Shipwrecks By Rebecca Fraker Shipwrecks One fascinating branch

Shipwrecks By Rebecca Fraker

Shipwrecks • One fascinating branch of archaeology is the search for and study of shipwrecks. • Through many centuries, ships have been sunk through war, weather conditions, and treacherous geological conditions. • Some of these ships contained treasure.

How do we find wrecks? • Most wrecks are found by viewing historical evidence such as diaries, eyewitness accounts, newspaper articles, and so on. • Water currents, storm history, and other factors must be taken into account when searching.

What are the difficulties? • Ship materials such as wood and iron decay and rust. Often, little survives. • Data is often not correct. People who are on a sinking ship aren’t worried about the accuracy of where they are sinking! • Few ships go down in water that is shallow and accessible.

…. difficulties • Fill a deep pan with water. Then sink a small object. Can you predict where it will land? • Ships are the same way—they do not sink straight down. • There are many hazards deep in the ocean: pressure, cold, darkness, sharks, etc.

Reasons for looking for shipwrecks • • • Treasure History To solve mysteries from the past To discover why a wreck occurred To recover bodies and personal effects

Where can I find a wreck? • Many places print maps for scuba divers to use to locate shipwrecks.

Have we found all the wrecks? • NO, NO !!! • There are thousands of wrecks that have never been found. • These include many treasure ships! • Today, most countries will take a large portion of your treasure find, but you can still get very, very rich. • http: //www. theshipslist. com/ contains lists of missing ships that have never been found.

Titanic • It took many years to locate the wreck of Titanic. • The ship had broken in two as it went down, and it settled in very deep water.

…. . Titanic • Titanic was a passenger liner that sank when it hit an iceberg. • It was found by Robert Ballard in 1984. • Ballard had to use the most modern equipment; only robotic submarines can safely explore the wreck because of the depth. • http: //www. oceanexplorer. noaa. gov/explorations

Atocha • Nuestra Señora de Atocha (Our Lady of Atocha) was the most famous of a fleet of Spanish ships that sank in 1622 in a hurricane off the Florida Keys while carrying copper, silver, gold, tobacco, emeralds and indigo to Spain. • It was found in 1985, after a many-year search by Mel Fisher, whose son was killed during the hunt. • http: //www. melfisher. org/

…Atocha • The Nuestra Señora de Atocha sank in a hurricane with 265 people on board. Only three sailors and two slaves survived by holding on to the broken mast. • Rescuers tried to enter the drowned hulk, but the water depth, at 55 feet, was too great to allow them to work. They marked the site of her loss and moved on to rescue people and treasure from Santa Margarita and Nuestra Señora del Rosario, other ships also lost in the storm. • On October 5 th a second hurricane came through, and further destroyed the wreck of the Atocha. For the next 60 years, Spanish salvagers searched for the galleon, but they never found a trace. • It was not found until the 20 th century.

…Atocha treasure • Just as King Tut’s tomb is known as the greatest treasure find on land, the Atocha is known as the greatest treasure ever found in the ocean.

Bismarck • • • The Bismarck was seen as the pride of the German navy. On its first trip in May 1941, after an eight-day chase in the Atlantic, Bismarck was sunk by an attack from the British in one of the most dramatic sea battles of the war. Crippled by heavy enemy fire, Bismarck rolled and slid to a halt on a steep undersea mountain. Only 115 of the 2, 200 men (whose average was 21) aboard the Bismarck survived. • In 1989, after combing an area of some 200 square miles, Dr Robert Ballard and his team finally found Bismarck's remains. The site lies 380 miles south of Cork, Ireland, and about 15, 000 feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic. • Despite the damage the British inflicted on the battleship and the effects of the sinking itself, the wreck is in surprisingly good condition.

Mary Celeste, Ghostship • The small ship Mary Celeste was found over a century ago under full sail with not a soul on board. • Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife and daughter and six crewmembers were all gone - vanished into the most mysterious of maritime tales. The ship was in perfect condition, and there was plenty of food. • An American group purchased her at a very low price and at the end of 1884 prepared her to sail from Boston to Port au Prince, Haiti. It would be the last voyage she would ever make. Mary Celeste met her end off a reef. • Clive Cussler takes credit for having found her wreck in 2001, a conch and coral covered pile. • http: //www. numa. net/ and http: //www. maryceleste. net/

…Mary Celeste • Theories abound as to why the ship was abandoned: from mutiny, seaquakes, toxic fumes, piracy, insanity, sharks, to even weirder things like aliens.

Some locations of shipwrecks

Edmund Fitzgerald Not all wrecks are on the oceans. Many take place in large lakes such as the Great Lakes. • The Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior. A song was written about it, and so the shipwreck became famous.

• The ship went down in 1975 in 650 feet of water without a distress call. Everyone was lost. • Earlier, another ship had reported large waves. • No one is sure what caused it to sink. • Although the largest ship lost, Fitzgerald is not alone on the bottom. • The Great Lakes have a long history of shipwrecks: nearly 6, 000 shipwrecks occurred between 1878 and 1898 alone. • Some ships and crews simply vanished in storms. A number of marine preserves have been established that allow divers to look at sunken ships.

Tools of the Trade--SCUBA In the past, free divers had no equipment and often made futile attempts at salvaging treasures from sunken ships and ancient cities. But in 1952, Jacques Cousteau invented the world's first self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA) that allowed divers to go deeper and stay under water. SCUBA has improved with the addition of enriched oxygen mixes and rebreathers. (Enriched oxygen in scuba tanks allows divers to stay on the bottom longer, with less risk of the decompression sickness known as "the bends. ” Rebreathers are systems that re-circulate oxygen mixes inside a closed system. ) Divers can have the time necessary to map out, survey, and study the wreck sites of ancient ships and coastal cities buried in sediments. The scuba technologies of today allow archaeologists the time they need for the careful removal and preservation of artifacts.

Tools of the Trade—Side Scan Sonar • Side scan sonar is typically a device tied to a ship by a cable, and then directed over large areas of the ocean floor. • Mapping, or "mowing the lawn", is a strategy employed by researchers sweeping an area for a suspected shipwreck. • The sonar device emits fan-shaped pulses down toward the seafloor across a wide angle, and reports data back to the mother ship. • The invention of side scan sonar has been instrumental in assisting researchers to create nautical charts, conduct surveys of the ocean floor, and especially to find and investigate underwater objects such as shipwrecks.

Tools of the Trade--ROVs Remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) are underwater robots tied to ships and then sent down to explore the deep ocean. • They are unmanned, and operated by a skilled technical crew from a control room in the vessel on the surface. The operators maneuver them, receive video data, and control mechanical arms of the robot through signals sent through an umbilical cable. • Recent advancements in underwater robotics have allowed researchers to discover wrecks that have been hidden away for hundreds of years. ROV's have been instrumental in the mapping, surveying, and collection of artifacts from several deep water shipwrecks like Titanic, but there is much to be done. • It will be up to a new generation of ROV's to illuminate the secrets held in the deepest, darkest ocean depths. . •

• There are vast areas of the ocean floor that have never been explored. • Maybe you could be the one who develops the technology that finds the next shipwreck!

A few resources • The Sea Hunters True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks By Clive Cussler Pocket Star, September 2003 Mass Market Paperback, 432 pages ISBN-10: 0 -7434 -8069 -4 ISBN-13: 978 -0 -7434 -8069 -7 • http: //www. discoverychannel. co. uk/best_of/wreck_detectives/ shipwrecks/index. shtml • http: //www. shipwreckcentral. com/teach. Mod 4. htm • http: //www. underwaterarchaeology. com/