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From Daily Mail

Deep-sea explorers have recovered thousands of gold and silver coins and more than 40 heavy gold bars easily worth millions of dollars, along with a slew of personal items that are a virtual time capsule of the California Gold Rush in a 150-year-old shipwreck.

Newly unsealed court documents provide the first detailed inventory of a treasure trove being resurrected from an 1857 shipwreck at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

The operation is being directed by a court-appointed receiver of an Ohio company, led by a treasure hunter and dreamer named Tommy Thompson, that first found the Central America in 1988 in what was then a monumental achievement that was funded by a group of central Ohio investors.

Immediately after finding the ship and recovering a fraction of its garden of gold, Thompson became embroiled in a decades-long legal battle over who had rights to the treasure and how it was being dispersed.

None of the investors ever saw a return, and in August 2012 after failing to show up for several court hearings, a warrant was issued for Thompson's arrest. He has been a federal fugitive ever since.

Meanwhile, the Central America and its gold sat untouched since 1991, the last time Thompson and his team were at the site.

The new recovery operation was made possible after an Ohio court appointed a receiver over some of Thompson's companies, and he awarded a contract to conduct the efforts to Tampa, Florida-based Odyssey Marine Exploration.

The inventories, unsealed by a federal judge in Virginia late Wednesday, show that Odyssey Marine has brought up 43 solid gold bars, 1,300 $20 double eagle gold coins, and thousands more gold and silver coins.

Full story...

From the New Zealand Herald

The remains of a ship belonging to the famed French explorer Rene-Robert Cavelier Sieur de la Salle, which sank off the Texas coast more than three centuries ago, began their final journey Thursday at a museum.

It is the last stop in a voyage that began in 1685 with La Salle's ill-fated expedition to find the mouth of the Mississippi River.

The keel and other large structural pieces of the ship La Belle, which have been preserved in a gigantic freeze-dryer at Texas A&M University since 2012, were gingerly loaded onto a truck for the trip to the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin.

The supply ship was built in 1684 and sank two years later during a storm in the Gulf of Mexico's Matagorda Bay, the first in a series of events that dashed France's hopes of colonizing a piece of the New World now known as Texas.

"It's part of Texas and Texas history," said Peter Fix, assistant director of the university's Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation.

Texas Historical Commission archaeologists found the shipwreck in 1995 in murky water, built a dam around the site and pumped it dry.

Researchers dug through mud to retrieve the nearly intact hull and some 700,000 items, including three cases of rifles, plus other guns, swords, a cannon and ammunition, and beads and mirrors intended for trade and tool chests containing hammers and saws.

Archaeologists also found a skeleton, believed to be the remains of a crew member or settler among the 40 or so people aboard.

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From Independent Records

The wreck of a U.S. Air Force twin-engine plane that crashed into eastern Lake Ontario more than 60 years ago has been found in deep water off Oswego, a team of underwater explorers said Tuesday.

The Beach Aircraft C-45 flew for miles on its own after its three-man crew and two civilian passengers bailed out when one of the engines failed during a flight over central New York in 1952.

The aircraft flew on automatic pilot for more than an hour before it crashed into the lake several miles northwest of Oswego, on the lake's southern shore 35 miles north of Syracuse.

A trio of explorers from the Rochester area said they located the nearly intact plane in more than 150 feet of water while searching for historic shipwrecks on the lake's eastern end on June 27.

One of the searchers, Jim Kennard, said the C-45 was on a routine flight on Sept. 11, 1952, from Bedford, Massachusetts, to Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York, when the left engine began failing about 50 miles from its destination.

As the plane started to lose altitude, the pilot believed it would soon crash and ordered the other two Air Force officers on board and the two civilians to parachute from the aircraft at 2,500 feet.

By Danny Mok - South China Morning Post

A group of local divers are on an underwater mission to find historical treasures they believe may have been resting on the sea bed off Sai Kung for centuries.

The seven members of the Hong Kong Underwater Heritage Group will complete their 13-day expedition today, retracing their 2010 search in the same area off High Island Reservoir, which turned up some promising finds.

"We identified 313 artefacts [in 2010], mostly porcelain, in a small area of 30 metres by 30 metres," said group member Marco Li Li-hen, 42.

"Twenty-two of them were intact blue-and-white porcelain bowls and plates.

"That surprised us. Why were there so many artefacts there?"

The group of divers are mentored by Dr Bill Jeffery, an Australian maritime archaeologist who lives in Hong Kong. Jeffery said the artefacts could date back to the Ming (1368-1644) or early Qing (1644-1912) dynasties, and could have ended up on the ocean floor after a shipwreck.

"Trading was going on in this general area, but how much was going on and are there other shipwrecks there? Quite possibly," Jeffery said, adding that it was too early to say what else might be found at the site.

"We need to do the excavation, then to get ceramic experts to look at what we have found to see the significance of the materials."

The group is hoping to find the source of the artefacts found in 2010.

Cheng Kai-ming, former chairman of the Archaeological Society, said it was an unusual undertaking for a group of amateurs.

"It's certainly rare to see [people] like them using their spare time for underwater archaeology … which is much riskier than on dry land, especially working with shipwrecks."

Both Cheng and Jeffery are keeping their expectations low about the likelihood of finding anything significant but that has not dampened their enthusiasm.

Full story...

From News Discovery

Researchers have begun exploring the wreckage of the Mars, a Swedish war ship that sank during a naval battle in 1564.

Johan Rönnby, professor of maritime archeology at Södertörn University in Sweden, was recently awarded a grant from the National Geographic Society for his project, "The Maritime Battlefield of Mars (1964)."

How were the Vikings such remarkable mariners ? Scientists have found the answer buried deep in a 16th-century shipwreck.

"It's a unique ship," Rönnby said. "Maybe the biggest in the world during this time. And when it exploded, because it actually exploded during the fight, it went down to the bottom ... so we are diving on the wreck, but we are also diving on the sunken battlefield."

The ship sank during a bloody battle against a fleet from Denmark and the German city of Lübeck. Mars was rumored to have been cursed because many of its 130 cannons were made from melted church bells.

Rönnby says due to the brackish water and conditions of the Baltic Sea, the ship is remarkably well-preserved.

"The cold and darker water of the Baltic Sea preserves wreck in a fantastic way, and that's really the reason we have Mars on the bottom like this," Rönnby said.

Video of the wreck

By Harriet Alexander - The Telegrap

An 'X' marked the spot on the explorer's map – and the crowd grew wide-eyed in amazement at what they were told lies beneath.

The 500-year-old diaries corroborated the find, said Barry Clifford, a marine archaeologist, standing at the front of the wood-panelled Explorer's Club in New York.

The ballast found under the waves matched the profile of the ship, believed to have run aground half a millennia ago. The government of Haiti, the country on the map, was excited by the news.

Mr Clifford thought he had found his treasure: the wreck of Christopher Columbus's ship, a prize 500-years in the searching.

"I think the evidence is overwhelming that this ship is most probably the Santa Maria," he said last month.

But after the triumphant announcement, Mr Clifford's find is now being called into question.

A Portuguese-American historian, Manuel Rosas, has said that the discovery of the shipwreck is impossible – because the ship never sank.

His theory, based on over two decades of research, is that the ship did not sink, as is widely believed, but was hauled onto the Haitian shore, used to house the sailors Columbus left behind on his return voyage, and eventually years later burnt as firewood.

He says that Columbus deliberately misled the world with his journals, because he was acting as a spy for the Portuguese king, rather than reporting to his Spanish paymasters.

"He was the James Bond of his day," said Mr Rosas, speaking to The Telegraph from his home in New York. "It's unbelievable that he has managed to pull the wool over everybody's eyes for five centuries.

"But the important thing to remember is that the whole mission was to trick the Spanish – and tell the Portuguese what was really going on. In this he succeeded.

"Anyone who looks for a shipwreck off Haiti won't find the Santa Maria – because it never sank."

Full article...

By Miguel Tébar - El Pais

Five years after being scooped up from the seabed off the coast of Cadiz by US deep-sea treasure-hunting company Odyssey, and following lengthy legal wrangling over their ownership, around 8,000 coins from a much larger haul that was aboard a Spanish frigate sunk by the British in 1804 have gone on display at ARQUA, the National Sub-Aquatic Archeology Museum, in Cartagena.

The Spanish government sees its success in reclaiming the coins as a major victory against companies such as Odyssey, which scour the world’s oceans in search of sunken booty.

The case sets a legal precedent, providing Spain with the mechanisms and procedures to protect hundreds of its vessels lying on the seabed around the world sunk in centuries past.

“This is an unprecedented international triumph against plundering and the illegal traffic in cultural heritage,” José María Lassalle, Spain’s secretary of state for culture, told assembled dignitaries on May 29 at the opening of a permanent exhibition about the vessel, Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, which will focus on Spain’s fight to recover almost 600,000 coins worth an estimated half-a-billion dollars that Odyssey found aboard.

Iván Negueruela, ARQUA’s director, gave journalists a guided tour of the exhibition, which aside from explaining the historical background to the treasure haul, also highlights what he calls the dangers of underwater “piracy.”

The exhibition is divided into four parts: “New Routes and Inter-Oceanic Trade”; “Naval Construction”; “Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes”; and “A Legacy to be Protected ?”.

Full article...

By Mike Schuler - gCaptain

An iconic two-masted, square-rigged tall ship famously featured in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies has sunk off Saint Lucia.

According to reports, the Brig Unicorn sank early Saturday morning as it sailed from Saint Lucia to Saint Vincent & the Grenadines for dry docking, a short journey of about 18 miles.

St. Lucia Times reports that the ship sank within a matter of minutes of first taking on water. So far there is no official determination as to the cause of her sinking.

All 10 crew members including the captain abandoned ship and were rescued by the St. Vincent & the Grenadines coast guard some time later. No injuries were reported.

In an interview with the St. Lucia Times, a spokesman for the St. Vincent & the Grenadines coast guard said the ship had already sunk upon their arrival at the scene.

The 138-foot long Brig Unicorn was built in the late 1940’s in Finland. The ship was featured in at least three of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (although not as the Black Pearl), as well as in the 1970’s TV series Roots.

The ship has been in St. Lucia since 1980, serving mostly recently as a bar and restaurant in Rodney Bay Marina.

The vessel will likely not be salvaged.