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By Martin Carvalho

Located some 12km from the heart of the city are the mystical island of Pulau Besar and its chain of five smaller islands, whose past is equally fascinating and interesting as the historic Malacca itself.

It takes about 25 minutes to an hour to reach the island by boat or a chartered ferry from the mouth of the Malacca River or jetties in Umbai and Anjung Batu for a fee of between RM14 and RM300.

With decent stretches of sandy beaches, rugged hilly jungle terrain, boulder cliffs and corals, the islands have been attracting picnickers, tourists, and pilgrims and even treasure hunters for as long as anyone could remember.

Some 40 frontline officers from the Malacca Museums Corporation and Tourism Malaysia recently took a familiarization trip to Pulau Besar including a beach clean of the lesser known Pulau Nangka nearby.

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By Eugene Boisvert

Researchers from Flinders University recently spent a week near Streaky Bay looking for two shipwrecks and the remains of camps set up to salvage material from the ships.

“We’re researching the location of two shipwrecks in Sceale Bay,” associate lecturer Emily Jateff said. “One is the Arachne lost in 1848 and the other one is Elizabeth Rebecca and that was lost here in 1845.

“And we’re also looking for information on a third vessel, Camilla, lost in – we think – the northwest quadrant of Streaky Bay in 1844 and all three were involved in the whaling operations here.”

They found some material from the salvage camp at Sceale Bay but no conclusive evidence for the location of either ship. “A location of a shipwreck in Sceale Bay that was shown to … and we’ve done magnetometer surveys there. The magnetometer found iron.”

Iron can indicate the bolts that were used to put the ship together but many of these were taken by the crew, who all survived. The academics visited the Streaky Bay Museum and spoke to people in Streaky Bay and nearby towns, who all knew a little information, or had heard about, the shipwrecks.

“The interesting thing is information comes from very different sources,” said Associate Professor Dr Mark Staniforth, an expert in marine archeology.

“The people in Yanerbie know of the area near Yanerbie but people in Sceale Bay know much more about that area…

From China View

Chinese archaeologists will start later this year to salvage a ship thought to be a Ming Dynasty merchant vessel that sank off the Guangdong coast 400 years ago, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH) said Wednesday.

The SACH approved the excavation plan early this year, it said in a statement to Xinhua. The administration hasn't yet announced all details of the salvage plan, but the Guangdong provincial cultural heritage department will organize an excavation team, the statement said.

The 10-meter-long ship was found buried in the silt on the sea floor, about 5.6 nautical miles offshore from Shantou City, Guangdong Province.

About 200 pieces of porcelain were recovered when the ship was found in 2007. The ship could have been carrying some 10,000 pieces of porcelain, most made during the reign of Emperor Wanli of the Ming Dynasty (1573-1620).

However, the earliest piece found so far dated back to the Song Dynasty (960-1279).

The ship was probably a Guangdong merchant vessel, since most of the porcelain items found so far were produced by local workshops, said Cui Yong, an archaeologist with the Guangdong Provincial Institute of Archaeology and Relics.

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By Dan Broadstreet

Not far from the building’s interior relics, including copper ingots from a sunken Spanish Galleon, Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City (NSWC PCD) Commander, Capt. Andrew Buduo III, and a team of volunteer Sailors painted the Man in the Sea Museum’s exterior exhibits Feb. 20 before entering for a tour of the museum’s artifacts.

“What we’re painting here are the Remote Minehunting Systems prototypes, which the Navy Base donated to the museum some time ago,” Buduo said.

Some time ago dates back to the late 70s, according to Museum Manager, Leslie Baker, who is a diver with experience in the Underwater Crime Scene Investigation (USCI) program at Florida State University. Baker’s diving background also includes diving on wrecks.

“The museum is a non-profit organization owned by the Institute of Diving, which was formed in 1977,” Baker said. “Before the museum was established at its current location in 1982, it used to reside in the lower level of a local restaurant, which doesn’t exist anymore. Long-time residents knew this dining spot as ‘The Four Winds.’”

Baker said the museum exists to preserve the history of diving, much of its heritage having originated locally at the Naval Support Activity Panama City. She said the NSWC PCD, the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center and the Navy Experimental Diving Unit (NEDU) have all contributed, quite literally, to putting ‘man in the sea.’ Baker pointed out one of the largest exterior exhibits in particular.

“Sea Lab—that big red capsule-shaped chamber displayed out front was the very first underwater habitat that people actually lived in under the ocean, and it was built right here at our Navy Base,” Baker said. “Bob Barth, a former employee at NEDU and a current member on our board of directors, was actually one of the four aquanauts who lived inside of it.”

From the Witness

The wreck of the SS Mendi on which 616 South African soldiers lost their lives in 1917 will be granted official war grave status later this year following a campaign by British underwater photo-journalist and shipwreck historian Ned Middleton.

“The wreck site will be designated a protected place under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986 later this year,” said Middleton. “As a protected place, my understanding is that she may still be visited by scuba divers but not touched.”

According to African traditional religious beliefs, those who died on the Mendi were unable to join their ancestors as they had not been buried.

“That these people needed to be buried in order to reach their afterlife was sufficient reason for me to try and do something about getting them buried,” said Middleton.

“Of course, nobody was considering physical burial; all that was required was an official designation to war grave status which has the same effect.”

On February 21, 1917, the crowded troopship the SS Mendi was heading for France when it collided with the SS Darro.

The Mendi was carrying a contingent of the South African Native Labour Corps. Over 600 men died in the icy waters of the English Channel in one of South Africa’s greatest military disasters.

The names of the men who died appear on war memorials at the Hollybrook Memorial in Southhampton, England, and at the Delville Wood Museum in France.

In South Africa, there are memorials in Port Elizabeth and at the Avalon graveyard in Soweto, which was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II in 1995.

In 2007, the SS Mendi memorial in Cape Town was unveiled on the Mowbray campus of the University of Cape Town.

By Dale Lezon

The ghostly image of an object recently found on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico just off Galveston Island is little more than a shadow.

But experts believe the sonar scan could be that of a well-known but never before discovered ship that sank nearly 150 years ago as it tried to break through the federal blockade of Galveston during the Civil War.

The Carolina, also known as the Caroline, was a merchant ship that left Galveston in July 1864 with a load of cotton.

Federal gunships followed the ship for hours until its crew ran it aground in shallow water between Galveston and San Luis Pass, then set it ablaze rather than let the enemy capture it.

Experts know little more about the ship except that it was privately owned and sank in the area where workers took the sonar image, said Steven Hoyt, state marine archeologist with the Texas Historical Commission.

Hoyt said he will research the ship’s size, style and other characteristics so that he and other divers can determine whether the object is the ship or part of it. It could be a more modern shipwreck or other debris. But experts said the shape of the image suggests it is a ship.

Hoyt said he expects divers to investigate the site in the spring or summer when the Gulf’s waters are calm. Even then, the cloudy water makes visibility near zero, and divers may have to identify the object by touch.

“It’s certainly significant if it turns out to be a historic wreck, as we think it is,” Hoyt said. “That’s really exciting.”

State officials won’t disclose the site’s location to prevent the public from plundering what could be a historically important discovery.

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By Jeremy Hsu

An archaeologist who examined remnants of the oldest-known seafaring ships has now put ancient Egyptian technology to the test.

She teamed up with a naval architect, modern shipwrights and an on-site Egyptian archaeologist to build a replica 3,800-year-old ship for a Red Sea trial run this past December.

The voyage was meant to retrace an ancient voyage that the female pharaoh Hatsheput sponsored to a place which ancient Egyptians called God's land, or Punt.

Ship planks and oar blades discovered in 2006 at the caves of Wadi Gawasis provided a basis for the ship reconstruction.

"The planks that we looked at from the archaeological site are in great condition," said Cheryl Ward, the maritime archaeologist at Florida State University who headed the effort. 

The nearly 4,000-year-old timbers even contained shipworms which had tunneled into the ships during sea voyages, leaving behind tube-like shells that filled up the wood like a sponge.

Ward was able to estimate from the shipworms that the ship endured a six-month, 2,000-mile round trip to Punt -- located in modern Ethiopia or Yemen.

A French production company called Sombrero and Co. approached Ward with the idea of recreating the ancient journey for a documentary, and so her team set about resurrecting a ship for the modern expedition.

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By Steve Almasy

Most people have had dreams of flying. Graham Hawkes had dreams of flying -- underwater. Hawkes has been in the business of building underwater craft for more than a decade. In the early days, his company, Hawkes Ocean Technologies, built vehicles for researchers and moviemakers.

But in the past few years, the ultrarich have increasingly looked for cool playthings for their ocean adventures. What better toy to have on the end of your 200-foot yacht than a submarine capable of diving to 1,500 feet below the sea's surface ?

Whoops. Did we say submarine ? It's a submersible that can "fly" underwater.

The Deep Flight Super Falcon looks like a fighter jet, with its thin body, two seats, two sets of wings and two tail fins.

"We just had to tear up everything we knew about submersibles and start again on winged subs -- underwater flying machines," Hawkes said.

He said Deep Flight submersibles are designed to be more agile than any creature living in the ocean -- with the exception of dolphins.

The company says that because of the wings, the Super Falcon can go barrel-rolling with dolphins while traveling at speeds much faster than other private submarines.

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