Deepest Roman shipwrecks found near Greece - and prove that ancient seafarers were more adventurous than thought ...

Two Roman-era shipwrecks have been found in deep water off a western Greek island, challenging the idea that ancient ship masters stuck to coastal routes.

The merchant ships were sunk nearly a mile deep between Corfu and Italy moving that ancient traders didn't 'hug the shore'. 

Greece's culture ministry said the two third-century wrecks were discovered earlier this month during a survey of an area where a Greek-Italian gas pipeline is to be sunk.

Broken ancient pottery from the 3rd Century AD ship: The merchant ships were sunk nearly a mile deep between Corfu and Italy - proving that ancient traders didn't 'hug the shore'

‘The conventional theory was that, as these were small vessels up to 80 feet long, they did not have the capacity to navigate far from the coast, so that if there was a wreck they would be close enough to the coast to save the crew,’ she said. 

U.S. archaeologist Brendan Foley, who was not involved in the project, said a series of ancient wrecks located far from land over the past 15 years has forced experts to reconsider the coast-hugging theory.

They lay between 0.7-0.9 miles deep in the sea between Corfu and Italy.

That would place them among the deepest known ancient wrecks in the Mediterranean, apart from remains found in 1999 of an older vessel some 3 kilometers 1.8 miles deep off Cyprus.

Angeliki Simossi, head of Greece's underwater antiquities department, said sunken ancient ships are generally found 100-130 feet deep.

Most scholars believe that ancient traders were unwilling to veer far offshore, unlike warships which were unburdened by ballast and cargo.

The ships, from the 3rd Century AD, prove that merchant craft of the era didn't 'hug the shore' and sailed across deep water instead

The remains were located during an investigation that covered 200 square kilometers (77 square miles) of seabed off the islands of Corfu and Paxoi.

A Greek oceanographic vessel using side-scan radar and robot submarines took footage of scattered cargo - storage jars, or amphorae, used to carry foodstuffs and wine - cooking utensils for the crew, anchors, ballast stones and what could be remains of the wooden ships.

The team also raised samples of pottery and a marble vase.

The one ship was carrying the kind of amphorae produced in north Africa, and Simossi said it might have sailed from there and headed for Greece after a stop in Italy.

Foley said deep wrecks are very important because they are almost always more intact than those found in shallow water.

‘So they contain far more archaeological and historical information than other sites,’ he said in an email. ‘As a result, the deep sea floor of the Mediterranean is the world's greatest repository for information about the earliest civilizations.’


Read more at the Daily Mail

New Zealand Charges Owner of Grounded Ship Rena

Greek owner of NZ oil spill ship to pay up to USD 31mln The Greek owners of the ship at the centre of New Zealand's worst maritime environmental disaster agreed to pay up to USD 31 million towards the cost of the clean-up.

Although damage from the toxic oil spill and recovery of shipping containers has so far cost New Zealand nearly NZD 50 million, Transport Minister Gerry Brownlee said the offer from Daina Shipping was "the best possible outcome".

The ship Rena, carrying 1,368 containers, ploughed into an offshore reef 12 months ago spewing more than 300 tonnes of toxic fuel oil that killed thousands of sea birds and fouled beaches in the North Island's pristine Bay of Plenty.

Daina Shipping is to pay NZD 27.6 million to settle the claims of the government and several public bodies, and will pay a further NZD 10.4 million if it decides to leave part of the wreck on the reef.

"These agreements allow both New Zealand as a whole, and the Bay of Plenty region, to move on from what was, from an environmental standpoint, the worst maritime disaster in our history," Brownlee said.

Konstantinos Zacharatos, a director of Daina Shipping which is part of Costamare Inc., said the company wanted to "address all aspects of this serious incident. (AFP)

Disasters due to Captains error did not start from Costa Concordia

The Tanker "Torey Canyon" ran aground on the 18th of March, 1967.

Torrey Canyon is one of the milestones in the history of oil tanker accidents because all the things that could go wrong did go wrong.

En route from Kuwait to England, it ran aground at the Western entrance to the English Channel. The captain was held responsible for the accident because he had kept the ship on automatic steering at its top speed of nearly sixteen knots. Furthermore, the captain had been advised to change course both by his third officer and by signals from a lightship, but had refused. When he finally decided to change the steering system to manual, it was too late.

The entire cargo, approximately 136 million liters of oil, was released into the sea. English authorities decided to respond prompt and effectively and four hours after the grounding, Royal Navy ships arrived, carrying over 10,000 tons of detergents, which were sprayed on the floating oil to emulsify and disperse it.

Minimal concentrations of these detergents were acutely toxic to many marine mammals and plants and caused a prodigious growth in green weed. The seashores were sprayed with toxic detergents as well.

Efforts to border the ship turned out to be a failure, as one crew member died during the operation and the ship broke in two.

The following day, it was decided to bomb the ship in order to start fires that would consume the remaining oil. Napalm, kerosene and aviation fuel was dumped on the wreck and for two entire days, the Royal Navy rained 1,000-pound shells on it.

The operations had a devastating effect on environment. An estimated 15,000 birds died, as well as untold numbers of fish and shellfish, and hundreds of kilometers of seashore in both England and France were contaminated.

Asia's Undersea Archeology

by Richard Gould

Diver with bowl Overseas trading of fine porcelain and other objects began in China during the Song Dynasty.

Seaborne commerce on a large scale in Asia dates to the Song Dynasty of China (A.D. 960-1270). The Mongols in the succeeding Yuan Dynasty (ca. 1271-1368) went on to build even more ships on a grand scale, and during his stay at the imperial court from 1275 to 1292, Marco Polo described four-masted, seagoing merchant ships with watertight bulkheads and crews of up to 300. Early in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), an expansion of seaborne trade took place with the construction of an immense treasure fleet—reported to consist of 317 ships when it was assembled in Nanjing in 1405—that made trading cruises throughout the Indian Ocean and the China seas

 Although shipwreck archeology is relatively new in Asia, important finds are pointing the way toward the broader use of archeological evidence relative to the documentary history of this era of Chinese maritime expansion.

What Really Happened ... Costa Concordia captain’s admission caught by black box moments after ship hit rocks

The revelation comes after Captain Francesco Schettino’s first full TV interview since the January 13 accident. During the talk on Italy’s Canale 5, Schettino claimed another officer was steering the ship when the accident occurred.

“At that moment, I went up to the deck and ordered the ship to be put on manual navigation and I didn’t have command, that’s to say being in charge of sailing the ship, that was the officer,” he said. The black box transcript published by the Corriere della Sera newspaper shows the panic that ensued immediately after the trouble began.

 “Our ass is dragging along the seabed!” one officer yelled.

 “What did we hit?” Schettino asked.

 “The reef.” “It was the salute that he wanted,” said a third officer.

 “The salute” was a maneuver Schettino allegedly agreed to perform to acknowledge a former crew mate on the island. 

  National Post staff, Agence France-Presse
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200-year-old shipwreck found in Gulf of Mexico

STACEY PLAISANCE, Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — An oil company exploration crew's chance discovery of a 200-year-old shipwreck in a little-charted stretch of the Gulf of Mexico is yielding a trove of new information to scientists who say it's one of the most well-preserved old wrecks ever found in the Gulf.

"When we saw it we were all just astonished because it was beautifully preserved, and by that I mean for a 200-year-old shipwreck," said Jack Irion, maritime archaeologist with the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management in New Orleans.

Video shows muskets and gin bottles littering the Gulf bottom, along with sea life mingling in the wreck.

Scientists say the ship is about 200 miles off the northern Gulf coast and about 4,000 feet deep. The depth has kept it largely undisturbed during two centuries of storms and hurricanes. And although most of the ship's wood dissolved long ago, the copper hull and its contents remain in place.