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From Ananova

A Chinese man spent 13 years building himself a car he can take fishing.

Wang Hongjun, an electrician from Qian'an city, Hebei province, says his "amphibicar" cost him about £100,000 and 13 years of persistence to develop.

After driving it to Beijing to find investors, he told the Beijing Times: "I'm looking for auto producers who are interested in my creation, since I don't want to keep it to myself."

Wang says he often drives his creation to the lake in his hometown to fish, and claims he has even taken his son for a 10-mile drive out to sea.

The yellow sportscar can be sealed to make it waterproof by remote control. A column-shaped thruster and two propellers are installed in the car's boot.

Wang said his car can float and drive in the water, but he refused to divulge exactly how it works.

"It's a business secret, but I can assure you the car was made entirely by my hands. Each plate was welded by me," he said.

By Bob Kostoff

A sudden gale stormed over Lake Ontario on a gloomy Halloween night in 1780, spelling doom for the ill-fated sloop Ontario and drowning nearly 90 souls on board.  
 
The wreckage and human bones recline today deep in the lake-bottom silt somewhere between Fort Niagara and the Town of Somerset.

A trio of Olcott men thought they had discovered the wreckage in 1995, but last year two Rochester divers claimed they discovered the wreckage and the Olcott find was misinterpreted.

Ironically, the British warship went down in the general vicinity where explorer La Salle's ship Frontenac sank on Jan. 8, 1679.

No lives were lost in that incident, but La Salle lost most of the material he was transporting to build the Griffon where Cayuga Creek flows into the Niagara River. 

Although there were no survivors of the Ontario to tell of the horror of that night, many have speculated.

The Ontario was en route from Fort Niagara to Carlton Island, located at the beginning of the Thousand Islands in the St. Lawrence River near present-day Kingston. Ont.

A great hurricane developed in October 1780 in the Caribbean. The British lost four ships to the hurricane (storms were not assigned names in that era) in the vicinity of St. Lucia and St. Vincent. Then Martinique was struck, and the French lost 40 ships there.

As today, the hurricane moved up the east coast and probably turned into a tropical storm when it hit land, but contained enough virulent energy to create a vicious Nor'easter storm. The Nor'easters are well known in this area for their sudden destructiveness.

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From TypicallySpanish.com

Two men have been arrested and the amphoras are thought to have come from a shipwreck off Villajoyosa.

Agents from the environment protection section of the Guardia Civil, Seprona, in Santa Pola, have arrested two people and recovered 19 amphoras dating from the first and second centuries, thought to have been plundered from a shipwreck.

The two men face charges of committing a crime against the historical heritage and one has been identified as 60 year old R.B.M.

The earthenware jars are thought to have been taken from the wreck of the ‘Bou Ferrer’ which was located off the coast of Villajoyosa in March 2001.

The arrests came as the men were transferring some the material which has now been taken to the Alicante provincial archaeology museum for study and cataloguing.

Other jars were found in searches of both men’s homes.

From NOAA

Maritime archaeologists today announced they have recently identified the wreck of the historic slave ship Trouvadore off the coast of East Caicos in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research significantly funded several years of archaeological research leading to the discovery by Don Keith and Toni Carrell, from Ships of Discovery, an underwater archaeology research institute.

The Spanish vessel Trouvadore was participating in the slave trade, outlawed in the British Indies, including the Turks and Caicos Islands.

In 1841, after the vessel was grounded on a reef, Caicos authorities arrested the crew, and most of the 192 African survivors settled on Grand Turk Island.

Keith and Carrell believe the African survivors of the Trouvadore are the ancestors of a large portion of current residents in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

For example, traditions on the Islands have a recognizable African origin. The Turks and Caicos National Museum is recording these traditions through oral histories and is educating the community about their ancestral history.

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From Antiques Trade Gazette

The British Museum have credited the Treasure Act – which ensures treasure hunters are compensated for finds – for the significant increase in reported objects.

This year’s Treasure Annual Report, published on November 19, lists a total of 749 precious metal objects reported last year, compared with 665 in 2006.

That amounts to a tenfold increase in the numbers of artefacts reported since the Act came into effect in 1996.

James Robinson, the curator of medieval collections at the British Museum, said: “The way the system works now is a massive incentive for people to go out and find things.

The number of items found seems to be getting bigger and bigger every year.”

Under the Act, any gold, silver and groups of coins more than 300 years old have to be reported to the local coroner.

“If the treasure is bought by the British Museum or a local museum, the proceeds are split, with half going to the finder and half to the landowner.”

This year’s major discovery was an Iron Age gold and silver torc c.50BC to 200AD found near Newark. It was purchased by Newark Sherwood museum services for £350,000.

By Anne Goodwin Sides

When the Lusitania went down, it left a mystery behind: What was the cause of the second blast ? After nearly a century of investigation, argument and intrigue, clues are starting to surface.

On May 7, 1915, the RMS Lusitania, jewel of the Cunard Line, was on a New York-to-Liverpool run when it was attacked by a German U-boat 12 miles off the coast of Ireland.

At 2:10 p.m., a torpedo plowed into the ship and exploded. Fifteen seconds later, a massive second explosion rocked the ship again.

Within a mere 18 minutes, the Lusitania plunged 300 feet to the bottom of the Celtic Sea. Of the 1,959 passengers and crew, 1,198 were lost, including 128 Americans. The tragedy sparked anti-German fervor that eventually drew the United States into World War I.

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By John Hogan

Imagine standing on the deck of a boat in the middle of a choppy Lake Michigan, with wind-blown rain buffeting your face like rice at a wedding.

Not exactly the ideal way to spend your 48th birthday.

Yet Valerie van Heest prefers this sort of mid-September activity to strolling Chicago's Magnificent Mile with friends and a charge card.

The conversion came 20 years ago, when van Heest met a group of people who shared her long-dormant love of Great Lakes history.

"In 1988, my life changed," she said.

"All my friends were people from work, and my time was spent either shopping for clothes or working. I forgot how much I missed the water."

By Tony Walter

It's agreed that the lake bottom holds the remains of dozens of vessels that challenged lake storms and lost. With each shipwreck, myth and lore add to the reputation of Lake Michigan as a recreational resource not to be trifled with.

Death's Door off the tip of Door County got its name for a reason.

Kevin Cullen, an archaeology associate for Discovery World at Pier Wisconsin in Milwaukee, recently speculated on what he called the "Lake Michigan Triangle," a 3,750-square-mile section of the lake that goes from Manitowoc to Benton Harbor, Mich., to Ludington, Mich., and back to Manitowoc.

Cullen cited the disappearance of a freighter, a Northwest Airlines plane, and one freighter captain within that triangle over the past century that he said could have natural or supernatural causes, depending on one's bent for mystery and mythology.

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