HOT NEWS !

By Jen Mills - Metro.co.uk

The ‘El Dorado of the Seas’ has been missing for 400 years and may finally reveal its secrets.

The mysterious Merchant Royal’s shipwreck is somewhere off the coast of Cornwall, but has left people baffled because to this day it has still never been found.

This is despite it carrying up to £4 billion of gold and other precious metals. So whoever finds it could get their hands on more treasure than Long John Silver, it is just going to be a little bit difficult for them to find it.

Previous attempts to find the 400-year-old ship have come back with nothing, but now a UK company is convinced they can do it. Former commercial fisherman and diver Nigel Hodge heads a team of 11 at Multibeam Services, a company specialising in locating lost wrecks.

He plans to spend all of the rest of this year looking for the wreck, covering a 200 square mile area of the English Channel.

It’s ‘not a gold rush’ though, Nigel told Metro.co.uk, even though he believes the wreck could be worth billions.

Full article...

By Kerry Breen - CBS News

The wreck of a passenger steamship that sank in 1856 in the Atlantic Ocean has been discovered about 200 miles off the coast of Massachusetts, a New Jersey-based salvage group said.

Le Lyonnais was a trans-Atlantic steamship, built in England for a French company. The ship was meant to carry passengers and mail between England and America, and had both sails and a steam engine, according to Atlantic Wreck Salvage, the organization located the wreck.

Le Lyonnais was making its first trip from America to Europe, carrying 132 people when it collided with the Adriatic, an American sailing vessel, on Nov. 2, 1856.

The ship sank due to damage sustained in the collision, and 116 of the people aboard Le Lyonnais died in the disaster.

D/V Tenacious, a dive vessel that locates, dives and salvages shipwrecks, first determined potential resting places for Le Lyonnais in 2022 and 2023.

In August 2024, the vessel and a crew returned to dive the sites.\u00a0After multiple search expeditions, the shipwreck was finally found off the coast of Massachusetts.

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From BBC
 

A wreck discovered near the site of a planned floating offshore windfarm off the Aberdeenshire coast may be a ship sunk during World War One. Russian merchant vessel Tobol - originally SS Cheltenham - was torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1917.

ScottishPower and Shell are behind the proposed MarramWind offshore windfarm about 75km (46 miles) off the north east coast of Scotland.

Scans during survey work discovered what it is thought could be the wreck of Tobol. An exclusion zone has now been set up to protect it. The ship had operated as the SS Cheltenham until it was captured in 1904.

After being transferred to Russian control and renamed Tobol, it was later torpedoed in September 1917.

ScottishPower said data gathered by sonar scans carried out during geophysical and environmental surveys for the proposed MarramWind floating offshore windfarm had identified the "likely resting place" of Tobol.

The UK Hydrographic Office and Historic Environment Scotland have been notified of the wreck find, though its identity has not yet been verified or confirmed.

Full article...

By Neil Michael - Irish Examiner
 

When you see them for the first time, you literally stop in your tracks. And your reaction is just to go ‘wow’.

It’s like seeing something completely out of place.

It’s like as if you looked out your window in the morning and saw aliens standing in your driveway. This is how Stewart Andrews felt the first time he saw Sherman tanks on the ocean floor, off the Donegal coast.

The deep sea diver reckons there are about nine of them resting there.

The 27-plus tonne steel hulks, some on their sides, others flat on their tracks, peer out at different angles with their 76mm guns from a cold 66-meter deep watery darkness.

That murky darkness has surrounded them since they spilled out of the SS Empire Heritage when the tanker hit the ocean floor about 30km off Malin Head after being torpedoed twice by a German U-Boat at around 6am on September 8, 1944.

Stuck in time at the depth it sank to, the debris that litters the resting place of the 155-metre ship includes reminders of the 111 souls, including crew, gunners, and passengers, who died.

Stewart, who has been deep sea diving for more than 37 years, adds: “It's fascinating to look around the Shermans, because they're totally intact.

“I think they've still all got their guns connected to them. They're all very impressive.

“You wouldn’t try and interfere with them, but even if you wanted to try and look inside, you can’t.

Full article...

By Samantha Libreri - RTE News

It has been the talk of the town all week. Reports by RTÉ News on Monday that three new shipwrecks have been discovered on Portmarnock Strand prompted locals to comb the north Dublin beach, to see with their own eyes the pieces of the past that have up to now been hidden by the sands.

This stretch of the capitals coastline has quite the history of ships running ashore. Some 50 wrecks are recorded in the Wreck Inventory, around the Portmarnock and Baldoyle areas which the National Monument Service says is "unusually high".

The physical remains of at least 13 of these vessels have been located.

The documented wreckage's range from 14th century trading ships to 20th century coal-boats and research suggests that most of the vessels recorded off Portmarnock Strand were lost during bad weather.

Several of the ships en-route to Dublin may have attempted to seek refuge in Howth Harbour during stormy conditions but failed to reach the safety of the harbour entrance and were compelled to run ashore on the strand to save lives.

Other ships, originating from ports on the west coast of Britain and bound for various global destinations, seem to have been driven ashore by stormy weather.

Below the National Monument Service outlines details about the three most recently uncovered wrecks, which provide some clues as to their origins and tell a story about maritime history around the north Dublin coast.

More to read...

By Franck Andrews - CBS News

A team of divers has discovered a massive haul of champagne and wine on a shipwreck on the floor of the Baltic Sea.

On a recent dive trip off the coast of Sweden, the Polish diving group BaltiTech spotted what looked like an old fishing boat on their sonar, 20 or so nautical miles south of the Aland islands, between Sweden and Finland.

"At first, there were doubts whether there would be anyone willing to go down," they said in a post on their website. But two of them decided to jump in and head down for a quick look.

When they didn't return for two hours, the rest of the team suspected "there was something very interesting on the bottom."

Their hunch was right. The divers swam down to discover a 19th century sailing ship "in very good condition, loaded to the sides with champagne, wine, mineral water and porcelain."

"I've been a diver for 40 years. From time to time, you see one or two bottles," Tomasz Stachura, who leads the team, told CBS News' partner network BBC News.

"But I've never seen crates with bottles of alcohol and baskets of water like this." "We certainly saw more than 100 bottles of champagne and baskets of mineral water in clay bottles," said the group.

The clay bottles helped the group establish the shipment was produced between 1850 and 1867.

Full story...

From The Guardian
 

Indigenous communities in Bolivia have objected to Colombia’s plans to recover the remains of an 18th-century galleon believed to be carrying gold, silver and emeralds worth billions, calling on Spain and Unesco to step in and halt the project.

Colombia hopes to begin recovering artefacts from the wreck of the San José in the coming months but the Caranga, Chicha and Killaka peoples in Bolivia propose that the galleon and its contents should be considered “common and shared patrimony”.

A substantial part of the treasure onboard the San José is believed to have been mined by the forced labour of Indigenous peoples in Bolivia, so Colombia’s plans to lift the remains without consulting their descendants would violate international law, the communities said in a letter to Unesco this week.

“Not having our consent, our participation and without taking into account how it will impact the present and future of our communities is irresponsible and contrary to justice,” they wrote.

“We do not have the right to forget, and nor do Spain or any of the American republics … have the right to erase or change our memory.”

The San José was carrying an immense bounty of gold, silver and emeralds from Latin America back to Spain in 1708 when it was sunk by a British fleet off the coast of Cartagena.

Full story...

By Holly Bishop - GB News


Treasure has been uncovered from a shipwreck dating back to the Roman-era, which was recovered after 17 centuries on the ocean floor.

The trading ship, which was carrying cargos of oil, wine, and fish sauces, was recovered near a tourist beach on the Spanish Mediterranean island of Mallorca in 2019.

Now, archaeologists have recovered 300 amphorae, a form of ancient ceramic jar or vase, decorated with more than 100 painted inscriptions, alongside coins and shoes from the wreck dating from the 4th century.

Previous research suggested that the ship, known as the Ses Fontanelles, originated near the Spanish port of Cartagena.

Analysis from archaeologists has theorised that the vessel was likely heading for modern-day Italy.

The circumstances of its sinking are unknown.

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