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From UPI

Archaeologists in Britain say an elaborately carved rudder from a ship resting on the bottom of the English Channel for more than 400 years has been raised.

The 28-foot-long, 3 1/2-ton rudder, bearing the carving of a man's face, is part of the so-called Swash Channel Wreck, believed to have been a Dutch trading ship that sank in the early 17th century, The Guardian reported.

Archaeologists from Bournemouth University have been working to excavate and piece together the history of the wreck, about which little is known.

"This is the first time this rudder has been seen above the surface in more than 400 years," marine archaeologist Dave Parham said.

Other artifacts raised from the wreck near Poole harbor in Dorset include cannons, leather shoes and wooden barrels.

"We've only recovered around 4 percent of the wreck and the rudder is the single largest object that we've raised," Parham said.

The rudder will undergo two years of conservation work before going on display in Poole Museum.

From Thanh Nien News

Fishermen in the central province of Quang Ngai have found another old sunken boat near the shore, the third old shipwreck spotted in the waters recently and only 100 meters from the second one found last September.

Though it was near midnight on Thursday, around 30 fishing boats had rushed over for a treasure hunt upon hearing of the discovery, which happened around 100 meters off Chau Thuan Bien Village of Binh Son District, and around 1.5 meters under water.

They were jostling around above the boat’s location, around 100 meters to the west of one that was salvaged last July, when more than 4,000 intact antiques were recovered and some were believed to come from the 13th century.

Boats also dredged the sea bed around the area in hopes it would stir up some antiques. Many people used axes and crowbars to take the antiques quickly, only to break many pottery plates and bowls.

Nguyen Van Thinh, a more gentle hunter, said: “There are many antiques in the boat, but people fought so much for them, smashing them… What a waste !” Thinh said the boat is buried under sand, but part of its has been revealed by dredging and the wooden body looks new.

Police and other security forces were deployed and cleared the chaos on Friday morning. Doan Ngoc Khoi, deputy director of Quang Ngai Museum, estimated the antiques had come from the 16th or 17th century.

“Their patterns are very sophisticated, and totally different from those on the 13th-century relics found on the other boat.”

Officials have ordered full-time security at the site and asked experts to quickly work on a excavation plan, together with Ho Chi Minh City-based salvage company Doan Anh Duong that helped with the other boat last month.

The previous shipwreck site was looted for days, and an attempt to recover the relics last October failed as the locals protested and threw rocks at police officers and turned police trucks upside down, arguing that finders should be keepers.

By Kim Stephens - Brisbane Times

For 200 long years, the Great Barrier Reef has concealed the answers to three maritime mysteries that are now on the verge of being solved.

Three shipwrecks, all believed to belong to vessels sunk in the early 1800s, have been discovered in Far North Queensland waters in the past four months.

Heritage experts are now excitedly working to determine the story behind each one.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Authority's Bruce Elliott said the three discoveries - two in remote Cape York waters and one off the coast of Gordonvale, south of Cairns - were exciting because they were largely intact.

"These three are all thought to be sailing vessels from the 1800s, all are fairly large and all are in relatively good condition," he said.

"We don't have any of the detail yet, heritage experts are trying to identify the ships, so we don't know at this stage if they were passenger ships or cargo ships."

Full story...

By Michael "Beach Mick" Hudson - Beach Carolina

Many unknown treasures and concretion-encased surprises await researchers on the wreck of Blackbeard’s flagship,  Queen Anne’s Revenge (QAR), near Beaufort. Part two of this year’s dive season resumed this week, and the plan is to recover artifacts from 60 five-foot by five-foot units by Oct. 31.

After nearly 300 years on the sea floor, the artifacts often are locked in a concrete like crust of sand, shells and marine life that is removed during the conservation process.

This summer’s earlier dive ended in mid-June with the recovery of two eight-foot long cannons. To date 15 cannons have been recovered, and six other cannons that then could not be retrieved now await recovery. Plans to lift them in June were upset by unfavorable wind and weather.

“We still hope to recover the other cannons; one is already in place and ready to go,” says Project Director Billy Ray Morris.

“We are seeking a vessel to lift the others since the retirement of the R/V Dan Moore, by Cape Fear Community College.

It was a wonderful partner with us for many years.” The team will ask the college about use of its new vessel, R/V Hatteras, for further cannon recoveries.
 

By Jasper Copping - The Telegraph

But in spite of years of painstaking work, two tantalising details about the vast wooden ship lying off the Dorset coast remain elusive - its identity and how it came to its meet its end.

But tomorrow, as the recovery phase ends, the biggest clue yet will come to the surface when the vessel’s 27ft, 2.4 tonne rudder, complete with Baroque carved face, is brought to the surface.

The team behind the project hope this piece can be added to the jigsaw to allow them to finally solve the 400 year old mystery of what is known only as the Swash Channel Wreck, after its location.

So far, they have established several clues, including more than 1,000 recovered artefacts, to hint at the ship’s real identity and have pieced together a most likely chain of events to explain how it came to be resting in 22ft of water, off the south coast.

The wreck was found in 1990, after a dredger hit an obstruction while conducting routine work in the approaches to the harbour.

Closer inspections revealed it to be the wreck of a 130ft ship, of which more than 40 per cent remained, including parts of the ship’s forecastle, complete with galley and gunports,

An early suspect was the Spanish Armada vessel, San Salvador, lost in the area in 1588.

However, it was eliminated after the tests dated the vessel’s timber frame to wood felled in 1628, from forests in the coastal region of the Netherlands-Germany border, near the modern city of Emden.

Analysis of the artefacts suggest they came from the second quarter of the seventeenth century, giving experts a window of 1628 to 1650, during which the vessel was lost.

Ornate woodwork on the vessel, including four other baroque-style carvings recovered, mark it out as a high status vessel. It was also heavily armed, with 34 gun ports, but the design suggested it was not a warship.

The galley was located in the bow castle, keeping the hull clear for cargo, indicating the vessel was an armed merchantman.

Frustratingly, there remains no sign on board of a possible cargo, suggesting it has either not survived almost four centuries on the seabed or was salvaged at the time.

Full story...

By Tia Ghose - LiveScience
 

The oceans surrounding Antarctica may be littered with buried shipwrecks in pristine condition, new research suggests.

Researchers came to that conclusion, detailed Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, after burying wood and bone at the depths of the Antarctic oceans and analyzing the handiwork of worms and mollusks more than a year later.

"The bones were infested by a carpet of red-plumed Osedax worms, which we have named as a new species — Osedax antarcticus — but the wood planks were untouched, with not a trace of the wood-eating worms," study co-author Adrian Glover, an aquatic invertebrates researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, said in an email.

"The wood was hardly degraded either, after 14 months on the seafloor."

That finding suggests that some of the most iconic shipwrecks — including the Endurance, the most famous ship to ever sail to Antarctica — could be perfectly preserved in the icy waters near the southern continent.

Sir Ernest Shackleton first set sail for Antarctica aboard the Endurance. At the time, the ship was the strongest one ever built. Yet it was crushed by icebergs in the Weddell Sea near Antarctica in 1915 and sunk.

More than nine months later and a after a series of harrowing ordeals, the entire crew was eventually rescued.

In any other ocean, wooden ships like the Endurance are quickly devoured by shipworms or wood-boring mollusks.

Antarctica, however, has been treeless for the last 30 million years. Instead, the region is teeming with whales and other cetaceans whose bones sink to the ocean floor.

That raised the possibility that, whereas ocean dwellers feast on wood in other regions, local organisms may have adapted to devour bone in Antarctica.

Full story...

By Marc Lallanilla - LiveScience
 

For fans of Italian cuisine, the news of a well-preserved ancient Roman shipwreck — whose cargo of food might still be intact — will surely whet their appetites.

The ship is believed to be about 2,000 years old and is buried in the mud off the coast of Varazze, Italy, according to The Age.

The mud kept the wreck hidden for centuries, but also helped to preserve it and its cargo, held in clay jars known as amphorae.

"There are some broken jars around the wreck, but we believe that most of the amphorae inside the ship are still sealed and food-filled," Lt. Col. Francesco Schilardi, commander of the police diving team that found the shipwreck, told the BBC.

Local fishermen suspected there might be a wreck in the area, because pieces of pottery kept turning up in their nets.

Police divers used a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to locate the shipwreck about 160 feet (50 meters) underwater.

"This is an exceptional find," Schilardi said. "Now, our goal is to preserve the ship and keep thieves out.

We are executing surveys and excavations to study the contents of the boat, which is perfectly intact."

Using sophisticated technologies like ROVs, sonar mapping equipment and genetic analysis, marine archaeologists have had considerable success in recent years in recovering well-preserved artifacts from shipwrecks.

Full story...

By Jeff Newpher - Your Houston News

The discovery of three shipwrecks last week in the Gulf of Mexico 170 miles from Galveston made possible by a mixture of technology, exploration and science has generated facts, assumptions and a list of questions that may grow to the 4,300 foot depth of water at the wrecks.

For now, the area of the historic discovery is called the "Monterrey Shipwreck” because Monterrey is what Shell Oil had named the area when they were exploring it for potential drilling.

They alerted government scientists that there was something unusual on the floor of the Gulf.

What the scientists from three federal government agencies, one state agency, three universities and a few private foundations know is that during their eight-day adventure, they participated in the country’s deepest archeological and scientific shipwreck artifact recovery.

On Thursday, July 25, at Moody Gardens in Galveston, the participants explained the significance and in some cases, the mystery that is still attached to the wrecks by displaying a handful of the 60 items they recovered from Monterrey.

Fact: the three wrecks are within five miles of each other. Each schooner was approximately 83 feet long and 25 feet wide.

Using a remote-operated vehicle “steered with the precision of a video gamer,” and controlled from the surface almost a mile away, members of the expedition carefully investigated, photographed (more than 600,000 images) and in some cases retrieved the salt water-preserved items from the seabed including dishes, a toothbrush, books, navigational tools, medicine bottles, jugs, bell, animal hides, a corked bottle of ginger, demijohns (bottles) and Spanish olive jars.

Full story...