Do fundo do mar... Sea bottom

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East Day
December 30, 2004

Archeologists say that they have found the country's (China) oldest wharf and it is believed to be the starting point of an ancient sea route to Central and West Asia.

The discovery has reaffirmed the widespread belief that the ancient trade route started in Hepu County, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, archeologists said at yesterday's symposium on the nation's marine silk road.

After three years of excavation, archeologists have unearthed a wharf that is at least 2,000 years old in Guchengtou Village, according to Xiong Zhaoming, head of the archeological team.

At the same site, Xiong and his colleagues also excavated relics from an ancient city wall, a moat, some gravel and fragments of porcelain with graphics.

"This is enough evidence to say the village was the site of the Hepu county government more than 2,000 years ago," Xiong said.

According to Han Shu Record, also the history of the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD), the five counties of Hepu prefecture had a population of 80,000 residents.

"We can assume Hepu alone had no more than 20,000 and it was quite natural for the magistrate's office to be located in the commercial hub," Xiong said.

Scholars have been searching for concrete evidence to confirm a statement in Han Shu Record, which said the ancient marine silk road started in Hepu of Guangxi and Xuwen counties in neighboring Guangdong Province.

"The new finding has supported the statement and proven the ancient wharf's role in China's foreign trade more than 2,000 years ago," Xiong said at the symposium.

The two-day symposium has drawn more than 50 archeologists, geologists, historians and geographers from across the country.

Historical records show that foreign trade via the marine silk road dated to the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-24 AD), about 200 years earlier than the inland Silk Road in northwestern China - known as the country's oldest trade route to Central and West Asia as well as Europe.

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North-West Evening Mail
December 27, 2004


FUTURE PLANS: A computer-generated
Submarine Heritage Centre.

A BARROW submarine could end up as a giant work of art instead of a visitor attraction people can explore.

Submarine Heritage Centre Ltd, run by ex-submariners, plans to bring HMS Olympus home to the town to be the centrepiece of a new sub museum.

But officials from Barrow Borough Council are worried that the £5m centre, planned for land close to the Dock Museum, could flop financially.

Talks between the heritage centre and the council last week have resulted in a deal where Barrow council will consider backing the bid for a Heritage Lottery Fund grant to bring the sub the 3,000 miles back from Canada.

In return the SHC would drop its plans for a full-blown museum for now and concentrate on just getting the sub back to the town and erected.

SHC members are preparing a feasibility study for the council. Steve Warbrick, Barrow’s director of regeneration, said: “There is in principle an agreement that the submarine could be sited on land adjacent to the allotments and the Dock Museum.

“We have asked them to do an initial study into just bringing it over with the submarine merely as a piece of art. “They are looking at what the costs are going to be of bringing it here, refurbishing it and preparing the foundations.

“If it looks feasible we would then ask a council committee to agree that it can be located there. “Then the SHC Ltd would do a further study to look at ongoing opportunities once it is there.”

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Taipei Times
By Yu Sen-lun
December 30, 2004

Advertising The east coast county of Taitung is home to beautiful mountains, valleys and beaches and it's also the place to experience different cultures.

Taitung County has become a center of archaeology and famed for the study of Austronesian cultures because it is also home to the National Museum of Prehistory (國立台灣史前文化博物館) and Beinan Cultural Park (卑南文化公園).

Two weeks ago, the museum held an international conference, Austronesian Forum: New Perspective on Museum and Cultural Tourism. Guests from Austronesian-speaking countries New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Northern Mariana paid visits to the museum and exchanged their experiences on preserving Aboriginal culture.

Prior to the forum, the installation ceremony of an 8m-long ancient Palau sailing boat took place in the entrance hall of the National Museum of Prehistory.

The museum made an order for the boat in Palau in September as part of its plan to establish permanent collections of boats from all Austronesian-language countries. According to director Tsang Cheng-hwa (臧振華), the collection will promote the sea-based culture of Austronesian people... (continue)

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BBC News
December 23, 2004


Historic tug boat The Wey is
returning to Milton Keynes.

The last known example of an inland waterways tug boat is to return to the area where it was built in 1924 after a career of duty and adventure.

The Wey was built in Stony Stratford which is now part of Milton Keynes.

Working mainly in conservation work on the River Thames the vessel carried fuel for use in London during WWII.
The boat was made by the Edward Hayes company which delivered vessels all over the world, for use on rivers, inland waterways and lakes.

Originally called the Pat and renamed the Wey in the 1930s, the tug boat spent all her working life on the River Thames and finished her career with the Environment Agency.

Pride of place
More than 300 boats were made by the company. Bill Griffiths, from the Stacey Hill Museum in Milton Keynes, believes the Wey will be an important addition to their collection.

He said: "We're now looking for other historical items associated with the Hayes Company."

She will take pride of place in the museum displayed on a specially constructed plinth.

She was bought by Thames Conservancy in 1935, to assist with the original river inspection scheme.

During the Second World War the Wey was commandeered by the Ministry of Transport to take fuel from Sunbury to Richmond, where it was passed over to London tugs for delivery to the bombed capital.

Pollution emergencies
Due to this war effort her glass was removed from the portholes of the engine house and steel plates fitted, to prevent her from being spotted by enemy aircraft.

Over the last 30 years, skippered by Ken Beard, the Wey's day job with the Environment Agency has included dredging and transporting construction materials and heavy-duty machinery.

However, she has also been involved in many pollution and emergency incidents, and assisted the "Thames Bubbler" in re-oxygenating the river during a major pollution incident several years ago.

Skipper Ken Beard said: "We will be sad to see the Wey go, but are glad to have been able to make such a valuable contribution to the Stacey Hill Museum, and hope that she will continue to provide pleasure to many for years to come."

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The Guardian
By John Vidal
December 23, 2004

Unesco appeals for help as ancient sites face being flooded


The tomb of Cyrus the Great,
at Pasargadae.
Photo: bestirantravel.com

More than 100 of Iran's potentially most important but least examined archaeological sites, including fringes of Pasargadae, the city built by King Cyrus the Great, will be flooded in the next two years according to the UN, which appealed yesterday to international scientists to try to record what they can.

The flooding of the eight-mile Tang-e-Bolaghi gorge because of the construction of a dam will destroy ancient Persia's imperial road which ran from Persepolis to Pasargadae.

The Sivand dam has been planned for 10 years as part of a project to provide irrigation water for farmers in the parched south of the country.

But the speed of its construction and the scale of what will be lost have surprised scientists and the UN.

Iranian archaeologists have pinpointed 129 sites of interest in the gorge, ranging from prehistoric finds to remains of the Qajar monarchy which fell in 1925.

Stretches of the cobbled road have already been unearthed but caves, ancient paths, burial mounds, canals and other sites which have never been excavated will also be lost. There are also legends of a long underground "king's passage".
Unesco said yesterday it was hopeful that the world heritage site of Pasargadae, Cyrus's capital city, renowned for its palaces, gardens and the tomb of the founder of the Achaemenid dynasty, would be only marginally affected.

The city, which was included in Unesco's world heritage site list last year, is less than three miles from the end of the gorge.

It was built on the site where Cyrus defeated Astyages, the leader of the Medes, in 550BC. It has added importance today because it is believed to be the capital of the first Asian empire which respected the cultural diversity of its people.

"We understand that only the buffer zone will be affected by the flooding. There is no immediate physical risk but the site's potential [heritage] value will be shrouded in mystery for ever", said Junko Taniguchi, a Unesco officer in Tehran.

Unesco and Iran have called on international archaeologists to go to the sites and eight teams of Iranian, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish and others are expected to arrive next month. "But they will only be able to do initial research. It is unfortunate but the work is very urgent," said Ms Taniguchi.

Mohammad Hassan Talebian, the Iranian director of the group conducting the "rescue archaeology", said the sites held a wealth of information on Iran's past.

"One clearly sees the unspoken thoughts of past peoples in Tang-e Bolaghi. We are not in a position to say 'don't do that project', but we can delay the construction process," he said.

The dam's opening was planned for next March but the Iranian energy ministry has delayed it to early 2006 to give the archaeologists more time to examine the sites.

Masoud Azarnoush, director of archaeological research at the Iranian Cultural Heritage Organisation in Tehran, was stoical about the flooding of the valley. "We are losing irreplaceable human heritage here but we have to take into account the fate of the country and people as well," he said.

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Big News Network.com
December 28, 2004

U.S. researchers are creating an inventory of World War II-era aircraft and ships lying in a watery grave off the coast of Hawaii near Pearl Harbor.

Dive missions this month by a team from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the University of Hawaii and the National Park Service have documented numerous sites, including that of the Navy's Marshall Mars, a giant flying boat with a 200-foot wingspan that in 1950 was forced by an engine fire to land at sea off Oahu, where it exploded.

Submerged historic wreck sites are like time capsules from our maritime past, said NOAA National Marine Sanctuary maritime archaeologist Hans Van Tilburg. In this case, naval aircraft sites shed light on our technological capabilities both before and during World War II.

The sea floor survey team used sonar to map the area and record images of the crash sites using digital video and still cameras. The results also will provide researchers with more information about loss events and site interaction with the marine environment.

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Oxbow Books
by Nicholas Dixon

The Crannogs of Scotland: An Underwater Archaeology



There are over 30,000 lochs in Scotland and many of these, if not all, would have had one crannog at least (there are lochs with more than ten). This presents a tantalising and very appealing resource for underwater archaeologists.

This well-illustrated and interesting book examines the techniques developed by archaeologists to tackle these watery sites; it also attempts to answer the question of why people would go to so much trouble as to build an artificial island.

The sheer effort, not to mention danger, of such an exercise becomes very apparent here. Another mystery is why modern archaeological literature pays such little attention to these remarkable sites.

In addition to a series of case studies, Nicholas Dixon also discusses the problems of interpreting these sites which were constructed in the Iron Age and through the Middle Ages. He considers the types of finds that have been recovered, including large amounts of organic material such as wood, bone and plant remains.

Much of the book focuses on the longterm excavations of Oakbank Crannog on Loch Tay which have greatly contributed to our knowledge of the design, construction and, possibly, purpose of these challenging but hugely rewarding sites. 191p, 69 b/w illus, 30 col pls (Tempus 2004)

ISBN 075243151X. Paperback. Publishers price GB £17.99, Oxbow Price GB £16.00

Browse other Underwater Archaeology books.

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Ship from The War of 1812.

The USS Carolina was built in Charleston, South Carolina in 1812 at a cost of $8,743.

She displaced 230 tons and was rated at 14 guns. She was 89 feet, 6 inches long on the deck, a beam of 24 feet, 4 inches, and a hold of 11 feet, 4 inches in depth.

Her original armament was twelve 12-pounder carronades and three long nine-pounders. However, other sources indicate that at New Orleans the Carolina mounted ten 6-pounders and two 12-pounders mounted on swivel bases, one each on the bow and stern.

Or, she may have had twelve 12-pounder carronades and two long 12-pounders. Her compliment was 70, all regular navy and mainly from New England.

The Carolina under the command of John D. Henley set sail for New Orleans, and while making making her passage, captured the British schooner Shark.

Arriving at New Orleans 23 August 1813, she began an active career of patrol directed against possible British action as well as the pirates which infested the Caribbean.

On 10 September 1814, Carolina attacked and destroyed the stronghold of the notorious Jean Lafitte on the island of Barataria.

Carolina, with the others of the small naval force in the area, carried out the series of operations which gave General Andrew Jackson time to prepare the defense of New Orleans when the British threatened the city in December 1814.

On 23 December, she dropped down the river to the British bivouac which she bombarded with so telling an effect as to make a material contribution to the eventual victory.

As the British stiffened their efforts to destroy the naval force and to take the city, Carolina came under heavy fire from enemy artillery on 27 December. The heated shot set her afire, and her crew was forced to abandon her.

Shortly after, she exploded. After loss of craft, the naval guns were mounted on shore to continue the fight.

More info here and here.

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The Detroit News
By Chris Sebastian
December 27, 2004

Lexington resident will be inducted into Women Divers Hall of Fame for underwater film work.

LEXINGTON, Mich. -- After three decades of underwater exploration, divers and landlubbers across the world have Pat Stayer to thank for a better glimpse of Great Lakes shipwrecks.

And the diving world is showing its gratitude to the 49-year-old Lexington resident by inducting her into the Women Divers Hall of Fame in March.

Stayer is co-owner of Out of the Blue Productions, an underwater filming business she operates with her husband, Jim. The couple each year help organize the popular "Shipwrecks Remembered" seminar in Port Huron.

The co-author of several books and producer of numerous shipwreck films, Stayer said she's happy to help make the Great Lakes a prominent location for divers worldwide.

But the freshwater lakes weren't always that way, she said.

Stayer learned to dive on her honeymoon in Florida because charter diving wasn't popular in Michigan.
"It wasn't developed up here," she said. "You had to dive off your own boat."

Working with other Great Lakes diving pioneers, she helped discover, map, photograph and videotape shipwrecks frequented by scuba divers.

Stayer gives presentations across the country on what is hidden beneath the surface of the lakes, and she hopes the next generation of divers has an equal respect for the wrecks.

"I'm trying to get people to realize the Great Lakes are there," she said.

Hall of fame member Joyce Hayward, who has filmed shipwrecks and advised on their management, nominated Stayer.

"There are not many of us women who do deep technical diving on shipwrecks in the cold water of the Great Lakes," Hayward said. "The amount of the contributions she has given ... has been extraordinary."

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HonoluluAdvertiser.com
By Bob Krauss
December 27, 2004

Last May I stood on the spot in China with a group from the Bishop Museum where the ancestors of today's Hawaiians may have first adopted a seagoing culture 7,000 years ago. That adaptation took them and other Polynesians across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean to these islands.

We didn't know then that we may have found the launching pad of a language family that reached Madagascar off Africa in one direction and Easter Island off South America in the other. It all started from a small area on the China coast.

Bishop Museum research archaeologist Tianlong Jiao brought back the news a week ago after visiting a site called Tianluoshan. Archaeologists in China theorize that this may be the birthplace of the Austronesian language family of which Polynesians are a part. The Austronesians became the most widely dispersed people on the globe before modern technology.

Excavation of the dig continued after our Bishop Museum party left last May. Among the artifacts found are three canoe paddles from about 4 feet to 6 feet long. Project director Dr. Sun Guoping, of the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Archaeology, said they may have been left at a canoe launching site.

Other artifacts include the bones of deep ocean fish and whales. Both indicate that the people at Tianluoshan were seafarers.

"I would say that this is the area where the Austronesians first encountered the ocean," said Tianlong. "The discovery has caused a sensation in Chinese scientific circles. The provincial and county governments are going to build an archaeological site museum at Tianluoshan. By next year, the site will be under cover."

Tianlong said he has been invited to participate in the dig. The 7,000-year-old paddles and other artifacts will be part of an exhibit he is assembling for the Bishop Museum.

If the site is indeed the birthplace of Austronesian culture it would be where the ancestors of Polynesians first learned their ocean skills that took them halfway around the world. Here is the proposed sequence of migrations:

A people called Hemudu moved down river from the middle Yangtze River area, birthplace of rice culture. They made pottery and planted rice. By 7,000 years ago they had reached the ocean and some became Austronesians, a mobile, maritime people. They moved to offshore islands and down the coast.

About 5,500 to 6,000 years ago, some of them colonized Taiwan. They reached the Philippines about 4,000 or 4,500 years ago and near Oceania in the Bismark Archipelago 3,500 years ago. Some of them formed a culture called Lapita that sailed to Tonga and Samoa where they became Polynesians by adapting to deep ocean space about 2,500 years ago.

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Sun-Sentinel.com
By Suzanne Wentley
December 25, 2004

Somewhere, in the waters off Jupiter Island could be the remains from the shipwrecked vessel that brought Jonathan Dickinson, the Quaker pioneer whose journal taught the nation about the earliest known Treasure Coast residents and environment.

By submitting an application for state historical-preservation funds, officials with the Historical Society of Martin County are hoping they will be able to find the ship and use the new information to further interpret Dickinson's famous journal.

"We're looking for and hoping to find Jonathan Dickinson's ship," said Robin Hicks-Connors, Historical Society president.

"We know we're going to find something. There's never been a survey of the water done in this area."Spurred by recent progress in the society's effort to have another shipwreck, the Georges Valentine, become the county's first underwater archaeological preserve, historical officials said the survey could find other shipwreck sites in south county waters besides Dickinson's Reformation.

Another ship, the Nantwich, also traveled from Jamaica and was reported to have crashed on the near-shore reefs alongside the Reformation in 1696.

The ships are among thousands to have crashed along the state and among scores along the Treasure Coast, which is named for a 1715 shipwreck that spilled gold along the beaches.

But the riches from a potential discovery of other shipwreck sites is purely historical, said Renee Booth, who compiled the grant application for the historical society."It's not going to be like the Titanic under the water," she said.

"But who knows what we may find. It's an educational opportunity, not just locally but for Florida history and international history as well."

By applying for a grant administered by the governor-appointed Florida Historical Commission, the society hopes to receive a $50,000 grant from the state -- matched by in-kind donations from professional underwater archaeologists -- to study about 7 square miles of sea off Jupiter Island.

They're looking there because Dickinson gave coordinates in his journal, although that location could be up to a mile off, officials said. There also is speculation that the ship was burned.

Roger Smith, a state underwater archaeologist, said it's likely there could easily be many shipwrecks discovered in the survey site, even though it would be extremely difficult to prove that one of the ships is, in fact, the Reformation.

"There's a lot of wishful thinking involved in archaeology," he said. "The idea of the survey is to see what's out there."

Professional archaeologists would use modern technology such as sonar and magnetic scanning and digitized navigational charts, as well as historical shipwreck data from Dickinson's journal and state archives.

If the Reformation or the Nantwich is discovered, Booth said, she would use the information to recreate Dickinson's day-by-day experience, as outlined in his journal, for local schoolchildren and tourists.

The journal explains the culture of the Ais Indians, a tribe that has no descendents, as well as the dangers of life as a pioneer.

The Florida Historical Commission, which determines the recipients of the competitive grants, will meet in April. If the grant is approved, local officials will begin the survey in July.

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ABC7News
December 24, 2004

CRANSTON, R.I. (AP) - Rhode Island legend tells of a spectral ship that haunts the waters off Block Island, bursting into flame and sinking into the ocean.

Depending on who's spinning the tale, the islanders involved in the human drama turned out to be heroes - or monsters.

The tales hold that the ship is the ghost of one that wrecked on the island's northern point shortly after Christmas 1738.

Different versions say the vessel's appearance augurs bad weather and appears on the Saturday between Christmas and New Year's.

And while there's good evidence that a British ship, the Princess Augusta, carrying a load of passengers from territory that would become Germany, ran aground on the island on Dec. 27, 1738, there's accord on little else about the incident.

A deposition taken from the ship's crew shortly after the incident - and republished in 1939 - tells of a voyage in which provisions were scarce, half the crew had died, and others were hobbled by the extreme cold. In the document, crew members said a heavy snowstorm drove the ship aground.

A year after the wreck, in another storm, the Palatine - apparently called by that name because it carried immigrants from the Palatinate - reappeared in flames.

In the poet's account, a century after the wreck and plundering, the islanders are still haunted by a blazing ghost ship which appears on some moonless nights. It's not a flattering portrait, and it clearly rankled islanders of the poet's day.

In his 1877 history of the island, Samuel Livermore tried to refute Whittier's version. "Poetic fiction has given the public a very wrong view of this occurrence, and thus a wrong impression of the Islanders has been obtained," Livermore wrote.

He included an 1876 letter from Whittier in which the poet responded to islanders' criticisms. According to Livermore's book, Whittier said he "did not intend to misrepresent the facts of history," but wrote the poem after hearing the story from a Rhode Islander.

Whittier acknowledged that it was quite possible his source "followed the current tradition on the main-land." Livermore instead presented an account by a scholar of his day.

According to it, the ship came ashore on Sandy Point, and once the tide rose, was able to be floated again, and towed into Breach Cove by the islanders. Many fell ill, died and were buried on the island's southwest side.

Today, a marker, installed in 20th century, stands at the site. It reads simply, "Palatine Graves - 1738." It's the only major physical evidence of the disaster.

Charlotte Taylor of the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission said no wreckage has ever been found that could be positively linked to the ship.

Martha Ball, the former first warden of Block Island and a life-long resident, said there's some evidence the ship was repaired and continued on to Philadelphia, its original destination.

Livermore blames the story of the ship's burning and other atrocities on "the testimony of a witch, an opium-eater, and a maniac" and concludes "Dutch Kattern (a passenger who stayed on the island after the wreck and was known as a witch) had her revenge on the ship that put her ashore by imagining it on fire, and telling others, probably, that the light on the sound was the wicked ship Palatine, cursed for leaving her on Block Island."

While Livermore dismissed the story of the islanders' barbarity, he was less willing to write off accounts of the so-called Palatine Light. He noted that an unexplained light was often sighted off Sandy Point by people both on Block Island and on the mainland, and included in his book an 1811 account from a doctor - whom he called a man of standing - who had witnessed a light that resembled a ship ablaze.

More than a century after that account, talk about the Palatine Light remained. "When I was growing up, they used to say of the Palatine Lights that no two people saw it at the same time. And everyone had a story about the Palatine Lights," Ball said.

Ball, who admits she doesn't have much patience for ghost stories, said an uncle who died before she was born was the only one in her family who claimed to have seen the lights. She noted with a laugh that he was the same one who also claimed to have felled six ducks with a single shot.

She believes the legend has hung on as long as it has mostly due to Whittier's work. "I'm not really sure what would be floating around were it not for that poem," she said.

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DelmarvaNow.com
By Bruce Pringle
December 22, 2004

Experts have slightly revised their analysis of artifacts found on a Lewes beach this fall, saying the bricks, pottery and other objects probably date to a period running roughly from 1700 to 1730.

Craig Lukezic, an archaeologist for the state of Delaware, said the new determination was made amid continued inspection of items displayed in recent days by people who gathered them from sands near Roosevelt Inlet.

The artifacts were dredged from beneath Delaware Bay by the Army Corps of Engineers as sand was pumped ashore in September and October. Most of the rare objects were broken in the process.

The Corps of Engineers dug up the sand -- and, inadvertently, the artifacts -- during a project to stabilize the inlet, which is heavily used by recreational boaters and fishermen. The Corps has said its employees spotted the artifacts, but continued to dredge because they mistook them for modern-day trash.

Lukezic and fellow state archaeologist Chuck Fithian earlier had suggested the artifacts might date as far back as 1680 and no later than about 1720. But they altered their estimates after checking thousands of pieces turned in by beachgoers such as Larry McLaughlin.

McLaughlin, supervisor of Lewes' streets department, presented the archaeologists with a variety of pottery last week, as well as a mysterious piece made of brick and metal. Lukezic said the piece might be from a ship's stove.
The artifacts may be remains of one of coastal Sussex County's many shipwrecks.

McLaughlin was among the first to comb the artifact-laden beach, which in recent weeks attracted so many people that the Corps of Engineers taped it off to discourage entry by the public. McLaughlin said he searched "before there was any publicity. That's probably why I found some unique pieces."

Potential injuries
Lukezic and Fithian were on the beach last week, excavating at various spots in an attempt to find where artifacts are most plentiful. Those locations are to be thoroughly searched by the Corps of Engineers, Fithian said.

That search will be conducted not only for the sake of archaeology, but also with safety in mind. Many of the dredged-up artifacts were sliced into sharp-edged pieces that could injure barefoot beachgoers.

"It could be a pretty big problem," Lukezic said. "The Corps is acknowledging it as a problem."

Corps of Engineers spokesman Merve Brokke said a decision has yet to be made on precisely what steps should be taken as his agency and the state continue to deal with the surprising results of the dredging.

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Smithsonian Magazine
by Michael Behar
December 2004

For more than a decade, American Robert Graf has combed the waters of a Seychelles island for a multimillion-dollar booty stashed by pirates nearly 300 years ago.

I've been treading water in a small, man-made lagoon for about half an hour, waiting for Robert Graf to surface. The 49-year-old American treasure hunter has cordoned off this rectangular swath of Indian Ocean in the Seychelles, and now he's somewhere 25 feet below, chiseling off chunks of granite and sucking up sand and grit with a four-inch-wide vacuum dredge.

He's searching for the entrance to a stone vault that he believes contains a pirate hoard—part of what many consider the largest high-seas heist in history—stashed nearly 300 years ago. Back then, locals speculate, the area where we're swimming was dry land, the sea held back by a sand berm later destroyed in a storm.

Graf, a former U.S. Air Force technical instructor, breathes through a 50-foot-long bright pink hose attached to an air tank on shore. He wears a face mask, a tattered wet suit and 26 pounds of lead weight strapped to his waist. Every so often I dunk my head, peering through my mask into impossibly blue water.

At one point a faint shadow glides over the bottom, then vanishes into a dark ravine. Moments later there's a creepy scraping sound, like someone prying open the lid of a sarcophagus.

Graf pops up on the other side of the lagoon. "I have maybe three or four feet to go," he shouts. "But I'm running out of air." The noise I heard was Graf trying to move several granite slabs, which he says appear to have been hewn by hand and stacked in a kind of capstone. He'll be back again tomorrow with a fresh air tank, and the day after that too.

Off and on for 15 years he has been hauling up stone and sand in search of the prize he's confident lies beneath the waters of this rocky beach on Mahé, the largest of the 115 granitic and coralline islands that form the Seychelles.
Historians believe that cached somewhere in this far-flung archipelago are the plunders of Olivier Le Vasseur, aka La Buse, or the Buzzard, a French pirate who roamed the Indian Ocean during the early 1700s.

In 1721, La Buse, along with English pirate John Taylor and their crews, ransacked the Nossa Senhora do Cabo, a Portuguese frigate undergoing repairs near Mauritius, about 1,000 miles south of the Seychelles. The Cabo carried gold, uncut diamonds and church regalia belonging to the retiring viceroy of Goa.

At the time, Goa was a Portuguese colony on the west coast of present-day India. La Buse and Taylor made off with the treasure—then valued at more than a million pounds sterling—and divided the spoils. Most of La Buse's considerable fortune, says Frank Sherry, author of Raiders and Rebels: The Golden Age of Piracy, came from his capture of the Cabo. French authorities caught up with La Buse a few years later near Réunion, a rugged volcanic island south of Mauritius.

In 1730, as he was about to face the gallows there, the pirate is said to have tossed a sheaf of papers into the crowd, taunting his audience with these final words: "My treasure to he who can understand."

When I arrive on Mahé, it's easy to spot Graf in the crowd at the airport. He's the only guy wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the classic pirate ensign—a skull and crossbones. Tanned and fit, the treasure hunter seems relaxed—hardly what you'd expect from someone who has spent a third of his life obsessed with a long-dead pirate. Yet Graf is no laid-back islander. He's in-your-face intense right from the start.

I'd barely heaved my suitcase into the trunk of his rusty compact car when he launched into a breathless retelling of how he'd voyaged some 10,000 miles from his Colorado home, married a Seychellois hotel reservations manager and spent more than $450,000 of his own money looking for a treasure that others have failed to find here for nearly a century.

"In 1923 a rare storm came through the Seychelles," Graf says as we wind through the streets of the capital, Victoria. "It eroded many of the beaches." One particular beach was in Mahé near the home of Rose Savy, a local landowner. Thrashing wind and waves had exposed boulders on her property with mysterious markings.

According to one version of the story, Savy wrote her nephew, who worked at the national archives in Réunion, with news of the discovery. He thought the markings might be related to a set of 200-year-old papers kept in the archives—the papers, it's believed, that La Buse had flung at the crowd before his execution. The nephew sent the papers to Savy. There was a cryptogram and four letters, each thought to offer different clues to the treasure.

Graf, who moved to Mahé in 1984 to manage a satellite-tracking station for a U.S. defense contractor, first learned about La Buse from a magazine article. By then copies of the La Buse papers were in the hands of another treasure hunter, John Cruise-Wilkins, who was resuming work started by his father, Reginald, a British soldier who'd acquired the papers in 1949 from Rose Savy and squandered 27 years looking for the treasure.

Graf agreed to help fund Cruise-Wilkins' project, and the two toiled together in the rocks for four years before Graf broke with his partner over where to search. "Cruise-Wilkins gave me copies of the papers," recalls Graf, "and told me to figure it out for myself." Graf then negotiated an exclusive agreement with the Seychelles government to dig on his own, which he did until 1998, when a license to continue was given to Cruise-Wilkins for two years. In April 2003, Graf once again obtained permission to dig.

Graf says he narrowed his search by trying to reconcile the La Buse papers with the markings on the rocks, which led him to the spot where he constructed his lagoon. "I tried to get into the mind-set of the pirates," he says. "I had this dream, and every single morning for two or three weeks I'd wake up wondering 'What does this single dot on the rocks mean?'"

There were dozens of similarly puzzling clues. La Buse had advised readers to be "fixed by the ecliptic plan," and also wrote: "Let Jason be your guide and the third circle will be open to you."

Kevin Rushby, author of Hunting Pirate Heaven: In Search of the Lost Pirate Utopias of the Indian Ocean, told me that the Seychelles aren't the only place people are seeking La Buse's stash. "Treasure hunters have been scouring Réunion for the treasure for years," he says. "They even sacrifice chickens on his grave there."

Graf isn't daunted. At his excavation site on Mahé, we scramble over weathered boulders that jut from the beach like giant stone fingers. He points out at least two dozen carvings and symbols etched into the rocks. Each of these markings, Graf takes pains to explain, is related to a comment in La Buse's writings.

Later, for four hours back at my hotel, he shows me PowerPoint slides on his laptop, including aerial photographs of the excavation site.

One picture, he says, reveals a sequence of seemingly random holes that mirrors a constellation of stars referred to in one of the letters. That's not the only evidence he might be on the right track. Years ago, Reginald Cruise-Wilkins had found a domino with handmade inlays showing a six and a two not far from the place where Graf is now digging. La Buse's papers, it turns out, contain a reference to the number 62.

Today it's thought that La Buse's share of the Cabo heist could be worth $200 million, but Graf says that figure varies depending on who you talk to. He's heard sums as high as $500 million. "But even if it's only $5 million," he says, "that's still a lot of money." Though under Seychelles law, he tells me, half of any earnings must go to the government. Yet time is running out.

Graf's excavation permit is due to expire in April 2005, and Cruise-Wilkins is standing by, ready for a third assault. "I know what we have to do, and it will be pretty fast," says Cruise-Wilkins, whose home is just down the road from the excavation site. "I was working on a tight budget, but now I have the funding.

Graf was supposed to move out and I was supposed to take over on October 1, but the government's technical adviser visited the site and gave him six more months." Cruise-Wilkins says that his former partner, now rival, is merely stalling and will run out of time before finding the treasure.

As Graf and I stood at the edge of his lagoon after a dive, he insisted that he was closer than ever to a narrow channel that he says will lead him to the vault that La Buse alludes to in his papers. It'll require just ten days of dredging to reach the vault's entrance, he claims. And what if it takes longer?

When I telephone Graf a few weeks after returning to the States, he tells me that the ceiling of the so-called channel has begun to collapse. He'll have to dig out part of the ceiling to prevent a cave-in—a setback that will cost him at least a couple of more months.

In the meantime, he'll have to persuade his wife to hold out a bit longer. "She's sick of it," he says. "She wants to go to the States so I can take a 9-to-5 job. But I won't do it. I've got five different letters that point to the same spot. The treasure has been sitting there for 300 years, and I've only got a couple of feet to go."

Later, getting ready to leave the island, I tell Graf that his story is a bit hard to believe. Then again, by now I've learned that to be a treasure hunter—to slog away for years in the heat, grit and grime—takes a certain amount of blind optimism.

As he starts to drive off, Graf pokes his head out the car window and shouts: "You'll believe me when the treasure comes out of the ground!" Optimism perhaps—or maybe just pirate fever.

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BBC News



A plan to pass off a cannonball as being from the Mary Rose shipwreck and then sell it on the internet for £5,000 has been thwarted by police.

Hampshire officers discovered 14 of the 16lb cannonballs under a barbecue after raiding a house in West Sussex.
They were tipped-off by The Tudor Mary Rose Trust and the Receiver of Wreck.

An expert from the Trust said the cannonballs were probably 18th or 19th Century and recovered from the shores of the county's River Hamble.

A Hampshire Constabulary spokeswoman said two officers from the force's marine unit visited the house of a middle-aged man on 26 November.

"The man led the officers out into the back garden and showed them the shot under his barbecue, " a spokeswoman explained.

"He said they were given to him by a family friend who said they were from the Mary Rose.

"When the man was away, another member of the family, a man aged 25, decided to sell the cannonball on eBay.

"Both men are co-operating fully with police who are trying to determine whether an offence has been committed."

The Trust said it was alerted about the sale by one of the divers who had worked on the excavation and knew that the Trust has a policy that all artefacts from the excavation are kept in the Mary Rose collection, with many of them on display at the museum in Portsmouth.

The Trust contacted Hampshire Police Marine Unit who worked with eBay to find the man.

Most of Henry VIII's flagship was raised from the Solent in 1982 after 437 years under the sea. The site is one of 55 in the UK that are designated under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973.

John Lippiett, chief executive of the Mary Rose Trust, said: "We are relieved that the shot turned out to be nothing to do with the Mary Rose but are not pleased that the vendor tried to pass them off as genuine and even used a photograph taken without authority from our website."

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Times online
By Roger Boyes
December 09, 2004

Divers at the site of one of the worst maritime disasters, a Nazi liner sunk in the Baltic, could end up in prison.


Wilhelm Gustloff.

POLAND has promised to take action against divers who are looting the wreck of the Nazi cruise liner Wilhelm Gustloff, which was sunk off the Polish coast by Soviet torpedoes in the dying days of the Second World War.

In response to protests by Germany, the Polish authorities have agreed to put an end to looting by maverick divers, who are removing everything from ashtrays to chandeliers. Divers caught near the wreck now risk prosecution, a fine or even imprisonment.

The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945, crammed with 9,000 mainly civilian Germans fleeing the Soviet Army, ranks as one of the worst maritime disasters of all time, with more than 7,000 fatalities — well ahead of the better-known tragedies of the Titanic (1,503 deaths) and the Lusitania (1,201).

The wreck has been designated a war memorial and is off-limits to salvage operators. Her location is disguised — Polish navigational charts register her only as Obstacle No 73 — 180ft deep in the soft mud of the Baltic. However, she is easy to find and most of the diving clubs between Gdansk and Kolobrzeg offer trips to the wreck.

The looting has caused deep resentment in Germany, where the Wilhelm Gustloff has become a focus for war remembrance. Germans are lobbying to build a museum or a shrine on the Polish coast to mark the 60th anniversary of the disaster, on January 30.

The new German sensitivity has been stirred in part by a novel written by Günter Grass, the Nobel prize-winning author.

“These divers are nothing better than graveyard hyenas,” Henryk Koszka, the head of the Polish Maritime Authority in Gdynia, on the Baltic coast, said.

Senior Polish officials, aware that the Wilhelm Gustloff could become another source of friction between Berlin and Warsaw, agree. “We have to stop these illegal diving missions now,” a Polish diplomat said.

Enforcing the clampdown may prove difficult, given the significant financial rewards for divers. German collectors will offer €10,000 (£6,888) or more for an ashtray marked with the name of the ship.

The cruise liner served the Nazi Party’s “Strength through Joy” scheme, which rewarded loyal workers with trips around Europe, a pioneer of the modern package tour. Even though she was converted into a hospital ship at the outbreak of war, her contents were branded with the Gustloff insignia.

Local divers have kept some of the prizes. Jerzy Janczukowicz has converted a ballroom chandelier into a table to support his cognac and vodka bottles. He claims that the looting is “about making sure that history does not get destroyed”.

He and a generation of divers are drawn by another elusive goal: to find the legendary Amber Room, the priceless Tsarist treasure, which, according to one theory, was stashed in the hold of the cruise liner for transport to safety in the West. Nobody has found it, but Soviet divers, soon after the Second World War, blew holes in the Gustloff looking for traces of the treasure.

It is not clear exactly how many people died in the icy Baltic waters in 1945. Some 1,200 survived. If the passenger list was the only guide, then 5,348 people were killed, but German refugees were scrambling to get on board and many were unlisted. They included women, children, elderly men and about 1,000 wounded soldiers. The passengers had walked through eastern Prussia ahead of the advancing Soviet Army, driven on by rumours of rapes and atrocities.

The ship’s captain decided to head north, to avoid British aircraft, rather than hug the Baltic coastline. The snow was heavy and the captain ordered the ship to switch on all her lights to avoid a collision. It was thus easy for the Soviet submarine S13 to spot.

The submarine slipped between the Wilhelm Gustloff and the coastline and let off three torpedoes. Within 50 minutes, the once-proud liner had slipped below the surface.

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CDNN
by Chuck Frederick



The deep blue of a clear, cool evening settled over Lake Superior on Oct. 31 as the shipwreck hunters turned their boat for one final pass.

It had already been a huge year. They'd found two wrecks: one a three-masted schooner, the other a steam-powered passenger vessel. The discoveries came after about 12 years of locating nothing but bottom.

The men were hoping for a third. The bulk freighter Robert Wallace was out here somewhere, they knew, just a few miles south of Two Harbors. Footage of its remains would give them a real zinger for a presentation they were scheduled to make in a few days at the Gales of November conference in Duluth.

But their dreams of a third discovery in 2004 were growing as dim as the day's failing light. Their sonar screen held the steady gray of nothingness as they turned across 6-foot waves that rolled their boat and their stomachs.

They steadied the motor one last time for the final pass, after more than six hours on the water. They had already decided Halloween would be their last day hunting for the year. The marina back near Knife Island beckoned.

But a sudden, slight glow at the top of their sonar screen changed everything. The men quickly gathered as the glow became a touch more brilliant and then worked its way down the picture tube.

"It was a bright target, something that didn't look natural to the bottom," said Ken Merryman of Fridley, Minn., one of the four shipwreck hunters. "It was a terrible picture, but we could tell."

"It had the general outline of a ship," said Jerry Eliason of Scanlon, another member of the team. "I said, 'There's something out there. What is that?' "

The Wallace, the men figured. Had to be.

But, of course, they'd made that mistake before.

NOT THE WALLACE
On June 5, about 13 miles south-southeast of Two Harbors, the men's sonar equipment detected the first wreck they found this year. After three follow-up weekend trips with cameras they lowered to the bottom, the men announced they had found the Wallace.

The ore-laden freighter had sunk Nov. 17, 1902, after hitting a log or something else in the water. With Lake Superior pouring into the Wallace's stern, the crew scrambled into a lifeboat and then boarded the barge they were towing, the 218-foot Ashland. The seamen had to be rescued by the railroad tug from Two Harbors, the Edna G.
The wreck the men found didn't turn out to be the Wallace, though.

In August, when they returned to dive to it for the first time, they quickly realized the wooden ship was probably the Thomas Friant, a steam-powered excursion boat that had been remodeled for commercial fishing and hauling cargo. The Friant sank after running into an ice floe and slashing its hull Jan. 6, 1924.

AGAIN NOT THE WALLACE
Believing for a second time they'd found the Wallace, the men lowered their video camera as the Halloween night sky turned an inky black. But the camera refused to work. No images returned to the surface.

"When we went in for the night, we were pretty confident we knew what we had found. The Wallace is what we were looking for, after all," Eliason said. "When we finally got to shore, all the lights were off in the marina. That's how late it was. We were lucky we didn't run aground ourselves."

The men decided they would call their bosses the following morning, take a day off and return to the wreck site with different cameras. To confirm and to begin documenting their find, they said.

"We just had to go back," Eliason said.

The first day of November dawned gray, with temperatures still reaching into the low 40s. About mid-morning, three video cameras lowered to the bottom began to return grainy images of floating silt, a sandy bottom and shapes that hadn't been seen for decades. A railing. A section of hull. The men compare viewing a wreck with a drop-down camera to looking at an elephant with a straw.

But they saw enough to realize the vessel they found wasn't made of wood, as is the Wallace. It was steel. And in its cargo hold they saw railroad rails.

"All of a sudden, a wave of knowing came over us," said Randy Beebe, a search team member and a Northwest Airlines pilot from Duluth. "Oh my goodness."

The only steel wreck unaccounted for in western Lake Superior was the Benjamin Noble, a loss ranking in shipwreck lore not far behind the Edmund Fitzgerald. The Noble went down with a load of steel rails.

That's what it had to be, the men realized.

"The Noble is the Loch Ness Monster, the Holy Grail of shipwrecks, at least in western Lake Superior," Eliason said. "It was always such a mystery. None of us who hunt for shipwrecks expected it would ever be found. There were literally thousands of miles where it could have gone down."

"People have been searching for 60 years," Beebe said. "We're pretty giddy. We still feel like we're going to wake up one morning and it's all going to be a dream."

The Noble's puzzling fate prompted Lake Superior Magazine to offer a $1,000 reward in 1978 to anyone who could locate it.

"It was just so hard to believe that a ship so big and with so much cargo couldn't be found. We wanted it solved," said Cindy Marshall Hayden, a publisher of the Duluth-based magazine and the daughter of magazine chairman James Marshall.

"It was a mystery my whole life," James Marshall said. "Its discovery is a terrific, fantastic story."

A TRUE MYSTERY
The Noble went down in a gale of mountainous seas, according to historical accounts, including Dana Thomas Bowen's "Shipwrecks of the Lakes."

The early spring storm of 1914 included heavy snow, biting sleet, a fog that enshrouded much of the western half of Lake Superior, and winds and waves so severe they caused thousands of dollars of damage to Duluth's Aerial Bridge and to homes up and down Minnesota Point.

The wind gusts also toppled a huge coal-unloading machine inside the Duluth Harbor, its falling wreckage smashing the forward houses of the steamer Champlain, which was tied to a nearby dock.

The Nor'easter came up so fast that the Noble probably received little or no warning as it passed through the Soo Locks on Saturday, April 25. With its 3,000-ton load bound for rail line construction in the western United States, the Noble steamed obliviously toward Duluth.

Three days later, a Duluth police officer reported finding hatch covers bearing the Noble's name washed up on the Park Point beach. Other wreckage washed up in the days that followed. Oars. Life belts. Spars. No bodies were ever found. The Noble's 20-man crew -- including its captain, John Eisenhardt of Milwaukee, on his first and last trip as master of a vessel -- was lost.

What happened to the Noble has been a matter of speculation and debate for decades.

A popular theory was that the Noble sank attempting to enter the Duluth Ship Canal. The crew couldn't see the entry, many believed, because the south entry pier light had been blown out by the storm. Light tenders couldn't relight the antiquated oil lamp because of waves that battered the pier heads, exploding into the icy air.

Conflicting witness accounts, both immediately following the loss and during months of testimony as the cargo owners sought compensation through the courts from the owners of the Noble, only deepened the mystery.

Some witnesses, including a woman on 21st Avenue East in Duluth, claimed to see a boat sink outside the Duluth Harbor. But it's possible they had seen any of four other vessels on Lake Superior during the storm, each one scrambling for safety inside the Duluth Harbor. Squalls of snow suddenly blocked out ships' lights, giving the illusion of vessels going down.

Another witness, aboard a freighter a few miles behind what he believed was the Noble, said in court he saw the big boat turn and then disappear. Based on where the Noble's wreckage was found, his account was probably accurate, Eliason said.

"There's so much confusing history, and you never knew who actually saw it go down or whether anyone really did. And then it was believed to be in such deep water there'd be no way to get at it," said Merryman, who searched for the Noble in 1973 but quickly gave up. "It was the first thing I ever hunted for. You didn't have to hunt long to realize it was a needle in a haystack.

"It really is beat up," he said of the wreckage. "It sank like a rock, and it was crushed when it hit bottom. It seems pretty obvious it was grossly overloaded."

At the Gales of November conference, the shipwreck hunters wowed the crowd. They told about the Friant and about a wreck they found July 30 several miles east of Michigan Island in the Apostle Islands. They've tentatively identified that wreck as the Moonlight, a three-masted schooner lost in a storm in September 1903.

They saved the Noble until the very end. It was their zinger.

"We had quite a season," Eliason said. "Granted, none of the wrecks we found this year were the ones we were looking for, but that's all right. We've decided that being lucky is far better than being good."

SOURCE - Duluth News Tribune

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The Virginia Gazette
By Paul Aron
December 22, 2004

As 2007 approaches, the nation will focus on the three famous ships that carried British settlers to Jamestown. Yet it was another journey to Jamestown, begun two years later, that nearly killed several major figures in the colony.

While some historians credit the later voyage with saving the starving settlement, it ended by almost abandoning the colony altogether.

The tale, one of a shipwreck, castaways, murder, mutinies and mystery, played out off the North Carolina coast and reverberated in Virginia and London, perhaps even pushing the quill of William Shakespeare.

The mission
The Sea Venture left England in June 1609, one of eight ships bound for Jamestown. George Somers was in command. His mission was to bring supplies and settlers to the colony in Virginia.

Somers was an admiral in the British Navy who had defended the Irish coast against the Spanish. He was also a privateer in the Azores and in South America, where he looted Spanish colonies and ships.

In London, he met members of Shakespeare's company, including the famous playwright. He also met members of the Virginia Company and became one of its officers. He invested some of his overseas plunder in the company as it made plans to explore and colonize North America.

So it was that in 1609 Somers set sail from Plymouth Harbor to bring supplies and settlers to the fledgling colony at Jamestown. He commanded the largest fleet to set out for Virginia.

Somers was on board the 300-ton Sea Venture, as were Thomas Gates, who had been appointed governor of the colony, and Christopher Newport, who had already captained three voyages to Jamestown, including the first.

Newport was well aware of the dangers, but he was confident they were leaving early enough in the shipping season to beat any tropical storms.

On June 2, the passengers who boarded included artisans, farmers and a few gentlemen and ladies accompanied by their servants. Among them was John Rolfe, who would later marry Pocahontas.

All told, there were 150 passengers and crew on board. Rather than the usual southern swoop by the West Indies, the fleet followed a more direct route to Virginia. By staying farther north, Somers hoped to shorten the trip and, more importantly, avoid the Spanish. It almost worked.

They were only about seven or eight days from Virginia when on Monday, July 23, the sky darkened.

The storm
Morning brought little light and deafening winds roaring in from the northeast. William Strachey, one of the passengers, described it in his 1610 account, “A True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight.”

The storm, Strachey wrote, “was not only more terrible but more constant, fury added to fury.” The Sea Venture was towing a small pinnace, the Virginia, which seemed as likely to smash into it as to follow it.

Somers decided it was safer to cut it loose. That was the last they saw of the Virginia, and they must have feared they would never see the colony after which it was named.

Even the more experienced travelers were, according to Strachey, “not a little shaken.” Almost everyone on board became wretchedly seasick. Passengers were praying or screaming, but you couldn't hear them.

The wind drowned out other sounds. Somers ordered eight men to try to hold the whipstaff, the lower end of which was connected to the tiller, but it was impossible to steer the ship.

The lever whipped back and forth so quickly that it bruised many of the men and eventually detached itself and smashed into pieces, one of which hit Somers.

The rain kept coming Strachey had been in storms before, in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, but this was different. “All that I had ever suffered gathered together might not hold comparison with this,” he wrote. “There was not a moment in which the sudden splitting or instant oversetting of the ship was not expected.”

The rain kept coming. “Waters like whole rivers did flood in the air,” he added. Worse, the water was coming in from below as well as from above. The Sea Venture had apparently sprung a leak, in fact a lot of them.

By Wednesday, the water had risen nearly five feet, and the crew feared they were as likely to be drowned in the ship as in the sea. Frantically, holding candles above the rising water, they searched for holes, plugging them with whatever was hand, in one case a slab of beef.

Somers quickly divided the crew and passengers into three groups, about 45 men in each, and assigned the groups to sections of the ship. The men took turns bailing and pumping until the pumps gave out. They worked for an hour, gentlemen and commoners, officers as well as crew, then rested an hour.

This went on for three days and three nights, with no stopping to sleep or eat. There was little to eat anyway, since the food and drink in the hold was under water. All told, Strachey guessed, they returned 2,000 tons of water to the sea. They also tossed overboard much of their food and luggage. But the water kept rising, reaching their chests as they continued to bail.

However many leaks they plugged, there were more, or maybe one large one no one could find. St. Elmo's Fire On Thursday night Somers spotted what Strachey described as “an apparition of a little, round light, like a faint star, trembling and streaming along with a sparkling blaze.” It seemed to start halfway up the main mast and then shoot across the ropes toward the ship's sides and, sometimes, back again. This lasted three or four hours. There wasn't enough light to see anything, but passengers and crew alike “observed it with much wonder and carefulness.” By morning, it was over.

These jets of light were known as St. Elmo's Fire, and Somers may have rightly seen them as a hopeful sign. The atmosphere did not usually become so charged with electricity until near the end of a storm.

And Friday morning the skies did clear, and the rain slowed to a misty drizzle. But the water was now 10 feet high in parts of the ship, and the Sea Venture seemed likely to sink within hours. In despair, the men stopped bailing.

They opened what little was left to drink, “taking their last leave one of the other until their more joyful and happy meeting in a more blessed world,” wrote Silvester Jourdain, another passenger, in “A Discovery of the Bermudas, Otherwise Called the Isle of Devils.”

Jourdain's fellow passengers “committed themselves to the mercy of the sea.” Exhausted, most of them fell asleep wherever they happened to be.

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GNN
December 21, 2004

Maritime And Coastguard Agency (National)

The Receiver of Wreck, together with the Mary Rose Trust, issued a warning today to those tempted to purchase objects on the internet auction house eBay, or elsewhere, that are listed as having come from the wreck of the Mary Rose.

The Trust states that such items are highly unlikely to have come from the Mary Rose, and if they are, they will have been acquired illegally. Anyone who sees such an item is advised to contact the Trust to ascertain provenance.

The warning has come as a result of a recent attempt by an individual to sell a cannon ball on eBay for over £5,000 claiming that it had come from the Mary Rose.

The Mary Rose Trust were alerted to the sale by one of the divers who had worked on the excavation and knew that the Trust has a policy that all artefacts from the excavation are kept in the Mary Rose collection with many of them on display at the museum in Portsmouth. The Mary Rose is one of 55 sites in the UK that are designated under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973.

The Mary Rose Trust believed that the items must either be from another source, or have been acquired illegally, and passed the matter on to the Receiver of Wreck who has powers to seize illegally held wreck material and to investigate such matters under the Merchant Shipping Act 1995.

The Receiver of Wreck worked in conjunction with eBay, and with Hampshire Police Marine Unit, who confiscated 14 cannonballs from the premises of the vendor. These were later inspected by Curator of Ordnance at the Mary Rose Trust, Alexzandra Hildred, who confirmed that they had none of the features found on shot from the Mary Rose.

Enquiries into the origins of the shot are still being conducted by the Police Marine Unit and it is believed they are 18th or 19th century in date and were recovered on the shores of the River Hamble.

The Receiver of Wreck, Sophia Exelby said:
"This joint operation shows that the Maritime and Coastguard Agency is willing and able to act on credible information received in relation to offences regarding illegally held wreck material. Although these cannonballs did not ultimately come from the Mary Rose, the principles of investigation and enforcement are the same and will be applied to any other such cases which arise."

John Lippiett, Chief Executive of the Mary Rose Trust said:
"We are delighted that the Receiver of Wreck took swift action to investigate the claim that this iron shot was from the Mary Rose. There should not be any artefacts from the Mary Rose in private hands apart from a few curios made from Mary Rose timber recovered in the 1830s and we would always like to be alerted to any fraudulent or illegal sales.

"We are relieved that the shot turned out to be nothing to do with the Mary Rose, but are not pleased that the vendor tried to pass them off as genuine and even used a photograph taken without authority from our website."

Notes to editors:
* Pictures are available from the MCA Press Office

* It is a legal requirement that all recovered wreck is reported to the Receiver of Wreck. The Receiver of Wreck is responsible for the administration of that part of the Merchant Shipping Act 1995, which deals with wreck and salvage. If you find wreck you should contact the Receiver of Wreck on 02380 329 474 or via email at row@mcga.gov.uk

* The Receiver of Wreck investigates ownership of wreck items. The owner has one year in which to come forward and prove title to the property. If the wreck remains unclaimed after that year it becomes property of the Crown and the Receiver is required to dispose of it. This may be through sale, although in many cases the finder will be allowed to keep the item in lieu of a salvage award.

* Artefacts from wrecks which are designated under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973, must still be reported to the Receiver, even if they were recovered under licence.

* Anyone who is in doubt about whether an item has been reported to the Receiver, or whether a vendor has the right to sell a wreck artefact, should contact the Receiver of Wreck, who will check their records.

* The stunning collection of objects from the Mary Rose is on show in the Museum at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard every day except 24-26 December. The popular website can be found at http://www.maryrose.org

Press releases and further information about the Agency is available on the Web at http://www.mcga.gov.uk

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1841 - USS Mississippi, the first U.S. ocean-going side-wheel steam warship, is commissioned in Philadelphia.

Mississippi-class sidewheel steamer (1f/3m) L/B/D: 229 × 40 (66.5ew) × 21.8 (69.8m × 12.2m (20.1m) × 6.6m) Tons: 3,220 disp Hull: wood Comp: 257 Arm: 2 × 10, 8 × 8 Mach: side-lever engines, 700 nhp, sidewheels; 11 kts Des: John Lenthall, Hartt & Humphries Built: Philadelphia Navy Yard; 1841.

One of the first sidewheel steam frigates ordered for the U.S. Navy, USS Mississippi was built under the personal supervision of Commodore Matthew Perry, formerly commander of USS Fulton II and a strong advocate of steam propulsion. Rigged as a bark, Mississippi was used extensively to test the utility of steam for naval operations. As with all paddle frigates, her greatest deficiency was that the placement of her paddles interfered with the guns, and her engines were vulnerable to enemy fire.

Check for more information here.

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eMediaWire
December 21, 2004

Researcher confirms Plato's assertion that the Florida Plain was once part of Atlantis. Plato not only described Harbor Island (in Tampa Bay) as Atlantis, but gave detailed descriptions of the Florida plain as part of the country.


Florida Plain/Atlantis.

Miami, FL (PRWEB) -- Researcher confirms Plato's assertion that the Florida Plain was once part of Atlantis. Plato not only described Harbor island (in Tampa Bay) as Atlantis, but gave detailed descriptions of the Florida plain as part of the country. His writings have been used to verify the findings that were published earlier.

Here is Plato's description with explanatory notes in parentheses: "The whole country was said by him to be very lofty and precipitous on the side of the sea (ocean), but the country immediately about and surrounding the city was a level plain, itself surrounded by mountains (Appalachian) which descended towards the sea; it was smooth and even, and of an oblong shape, extending in one direction three thousand stadia (330 miles), but across the centre inland it was two thousand stadia (110 miles)...and where falling out of the straight line followed the circular ditch (Indian River).

"The depth, and width, and length of this ditch were incredible, and gave the impression that a work of such extent, in addition to so many others, could never have been artificial.

Nevertheless I must say what I was told. It was excavated to the depth of a hundred, feet, and its breadth was a stadium (600 ft.) everywhere; it was carried round the whole of the plain, and was ten thousand stadia (1,100 miles) in length. It received the streams which came down from the mountains, and winding round the plain and meeting at the city (Tampa), was there let off into the sea (gulf).

"Further inland, likewise, straight canals of a hundred feet in width were cut from it through the plain, and again let off into the ditch leading to the sea: these canals were at intervals of a hundred stadia, and by them they brought down the wood from the mountains to the city, and conveyed the fruits of the earth in ships, cutting transverse passages from one canal into another, and to the city.

"Plato's description of the Atlantis Plain is the same as that of the Florida Plain, which is 110 miles across at its narrowest point. Its length is 330 miles, and the great ditch runs 1,100 miles around the coast to Tampa Bay. The terrain features and waterways can be measured and verified on a topographic map.

Florida also has many archeological sites that can only be explained by the presence of an advanced civilization.

There is much more to this story. Dennis Brooks has rewritten Plato's description of Atlantis in a 48-page book that tells the complete story. The entire story can be read online.

http://www.cramschool.us

We would like to apologize to everyone who went to our website after our first press release and had trouble viewing the pdf file that contained the story.

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Correio da Manhã
December 21, 2004




Os vestígios de um galeão afundado há 300 anos e de um bombardeiro da II Guerra Mundial são as duas ‘jóias’ subaquáticas que os amantes do mergulho podem descobrir ao largo de Faro, no Algarve, a troco de 50 euros.

Estes ‘mergulhos’ são organizados pela Hidroespaço, uma das poucas entidades privadas que, a nível nacional, explora circuitos arqueólogicos subaquáticos, através de um protocolo formado com o Centro Nacional de Arqueologia Náutica e Subaquática (CNANS).

As visitas, possíveis desde Agosto de 2003, ao que resta do avião e do navio – descoberto por acaso há oito anos por dois mergulhadores em lazer – são as mais procuradas da panóplia de locais para onde aquele centro de mergulho organiza saídas.

Os destroços do avião mantêm-se relativamente intactos. No entanto, o mesmo não se pode dizer do navio, do qual ainda só foi descoberto o que se julga ser a carga – peças de artilharia, canhões e ferro.

Os vestígios encontram-se em frente à Barrinha (extremo Oeste da Praia de Faro), a uma milha da costa – cerca de dois quilómetros –, mas a estrutura do galeão em si ainda está por descobrir.

De acordo com Fátima Noronha, sócia da Hidroespaço, o navio faria parte de uma frota de 400 embarcações inglesas e holandesas atacadas por espanhóis no Cabo de São Vicente.

“Supõe-se que os destroços do navio estejam enterrados na areia mas o Governo diz que não há dinheiro para mais campanhas arqueológicas”, lamentou-se a bióloga marinha.

O avião – um B-24 com 36 metros de envergadura e quatro motores – caiu no mar a 30 de Novembro de 1942, em plena II Guerra Mundial. Seis dos seus onze tripulantes acabariam por ser salvos por três pescadores algarvios, um dos quais ainda está vivo.

Os destroços encontram-se em frente à Praia de Faro, a uma milha e meia da costa. As asas e os motores ainda estão relativamente intactos – falta apenas a carlinga –, e já foram encontradas partes da cauda, hélices, peças de metralhadoras, balas.

“Estamos a tentar fazer um pouco de arqueólogos e a fazer buscas para encontrar mais peças, para depois ligá-las todas e fazer um roteiro. Mas está tudo muito disperso”, declarou Fátima Noronha.

Mas nem toda a gente está apta a ‘mergulhar’ nas profundezas da História, principalmente na zona onde está o navio, a cerca de 30 metros de profundidade, cujo mergulho é orientado por um guia certificado.

Lusa

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NewsZap.com
By Darrell Neale



LEWES - Treasure hunters who collected artifacts from Lewes Beach over the last month had an opportunity Thursday to have them cataloged by archaeologists from the state Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs.
The documentation sessions took place at the Zwaandael Museum on Savannah Road in Lewes.

Pottery shards, broken bottles and crockery have been found on the beach following an offshore dredging and beach replenishment effort by the Army Corps of Engineers.

"These shards are like gold," said John Stewart of Ocean View. "They can tell us so much history."

Mr. Stewart and Bill Winkler, also of Ocean View, went to Lewes about three weeks ago after hearing about the discoveries.

"All these items were on top of the sand, the beach was just loaded," Mr. Stewart said. "Red bricks were everywhere."
Mr. Stewart believes the area of the dredging, off Roosevelt Inlet, could have been the site of a shipwreck, an old settlement that is now underwater or a spot once used for unloading ships.

"It might have been a combination," he said.

An area where ships were unloaded seems likely because of the condition of the bricks that were found.

Mr. Stewart said they did not have mortar on them, so they were probably being used for construction or as ballast on the ship.

"Ships used to use bricks for ballast, then they would dump it overboard when they got to their destination," he said.
Joeann Vickers of Rehoboth Beach said she went to the beach at Lewes the week before Thanksgiving to make her discoveries.

One of the pieces of a bottle appeared to have a crest stamped on the bottom.

"I am glad it is important, I am going to make this a donation to the state," she said.

Charles Fithian, an archaeologist with the Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs, said the items found so far have been from the first half of the 18th century.

"Hopefully, we can tighten that down with additional study," he said. "It is apparent they were engaged in some of the early commerce of the area."

He said the site could be a shipwreck or just an area where there was a lot of harbor usage.

Holding a shard, Mr. Fithian said, "These are all interesting clues to the past. The more information we get, the better."

Peter Bon, president of the Lewes chapter of the Archeological Society of Delaware, said members had walked the beach and a grid was made where items were found.

By determining what area had the most artifacts on the top, he hopes discoveries will continue on deeper into the sand.

"Sure enough, there was an area," Mr. Bon said. "But I am not telling where it is."

Mr. Bon said the local chapter formed only about six months ago and its members were surprised when artifacts were found on the beach.

"It is a privilege to work with the state," he said. "Members who were untrained are learning how to preserve finds."
Mr. Stewart said there was good news and bad news about the find, which is suspected to have been pumped ashore in the dredging and beach replenishment project.

"The integrity of the site has been compromised, everything was mixed together and it is difficult to tell what came from where," he said.

"But it is good they found it or it would have laid on the bottom for another 200 years."

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There is a new one-hour long DVD production that came out recently that probably will be of interest to who wants to know more about side scan sonar and magnetometer surveying.

It is entitled "Principles of Sonar and Mag for Underwater Archaeologists and Cultural Resource Managers" by Black Laser Learning, a division ofBarkentine, Inc. Bateaux Below, Inc., a not-for-profit educational corporation that does underwater archaeology at Lake George, New York, provided logistical andscuba support to Black Laser Learning.

For more information check out the web site:_www.blacklaserlearning.com_ (http://www.blacklaserlearning.com)

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The Florida Underwater Archaeology Conference in conjunction with the 57th Annual Meeting of the Florida Anthropological Society announces the call for papers.

Abstracts due by February 10, 2005 Meeting to be held May 13-15, with papers to be given on Saturday, May 14th.

Hosted by the Florida Museum of Natural History and the University of Florida, Gainesville. Information and forms on the Florida AnthropologicalSociety's website: http://www.fasweb.org/

The local contact for any further information will be: Donna Ruhl, ruhl@flmnh.edu, 352-392-1721 x. 493

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CDNN
by Stephen Manning
December 18, 2004


Neta Snook with Earhart.

MAINE, USA -- At 5,000 meters beneath the surface, the temperature of ocean water is just above freezing, oxygen is sparse and currents are relatively calm. In other words, ideal conditions for preserving an airplane that might have crashed into the depths nearly 70 years ago, according to marine explorer David Jourdan, who hopes to answer one of aviation's greatest mysteries _ the fate of famed pilot Amelia Earhart.

Jourdan and his Maine-based company, Nauticos, plan to launch an expedition in the spring using sonar to sweep a 1,000-square-mile swath of ocean bottom west of tiny Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean.

It is the latest in a string of missions to learn what happened to Earhart when she, her navigator and their Lockheed Electra plane disappeared on a flight around the world.

"Things tend to last a time" in the deep ocean, said Jourdan. "Our expectation is the plane will be largely, if not completely, intact."

That is, if the plane is even in the ocean.

There is a host of theories about what befell Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan in 1937 as they made one of the final legs of their widely heralded flight.

Some have searched the sea, believing the plane ran out of gas. Others think she survived a crash landing but died on a deserted island. Another theory is that the Japanese captured and executed her. The conspiracy-minded claim Earhart survived and lived out her life under an assumed name as a New Jersey housewife.

This much is agreed on _ Earhart and Noonan vanished July 2, 1937, as they approached an air strip on Howland Island, roughly midway between Australia and Hawaii. They had taken off from Papua New Guinea, just 7,000 miles short of their goal to make Earhart the first woman to fly around the world.

A fearless flyer, Earhart set a string of altitude, distance and endurance records in the 1920s and 1930s, proving the still-young world of flying wasn't reserved for men. She captivated a Depression-era America eager for heroes, was feted by presidents and was compared to Charles Lindbergh. The press dubbed her "Lady Lindy."

The Navy launched a weeks-long search of 250,000 square miles of ocean around Howland and a nearby chain of small islands. No trace was ever found of the plane.

One of those going along on the Nauticos mission is Elgen Long, a former commercial pilot who has spent 30 years researching the mystery.

Long, 77, of Reno, Nev., believes the answer to Earhart and Noonan's fate lies in their radio communications with a U.S. Coast Guard cutter that was tracking their course near Howland Island. Using Coast Guard radio operator's logs, Long concluded Earhart was perilously low on gas because a headwind was much stronger than she had anticipated.

One of her last radio calls said she had only a half hour of fuel left and couldn't see land.

"We can follow her all the way across the Pacific," he said of the radio records. "She ran out of gas just when she said she was going to."

This is Jourdan's second search of the area west of Howland; a 2002 mission was aborted because of technical problems.

The same general area was searched in 1999 by another mission that found nothing conclusive, but Jourdan said his new expedition, costing about $1.5 million, will use better sonar technology and more accurate information on where the plane may have crashed.

The shortage of oxygen and the fairly still water means a metal airplane likely would not have completely corroded, he said.

Any human remains would have long vanished, but Jourdan hopes to find clues such as Earhart's jewelry in the pilot's seat, or perhaps even Earhart's leather jacket.

"That would be eerie," he said.

If he finds it, Nauticos would plan another mission to raise the plane, which would become the centerpiece of a traveling exhibit on Earhart's life, Jourdan said.

Earhart's stepson, George Putnam, was 16 years old when her plane disappeared. Putnam, now 83 and living in Florida, said he supports the mission partly because it could end the wild speculation about what happened to her. He doesn't mind if Nauticos salvages the plane.

"Let's see what happens," he said.

To Long, it could be his last chance to solve one of the 20th-century's biggest mysteries.

"We need the true story of what happened," he said. "The history we read needs to be correct."

SOURCE - LA Times

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CDNN
by Patrick Symmes
December 19, 2004


Read the story and see more images here.

The steamer Mohawk was a 387-foot workhorse on the weekly run to Havana, carrying freight and discount passengers in both directions. When it sailed out of New York for the last time, on January 24, 1935, the Mohawk had neither fame nor beauty, and it has taken a damn serious beating since then.

The first blow was administered by the Norwegian freighter Talisman, which slammed into the ship a few hours from Manhattan, slicing a deep gash in the bow. It took 70 minutes for the Mohawk to sink, enough time for most of the lifeboats to get away with most of the 164 people aboard, though not all. Forty-five lives ended on that icy night off the coast of New Jersey, and the Mohawk plunged 80 feet and cracked open on the sea floor. For most of the world, the story ended then and there.

But the awkward little ship never had a final resting place, nor any peace. Sitting upright on the silty bottom, the wreck's tallest parts—the bridge and smokestack—were still hazards in the busy New Jersey shipping channels. Soon two tugboats were dispatched to wire-drag the wreck, forcing a heavy steel cable back and forth through the superstructure, snapping the deck plates apart, ripping the bridge from the hull, and scattering debris into the currents. A few years later, in World War II, the Coast Guard pummeled the Mohawk with depth charges; German U-boats had been hiding alongside wrecks in these waters, dodging sonar behind their bulky silhouettes.

With insult heaped on injury, the Mohawk was left to the mercy of the Atlantic. Decade by decade, the ocean shoved, pulled, twisted, flipped, and buried the ruins of the old boat and its rusting cargo of car parts and china. When scuba diving became a mass sport in the 1960s, a few visitors dropped onto the wreckage, but by the 1990s, as technology—advanced GPS, inexpensive side-scan sonar, and nitrox gas mixtures—made it easier to explore wrecks, a new wave of divers began to pick its bones. Hundreds of thousands of certified divers live along the Middle Atlantic seaboard, and nowadays a dozen or more of them can be found crawling over the vessel on any given summer Sunday.

Inevitably, those divers come back up with something: some trophy, some artifact, some souvenir. If they are lucky, or determined, they might find a porthole, bring it up, clean it, and slap it on the mantelpiece. Weekend by weekend, storm by storm, man and the elements are reducing the Mohawk to a memory. This would not concern me in the least, except that my uncle died on the S.S. Mohawk.

HE WAS MY FATHER'S eldest brother, William D. Symmes, a student at Williams College traveling with his geology professor and five classmates. They were scheduled to catch a plane from Havana to the Yucatán for an inspection of Mayan ruins. In the small world of families and acquaintances, January 24, 1935, was a black tragedy. A Massachusetts newspaper headlined a group photo of the six Williams passengers, taken right before they sailed: "JUST THREE RETURN ALIVE."

Time dissolves grief, just as rust undoes the strongest steel, and while the Mohawk slowly broke apart on the ocean floor, a few pieces of its history began to surface again. A chunk of that forgotten past fell into my hands last summer—and then dropped hard onto my big toe, before skittering across the floor and lodging under a sofa.

The item in question was a modest ceramic tile, thick, hexagonal, sharp-edged, about the size of an Oreo, that fell unexpectedly from an envelope stuffed with documents about the Mohawk. I'd requested the paperwork from Steve Nagiewicz, executive director of the Explorers Club in New York, a group as famous for its annual dinner (where else can you dine on tarantula tempura with astronauts?) as for the grand scientific expeditions of its members. But Nagiewicz's interest in the Mohawk was personal, too—it lies just offshore from his New Jersey home. He runs a weekend dive-charter business, and like most Jersey divers, he knows the wreck well.

Over the years he's brought up plates and a few tiles, and it was one of the latter that he slipped into the envelope. Recovering the cream-colored tablet from under the couch, I steeled myself for any number of reactions: sorrow at encountering this touchstone from a tragedy, perhaps anger that this fragment had been rousted from a grave.

I wouldn't have been the first to be outraged at the desecration of a lost ship. Ever since the early 1960s, when wildcat treasure hunters like the late Mel Fisher first pulled gold off Spanish galleons in the Florida Keys and marine archaeologists like George Bass of Texas A&M first sent frogmen down to Byzantine merchant ships in the Mediterranean, the rivalry between scholars and salvagers has deepened.

Commercial salvagers, gold seekers, and souvenir hunters argue that they are rescuing value from the encroaching sea, that anything not removed will eventually be lost for good. Archaeologists counter that salvagers are disturbing vital cultural resources, like pot thieves defiling Anasazi ruins. Governments claim sunken warships as their patrimony. Insurance companies claim a share of lost treasure.

Family members claim that wrecks should be left as undisturbed graves. The result has never been as simple as "finders-keepers," nor as absolute as the legal rulings of dry-footed legislators. But as wreck diving increases, the calls for regulation grow louder: California allows only permitted archaeologists to remove objects from the 1,600 wrecks in its waters, and Wisconsin arrested a diver in 1998 for taking a porthole. In Britain, a group called Wreck Respect is agitating to ban all souvenir diving, everywhere. Last July, Paris-based UNESCO—the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization—promulgated a new international convention defining any shipwreck older than 100 years as a "cultural deposit" and the "patrimony of mankind," subject to restrictions including a total ban on amateur salvage. Lacking any enforcement mechanism, the new policy is toothless.

Most wrecks lie in the shallow waters claimed by sovereign nations, and most maritime powers, including the United States, have refused to sign, claiming the convention contradicts existing laws of the sea.

Emotions are another matter. Turning the tile over in my fingers, I felt vaguely disappointed: It was cold, lifeless, a little bit ugly. The humble reality was that it probably came from the wall of a washroom or the floor of the galley. It wasn't the time capsule I'd hoped for, and it carried no messages from the past. Within days I had called Nagiewicz and arranged for a deeper immersion.

"ABOUT NINE TWENTY, as though from some unknown danger, the room we were in fell into a deadly silence—no word was uttered. Then came the crash." The final moments of the Mohawk were chaotic, according to one of the surviving Williams students. In a 28-page testimonial composed for the college archives, Karl Osterhout described the departure that blustery afternoon from Pier 13 in Manhattan and the crash just hours later.

The Mohawk sailed the day after what the New York Daily News called the "worst storm since 1920"; 17 inches of snow had fallen on the city, and ice still coated the ship's railings. As the vessel rounded Sandy Hook and headed south, the college students had no inkling that the steering system was freezing up. They ate dinner and then sat in the lounge, playing cards.

Osterhout had just dealt a hand to my uncle when they heard a ship's whistle blow, and then silence fell over the passengers. The Mohawk had veered out of its sea lane; everyone seemed to sense some danger approaching. It was the Talisman, which surged out of the night and into the Mohawk's port bow.

"It didn't seem like a big crash," Osterhout wrote, "but there was a sound like splintering wood. At the impact everyone stood up simultaneously. One woman screamed." The Talisman sheared off, drifting but intact, and after gawking at the disappearing freighter the Mohawk's passengers rushed to their staterooms.

Some sensibly put on warm clothing, but many paused to pursue bizarre urges. Osterhout encountered one of his friends sitting calmly in bed, scribbling a diary entry about "exactly how I felt when the crash came." One man stowed two teaspoons in his pockets, dejected that his shipment of antique silver was locked in the hold. Osterhout caught himself obsessively collecting his scattered playing cards.

The Mohawk listed hard to port, then tilted to starboard. The pitching corridors were filled with families hauling steamer trunks, and old women in nightgowns. Falling pots and pans brained the cook. Few members of the 110-man crew were to be found: One officer, Osterhout noted, "tried to make the band play, but the men refused." Passengers stumbled up the gangways and skittered across the snowy decks.

Some of the lifeboats could not be broken out of the ice; people filled others with their luggage, and handed their children out to strangers in departing boats. The lights failed, restarted, and failed again. In the darkness, the geology party became separated. Osterhout heard glass portholes shatter belowdecks, a sign that water was rising fast. He jumped into one of the last lifeboats, landing beside the waiter who had served him dinner.

Even those who made it into the lifeboats suffered severe frostbite during the two-hour wait for rescue, but my uncle didn't make it into a boat. If he did manage to escape the ship, the "suck" that followed the Mohawk's dive would have pulled even a strong swimmer under, and as the downdraft subsided, the debris that rocketed back to the surface would have knocked even a strong man unconscious.

More than a hundred people in lifeboats survived, but the lives of my uncle and 44 others ended quietly, a plunging body temperature leading quickly to exhaustion, then numbness, then blackness.

Two ships picked up the lifeboats and stayed on station until dawn as a formality; the Talisman did too, before being towed into port. When the Mohawk survivors docked in New York, they were thronged by photographers ("MORE SHIP DISASTER PICTURES PAGES 12, 18, 20, AND 21," crowed the Daily News) and the distraught families of passengers. Among them was my grandmother, still hopeful that her eldest son, initially reported to be safe, would come limping down a gangway. A few days later his body was recovered, and William D. Symmes was switched into the column of the dead. Most of the bodies were found, but not all, and the Mohawk began its long residence as a memorial to the lost.

I never knew my grandmother, but I find it hard to think of her on the dock that day, waiting. Things seemed to go wrong for my family after that. Within a few years my grandfather too died; my grandmother passed away shortly after that. My father's remaining brother died in the 1950s, and my father more than a decade ago. The youngest son of the youngest son, I was cut off from this lost generation. In the photos, Uncle Bill seems like a stranger—unfamiliar in the root meaning of that word.

There is an old photo of my father sledding in Central Park on a snowy day, and when I turned it over recently I was surprised to see, in my grandmother's neat writing, that it was taken on January 24, 1935, the day the Mohawk sailed. It was the last day of an old world, the day something broke between the past and present.

WE CRUISED OUT TO the Mohawk before dawn on a calm Sunday, leaving Point Pleasant Beach on Steve Nagiewicz's dive boat, the Diversion II. I sat on the aft deck with eight other divers, sipping coffee amid the odor of diesel fuel as the condos of the Jersey shore shrank away. My companions were members of a local dive club, veterans who teased one another as they squeezed into drysuits and strapped on knives, weights, guidelines, lights, and salvage bags.

There wasn't much time to get ready, since the Diversion needed only 40 minutes to reach the Mohawk; the site is just eight miles out, close enough that you can sometimes smell the cheese fries of Asbury Park when you surface. As word spread that I had lost a relative on the Mohawk, the other divers offered to hold a moment of silence, but when I declined they went right back to ribbing each other and me about equipment ("You call that a knife?").

New Jersey is one of America's epicenters of wreck diving—the state has even created 14 artificial reefs out of sunken ships and scrap—and dive boats here are known for macho hazing. It's a normal defense mechanism as much as anything: Set amid tragedies of the past, wreck diving is also inherently dangerous. Author Bernie Chowdhury's book The Last Dive describes a fatal search for a U-boat in Jersey waters, and the Mohawk itself recently claimed a life, a diver who had a heart attack.

I climbed up to the flying bridge to watch Nagiewicz guide us toward the site. Finding a wreck used to require expert triangulation, factoring in travel time, land bearings, and currents, but now anyone can push a few buttons on a GPS and hit it on the first try.

Stout and bearded, 48-year-old Nagiewicz lived up to his Explorers Club mystique—one of those hale-and-hearty specimens who can have fun at 6 a.m. Working the throttles, he grinned with contentment at the flat sea and clean air, and attempted to rouse me with a string of donuts, quizzing me about my uncle and railing against the UNESCO convention. ("They've gone overboard," he said.) His grin faded as we approached the site and found another large boat anchored over the wreck, with divers already plunging into the sea. Like our crowd, they all carried large mesh bags.

I let the club divers go first, and when their bubbles had vanished I waddled to the railing. Although there were three guides with us, the real authority on deck was Nagiewicz's four-year-old son, Travis, whose self-proclaimed duties included watching out for pirates and "assisting" divers into the water. He shoved me in with gusto, hurling oyster crackers at my bobbing head until I finally slipped under and followed the anchor line into a green void.

The water was thick with particles, limiting visibility to 25 feet—nearly perfect for this murky coast. It was obvious why souvenirs hold such a central place for Jersey divers: Without crystal waters, coral reefs, or exotic species, there isn't much to look at. But even in five feet of visibility, common here, you can feel your way along a wreck, hand over hand, picking up and examining things.

The most successful souvenir hunters on the Mohawk were the diggers, who fanned away at the sandy bottom, groping through silt clouds for something solid. A couple of years ago someone found a pocket watch that way, and last year a crate of china.

As I dropped below 40 feet, the dark brine parted to reveal the Mohawk itself—it was less "cultural deposit" than junkyard, with steel plates and girders strewn randomly across the sea floor. Dropping onto midships, I landed between two massive winches, near what looked like a generator. I spotted a rusting Chevy grill, and a handful of tires.

The sea surge tossed loose cables back and forth over the wreckage; fat blackfish flocked past islands of debris, and dark lobsters ducked under the scrap as I approached. The Mohawk is known as a great lobster dive, but after a few attempts to pry dinner out of a hidey-hole I gave up. Getting a meal here spooked me—like somehow skirting cannibalism.

I swam slowly across the wreck, steadily bumping into other divers; there were enough here to hold a cocktail party. Only near the end of my air supply did I see a ship shape loom out of the dark: an upright bulkhead, with a curving doorway attached. I purged a little air, dropped down, and floated through the opening, wondering if this was the last thing my uncle saw.

I THREW UP SEVEN TIMES during the surface interval, launching coffee and half-digested donuts over the Diversion's port railing and onto this grave site of my clan. Diving squeezes the softer internal organs in unnatural ways, and I've found that even the best dive may be followed by a good puke.

"You're dunkin' those donuts, pal!" the Jersey boys heckled. Divers were crowding in and out of the water. A man staggered up the back ladder, holding a mesh bag. "Whadjaget?" someone asked. The bag disgorged an object, flat and brown, roughly triangular. We all gathered around and examined the trophy, which turned out to be a...stone.

"I thought it was a hinge," the embarrassed treasure hunter muttered, turning bright red. "He's got a rock!" one of his friends cackled. "Good job, a rock!" Over on the other boat, a diver popped up and scrambled on board. "Ooohhh," someone on our boat muttered. "He's got a big bag." We pressed against the rail to watch, but tradition demanded that we scorn the other crew, and no one called across to concede curiosity.
Watching the scene on the Diversion, I realized that whatever the legal or ethical protests, this sort of trophy diving was something larger than my own family's history. By traditions dating back thousands of years, wrecks are the property of whoever can first find and salvage them. "Salvage has been around since things have been lost," Robert Ballard, the discoverer of the Titanic, told me. "If they dropped a coin, they went down to pick it up." As far back as ancient Rhodes, the right to salvage wrecks was detailed in legal codes that rewarded divers for going deep. "The concept of preserving underwater cultural heritage is wonderful," Ballard continued, but the UNESCO convention could "throw out the baby with the bathwater" by severely curtailing serious exploration. "Porthole divers," as he derides them, can't reach deepwater sites—yet.

But cheap robotic submersibles are already sold in dive magazines; it won't be long, Ballard warns, before "some asshole" clips off a piece of the Titanic. He still believes, however, that, with a few famous exceptions, only those wrecks over a thousand years old—not a hundred—should be protected for their rare archaeological heritage.

The Mohawk, of course, cannot qualify for legal caresses from anyone. Lying in the public domain, it isn't old enough to be covered by the UNESCO convention (although, within my lifetime, it will be). With every rivet detailed in existing blueprints, it holds no historic value.

Resting within sight of the Jersey Shore, it has no meaning for ocean explorers. Filled with auto parts and luggage, it has no value for treasure hunters. It has no advocates, except for me, and even I wasn't sure how I felt.

George Bass, the 69-year-old father of marine archaeology himself, told me he'd long ago reconciled himself to the slightly gruesome mixture of souvenir diving and personal tragedy.

Bass lost a distant relative on the S.S. Atlantic, which foundered in Long Island Sound in 1846, but he said it never bothered him that divers had picked the wreck over and brought up the ship's bell. "I always wanted to go see it," he admitted. So it was for me and the Mohawk.

Travis Nagiewicz pushed me into the water again, and I sank down toward the wreck to say a final farewell. This time I'd brought something along with me in the pocket of my dive vest, and it seemed to drag me down toward the ship like a magnet.

The familiar scrap of girders and steel plates emerged from the gloom below me; a wall of steel stuck up from the mud, a section of the graceless hull. When I neared the turnaround point on my air supply, I floated quietly for a moment more, and in the darkness a last tall shape loomed: I thought I could make out a bit of the ship's bridge, 15 feet high, and beyond it a section of the bow still thrusting forward toward Havana. I pushed my fingers through the sand, thinking I might come across some of the old silver teaspoons that Mohawk passenger had left behind.

The water pushed back and forth, and I reached into my vest pocket and looked around for other divers—I didn't want to get ribbed about this later. Then I slipped the tile back into the silt, letting the currents cover it over for good.

SOURCE - Outside Online