Free Republic

AP, so auto-excerpted.

In the summer of 1495, King Hans of Denmark and Norway anchored his warship off the southern coast of Sweden. While Hans was on land, his vessel—known as Gribshunden or Griffen—mysteriously caught fire and sank to the bottom of the Baltic Sea.Hans was on his way to Kalmar, where he hoped to be elected king of Sweden and reunite the broader Nordic region under a single ruler. As such, Hans brought many opulent status symbols, including luxurious foods and spices, to help persuade the Swedish leadership to agree to his plan.Remarkably, many of those foods and spices have survived underwater...

DAYTONA BEACH SHORES, Fla. — Severe beach erosion from two late-season hurricanes has helped uncover what appears to be a wooden ship dating from the 1800s which had been buried under the sand on Florida’s East Coast for up to two centuries, impervious to cars that drove daily on the beach or sand castles built by generations of tourists. Beachgoers and lifeguards discovered the wooden structure, between 80 feet to 100 feet, poking out of the sand over Thanksgiving weekend in front of homes that collapsed into rubble on Daytona Beach Shores last month from Hurricane Nicole. “Whenever you find...

The wreck of a long-lost “sidewheeler steamship” that sank off the coast of Washington nearly 150 years ago has been found by a pair of local maritime historians. The ship we’re talking about is called the “SS PACIFIC” – a 225-foot long sidewheel steamer. It carried passengers and cargo way back in the time of the Washington Territory The ship was on its way from Puget Sound and Victoria to San Francisco when it collided with a big sailing ship in the dark off of Cape Flattery on November 4, 1875. The loss of hundreds of lives makes it one...

Scientists investigating the remains of an old wooden ship off the cold, windy coast of far southern Argentina say it almost certainly is the Dolphin, a globe-trotting whaling ship from Warren, R.I., lost in 1859. Archaeologists have spent years researching the ship’s origin without making a definitive identification, but a new analysis of tree rings in its timbers has provided perhaps the most compelling evidence yet. A team of Argentinian and American researchers just published the findings in the journal Dendrochronologia....lead author Ignacio Mundo of Argentina’s Laboratory of Dendrochronology and Environmental History, IANIGLA-CONICET... and scientists at the Columbia Climate School’s...

What does champagne left on the bottom of the ocean for 170 years taste like? Leather and wet dog, apparently.Those were the initial findings by a team of scientists and lucky tasters after analyzing a sample from one of the 168 bottles of champagne recovered from a shipwrecked vessel on the Baltic seafloor. Divers had found the sunken trade ship off the Aland Islands of Finland in 2010, and the treasure trove has chemists and connoisseurs curious.After allowing what is thought to be the oldest champagne ever tasted to breathe, however, the researchers were surprised to find an entirely different...

MANILA, Philippines -- A U.S. Navy destroyer that engaged a superior Japanese fleet in the largest sea battle of World War II in the Philippines has become the deepest wreck to be discovered, according to explorers. The USS Samuel B. Roberts, popularly known as the “Sammy B," was identified on Wednesday broken into two pieces on a slope at a depth of 6,985 meters (22,916 feet). That puts it 426 meters (1,400 feet) deeper than the USS Johnson, the previous deepest wreck discovered last year in the Philippine Sea also by American explorer Victor Vescovo, founder of Dallas-based Caladan Oceanic...

Explorers have found the deepest shipwreck ever identified, a US navy destroyer escort sunk during WWII. The USS Samuel B Roberts went down during the Battle Off Samar in the Philippine Sea in October 1944. It lies in 6,895m (22,621ft) of water. Texan financier and adventurer Victor Vescovo, who owns a deep-diving submersible, discovered the "Sammy B" battered but largely intact. The vessel is famed for a heroic final stand against the Japanese.

The wreck of one of the most famous ships of the 17th century—which sank 340 years ago while carrying the future King of England James Stuart—has been discovered off the coast of Norfolk in the UK, it can be revealed today. Since running aground on a sandbank on May 6, 1682, the wreck of the warship the Gloucester has lain half-buried on the seabed, its exact whereabouts unknown until brothers Julian and Lincoln Barnwell, with their friend James Little, found it after a four-year search. Due to the age and prestige of the ship, the condition of the wreck, the...

A team of adventurers, marine archaeologists and technicians located the wreck at the bottom of the Weddell Sea, east of the Antarctic Peninsula, using undersea drones...Mensun Bound, the expedition's exploration director and a marine archaeologist who has discovered many shipwrecks, said Endurance was the finest he had ever seen. It is upright, clear of the seabed and "in a brilliant state of preservation," he said.

Ernest Shackleton’s lost ice ship, Endurance, has been discovered in the waters of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea. Endurance was crushed and sunk by pack ice in 1915, during Shackleton’s failed attempt to cross the Antarctic continent, and remained lost to the depths for more than a century. Now, the wreck has been found, filmed and surveyed by members of the Endurance22 expedition, which set out in search of the shipwreck in February 2022. After weeks of surveying the seabed, the shipwreck was located in early March 2022, 100 years after Shackleton died in 1922.

The boat sank on the night of December 12, 1770 – since then its origin has been shrouded in mystery – it was initially thought to be part of the fabled Spanish Armada, but this has been ruled outThe mystery of the "Butter Boat" shipwreck has finally been solved 250 years after the ship sunk. After the remains of the boat were found off the coast of Ireland, its true origin has finally been discovered. The skeletal remains of the large vessel become visible when the low tide shifts – for years it has attracted curious tourists, reports The Mirror.....

A SUNKEN ship has been found in almost perfect condition despite spending 400 years underwater. Divers made the mysterious discovery while exploring the Baltic Sea off the coast of Finland. The divers, from the non-profit Badewanne team, have come across shipwrecks before but never one as old and undamaged as the Dutch merchant vessel. The ship has been dated back to the 17th century. It dates back to a time when the Dutch Empire spanned five continents, becoming an economic superpower that was single-handedly responsible for half of Europe’s shipping by 1670. The ship is called a 'fluyt', a type...

A second crew member has been found alive from a ship carrying livestock that capsized and sank during a typhoon off the southern coast of Japan. But another storm expected to hit the area over the weekend is likely to hamper the search for 40 other people still missing. The Gulf Livestock 1, a 450-foot ship with a cargo of some 5,800 cows en route from New Zealand to China, issued a distress call early Wednesday Japan time near the island of Amami Oshima, north of Okinawa. The ship's "mayday" was sent from an area affected by Typhoon Maysak, a...

A ship carrying more than 40 crew members and some 6,000 head of cattle has disappeared off the coast of Japan after capsizing in typhoon-lashed seas, according to a crew member who so far is the only known survivor. The Gulf Livestock 1, en route from New Zealand to China, issued a distress call early Wednesday from a position west of Japan's Amami Oshima island. The mayday call, to which the Japanese coast guard responded, was sent as Typhoon Maysak was tracking through the region as a powerful Category 4 storm. The GULF LIVESTOCK 1 has disappeared, probably hit by...

Every one experiences minor or major disasters in their life.  But some people's incompetence and stupidity is so great that their lives appear to be a series of shipwrecks. Hillary's legacy as Secretary of State is clearly one disaster after another: going to war against Syria, the TPP, the Iran deal, her gloating over the fall of Khadaffi in Libya only to be followed shortly thereafter by the Benghazi tragedy. So I collected three shipwreck images in tribute to Hillary's legacy.  The last shipwreck is an interesting one and I've elaborate on that one a bit... The Swedish warship...

Anders Franzén lived for shipwrecks. An engineer and expert on the naval warfare of the 16th and 17th centuries, he was especially obsessed with the old Swedish men-of-war that had once menaced the Baltic Sea. When he wasn’t busy at his day job with the Swedish Naval Administration, he’d spend hours combing through archives in search of maps and documents, hoping they might reveal the location of Sweden’s great sunken warships. And when he learned that one wreck might still be trapped, undiscovered, not far from his home in Stockholm, he was hungry to find it.

Dr. Mike Brennan: Unfortunately, on the E/V Nautilus expeditions, we have seen that many of the wrecks in the Aegean and Black Seas are heavily damaged by trawling activity. For example, one shipwreck, Eregli E, is the most trawled shipwreck in the Black Sea based upon scatter and damage to the artifacts and surrounding seabed. When we found it last year we saw that it was really damaged. The site had been so disturbed, it uncovered materials from beneath the sediment, including human bones. The bones had been preserved in the mud, but then had been ripped out by trawls...

A dugout probably dating back to the prehistoric age has been discovered the bottom of the Black Sea, National History Museum Director professor Bozhidar Dimitrov told Focus News Agency. On Friday evening at some 15 miles in the sea, east of Maslen Cape, between the seaside cities of Sozopol and Primorsko, a fishing ship found an enormous dugout, he added. "You can find nowhere similar dugouts, as well as any type of vessels older than 3 years of age, because water rots the wood away, but in the Black Sea below a certain depth there is dissolved sulphuretted hydrogen, which...

A ship from the 8th century discovered off Dor Beach in the Mediterranean is thought to be the only vessel from that era ever found in the region. "We do not have any other historical or archaeological evidence of the economic activity and commerce of this period at Dor," said Ya'acov Kahanov from the Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies and the Department Of Maritime Civilizations at the University of Haifa. "The shipwreck will serve as a source of information about the social and economic activities in this area." The wreck [image] was found almost a decade ago but only...