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By Justin Murphy - Democrat and Chronicle

Almost 175 years ago, a 52-foot boat carrying a load of limestone ran into a violent storm as it approached the port of Oswego.

The combination of high winds, tall waves and a heavy cargo proved fatal to the five sailors aboard.

But the ship itself, the Atlas, has been located by a team of Rochester-area shipwreck hunters, who hailed it as the oldest confirmed commercial shipwreck site in the Great Lakes.

The find was made last month by a three-man team using a torpedo-like sonar device and a remote-controlled underwater camera the size of a microwave.

Matching the wreck location with the cargo and the ship’s size and construction proved the pile of timber, seaweed and mussels was in fact the Atlas.

The condition of the wreck indicates the ship, sailing from Chaumont, Jefferson County, went down in a hurry after its heavy cargo shifted suddenly in the bad weather.

The deck collapsed on impact, the sides fell away and the two masts toppled to the side.

The boat came to rest at a depth of 300 feet and had not been noticed since it settled there in 1839.

It went down like the stone it was carrying,” said Jim Kennard of Perinton, one of the explorers.

“With a strong northwest gale, the buildup of the waves can get pretty fierce. A boat like that gets hit by a strong wave and that’s all it takes.”

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From Wales Online

Treasure worth £1m remains undiscovered in a shipwreck off the Welsh coast, an explorer claims.

The Royal Charter was on the final leg of her voyage from Australia to Britain when she was smashed to pieces by one of the biggest storms ever to hit Britain off the coast of Anglesey on October 25, 1859.

The ship was carrying hundreds of passengers and crew and a fortune from Australian gold fields.

The death toll of 497 is the highest of any shipwreck on the Welsh coast and was written about by Charles Dickens.

Treasure hunter Vincent Thurkettle, a full-time gold-panner who is leading the exploration of the wreck, admits it's increasingly difficult to find anything of value amongst the remains – but said there’s likely to still be £1m of gold on the sea bed.

“She was probably carrying well over £100m in gold – at least £80m in cargo plus the passengers' personal belongings – and even if 99% has been recovered now that still leaves at least £1m undiscovered,” said Vincent, whose exploration is being filmed for S4C series Trysor Coll y Royal Charter (Lost Treasure of the Royal Charter).

Vincent said: "The debris scattered on the seabed includes everything from broken plates to dress-making pins and coal. The last of the gold may never be found.”

Vincent has uncovered relics which would have been very dear to some of the ship's passengers, including a small, beautifully crafted ring of gold, opal and diamonds and a snuff box engraved with the name Edward Bennett.

Vincent said: “£1m is roughly 1% of the money that sunk with the ship.

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By Aziz Idris - Brudirect

Brunei's World War II shipwrecks are the crown jewels of the underwater treasure that have recently gained exposure at regional dive shows and international travel magazines.

However, private operators warn that these resources are depleting at an alarming rate due to high oxygenated environment on the seabed.

In most places across the Pacific Ocean, nothing has been done to restore or protect these shipwrecks as the cost of such project is high with only a few expertises available to carry out the risky job. As-a result, these significant resources are disappearing.

Director of Professional Diving Services from Australia, Mark Venturoni, together with his team of professional divers recently took the plunge to make an underwater observation of the Australian wreck and American wreck off the Brunei coastline.

Both vessels have an important part in our heritage with the Australian wreck, originally a Royal Dutch Navy ship, taken over by the Japanese and later renamed Imaji Maru.

It sank after hitting a mine 34 metres off the coast of Brunei.

The American wreck, located a mere 1.4 kilometres away from the Australian wreck, is a classic World War II remnant with live artillery shells still found on deck.

The original USS Salute built in 1943 was a US Navy Minesweeper first used to escort convoys between Pearl Harbor and the Far East.

With 20 years of experience in commercial diving and another five as a former maritime ecologist, Mark was delighted to witness this heritage that dates back to the mid-40s.

"This generation of divers can still enjoy them," he told the Bulletin, before adding quickly, "but this is probably the last (generation)".

According to his observation, taking into account the landscape and decaying metals on the shipwrecks, "it has become dangerous to penetrate them.

With nothing being done, they will keep falling apart until they become a pile at the bottom in 10 years," he explained.

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From Associated Press

Marine archaeologists made a thrilling discovery this week while examining a well-preserved shipwreck deep in the Gulf of Mexico — two other sunken vessels that likely went down with it during an early 19th century storm.

Much isn’t known about the ships, including the flag or flags they sailed under and the year they sank about 170 miles southeast of Galveston.

They came to rest 4,363 feet, or nearly three-quarters of a mile, below the surface, making them the deepest Gulf or North American shipwrecks to have been systematically investigated by archaeologists, the researchers said.

“What you’re going to see and hear I hope will blow your mind. Because it has ours,” lead investigator Fritz Hanselmann told reporters at a Thursday news conference in which the team revealed its initial findings.

“We went out with a lot of questions and we returned with even more. The big question we’re all asking is: What is the shipwreck? And the answer is we still don’t know,” said Hanselmann, a researcher from Texas State University in San Marcos’ Meadows Center for Water and the Environment.

During eight days of exploration that ended Wednesday, the scientists used remote-controlled machines to recover more than 60 artifacts from the initial shipwreck site, including musket parts, ceramic cups and dishes, liquor bottles, clothing and even a toothbrush.

The artifacts, including china from Britain, ceramics from Mexico and at least one musket from Canada, will help researchers determine the ships’ histories, Hanselmann said.

“Nationalities, cultures, all collide in these shipwrecks. We hope to return in the future next year with more work,” he said.

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By Dene Moore - Vancouver Sun

Almost seven decades after a U.S. military transport ship sank to the ocean floor off the north coast of British Columbia, the Canadian Coast Guard has received approval to remove bunker oil and other potentially hazardous materials from the Second World War-era vessel.

The maritime safety agency issued a request for proposals on Friday for a contractor to tap into the rotting hull of the Brigadier General M.G. Zalinski where it lies 100 kilometres south of Prince Rupert, B.C., burping oil to the surface.

“This was a vessel that was lost, ran aground and sank. It was one of those dark and stormy nights in 1946,” said Roger Girouard, assistant commissioner of the western region for the coast guard.

The Zalinski was transporting ammunition and equipment to Alaska at the outset of the Cold War. The location of the wreck was consigned to history.

“There she sat for several decades,” Girouard said.

It lies under 34 metres of water, on the edge of a cliff in the Grenville Channel, a narrow and scenic waterway that sees as many as a half dozen ferries and cruise ships a day in the summer and countless commercial fishing vessels.

Reports said no crew members died when the ship went down in a blinding rain storm, and the wreck remained out of sight and out of mind until an oil slick was reported to the coast guard in 2003.

The agency located the source of the oil using an underwater remote-controlled vehicle, and later divers retrieved the ship’s bell to confirm her identity.

From Berwick Advertiser

A nineteenth century shipwreck could become protected as part of a special anniversary project by English Heritage.

By Doug Miller - KHOU

A shipwreck undetected in the briny deep of the Gulf of Mexico for two centuries has been discovered off the coast of Texas, where archeologists using robotic submarines have launched a high-tech salvage operation.

Inside a control room on the campus of Texas A&M Galveston, a team of nautical archeologists and biologists are coordinating the exploration of the wreckage discovered by a Shell Oil survey crew about 150 miles off the coast.

Satellite video and audio signals keep them in communication with the crew staffing a vessel stationed above the debris field, which sits about 3000 feet below the surface of the water.

Images beamed back from the floor of the gulf show muskets, cannon, clothing, plates and platters that went down with the ship. One especially striking artifact retrieved by the robotic arms:

A sealed bottle filled with bright yellow ginger, which was used as a treatment for seasickness.

“We have a lead plate,” said Tom Oertling, a nautical archeologist with Texas A&M Galveston.

“And sitting on top of the lead plate is the galley stove, which has fallen back over on its back. The lead plate, we think, was to protect the ship from embers that fell out of the stove.”

The discovery has brought a team of scientists and explorers together for an expedition broadcast live to an audience watching on the Nautilus Live website.

Texas A&M Galveston, renowned for its oceanographic expertise, is working with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration using a vessel borrowed from Bob Ballard, the famed underwater explorer who found the wreckage of the Titanic.

With the discovery comes a mystery: Where did the doomed vessel come from and how did it she and her crew go down in the gulf ?

The artifacts apparently date from the early 1800s, a time when Galveston infamously became the operations base for the notorious pirate Jean Lafitte.

Some of the debris apparently came from Spain and Mexico, but the guns appear to be British.

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By Frank Thadeusz - Spiegel Online

On the old game show "What's My Line ?" Briton Mark Dunkley might have been described with the following words: "He does what many adventurers around the world can only dream of doing."

Dunkley is an underwater archaeologist who dives for lost treasures. His most recent discoveries were anything if not eerie.

On the seafloor along the southern and eastern coasts of the UK, Dunkley and three other divers have found one of the largest graveyards in the world's oceans, with 41 German and three English submarines from World War I.

Most of the submarines sank with their crews still on board, causing many sailors to die in horrific ways, either by drowning or suffocating in the cramped and airtight submarines.

Several U-boats with the German Imperial Navy are still considered missing today.

Lists provide precise details on which of the U-boats the German naval forces had lost by the time the war ended in November 1918.

But it was completely unclear what had happened, for example, to UB 17, a subway crewed by 21 men under the command of naval Lieutenant Albert Branscheid.

Neither was it clear where the 27-member crew of UC 21 -- a minelayer commanded by naval Lieutenant Werner von Zerboni di Sposetti -- had perished.

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