mozambique, on the east coast of Africa, for what was to be a 7,000-mile voyage to Maranhão, Brazil, and the sugar plantations that awaited its cargo of black men and women.

Shackled in the ship’s hold were between 400 and 500 slaves, pressed flesh to flesh with their backs on the floor. With the exception of daily breaks to exercise, the slaves were to spend the bulk of the estimated four-month journey from the Indian Ocean across the vast South Atlantic in the dark of the hold.

In the end, their journey lasted only 24 days. Buffeted by strong winds, the ship, the São José Paquete Africa, rounded the treacherous Cape of Good Hope and came apart violently on two reefs not far from Cape Town and only 100 yards from shore, but in deep, turbulent water.

The Portuguese captain, crew and half of the slaves survived. An estimated 212 slaves did not, and perished in the sea.

On Tuesday, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture, along with the Iziko Museums of South Africa, the Slave Wrecks Project, and other partners, will announce in Cape Town that the remnants of the São José have been found, right where the ship went down, in full view of Lion’s Head Mountain.

It is the first time, researchers involved in the project say, that the wreckage of a slaving ship that went down with slaves aboard has been recovered.

The story of the São José, like the slave trade itself, spanned continents and oceans, from fishing villages in Africa to sheikhdoms where powerful chiefs plotted with European traders to traffic in human beings to work on plantations in the New World. Fittingly, the discovery of the São José also encompassed continents and oceans.

Divers from the United States joined divers in South Africa, while museum curators in Africa, Europe and the Americas pored through old ship manifests looking for clues. In the end, the breakthrough that the shipwreck was of a vessel that had been carrying slaves came from something unexpected, the iron blocks of ballasts that were used to offset the weight of slaves in the hold.

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By Mckenna Stayner - The New Yorker
 

In the summer of 2010, Christian Ekström, a diver from the Åland Islands, an autonomous region of around sixty-five hundred isles off of Finland’s west coast, began searching for a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea, based on a tip he’d received from a fisherman.

The Baltic’s temperature is unusually consistent (between about thirty-nine and forty-three degrees Fahrenheit on its seabed), and it hasa salinity level that is less than a fifth that of oceans.

Its coastal waters are also treacherously shallow. All of this makes it particularly well suited to sinking ships, and then, once they’ve sunk, to preserving them for centuries.

(Creatures commonly known to erode wrecks, like shipworms, can’t survive in such brackish waters.)

As a result, the Baltic has an estimated hundred thousand shipwrecks, only a fraction of which have been explored. Ekström and his dive partners soon found a small, wooden schooner, a hundred and fifty-five feet underwater, coated in sand and algae.

Its hull had ruptured and there were no name signs or ship bells by which to identify it. Shining his headlamp into the large gash in the ship, Ekström saw some dark-green bottles, lying corked among broken planks of mossy wood. He reached in and pulled one free. As he rose to the surface with the bottle, the cork began to work its way out.

He pushed it in with his thumb. Back on the boat, it poppedout completely.

“All this aroma came through,” he told me recently. “It was phenomenal. And we tasted it without any knowledge of what we were drinking.”

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By Fanny W. Y. Fung - South China Morning Post
 

The mystery is nearly over: the government has all but confirmed that wreckage found during harbour dredging in Wan Chai last year is the remains of HMS Tamar, Hong Kong's most famous military ship that was scuttled by the British navy in 1941 to prevent her from falling into Japanese hands.

The Civil Engineering and Development Department said yesterday that the large metal object, about 40 metres long, two to 11 metres wide and two metres high, "may be part of the bottom of the wreck" and "could be the remains of HMS Tamar".

But it stopped short of confirming the historic find, "as the ship's bell, name plate or any other unique features have not been found".

The government's statement came a day after the South China Morning Post confronted it with findings by the founding chief of the Hong Kong Maritime Museum, Dr Stephen Davies, that identified the wreck as HMS Tamar, and asked it to respond to the marine historian's claim that he had been removed from the investigation team after presenting evidence to officials.

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From Newschannel9

The Navy is preparing to send one if its premier diving teams to Georgia to help salvage a Confederate warship from the depths of the Savannah River.

Before it ever fired a shot, the 1,200 ton ironclad CSS Georgia was scuttled by its own crew to prevent its capture by Gen. William T. Sherman when his Union army took Savannah in December 1864. Today, it's considered a captured enemy vessel and is property of the U.S. Navy.

The shipwreck is being removed as part of a $703 million project to deepen the river channel so larger cargo ships can reach the Port of Savannah. Before the harbor can be deepened, the CSS Georgia has to be raised.

After years of planning, archaeologists began tagging and recording the locations of thousands of pieces from the shipwreck in January. They've been able to bring smaller artifacts to the surface, but the Navy is being called in to raise the 120-foot-long ship's larger sections and weapons. Navy divers are scheduled to arrive at the site near downtown Savannah about 100 yards from the shore on June 1.

The Navy divers assigned to the project are from the same unit that's had some of the military's highest profile salvage operations. That includes the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor, TWA Flight 800, Swiss Air Flight 111, as well as the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia.

Divers from the Virginia Beach-based Mobile Diving Salvage Unit 2 also provided damage assessments and repairs on the USS Cole following the terrorist attack on it in Yemen in 2000 and pulled up wreckage from an F-16 that crashed off the eastern shore of Virginia in 2013.

In Georgia, Navy divers will pull up parts of the ship's armor systems, steam engine components and small structure pieces. They'll eventually be sent to one of the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command's repositories and Conservation Research Laboratory at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.

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By Carol Christian - Chron

Sword blades, scissors and mule shoes are a few of the myriad artifacts from a colonial Spanish shipwreck being studied by Texas researchers.

The Spanish merchant ship, which sank in 1681 off the Caribbean coast of Panama, is a rare find, according to underwater archaeologists at the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University in San Marcos.

Dug out of sand in July 2011, the ship, known as a nao, has recently been identified through painstaking analysis as Nuestra Senora de Encarnacion, which was built in Veracruz, Mexico, for Spain. The identification was accomplished partly through archival research in Seville, Spain, by project historian Jose Espinosa of the Universidad del Norte.

The  334-year-old wreck is extremely well preserved because it was buried in up to 3 feet of muddy sand and silt, said Fritz Hanselmann, head of the research team.

"The amount of hull that's still there is really unique for the Caribbean and any warm saltwater locale," he said. "Very few Spanish merchant naos have ever been found, making this one an extraordinarily significant find because it is so well preserved."

The entire lower portion of the ship's hull is still there, along with the cargo in the hold, including wooden barrels, more than 100 wooden boxes with sword blades, scissors, mule shoes, nails, ceramics and other items.

About 20 artifacts have been removed from the ship, in dives during 2012 and 2014, Hanselmann said. Among them are lead seals, devices that looked like coins and were attached to strings around items such as bales of cloth, to mark ownership. While the cloth has long since disintegrated, the lead seals remain.

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From Latin American Herald Tribune

The 60-gun British privateer Lord Clive, sunk in combat off the coast of Uruguay in 1763 during a raid that might have changed the history of Latin America, will be brought up from the floor of the River Plate.

If that ship had not failed in the attempt to take the city of Colonia, nowadays we might all be speaking English in Latin America,” said Argentine treasure-hunter Ruben Collado, who found the wreck.

The ship lies just 350 meters (380 yards) off Colonia del Sacramento.

Spain and Britain were on opposite sides in the Seven Years War, a multifaceted European conflict that extended to the Americas, West Africa, India and the Philippines.

British merchants desperate to break Madrid’s monopoly on trade with Spanish colonies in the New World saw in the war a chance to force their way into the South American market.

The Lord Clive – launched in 1697 as the Royal Navy vessel HMS Kingston – was sold in 1762 to privateers linked to the British East India Company.

The Clive arrived in the River Plate in 1763, carrying guns intended for would-be rebels in Spanish bastions such as Buenos Aires, Lima and Santiago.

When the British raiders found Spanish defenders on the alert in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, they headed to Colonia del Sacramento, a Portuguese stronghold 180 kilometers (111 miles) west of Montevideo.

Under the command of Capt. Robert McNamara, the small British force intended to take on supplies at the Portuguese post.

What the British didn’t know was that their Portuguese allies had lost Colonia to Spanish troops two months earlier.

At noon on Jan. 6, 1763, the Lord Clive’s 32 port-side cannons opened fire but the squat buildings and huts of Colonia remained untouched because of McNamara’s faulty ballistic calculations: with the ship so close to the coast, the shells sailed harmlessly over the targets.

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