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From The Courier.co.uk
 

The wrecked vessel is believed to be the Queen of Sweden, a merchant ship of the Swedish East India Company.

It hit a rock off the headland of Knab while seeking shelter in Bressay Sound, Shetland, after running into stormy weather on  January 12, 1745.

Historic Environment Scotland (HES) said the wreck is of national importance as “arguably the best preserved remains of a Swedish East Indiaman located in waters around Scotland”.

It has recommended that the Scottish Government designate the area as a Historic Marine Protected Area (Historic MPA) and a consultation has been launched inviting people to give their views.

Historic MPAs aim to preserve marine historic assets of national importance, so they can be protected, valued and understood.

Philip Robertson, Deputy Head of Designations at HES, said: “The sinking of the Queen of Sweden was a significant event in the history of the Shetland Isles, and the wreckage that remains is a marine heritage site of national importance that can greatly enhance our knowledge and understanding of the Swedish East India Company and its trading activity around Scotland’s coasts during the 18th century.

“We believe that designating the site as a Historic MPA will promote its heritage value, and I’d like to encourage as many people as possible to take this opportunity to share their views about this important piece of our nation’s priceless marine heritage.”

It comes after First Minister Nicola Sturgeon last week announced a consultation on proposals to create a Historic MPA at Scapa Flow in Orkney, where vessels from the German High Seas fleet were scuttled in 1919.

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By Alan Boyle - Geek Wire
 

The USS Strong put in less than a year of service at sea, but the destroyer and its crew nevertheless earned a place of honor in the U.S. Navy’s history of World War II. Now the Strong’s legacy is once again in the spotlight, thanks to the shipwreck’s discovery by the research vessel Petrel.

The R/V Petrel’s expedition team, supported by the late Seattle billionaire philanthropist Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc., found the wreckage on Feb. 6, lying 1,000 feet deep on the floor of the Kula Gulf, north of New Georgia in the Solomon Sea. The latest find adds to the Petrel’s long list of World War II shipwreck discoveries, including the USS Indianapolis, the USS Lexington, the USS Juneau, the USS Helena and the USS Hornet.

“With each ship we are find and survey, it is the human stories that make each one personal,” Robert Kraft, expedition lead and director of subsea operations for the Petrel. “We need to remember and honor our history and its heroes, living and dead. We need to bring their spirit to life and be grateful every day for the sacrifices made by so many on our behalf.”

The Strong put out to sea for the first time in 1942, and during the first half of 1943, it conducted anti-submarine patrols and supported naval mining operations around the Solomon Islands, New Hebrides and Guadalcanal in the Pacific.

Its final battle came on July 5, 1943, when the Strong was sent to shell Japanese shore installations to provide cover for the landing of American forces at Rice Anchorage on the coast of New Georgia.

During the engagement, the destroyer was struck on the port side by a Japanese torpedo fired at long range. One of the Strong’s crew members, Donald Regan, recalled that the force of the strike “knocked me off my feet.”

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By James Rogers - Fox News

One of the first Japanese battleship to be sunk by U.S. forces during World War II has been discovered in the Solomon Islands by a research organization set up by the late billionaire Paul Allen.

Imperial Japanese Navy ship Hiei, which sank on Nov. 14, 1942, was spotted on the seabed by experts from the research vessel RV Petrel.

“HIEI was crippled by a shell from the USS San Francisco on the 13th which disabled the steering gear,” explained RV Petrel, in a Facebook post. “For the next 24 hours it was attacked by multiple sorties of torpedo, dive and B-17 bombers. Hiei sank sometime in the evening with a loss of 188 of her crew.”

The battleship was found lying upside down on the seabed northwest of Savo Island, according to the RV Petrel team. Eerie images posted to Facebook show Hiei’s 5-inch guns and intact glass portholes in the ship's barnacle-encrusted hull. RV Petrel also posted sonar images of the battleship and her debris field on the seafloor.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen died in October 2018 from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The research organization established by Allen has discovered a host of historic military shipwrecks, such as the wrecks of the USS Helena, USS Lexington and the USS Juneau.

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By Lucas Reilly - Mentafloss

Anders Franzén lived for shipwrecks. An engineer and expert on the naval warfare of the 16th and 17th centuries, he was especially obsessed with the old Swedish men-of-war that had once menaced the Baltic Sea.

When he wasn’t busy at his day job with the Swedish Naval Administration, he’d spend hours combing through archives in search of maps and documents, hoping they might reveal the location of Sweden’s great sunken warships.

And when he learned that one wreck might still be trapped, undiscovered, not far from his home in Stockholm, he was hungry to find it.

For five years, Franzén spent his spare time searching for the shipwreck. He had little luck. Trawling the waterways around Stockholm—what locals call the ström—with a grappling hook, Franzén's “booty consisted mainly of rusty iron cookers, ladies’ bicycles, Christmas trees, and dead cats,” he’d later recall.

But on August 25, 1956, Franzén's grappling iron hooked something 100 feet below. And whatever it was, it was big. Franzén gently lowered a core sampler—a tool used by oceanographers to get soil samples from the bottom of bodies of water—and retrieved a dark and soggy chunk of black oak.

The following month, Franzén's friend Per Edvin Fälting dived into the ström and see what was down there.

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By David Gibbins - History Channel

The Schiedam was a pirate ship for a period of time in between its life in the Dutch East India Company and its time in the English fleet. It wrecked in 1684 off the coast of Cornwall in England while transporting English munitions; and recently, two hand grenades still filled with gunpowder from that ship have washed up on a beach.

The pair of 17th century hand grenades were made with iron shells and filled with gunpowder. “These are the earliest type of grenade used by British soldiers, who were selected for their strength and ability to throw them long distances,” local historian Robert Felce told Cornwall Live.

“These men formed the forerunners of the British Grenadiers and their badge of identification still shows a similar grenade.”

The grenades were heavily encrusted after lying at the bottom of the ocean for 334 years. Felce told LiveScience he actually thought the second grenade was a rock when he discovered it in November 2018—that is, until he dropped it and it broke open, revealing damp gunpowder inside. (He then contacted the police, who worked with the army to properly move the grenade.)

Originally, the Schiedam was was a ship of the Dutch East India Company, which colonized southern Africa and southeast Asia in the 17th and 18th centuries. Pirates off of Gibraltar captured the ship in 1683, and an English ship recaptured it from them.

After that, the Schiedam became a carrier in the English fleet. It sailed to English-occupied Tangier in Morocco before England evacuated the city in early 1684.

The Schiedam was transporting English military weapons back to England on April 4, 1684 when it ran aground at Cornwall’s Gunwalloe Church Cove and sank into the ocean, where it’s been ever since.

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By Chris Ciaccia - Fox News

The USS San Diego was the only major warship the U.S. lost during World War I. Now, nearly 100 years after it sank, and countless theories as to what caused the wreck, researchers believe they have determined the cause of it — a German U-boat in conjunction with a mine.

Presenting the theory at the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) fall meeting, Dr. Alexis Catsambis said new survey data – based on additional research into archives, computer impact, flood models and surveying the area of the ocean floor where it lays – all point toward the Germans.

“The legacy of the incident is that six men lost their lives on July 18, 1918,” said Catsambis in a statement obtained by Fox News.

“With this project we had an opportunity to set the story straight and by doing so, honor their memory and also validate the fact that the men onboard did everything right in the lead up to the attack as well as in the response. The fact that we lost six men out of upwards of 1100 is a testament to how well they responded to the attack.”

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By Fiona Stocker - BBC News

Australia is a nation built on beer. When Port Jackson, the site around which the city of Sydney sprang up, was settled in the late 1700s, the people there were hungry not just for food, but for a steady supply of ale and other types of liquor.

In 1796, the colonial trading firm Campbell and Clark commissioned the ship Sydney Cove to sail from Calcutta in India to Port Jackson, with a cargo of provisions including ales, wines and spirits as well as essential supplies such as grain and timber. The ship never reached its destination.

Foundering off Tasmania’s treacherous north coast near the aptly named Preservation Island, the Sydney Cove ground to a halt on a sandbank and sank slowly while the crew salvaged what they could. Artefacts from excavations of the survivors’ camp indicate that this included some of the beer.

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By Paul Cooper - Discover Magazine

For centuries, the medieval fishermen who sailed in the placid waters of Lake Nemi, 19 miles south of Rome, knew a secret. It was said that the rotting timbers of a gigantic ancient shipwreck lurked below the water’s quiet surface.

But the lake was tiny, with an area of only 0.6 square miles. And with no other body of water connected to it, what could a vessel of that size be doing there?

Still, the stories about the gigantic ship persisted. They couldn’t have known then, but at the bottom of this tiny lake were two of the most unique artifacts ever to be uncovered from the ancient world.

Their story would span millennia, bridging the eccentricities of Rome’s most notorious Emperor and one of the twentieth century’s most reviled rulers — only to be lost forever in the fires of war.

Looking at the placid waters of Lake Nemi in the 15th century, none of that would have seemed plausible. But for years now, fishermen had been using grappling hooks to bring up ancient artifacts from the legendary wreck that lay beneath, and selling them in the markets.

An investigation was warranted. In 1446, a young Cardinal and nephew of the Pope named Prospero Colonna, decided to probe for himself the rumours of an unlikely shipwreck at the bottom of Lake Nemi.

He sailed out onto the lake, and sure enough, he could just make out a sprawling lattice of wooden beams. He and his men tried to send down ropes with hooks on the end to retrieve parts of this mysterious structure, but at a depth of 60 feet they didn’t have much luck.

All they managed was to tear off some planks. Colonna had confirmed that the wreck existed, but from there the mystery only deepened.

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