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By Randy Mink

We all have romanticized visions of pirates and may have daydreamed about a swashbuckling life at sea.

Chicago's Field Museum will shed light on those notorious seafaring plunderers of yesteryear in the touring exhibition "Real Pirates: The Untold Story of the Whydah from Slave Ship to Pirate Ship."

From Feb. 27-Oct. 25, landlubbers can sail with legendary pirate Sam Bellamy and his crew and learn the true story of the Whydah, an empty slave ship that was captured in the Bahamas in February 1717.

Two months later, the vessel, laden with booty seized from 50 ships, sank off the coast of Massachusetts.

Underwater explorer Barry Clifford discovered the shipwreck in 1984 and is excavating the site.

More than 200 artifacts from the first fully authenticated pirate ship ever found in U.S. waters will be on display at the Field.

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By Bruce Bower

Surprising insights about ancient shipbuilding have floated to the surface from the submerged remnants of two major harbors, one on Israel’s coast and the other bordering Istanbul, Turkey.

Researchers described their finds January 9 at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America. 

Analyses of salvaged crafts indicate that shipbuilders started making sophisticated frames for their vessels by about 1,500 years ago, 500 years earlier than had been suspected, reported Yaakov Kahanov of the University of Haifa in Israel.

By a few hundred years later, craft constructors had steadily improved hull designs for a diverse collection of ships, says Cemal Pulak of Texas A&M University in College Station.

Frames provided greater structural stability for ships than an earlier hull-building technique that had relied on joining planks with adhesives and fasteners to form a shell. Such vessels date to as early as approximately 2,000 years ago.

Kahanov and his colleagues have documented the existence of frame-based hulls on five shipwrecks, all from the fifth to ninth centuries. Water-logged wood from the vessels was recovered at the now-submerged Mediterranean harbor off the island of Dor in Tantura Lagoon, south of Haifa. Researchers then transported the finds to the University of Haifa for study.

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From Andi Hajramurni and Nurni Sulaiman

A ship carrying 250 passengers and 17 crew members sank in rough seas in waters off Baturoro in Majene regency, West Sulawesi, on Sunday. Rustam Pakaya, head of the Health Ministry’s crisis center, said six people had been confirmed dead in the accident, Reuters reported.

A joint search-and-rescue team pulled 150 passengers from the water, and 18 others were rescued by fishermen. The ship had departed from Pare-pare in South Sulawesi at 5:45 p.m. local time (4:45 p.m. Jakarta time) on Saturday on a voyage through the Makassar Strait to Samarinda, capital of East Kalimantan.

The ship sank at about 4 a.m. after being hit by a cyclone in rough seas.

“There’s currently a tropical cyclone that is causing tides of 5 to 6 meters,” Jusman Syafi’i Djamal told Reuters.

Transportation Ministry spokesman Bambang Ervan said the missing persons had not been acounted for.

"We still don't know whether they had lifejackets on when the ship was hit, and it happened at dawn so most people were probably asleep," he said.

The 747-ton ship, skippered by captain Sabir, sent its last transmission at 2 a.m. to the Pare-pare port, the port administrator Nurwahidah said.

By Eric Chao

Located between the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea, Taiwan has been shaped by its relation with the ocean, though today its focus is turned toward the land.

With its rich collection of marine artifacts, the newly inaugurated Evergreen Maritime Museum aims to revive this ancient link by educating the people of Taiwan about the sea and ships. Taiwan Journal reporter Eric Chao recounts a visit to the museum.

Being an island, the sea was always important to the people of Taiwan, and still is. The nation's largest marine museum, which opened its doors Oct. 7, 2008 in Taipei, celebrates this relationship.

The Evergreen Maritime Museum is the brainchild of tycoon Chang Yung-fa, chairman and founder of the Taipei-based Evergreen Group, one of the largest container shipping companies in the world, and owner of Eva Air, the second major airline in Taiwan.

The inauguration of the museum coincided with the 40th anniversary of the company.

From BBC News

A team of Cornish divers accused of plundering a shipwreck off the Spanish coast are to face trial in Spain. 

Peter Devlin, from Falmouth, Malcolm Cubin, from Truro, and Steve Russ, from Helston, are accused of taking gold and diamonds from the wreck in June 2002. They say they were diving for tin ingots from a nearby wreck, for which they had a contract. 

The men, who all deny a charge of theft, are due to appear for trial at the Court of Santiago on 24 March. 

The men are each charged with one count of theft. They also each face a further charge of destruction of the patrimonial heritage of Spain, which they also deny.

The trio said they were working as divers on a salvage contract awarded by the Spanish government when they were arrested. 

If they are found guilty, the men each face up to six years in jail.

By Alexandra Wood

As dawn broke more than 90 years ago over the North Sea a U-boat captain gleefully ordered the destruction of the Scarborough fishing fleet.

Long after his daring attack in 1916 which sent a dozen trawlers to the bottom of the North Sea, Karl Von Georg recalled: "What a massacre of ships that was!

"We steered back and forth firing at full speed with the bow gun. One after another the ships hit at the water line, listed and plunged, until all had vanished from the surface of the sea, save the one on which the survivors were crowded."

It could have been a lot worse – and Von Georg, of U-57, has gone down in history as a humanitarian who saved more than 120 lives, making sure they were all transferred to a boat to carry them home.

Now divers from Scarborough Sub Aqua Club have discovered the resting places of at least six of the trawlers, recovering three bells, and this year they will be trying to find yet more.

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By Benjamin Gohs

It’s got all the elements of a flashy Hollywood action flick — French dignitaries, deep-sea archeology, sabotage, a 330-year-old ship and a U.S. Federal Marshall — and it also has all the paperwork of an IRS audit.

The latest chapter in the saga of 17th century French ship Le Griffon hunter and head of Great Lakes Exploration Group (GLEG) Stephen Libert finds Libert still battling with the state of Michigan over possession of what may or may not be the ship’s remnants.

“The facts are straightforward,” stated the State of Michigan in documents it filed on Dec. 23, 2008, in Western District, Northern Division of Michigan’s United States District Court. “GLEG asserts that it has discovered a shipwreck in Lake Michigan. GLEG alleges that the wreck is the Griffin (sic). GLEG seeks to be declared the owner and/or salvor of the defendant shipwreck.”

In the pleading for a dismissal of the case, the state asserted, among several claims, that it has immunity through the 11th Amendment — which basically states that a citizen cannot sue a state — and further stated that, not only did no one make claim to the alleged ship when the State of Michigan noticed it in two newspapers, but a state diving expedition revealed no ship.

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From Power Boat World

Australian National Maritime Museum archaeologists have almost certainly found the site of an intriguing 1829 shipwreck on the Great Barrier Reef some 20 km off the coast of North Queensland.

Scanning Flora Reef, 13 km east of the Frankland Islands off Cairns, they have found an anchor and other metal fittings which they consider probably mark the final resting place of HM Schooner Mermaid, a government vessel that ran aground and broke up on a voyage from Sydney to Port Raffles (in what is now the Northern Territory).

They hope to find further evidence in the next few days to confirm the vessel’s identity. 'This is an historically significant shipwreck, and there have been several attempts to locate where it happened – all of them unsuccessful so far,' the leader of the museum team, maritime archaeologist and curator Kieran Hosty, said today.

'There’s great excitement among the team at the strong prospect we’ve found it.'

The search team, which includes National Maritime Museum archaeologists and divers as well as scientists from James Cook University and the Museum of Tropical Queensland, set out from Cairns on New Year’s Day specifically to search for the Mermaid wreck site.

They targeted Flora Reef as earlier searches had discounted several other possible sites.

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