News

Unseen by the public for 269 years, the greatest warship from the age of sail can now be visited through the world’s first virtual wreck dive trail. HMS Victory sank during a ferocious storm on 5 October 1744. Remains washed up on the Channel Isles, leading the Admiralty and modern historians to seek this First Rate English flagship off the Casquets. This great maritime mystery was solved when Odyssey Marine Exploration discovered the wreck 100 kilometres west of the Channel Isles. The wreck site is owned by the Maritime Heritage Foundation following a gift from the Ministry of Defence in January 2012.

© Odyssey Marine Exploration

Located in the western English Channel, 80 kilometres southeast of Plymouth and outside UK territorial waters, the wreck of the Victory is almost inaccessible. Her remains lie in 75 metres – beyond safe diving depths and beneath one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. Changing tides and strong currents make diving by humans dangerous. Offshore fishing boats drag heavy gear across the seabed. For safety reasons the surveys conducted since 2008 have relied on Odyssey’s 7-ton Remotely-Operated Vehicle Zeus, the world’s most sophisticated archaeologically tooled robot.

Now everyone can share the warship’s deep-sea wonders. The Victory Virtual Dive Trail presents high-definition video coverage. Visitors can move across the wreck – using a bird’s eye vertical view made up of 4,535 digital photographs – to micro views of the wreck and, in turn, to high-definition video taken in 2008.

The video trail shows many of the Victory’s most prized features – its 100 bronze cannon collapsed onto the seabed (including Europe’s most powerful 42-pounder guns), hull remains, wood and bronze rigging, iron ballast, anchors and the ship’s rudder. Accompanying text sets the archaeological remains in a historical setting.

The site’s survival is threatened by many environmental and human issues and the Virtual Dive Trail shows snagged fishing gear, heavily scratched cannon, and guns dragged up to 230 metres away from the wreck mound. Video captures the position of a 24-pounder bronze cannon before it was looted by Dutch salvors in 2011.

© Odyssey Marine Exploration

The Victory Virtual Dive Trail is part of the Maritime Heritage Foundation’s commitment to making this deep-sea site accessible to everyone through scientific and educational programmes. The UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage encourages non-intrusive access to shipwrecks worldwide to create public awareness, appreciation, protection and to benefit sustainable economic development. This is why a virtual dive trail has been created to bring the site to the people.

© Odyssey Marine Exploration

The Victory Virtual Dive Trail has been developed by the Maritime Heritage Foundation, Odyssey Marine Exploration and Wreck Watch Int. The website platform and its additional sections on the historical and archaeological background of HMS Victory can be visited at: http://www.victory1744.org.

JUST PUBLISHED, 2011

Oceans Odyssey 2. Underwater Heritage Management & Deep-Sea Shipwrecks in the English Channel & Atlantic Ocean

 Edited by Greg Stemm & Sean Kingsley

Oceans Odyssey 2 presents the results of the discovery and archaeological survey of ten deep-water wrecks by Odyssey Marine Exploration. In the Western Approaches and western English Channel, a mid-17^th century armed merchantman, the guns of Admiral Balchin’s Victory (1744), the mid-18^th century French privateer La Marquise de Tourny and six German U-boats lost at the end of World War II are examined in depth. From the Atlantic coast of the United States, the Jacksonville ‘Blue China’ wreck’s British ceramics, tobacco pipes and American glass wares bring to life the story of a remarkable East Coast schooner lost in the mid-19^th century. These unique sites expand the boundaries of human knowledge, highlighting the great promise of deep-sea wrecks, the technology needed to explore them and the threats from nature and man that these wonders face. Challenges to managing underwater cultural heritage are also discussed, along with proposed solutions for curating and storing collections.

ISBN-13: 978-1-84217-442-5
ISBN-10: 1-84217-442-8

354 pages, full colour throughout (Oxbow Books, 2011) – £25

To order your copy: Oxbow Books, Oxford.

A human skull found in the Hoyo Negro cave, Mexico. Photo: Daniel Riordan-Araujo.

Deep within the flooded cave of Hoyo Negro, the ‘Black Hole’ in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, explorers from PET (Projecto Espeleológico de Tulum) have possibly discovered America’s earliest human remains. After diving along 1,200 metres of underwater passages through an eerie submerged Ice Age landscape using underwater propulsion scooters, the team of Alex Alvarez, Franco Attolini and Alberto Nava touched down at a depth of 57 metres and started surveying a 60 x 36 metre cavern.

Near to several megafauna remains, including a mastodon bone, the team came across a sight that caught their breath. “I was searching for more of the mastodon remains”, recalled Alvarez, “when I saw what looked like a human skull. I had thought we already had a great discovery after finding the remains of several Pleistocene animals… but finding a human skull was totally amazing for us. All of our efforts… walking through the jungle, carrying all the gear, securing the helium required to do such a deep dive… paid off at that moment. This is the Holy Grail of underwater cave exploration.”

Remains of an extinct mastodon in the Hoyo Negro cave, Mexico. Photo: Daniel Riordan-Araujo.

Some 12,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene period, the Earth was rocked by great climatic change. As the ice caps melted, a global flood triggered a colossal rise in sea levels, which flooded low-lying coastal landscapes. Many of the underground spaces where for millennia animals had rested and taken on water, and where tribes escaped the sun and performed cultic rituals, were inundated.

Although radiometric dating of the bones is still pending, the bones found with the megafauna remains in Hoyo Negro could represent the oldest evidence of humans in the Americas. Guillermo de Anda, an archaeologist from the University of Yucatan in Merida, believes that “The findings of Hoyo Negro are a once-in-a-lifetime discovery. The skull looks pre-Maya, which could make it one of the oldest sets of human remains in the area… Therefore, protecting and learning the secrets of Hoyo Negro should be one of the main priorities for the archaeologists in the region.”

Detailed analysis of the human skeletal remains from Hoyo Negro, a site located inside the Aktun-Hu cave system in the state of Quintana Roo, is expected to help reveal when these Paleoindian peoples reached this area and, ultimately, who were the First Americans, one of the great mysteries in American archaeology.

Source: NatGeo News Watch.

Plan of the 370 metre-deep Jacksonville 'Blue China' shipwreck (Site BA02), mid-19th century. Photo: © Odyssey Marine Exploration.

Just published – the first two reports by Odyssey Marine Exploration on its rescue archaeology on a mid-19^th century wreck (Site BA02) lost at a depth close to 370 metres, 70 nautical miles off Jacksonville, Florida.

The wreck was brought to Odyssey’s attention in 2003 by a fisherman, whose nets had snagged ceramic wares over the last 40 years. A small selection of artifacts was recovered in 2003 and the wreck arrested in court. The site was revisited by Odyssey in 2005, when disturbing further impacts were documented, caused by recent dragging of trawl nets in the interim years by shrimp boats seeking fish for America’s booming sushi restaurants. Further diagnostic material culture was recorded in relation to its contexts prior to select recovery to identify and date the site before the wreck became even more extensively disturbed and data lost.

Lines of ceramics disturbed and cleared by trawl gear running across Site BA02. Photo: © Odyssey Marine Exploration.

Site BA02 contains the remains of a small American coastal schooner that was transporting a consignment of British ceramics manufactured in Staffordshire in the decade 1850-60 alongside American glass wares and building materials. The most plausible theory is that the ship was lost in a hurricane, with the great storm of September 1854 the most likely candidate.

The vessel appears to have been a two-masted schooner typical of the East Coast’s thriving regional maritime trade based in New York City. The Jacksonville ‘Blue China’ shipwreck reflects the lure of high status, yet relatively cheap, Staffordshire and US products that prevailed across middle class America and permeated down into the lower classes. This is surprisingly the first wreck of any mid-19^th century coaster found off America with a substantial cargo and reflects the roots of New York’s original mercantile and economic rise to urban stardom.

Two further reports on the Jacksonville ‘Blue China’ wreck’s tobacco pipes and glass wares will be published soon.

Download OME Papers 19 and 20 from Odyssey Marine Exploration’s website.

The only preserved stack of British shell-edged plates and platters on the 370 metre-deep Jacksonville 'Blue China' shipwreck. Photo: © Odyssey Marine Exploration.

“No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe” (Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, 1851).

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The ship captained by the man whose adventures at sea inspired one of the great American novels, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, has emerged from the battered shallow reef where it sank on 11 February 1823, some 600 miles northwest of Honolulu. The Nantucket whaler the Two Brothers was under the captaincy of George Pollard Jr. when it struck the French Frigate Shoals in today’s Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in the Pacific Ocean, at 139,797 square miles the largest conservation area under the US flag. After abandoning ship, the crew survived a harrowing night by clinging to the ship’s boats, fortunately to be picked up the next morning by another Nantucket whaler.

Just a few years earlier Pollard had earned infamous notoriety in 1819 as captain of another Nantucket whaling vessel, the Essex, which had the ill fortune to be rammed and sunk by an 85 foot-long spermaceti whale in the South Pacific.

Dr Kelly Gleason with a whaling trypot off French Frigate Shoals. Photo: NOAA/Greg McFall.

As Owen Chase, First Mate of the Essex, would later recount in his Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex of Nantucket (New York, 1821), “He spouted two or three times, and then disappeared. In less than two or three seconds he came up again, about the length of the ship off… he came down upon us at full speed, and struck the ship with his head, just forward of the fore-chains, he gave us such an appalling and tremendous jar, as nearly threw us all on our faces. The ship brought up as suddenly and violently as if she had struck rock, and trembled for a few seconds like a leaf. We looked at each other with perfect amazement, deprived almost of the power of speech… the ship had settled down a considerable distance in the water, and I gave her up as lost”. During their trials on the sea voyage home, home George Pollard and his crew only survived by resorting to cannibalism as they drifted across an empty sea.

The Two Brothers was part of a fleet of several hundred whaling ships that played a major role in America’s economic and political expansion into the Pacific, transforming the region, including Hawaii, both economically and culturally. This colonialism resulted in the near extinction of many whale species.

Dr Kelly Gleason with a blubber hook off French Frigate Shoals. Photo: NOAA/Greg McFall.

Marine archaeologists identified the scattered wreck, heavily pounded by the waves, through the survival of two large anchors, three cast iron trypots used to melt whale blubber to produce oil, and the remains of part of the ship’s rigging – all typical of the gear used on early 19^th-century whalers. The location of the wreckage matched the general location of where the Two Brothers had grounded. The picture was confirmed by recent fieldwork that found blubber hooks, five whaling harpoon tips, three whaling lances, four cast-iron cooking pots and American ceramics and glass wares, confirming the date and nationality of the wreckage.

The 19^th-century whaling industry was one of the most prominent businesses in America. By 1846, 736 whalers were based in the ports of southern New England and Long Island. Whales were thought of as swimming oil wells. The waxy oil derived from the head of the sperm whale, spermaceti, was highly prized for making the finest candles in the world. The bones and teeth of various species, meanwhile, were exploited for numerous products from collar stays to buggy whips, toys and even for springs in early typewriters. Baleen from the mouths of some species of whale was the de rigueur fashion accessory for the manufacture of ladies corsets. Whalebone was the plastic of the 1800s.

Dr Kelly Gleason with a ginger jar from the French Frigate Shoals whaler wreck of the Two Brothers, lost in 1823. Photo: NOAA/Greg McFall.

Examining a beer bottle from an early 19th-century wreck in the Baltic Sea. Photo: VTT Technical Research Centre, Finland.

If the 168 bottles of Veuve Clicquot and Juglar types of champagne recovered from an early 19th century wreck off the Åland archipelago at the bottom of the Baltic Sea are not to your taste – or at an expected $70,000 a pop don’t suit your wallet – fear not. It seems the ship, found between Finland and Sweden, catered for all tastes and occasions. Five bottles of beer from the wrecked schooner are now being heralded as amongst the world’s oldest preserved pints.

The VTT Technical Research Center of Finland hopes its analysis of a sample of the ‘pale ale’ will determine the original brewing recipe through identification of microbes, such as yeast or lactic acid bacteria. VTT scientist Arvi Vilpola has had a sneaky first gulp of the brew and reported that “It was a little sour and you could taste the saltiness of it slightly.” The team hopes to use these remains to bring the beverage back to life for modern consumers.

Chateau Jiahu, a Neolithic beer available from the Dogfish Head Brewery, Delaware.

All good fun, but for age this is literally small beer compared to the hard stuff knocked out by early Celtic revellers at Eberdingen-Hochdorf in southwestern Germany. Excavations in a series of 2,500 year-old ‘industrial’ ditches were stuffed with thousands of barley grains from high-quality barley malt, a key ingredient of beer.

Reconstructions of Celtic ceremonial boozing at the site by archaeobotanist Hans-Peter Stika of the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart suggest that the barley was soaked in specially constructed ditches until it sprouted. The grains were then dried by fire, instilling the malt with a smoky taste. Lactic acid bacteria stimulated by the slow drying of the soaked grains added sourness to the brew. In the place of modern hops, the Eberdingen-Hochdorf brew was probably flavoured with spices like mugwort, carrot seeds or henbane. But beware: Prof. Stika warns that this drink would have been an “extreme beer”. Little wonder the Roman emperor Julian condemned Celtic beer as smelling “like a billy goat.”

Even millennia older than Celtic and Egyptian beer, however, is the 9,000-year-old hard stuff recreated by an American brewery after analysing the linings of Neolithic pottery found at a burial site in Henan province in central China. The brew was identified by Dr Patrick McGovern, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, after he came across sherds from the Neolithic village of Jiahu in Henan province. The Dogfish Head Brewery in Delaware has started making Chateau Jiahu from wildflower honey, muscat grapes, barley malt, hawthorn fruit and chrysanthemums. The wort is fermented for about a month with Sake yeast until the $13 a bottle beer is ready for packaging.

This winter there’s plenty of options for all manner of adventurous tipples – salty malt, Billy goat beer or fruity Dogfish brew. Or you could just go down the pub.

Photo: courtesy British Marine Aggregate Producers Association.

Hot on the heels of the government’s decision to abolish after 30 years of service the crusaders of Britain’s vast submerged heritage, the Advisory Committee on Historic Wreck Sites, the lid to marine archaeology’s limited resource coffers in the UK has closed some more. The ‘white knight’ that was the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund will disappear in a puff of smoke in March 2011.

This pot of silver earmarked for reducing the environmental impacts of the extraction of aggregates was a success story for a cog of marine science that has traditionally had to beg for funds at the bottom of the food chain. Gravel dredging is big business. The UK has the largest offshore dredging industry in Europe and is one of the biggest in the world. Figures for 2006 suggest an annual processed sale value of £293 million. The marine aggregates industry operates 28 purpose built dredgers with a total replacement value of £1 billion.

Some 138 square kilometres of the UK’s continental shelf was actively dredged in 2008 to provide aggregate for the building industry. The war chest levy was introduced in April 2002 at a rate of £1.60 per tonne, and since 2009 had stood at £2.00 per tonne to enable the effects of dredging on shipwrecks and submerged prehistoric settlements to be modeled and managed.

According to DEFRA, “We have had to look very carefully across all the Department’s priorities to see where we can make best use of available funds in a very tight spending context. Unfortunately, the Department is no longer in a position to be able to continue the funding of the ALSF programme.” It is unclear how these funds are to be otherwise ‘prioritised’.

All seemed to be running particularly smoothly. The ALSF 2008-11 Evaluation concluded only in 2010 that “The Fund will generally deliver good value for money with potentially more significant gains in the longer term… The ALSF is now a mature programme with considerable momentum behind it, a good reputation and a wide community of interest. In some areas it has an influential European and international profile…”

You only have to peer over the sea to Holland’s Flushing wharf, where recent dredging has brought up 16th-century coins, boat and ship fittings, a British aircraft part, anchors and mammoth teeth – all declared to Wessex Archaeology – to see the value of this excellent scheme. In the UK, Wessex Archaeology reported the discoveries in 2009 and 2010 of a Roman mortaria in Licence Area 107 off Lincolnshire and a collection of late 18^th-century hallmarked silver dredged from Licence Area 254 bearing the crest of the 6^th Earl of Stair, John Dalrymple (1749-1821).

A Mesolithic site of around 8,500 BC off Great Yarmouth only came to light after a Dutch dredger declared the discovery of wood, bone, antler and struck flint. Since 2005 Wessex Archaeology has secured filings on 784 finds dating from the Palaeolithic period to the modern day. Hopefully the Awareness Programme that has so successfully monitored landings of dredged underwater cultural heritage, and generated great interest amongst ‘Site Champions’ on the wharves where the dredgers land, will find another income stream and live on.

Defra’s mission statement says that “We deal with environmental risks and work towards securing a sustainable society and a healthy environment.” What does the latest development tell us about the sustainability and health of underwater cultural heritage? The £2,715,759 that the ALSF allocated English Heritage in 2005 for various multi-year projects may seem like a cheap investment if an intact wooden wreck sunk in the middle of an aggregate licence area demands future rescue excavation. What price the sunken past?