Heat Turned Up on Shipwreck Treasure Hunter

From the Jakarta Globe

Heat Turned Up on Shipwreck Treasure Hunter

The government has launched an investigation into alleged looting by shipwreck salvage diver Michael Hatcher, who has a long history with Indonesia and is believed to be operating on a new discovery.

Aji Sularso, an official with the National Committee for the Salvage and Utilization of Valuable Objects from Sunken Ships (Pannas BMKT), said on Wednesday it had established a joint investigation team comprising related government institutions. “We are investigating the case,” Aji said.

He was responding to complaints by the Consortium for Rescuing National Assets (KPAB), which alleged the government had not responded to its report regarding Hatcher, who may hold both British and Australian passports.

Endro Soebekti Sadjilman, from the KPAB, said he had solid evidence of the alleged looting.

“We’ve heard he’s in Blanakan waters near Pamanukan in Subang [West Java],” he said. “The government must arrest him.”

Daniel Nafis, from the Institute for Strategic Interest and Development (INSIDe), a member of the consortium, claims Hatcher’s illegal salvage missions in Indonesia began with the discovery of the wreck of the Vec De Geldermalsen in East Bintan, Riau Islands, from which he recovered Chinese porcelain that was auctioned for $20 million.

That mission prompted the Indonesian government to establish Pannas BMKT, to monitor all salvage missions.

In 1999, Hatcher raised 365,000 porcelain items from the wreck of the Chinese junk Tek Sing, which ran aground off southern Sumatra in 1822, constituting the biggest find of its type ever.

On that mission, Nafis said, Hatcher worked with local operator PT Pratama Cakra Dirga.

“The government only found out about it from Australian customs officials,” he said. “They said 43 containers of porcelain were ready to be sent to Germany.”

In both cases, Hatcher’s destruction of the wrecks to get to the cargo drew the ire of the culture-heritage community.

The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea recognizes the “preferential rights” (and not claims) of the country of origin, cultural origin or historical/archeological origin, leaving a legal quandary over who can claim shipwrecks or their cargoes.

Since 2008 Hatcher has been seen in Blanakan with operator PT Comexindo Usaha Mandiri, which was only permitted to survey the area from 2009, Nafis said, meaning surveys before then were illegal.

“We have a copy of a letter from the local naval commander saying Hatcher’s and Comexindo’s activities there are illegal,” Nafis said.

“We filed a complaint with the Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries on April 14, but they haven’t done anything yet.”

Illegal salvaging is punishable under the 2002 Cultural and Heritage Objects Law by up to five years in prison and Rp 50 million ($5,500) in fines.

Former military intelligence officer Multo Wibisono said unchecked salvaging could draw in local officials and servicemen.

“My concern is that Navy personnel will go along to loot these national treasures,” he said.

Jhohannes Marbun, from the People’s Advocacy for Cultural Heritage, said local officials were likely on the take, pointing out Hatcher had never been denied entry into the country, despite being on the intelligence watch list.

German treasure hunters strike gold with English shipwreck

From the Telegraph.co.uk, JULY 30, 2009

German treasure hunters strike gold with English shipwreck

The wreck of a 19th century English ship loaded with gold and silver worth millions of pounds has been found by German adventurers in seas off Indonesia.

More than 1.5 tonnes of silver coins, gold jewellery, crystal, Chinese porcelain, cannon, muskets and 400 bottles of wine were recovered by the treasure hunters from the Forbes, a ship that ran aground between Borneo and Sumatra in 1806.

The team believes the value of the find to be at least 7 million euros (£6m).

"I found the first things during a survey and everything just looked encrusted but when I saw there was treasure like this I just couldn't believe my eyes," he said.

The Forbes was a prolific trading and buccaneering ship that had King George III's approval to attack and plunder foreign vessels.

It had raided at least one Chinese ship, as there was Ming dynasty porcelain on board, Mr Wenzel said.

The Forbes had carried opium and iron from Calcutta to the far east and was, according to the Asiatic Annual Register, on its way home with a "considerable amount" of loot and cargo.

But shortly after it raided a Dutch brig, both ships were driven onto a rock reef at five knots, the register writes.

The crew survived and piled into three lifeboats. Then, after "undergoing the greatest distresses from want of water and provisions under a scorching sun without an awning or anything to cover them" they were picked up by another English ship.

The Forbes' captain, a Scotsman named Frazer Sinclair, went on to skipper other English ships and was decorated by George III for his bold raids on foreign vessels.

National Archives records suggest Captain Sinclair died in 1816 and describe him as "Mariner of Calcutta".

Half the value of the treasure must be given to the Indonesian government under the salvage licence agreement but the German team plan to sell its share at auction, and use the money to finance future operations, Mr Wenzel said.

The adventurers are already eyeing another wreck that they believe may hold two tonnes of gold.

"This is an exciting hobby but an expensive one," Mr Wenzel said. "This is the biggest thing we've found." The Forbes salvage operation cost about 400,000 euros.

The wreck of the Forbes lay off Belitung Island, between Malaysian Borneo and Indonesian Sumatra, near the Strait of Malacca. The strait remains an important shipping route and has historically been a lucrative passage for pirates.

Mr Wenzel and his partner Klaus Keppler have spent up to 3 million euros searching Indonesian waters for wrecks. They have also found a 10th century wreck with ancient Chinese coins.

He said they scoured archives and libraries for documentary clues and also spoke to local fisherman to help pinpoint wrecks worth exploring.

Underwater 'safe' protects £5m shipwreck treasures

From Telegraph.co.ukA shipwreck containing £5million worth of ancient treasures is being protected by a cage, creating a giant underwater safe, in Croatia.

The second century Greek trading vessel lies on the sea bed off the coast of Cavtat.

Little remains of the wooden ship but its cargo of earthenware amphora - ceramic vases - still remain stacked row upon row.

Its cargo - one of the best preserved from an ancient wreck - has great historical significance and has an estimated value of £5m on the black market.

Croatian authorities are so concerned about looters plundering the valuable artefacts they have now protected the site - with a metal cage.

The heavy-duty cage features a large hinged door, which is kept locked with occasional access granted for divers under strict supervision.

Underwater photographer Neil Hope, of Torpoint in Cornwall, was among those given permission to dive the wreck.

He said: ''I'm an experienced diver and I've dived wrecks all over the world, but this was the most unique experience.

''I was taken down there by the man who discovered it. As soon as we were finished they closed the door and locked it up again.

''Obviously when you are inside you can't touch any of the cargo as it is very valuable, so they don't just let anyone inside the cage.

''You need excellent buoyancy skills so you're not damaging these valuable things.''

He was working on an assignment for the British Sub-Aqua Club's (BS-AC) DIVE magazine.

O Captain, My Captain

O Captain My Captain
a poem by Walt Whitman

O Captain my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up--for you the flag is flung for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

OSU scientist seeking underwater archaeology sites

From a press release:

CORVALLIS, Ore. th An Oregon State University scientist will begin probing undersea sediments off Isla Espíritu Santo in the Sea of Cortez this spring, searching for evidence of ancient peoples who may have lived in the region thousands of years ago before melting ice-age glaciers raised ocean levels.

(Media-Newswire.com) - CORVALLIS, Ore. – An Oregon State University scientist will begin probing undersea sediments off Isla Espíritu Santo in the Sea of Cortez this spring, searching for evidence of ancient peoples who may have lived in the region thousands of years ago before melting ice-age glaciers raised ocean levels.

If his techniques work, the OSU archaeologist hopes to begin in-depth near-shore surveys off the Pacific Northwest coast in hope of finding potential underwater archaeology sites that could help reveal when people first came to the western hemisphere.

Though it may sound like searching for a needle in a haystack, says OSU archaeologist Loren Davis, some of the same strategies apply as when searching for terrestrial dig sites.

“The ocean is way too big to conduct random sampling, so you want to look for locations where people would be,” said Davis, an associate professor in OSU’s Department of Anthropology. “The key is to determine where the shoreline was prior to about 6,000 years ago, then use the contours of this now-submerged landscape to determine where potential sites may be – such as near river channels, near estuaries, or on certain points of land.”

The project is more than speculative; Davis and his colleagues already have made one foray into the waters off Isla Espíritu Santo in 2008 and were able to locate a probable archaeological site on the west side of the island. The team chose the area for a pilot project because they had excavated an early terrestrial shell midden site nearby. The ancient peoples who had made the early shell midden would have accessed marine resources from a coastline now submerged beneath the sea.

“It didn’t hurt that the water is much shallower, warmer and clearer than you get off Oregon,” he added with a laugh.

With funding from OSU’s Bernice Huber Charitable Trust, Davis and his colleagues did some initial surveys in 2006 using simple tools – a small motorboat, a fish finder and a handheld GPS instrument – to obtain data on the seafloor’s bathymetry. They used these data to create digital maps of what the coastal landscape would look like if the ocean was about 50 meters lower.

Based on the digital model, they chose an area between a tiny island and Isla Espíritu Santo, at the convergence between a submerged estuary and a rocky headland, which would offer a range of marine species for ancient peoples.

The National Geographic Society was impressed with the team’s predictive model and provided funding in 2008 for limited test excavations in underwater locales. Though limited to handheld tools, Davis and his colleagues found multiple piles of shells as well as stones that appeared to have been altered and used as tools by prehistoric peoples.

But Davis is cautious about reading too much into the findings.

“You’d expect to find shells in the ocean, but the distribution of shells was curious because they were largely limited to marine animals that had some kind of economic value to coastal foragers – pearl oysters and other big, meaty clams,” Davis said. “At other random locations along the island, we found much greater diversity, with as many as 37 different species. So the shells appeared to be possibly discarded by people, not random.

“We also recovered stones with features that are consistent with prehistoric tool production; however, many things can alter the appearance of stone and we must eliminate the possibility that natural processes created these items,” he added. “At the end of the day, though, we determined that if we had found the same evidence on land, we would have called that a viable archaeological site.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concurred, and is funding a return trip for Davis and colleagues from the University of California at Santa Barbara to explore more of Isla Espíritu Santo. This time, Davis and UCSB scientists Mike Glassow and Amy Gusick hope to create a more detailed map of the undersea terrain and use more powerful equipment to retrieve core samples and to facilitate large excavation of underwater sites.

Davis said he hopes the techniques are successful enough to encourage funding from federal agencies or private donors to begin exploring the waters off Oregon for similar sites.

“More than half of Oregon’s archaeology sites are likely located offshore, out to 30 miles or so,” Davis said. “And we think we can find them.”

Davis and his colleagues have created an initial reconstruction of what the central Oregon coastline was like some 15,000 years ago and point to a large area they call Heceta Bay, into which drained the ancient Alsea and Siuslaw rivers. That bay would have been half as large as San Francisco Bay, Davis said, and its estuaries would have drawn early peoples for its clams, mussels, crab, oysters, fish and other food sources.

Another potential location is off Brookings, where Rainbow Rock extends its formation of glassy chert into the Pacific Ocean. Ideal for making stone tools, the rocky outcrop would have “drawn people like a beacon,” Davis said.

Finding precise areas where ancient settlements or camps were located, when they are under a couple hundred feet of rugged Pacific Ocean, won’t be easy, Davis admits. The first step is to use new data, including seafloor mapping now under way by OSU oceanographer Chris Goldfinger, to determine where old river channels might be. Submerged river valleys, he reasons, are great places for ancient sediments – and any sites they might contain – to be preserved along Oregon’s offshore areas.

When the scientists can hone in on potential hotspots, Davis said, they would need to use remote sensing equipment to image the sub-seafloor, then take a series of core samples to evaluate whether ancient terrestrial sediments are preserved.

“Oregon’s turbulent past does make this a difficult area in which to work,” Davis said. “Past earthquakes will have caused undersea landslides that shift the sediments and the subduction of the tectonic plates no doubt has further distorted the terrain. But we think that there are a lot of viable sites right off our coastline that could provide a wealth of scientific information.”

And what does he hope to find?

“The magic number is 14,500 calendar years ago,” Davis said. “That’s when the accepted evidence points to human habitation at sites from Monte Verde, Chile, to Oregon. But people didn’t arrive overnight. It is likely that they begin arriving earlier, perhaps by 15,500 years ago – and the evidence of their arrival is likely just a few miles off our own coastline.”

About the OSU College of Liberal Arts: The College of Liberal Arts includes the fine and performing arts, humanities and social sciences, making it one of the largest and most diverse colleges at OSU. The college's research and instructional faculty members contribute to the education of all university students and provide national and international leadership, creativity and scholarship in their academic disciplines.

Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies

Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies
a poem by William Shakespeare

Full Fathom Five thy Father lies
(Ariels's song from The Tempest)

Full fathom five thy Father lies,
Of his bones are Corrall made:
Those are pearles that were his eies,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a Sea-change
Into something rich & strange
Sea-Nymphs hourly ring his knell.
Harke now I heare them, ding-dong, bell.

Meteorite hunters seek 'treasure' in Wisconsin

This is from April 17, 2010

Meteorite hunters seek 'treasure' in Wisconsin

LIVINGSTON, WISC. -- Treasure hunters took to the fields at sunrise Saturday, canvassing miles of open farmland in southwestern Wisconsin for fragments of a meteorite that crashed Wednesday night.

Armed with metal detectors and magnets, a rag-tag ensemble of scientists, professional meteorite hunters and amateurs raced to find the rare space relics some say could help unlock the secrets of the universe.

"To think about where these came from and how long it took to get here is really remarkable," said Karl Aston, 51, an amateur hunter from St. Louis who drove to Wisconsin with a partner this week to join the search. "Some people treat it like a real treasure hunt, but others are in it for the science."

Using radar equipment and computer analysis, hunters estimate the pieces of Wednesday's rather large meteorite could be spread out over nine miles or more in this corner of Wisconsin.

And with marble-size chunks of rock fetching a few hundred dollars or more on the open market, there's a lot of incentive out there, said Joe Kerchner, 31, an amateur hunter from Mendota, Ill., a few miles outside of Rockford.

Steve Arnold, 55, a professional meteorite collector from Elign, heard about the crash earlier in the week but waited until Saturday to make the nearly four-hour drive to Livingston.

"Yeah, I had to work," he said with a shrug.

Arnold said he's been collecting and selling meteorite fragments for 11 years, but that Saturday's hunt was only the second time he has been able to physically participate. The first time was the Park Forest meteorite that crashed through a residential home in 2003.

"I've only got one day out here, so I'm going to try to make the most of it," Arnold said.

Starting at daybreak, hunters fanned out across acres of open wheat and soybean fields and dairy farms. Since meteorite fragments have a magnetic pull, hunters wave magnets attached to the ends of rods over rocks, dirt and brush.

The meteorite crash came at a particularly difficult time for local farmers, who are now beginning the growing season, said Paul Sipiera, an adjunct curator of meteorites for the Field Museum, who rushed up to Wisconsin to take part of the search.

"Farmers need to get their crops in the ground and they have all these people swarming their fields," Sipiera said.

"There are probably hundreds to thousands of pieces scattered out there," said Terry Boudreax, a private meteorite collector from Lake Forest who was among the first to find a rock fragment from Wednesday's meteorite crash.

Since the larger pieces command more money and are more valuable to scientists, search parties are hunting for the "main mass" of the meteorite, which is the intact center.

"Finding a meteorite (fragment) is rare enough," Boudreax said. "Finding the main mass is much, much rarer."

Meteorite hunters seek 'treasure' in Wisconsin
April 17, 2010 10:31 AM | No Comments

Geocachers part of citywide cleanup effort

A local news article, but I thought the idea of geocachers was an appropriate one for a treasure hunter's blog. It's all part of the lust of the hunt. And these guys are ecologically conscious, with it.

Geocachers part of citywide cleanup effort

Ehud Torres carried a black trash bag as he and two friends picked up discarded cans, wrappers and other garbage out of the brush Saturday morning along a path in the Skyline Wilderness Area.

The ground was soggy, and the strong winds whipped around the three members of the Black Hills geocaching group, but the dreary weather did not detour them from participating in the 40th annual Rapid City Clean Up Day.

Geocaching is a treasure-hunting game played throughout the world using GPS devices; players locate hidden containers and log finds online.

Despite the cold, Torres still enjoyed spending the morning outside and cleaning up the area for others to enjoy.

“Look where we live. We live in the Black Hills,” Torres said. “It’s beautiful.”

The local geocaching group was one of about 50 groups scheduled to clean up different sections of Rapid City on Saturday.

About 30 members of the organization picked up trash around the Skyline Drive area, which is a popular spot for the members, since about 14 caches are located in the area, according to Mark Klewicki, event coordinator for the group.

“We decided rain or shine we would do it,” Klewicki said. “Most people here believe in taking care of the environment.”

In fact, geocaching and environmental consciousness go hand in hand. Saturday was also the geocaching world’s environmental initiative, Cache In Trash Out day. Geocachers are encouraged to take along trash bags and pick up garbage anytime they look for caches.

As they were picking up garbage, Torres and Jared Hannon, 9, found one of the hidden caches with the help of Hannon’s father, Troy Hannon, who had found it on another day. Troy Hannon introduced Torres to the game. Both are airmen at Ellsworth Air Force Base; Torres used to be one of Hannon’s troops.

Across town at the city landfill, area residents went on a different kind of treasure hunt at the Trash to Treasure exchange. Anyone could drop off or take items from a designated area throughout the day.

George Nalley of Piedmont hauled in a truck and trailer full of school desks, computer towers and printers and brought home a dishwasher he picked from the treasure pile.

“I look forward to this week because it’s a free way to clean up stuff,” Nalley said. “The more trash I get, the less it looks like treasure.”

Kevin Hayes and his two stepchildren, Kortney Scheffert, 12, and Trevor Whitehead, 9, sifted through the discarded items. They took home a bicycle, boat parts and an antelope decoy.

Hayes’ only regret was not being able to bring in his own things for the program because of the rain.

“I think it’s a good way to keep from filling the landfill up,” said Hayes, of Hermosa.

Jerry Wright, the city’s solid waste superintendent, said anything left over from the Trash to Treasure exchange would be either discarded or recycled.

“We won’t throw anything good away,” Wright said.

Area residents could also dump trash at the landfill for free all day Saturday.

"Old Ironsides" by Oliver Wendell Holmes

There's no mystery about "Old Ironsides."

USS Constitution is a wooden-hulled, three-masted heavy frigate of the United States Navy. Named by President George Washington after the Constitution of the United States of America, she is the oldest commissioned naval vessel afloat in the world.[Note 1] Launched in 1797, Constitution was one of the six original frigates authorized for construction by the Naval Act of 1794. Joshua Humphreys designed these frigates to be the young Navy's capital ships, and so Constitution and her sisters were larger and more heavily armed and built than the standard frigates of the period. Built in Boston, Massachusetts at Edmund Hartt's shipyard, her first duties with the newly formed United States Navy were to provide protection for American merchant shipping during the Quasi War with France and to defeat the Barbary pirates in the First Barbary War.

Constitution is most famous for her actions during the War of 1812 against Great Britain, when she captured numerous merchant ships and defeated five British warships: HMS Guerriere, Java, Pictou, Cyane and Levant. The battle with Guerriere earned her the nickname of "Old Ironsides" and public adoration that has repeatedly saved her from scrapping. She continued to actively serve the nation as flagship in the Mediterranean and African squadrons and circled the world in the 1840s. During the American Civil War she served as a training ship for the United States Naval Academy and carried artwork and industrial displays to the Paris Exposition of 1878. Retired from active service in 1881, she served as a receiving ship until designated a museum ship in 1907. In 1931 she started a three year 90-port tour of the nation and in 1997 she finally sailed again under her own power for her 200th birthday.

Constitution's mission today is to promote understanding of the Navy’s role in war and peace through educational outreach, historic demonstration, and active participation in public events. As a fully commissioned US Navy ship, her crew of 60 officers and sailors participate in ceremonies, educational programs and special events while keeping the ship open to visitors year-round and providing free tours. The officers and crew are all active-duty US Navy personnel and the assignment is considered special duty in the Navy. Traditionally, command of the vessel is assigned to a Navy Commander. She is berthed at Pier 1 of the former Charlestown Navy Yard, at one end of Boston's Freedom Trail.

I just wanted to share this poem:

Old Ironsides
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
September 16, 1830
Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon's roar;--
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more.

Her deck, once red with heroes' blood,
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o'er the flood,
And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor's tread,
Or know the conquered knee;--
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea!

Oh, better that her shattered bulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,
The lightning and the gale!

"The harpies of the shore." I love that line. That's what should be addressed to everyone who tries to prevent space exploration, as well as anyone who wants to dare great things but is prevented by red-tape, etc.

Shipwrecks sought by Odyssey Marine

I haven't talked about this organization in a while...

HMS Victory
SS Republic
Black Swan
HMS Sussex
Tortugas
Blue China

Here's what their site says about HMS Victory:

HMS Victory Project Overview
Now Online: HMS Victory, A First-Rate Royal Navy Warship Wrecked in the English Channel, 1744. Preliminary Survey & Identification

One of the world's greatest maritime mysteries was solved when Odyssey Marine Exploration discovered the shipwreck of HMS Victory, lost in 1744 under the command of Admiral Sir John Balchin. The direct predecessor and inspiration behind Nelson's flagship, Balchin's Victory was the mightiest and most technically advanced vessel of her age. She was lost during a storm with all hands and was the last Royal Navy warship to be lost at sea with a complete complement of bronze cannon. Two of the greatest admirals in English history, Sir John Norris and Sir John Balchin called her their flagship. Research indicates that Balchin's Victory sank with a substantial amount of gold and silver specie aboard.

Odyssey has been cooperating closely with the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence (MOD) on the project, and all activities at the site have been conducted in accordance with protocols agreed with MOD and Royal Navy officials. On September 18, 2009, Odyssey announced it reached an agreement with the UK Government on a salvage award for the cannon recovered from the site. The company will be participating in the ongoing process of consultation to determine the approaches that should be adopted towards the wreck. Terms of the collaboration between Odyssey and the UK MOD on the project are currently being negotiated.

Odyssey discovered the site nearly 100 km from where the ship was historically believed to have been wrecked on a reef near the Channel Islands. In an operation conducted in cooperation with the MOD, Odyssey has completed an archaeological pre-disturbance survey of the site, conducted limited test trenching, and recovered two bronze cannon to confirm the identity of the shipwreck. The cannon recovered include a 12-pounder featuring the royal arms of George II and a 4 ton, 42-pounder bearing the crest of George I. The huge 42-pounder recovered is the only known example of a gun of this type and size currently in existence on dry land. The only other artifacts recovered to date were two small brick fragments that were brought into U.S. federal court in order to file an admiralty arrest of the site.

During these operations, evidence was discovered of substantial damage to the site from natural deterioration, scouring, extensive fishing trawl net damage and the intrusion of modern trash and debris. Read more in Dr. Sean Kingsley's archaeological paper, Deep-Sea Fishing Impacts on the Shipwreck of the English Channel & Western Approaches (2009).

Today's the Day

If you read the paperback version of The Navigator, by Clive Cussler and Paul Kemprecos, on pg 257, Chapter 25 begins:

"Today's the day," Paul Trout said with steely determination.

He's talking about winning a fishing competition with his wife, but the sentence is also an in-joke. "Today's the day" is what treasure hunter Mel Fisher said every day for a decade before he and his team found the Atocha.

Several posts ago, I made mention of Art McKee, the "grandfather of treasure hunters". He's the one who started it all, back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, after World War II.

The book I was referencing was Sunken Treasure: Six Who Found Fortunes, by Robert F. Burgess, first published in 1988. It's an annoying book, for me, because while Burgess tells the stories of these men's famous finds, he doesn't give any dates (except the ancient ones) so its impossible to compile a decent chronology of when they found their treasures.

The men covered are:

Art McKee, The treasure hunter's treasure hunter
Kip Wagner: Beachcomber's reward
Robert Marx: Incorrigible adventurer
Burt D. Webber: High tech adventurter
Barry Clifford: Pirate Hunter
Melvin Fisher: Today's the day

CSS Arkansas: Cussler's search

Cussler recounts his search for the Arkansas in his book, The Sea Hunters (1996).

In November 1981, Cussler set out to look for the CSS Arkansas.

Cussler says that he ran an ad in the Wall Street Journal: "Men wanted to fund search for historic shipwrecks. Some danger. Much frustration. Long, tedious hours at sea. Failure often possible. Return on investment unlikely. Great personal satisfaction when successful.

According to Cussler, he receieved only two replies - just curiosity seekers, - and no offers of funding.

How disappointing! I would have thought people would have jumped at the chance. I would have jumped at the chance. But perhaps they recognized the name and just thought it was a stunt for his book...

Cussler, Colonel Walt Schob, and a piece of equipment called the Schonstedt gradiometer, "hunted up and down the Nississippi River and discovered the Confederat ironclads Manassas, Louisiana, and Arkansas.

"The best piece of advice I can give anyone who is looking for a historic site in a small town is to head directly to the sheriff or police chief's office. Explain what you are hoping to accomplish and ask for his help and blessing. By being straightforward and honest, I have yet to encounter problems, and have always received a warm welcome and friendly cooperation. Too often, strangers poking around a small town's river or fields are treated with undisguised suspicion by the local residents, but if you tell them the sheriff is behind your project, you're always greeted like an old friend."

In this case, Sheriff Bergeron loaned Cussler his search boat.

"We began our search above Free Negro Point at Mulatto Bend Landing, four miles north of Baton Rouge. This was recordec as the site where Arkansas was run aground by her crew before she was put to the torch. The only question was, how far did she drift around and below the bend before she actually sunk?"

Cussler read a book, A Confederate Girl's Diary, by Sarah Morgan Dawson, which mentioned the Arkansas.

"Her account put the ironclad precisely on the west bank at the river's bend when the crew set it on fire."

Dismmising other reports that seemed unreliable for a variety of reasons, Cussler started his search for the Arkansas ... and found it.

(He recounts that he started at the furthest possible point he thought the ship could have sunk, and worked backesrdf from there.

"It's called 'not knowing where it is, but knowing where it ain't."

Cussler turned their findings over to the Louisiana State archeologists, who confirmed their findings.

Magazine: Archaeology

Archaeology.
www.archaeology.org
Published by the Archeological Institute of America
Bimonthly publication

Here's the table of contents for the May/June 2010 issue:

Features:
Bog bodies rediscovered: True tales from the peat marshes of northern Europe
Fall of a Sacred Fortress: The origins of ritual warfare in ancient Peru
Infdia's Village of the Dead: an exclusive look at a little known Iron Age cemetery
Child's Play: Excavated toys and games reflect the chaning experience of childhood in New Mexico
Layers of the past: Combing data from two centuries' worth of images creates a new view of the ancient Near East

Departments
In this issue
From the president
Letters
From the trenches
Commentary
Conversation
Insider
Letter from Canada
Artifact

On the web:
Exclusive features
Interactive digs
More from this issue
Archaeological news from the around the world, updated every weekday.

CSS Arkansas - history

Clive Cussler writes about the CSS Arkansas in his first Sea Hunters book, written with Craig Dirgo.

First - the history

July, 1862
The Confederate ironclad Arkansas heads down the Yazoo River, "prined and ready for battle."

Its Captain is Isaac Brown, who has served 27 years in the US Navy before resigning to take up the cause of the Confedracy. The chief engineer is George City.

The main problem with the Arkansas, and indeed, most Confederate ships, were that the engines were never very reliable. One or the other of the two engines stops, causing the craft to steam in circles.

The Arkansas steams down the Yazoo. First it meets a small fleet, consisting of the USS Carondelet, the ram Queen of the West, and a gunboat, the Tyler.

Crippling the Carondelet, the Arkansas continues on, running straight into the 37 warships of the Union Mississippi River Squadron.

The Arkansas passes through the ships, and the smoke from so many guns covers the water like a fog. The Union ceases firing, to let the smoke clear.

Badly damaged, the ironclad manages to steam past this fleet as well. It comes under the protection of the gun batteries above Vicksburg.

Nevertheless, below Vicksburg, Union batteries begin firing on the ship the next day. The Arkansas steams into the fray, does some damage, but is damaged in turn, with more men injured and killed.

After a few days, repairs made, the Arkansas sets out once more to attack the Union fleet, steaming down 300-miles to Baton Rouge. The captain is not on board, resting from his wounds. Lt. Stevens is in charge.

Although the ship reaches Baton Route, one of the engines quits. She is grounded and scuttled by her crew.

From launch to death, she lasted 23 days.

Ophir

Just been reading The Navigator, a Kurt Austin/NUMA adventure by Paul Kemprecos and Clive Cussler. Pedestrian writing as usual, but the historical stuff, fascinating.

Here's info on Ophir from Wikipedia.

Ophir is a port or region mentioned in the Bible, famous for its wealth. King Solomon is supposed to have received a cargo of gold, silver, sandalwood, precious stones, ivory, apes and peacocks from Ophir, every three years.

Ophir in Genesis 10 (the Table of Nations) is said to be the name of one of the sons of Joktan. Biblical references to the land of Ophir are also found in 1 Kings 9:28; 10:11; 22:49; 1 Chronicles 29:4; 2 Chronicles 8:18; Book of Job 22:24; 28:16; Psalms 45:9; Isaiah 13:12.

—John Masefield, "Cargoes"
Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.
[edit] In pre-Islamic literature
Details about the three of Joktan's sons, Sheba, Ophir and Havilah, were preserved in a tradition known in divergent forms from three pre-Islamic Arabic and Ethiopic sources: the Kitab al-Magall (part of Clementine literature), the Cave of Treasures, and the Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan.

The Kitab al-Magall states that in the days of Reu, a king of Saba (Sheba) named "Pharoah" annexed Ophir and Havilah to his kingdom, and "built Ophir with stones of gold, for the stones of its mountains are pure gold."

In the Cave of Treasures, this appears as: "And the children of Ophir, that is, Send, appointed to be their king Lophoron, who built Ophir with stones of gold; now, all the stones that are in Ophir are of gold."

The version in the Conflict of Adam and Eve says: "Phar’an reigned over the children of Saphir [Ophir], and built the city of Saphir with stones of gold; and that is the land of Sarania, and because of these stones of gold, they say that the mountains of that country and the stones thereof are all of gold."

[edit] Theorized or conjectural locations
Biblical scholars, archaeologists and others have tried to determine the exact location of Ophir. Vasco da Gama's companion Tomé Lopes reasoned that Ophir would have been the ancient name for Great Zimbabwe in Zimbabwe, the main center of sub-African trade in gold in the Renaissance period — though the ruins at Great Zimbabwe are now dated to the medieval era, long after Solomon is said to have lived. The identification of Ophir with Sofala in Mozambique was mentioned by Milton in Paradise Lost (11:399-401), among many other works of literature and science.

On the other hand, the theologian Benito Arias Montano (1571) proposed finding Ophir in the name of Peru, reasoning that the native Peruvians were thus descendants of Ophir and Shem.

In the 19th century Max Müller and other scholars identified Ophir with Abhira, at the mouth of the Indus River in modern-day Pakistan. Another possibility is the African shore of the Red Sea, with the name perhaps being derived from the Afar people of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti. Most modern scholars still place Ophir either on the coast of either Pakistan or India, in what is now Poovar, or somewhere in southwest Arabia in the region of modern Yemen. This is also the assumed location of Sheba. Saudi Arabia's cradle of gold, Mahd adh Dhahab.

Other assumptions vary as widely as the theorized locations of Atlantis. Portuguese mythology locates it in Ofir, a place in Fão, Esposende. Easton's Bible Dictionary (1897) adds a connection to "Sofir," the Coptic name for India. Josephus connected it with "Cophen, an Indian river, and in part of Asia adjoining to it," (Antiquities of the Jews I:6), sometimes associated with a part of Afghanistan.

In 1568 Alvaro Mendaña discovered the Solomon Islands, and named them as such because he believed them to be Ophir.[1]

Proponents of pre-Columbian connections between Eurasia and the Americas have suggested even more distant locations such as modern-day Peru or Brazil. Author on topics in alternative history David Hatcher Childress goes so far as to suggest that Ophir was located in Australia; proposing that the cargoes of gold, silver and precious stones were obtained from mines in the continent's north-west, and that ivory, sandalwood and peacocks were obtained in South Asia on the voyage back to Canaan.[2]

In a book found in Spain entitled Collecion General de Documentos Relativos a las Islas Filipinas, the author has described how to locate Ophir. According to the section "Document No. 98", dated 1519-1522, Ophir can be found by travelling from the Cape of Good Hope in Africa, to India, to Burma, to Sumatra, to Moluccas, to Borneo, to Sulu, to China, then finally Ophir. Ophir was said to be "[...] in front of China towards the sea, of many islands where the Moluccans, Chinese, and Lequios met to trade..." Jes Tirol asserts that this group of islands could not be Japan because the Moluccans did not get there, nor Taiwan, since it is not composed of "many islands." Only the present-day Philippines, he says, could fit the description. Spanish records also mention the presence of Lequious (big, bearded white men, probably descendants of the Phoenicians, whose ships were always laden with gold and silver) in the Islands to gather gold and silver.[3] Other evidence has also been pointed out suggesting that the Philippines was the biblical Ophir.[4][5][6][7]

[edit] Former Israeli settlement
The Israeli settlement created in the 1970s at Sharm el-Sheikh in Sinai was called Ophirah (אופירה), Hebrew for "Towards Ophir" - since its location on the Red Sea was on the route supposedly traversed by King Solomon's ships en route to Ophir.

The settlement was evacuated in 1982, under the terms of the Israeli-Egyptian Peace Treaty, and the name fell out of use.

[edit] In fiction

Cover page of Hadon of Ancient Opar by Philip José Farmer.Ophir is the subject of H. Rider Haggard's novel King Solomon's Mines, which places the lost city in South Africa.

Ophir is also a kingdom in Robert Howard's Conan the Barbarian series of stories; see Hyborian Age for more information.

Several of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan novels happen in and around the lost city of Opar, deep in the African jungles — with Opar evidently being another name for Ophir. The city appears in The Return of Tarzan (1913), Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar (1916), Tarzan and the Golden Lion (1923), and Tarzan the Invincible (1930).

Philip José Farmer took up the theme from the Tarzan books and wrote two books of his own, taking place in Opar at the height of its glory thousands of years ago: Hadon of Ancient Opar and Flight to Opar.

Wilbur Smith's novel The Sunbird is set in ancient Ophir (called Opet) and its modern ruins.

Ophir is the name of the Nordic Utopia in M. M. Scherbatov's 1784 novel "Putishestvie v zemliu ofirskuiu" ("Voyage to Ophir").

Clive Cussler's The Navigator places the mines of Ophir on the eastern seaboard of the United States, postulating a pre-Columbian voyage by the Phoenicians.

The Treasure Hunter's Roadshow - bogus!

The title of this show is rather bogus, it's nothing to do with treasure hunting. It's just an evocative name for a different version of the Antiques Roadshow...only here the people can actually sell their belongings right away.

Thousands of little tragedies...as people try to sell items they've probably collected for a lifetime...

Treasure Hunters Road Show: Some sell; some don't

For Lynne Keightley, selling her diamond ring Friday at the Treasure Hunters Roadshow was a no-brainer.

“I am divorced,” she said.

Keightley did not want to disclose how much she got for the ring but said she wanted to buy an SUV.

“I may use it to get out of Texas,” she laughed.

The Treasure Hunters Roadshow, sponsored by the International Collectors Association, winds up today, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Holiday Inn Express, 3112 S. Clack St.

On Friday, men and women waited in line to have the buyers evaluate their antiques, and in some cases purchase, mementos that once belonged to an aunt or grandparent. Some were laughing but others were somber, thinking of selling a favorite childhood memory or that of their mother or father.

Barbara Wright, manager of the show, said a team of four people travels three weeks out of every month then takes off a week. Wright said 55 teams travel all over the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

A dealer can look at a diamond ring, a 100-year-old coin or doll, check a computer database and find who is looking for such an item. The dealer also can see what similar items are worth.

“We have 6,000 prospective buyers on our database,” Wright said.

Wright said one of the most unusual things she had seen in the show was a 1930s barber kit complete with a jar of powder to stop bleeding after someone shaved with the straight razor.

J.T. Scott and Danny Johnson, both of Ranger, drove in with a table and chairs in their truck and numerous other items. They sat waiting their turn in line holding boxes of smaller items.

Johnson had a Coca-Cola sign and a 1920s sign that warned people where to locate an underground telephone line. He also had a cookie jar that once belonged to his family.

“I remember putting my hand in it and got a cookie in the 1950s,” he said.

Some made a family affair out of the road show.

Linda Barron and her mother, Dorothy Cason, brought some items that had been in the family for 100 years or more. Some of the items had belonged to an aunt who died at the age of 98.

The buyer offered the two ladies $75 for a piano stool, but they decided to keep it.

“If you hold on to the stool, it will get more valuable,” the buyer told them.

Gayland Mitchell of Merkel had a box containing a “Buddy L” steam shovel, trailer and truck. He was waiting in line to see if the toys had value.

“I helped a lady move, and she gave them to me,” he said. “I used to have some of them when I was young.”

Wright, the show manager, said her team buys gold, silver, diamonds and other valuables. She said sports cards were big sellers and that some of them sell well. Wright showed three or four that were valued at $600 or more.

“The slow economy has brought more people to sell their collectibles,” she said.

The art of the anagram - or why a treasure hunter should learn Latin

One of the most popular movies a few years ago was Nic Cage's National Treasure. (Would that the sequel would have been as good, but they so rarely are!) The whole theme of the movie was that freemasons from over 200 years ago had left all kinds of cryptic clues to the location of their treasure.

Another, even more famous book (I don't think the movie did quite as good!) was Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, which had cryptic clues from as far back as Leonardo DaVinci (1452 – 1519).

(As far as that goes, take a look at the Last Supper, painted by Da Vinci. Clearly, that disciple to the left of Jesus is a woman!


But...what is it with all these anagrams and codes and things. Did people really do this type of thing, and if so, why?

Well, they did do it, for a variety of reasons. Remember that when the Catholic Church was all powerful, the Inquisition had the power to torture and kill heretics. And if you believed that the earth moved around the sun, instead of the sun around the earth, you could be branded a heretic and burned at the stake.

Similarly, scientists - or natural philosophers, as they were known in thise days, as the term "science" had not been invented, were rivals, each trying to find new things before the other.

Here's an example, from Isaac Newton. Isaac Asimov wrote about it in his essay, "The Seventh Planet", in 1968.

Prior to 1610, people could not see the planets well enough to tell if they were discs, or pinpoints of light. Pinpoints of light are stars, discs are planets. And even if they could see discs, they couldn't see if the discs had phases, like the moon. (New moon, half moon, quarter moon, etc.) If the planets did have phases, it would mean that Copernicus theory, that the planets revolved around the stars, was caorrect. (Copernicus didn't publish his theory until he was on his deathbed, so the Church couldn't come after him. Even then, they still tried to destroy all copies of his book that stated his theory.)

According to simov:

"In September 1610, Galileo turned his telescope on Venus and found that it more than half-Venus.

Galileo was enough of a scientist not to want to rush into print half-cocked. It was important that he follow Venus all through its orbit and make sure that its phases followed in order, precisely according to Copernican predictions. On the other hand, he was enough of a self-centered human being not to want to lose credit for the discovery simply because he was being cautious.

He therefore published the following Latin sentence in the little newsletter he was putting out concerning his investigations:

Haec immatura a me iam frustra leguntur, o.y.

This means, "In vain were these things gathered by me today, prematurely." This is a sort of dim hint that he was onto something he was not yet ready to disclose, but the sentence was an anagram and when the letters were rearranged it gave the true nature of his doiscovery. (The o.y. at the end was needed to make the anagram come out correctly.)

Rearrangedm, the sentence was

Cynthiae figuras aemulatur mater amorum.

This means, "The mother of love imitates the appearance of Cynthia."

Galileo was being figurative in an age in which intellectual society knew their Greek myhs. Cytnia is a "classical epithet" for the moon, and who else could the "mother of love" be but Venus, mother of Eros (love).

So in effect he was saying, Venus displays phases like the moon.

There is one mysterious manuscript from the past that has never been deciphered, and many people think it's a hoax. What do you think?

The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious book thought to have been written in the 15th or 16th century and comprising about 240 vellum pages of handwritten text,[1] of which the majority have illustrations. The text of the manuscript has never been deciphered, and the author, script, and language remain unknown.

Since its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II fame, all of whom failed to decrypt any portion of the text. This string of failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into a famous subject of historical cryptology, but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is simply an elaborate hoax—a meaningless sequence of arbitrary symbols.

The book is named after the Polish-American book dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912. Currently the Voynich manuscript is stored in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University as item "MS 408". The first facsimile edition was published in 2005.

By current estimates, the book originally had 272 pages in 17 quires of 16 pages each.[4] About 240 vellum pages remain today, and gaps in the page numbering (which seems to be later than the text) indicate that several pages were already missing when Voynich acquired it. A quill pen was used for the text and figure outlines, and colored paint was applied (somewhat crudely) to the figures, possibly at a later date. There is strong evidence that at one point in time, the pages of the book were arranged in a different order.

The text was clearly written from left to right, with a slightly ragged right margin. Longer sections are broken into paragraphs, sometimes with "bullets" in the left margin. There is no obvious punctuation. The ductus flows smoothly, suggesting that the scribe understood the words as he wrote. The manuscript therefore gives the impression that the symbols were not enciphered, otherwise the individual characters would have had to be calculated before being written. However, it is possible to write somewhat fluently in other codes.

The text consists of over 170,000 discrete glyphs, usually separated from each other by narrow gaps. Most of the glyphs are written with one or two simple pen strokes. While there is some dispute as to whether certain glyphs are distinct or not, an alphabet with 20–30 glyphs would account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen rarer characters that occur only once or twice each.

Wider gaps divide the text into about 35,000 "words" of varying length. These seem to follow phonetic or orthographic laws of some sort; e.g. certain characters must appear in each word (like the vowels in English), some characters never follow others, and some may be doubled but others may not.

Statistical analysis of the text reveals patterns similar to those of natural languages. For instance, the word entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of English or Latin texts. Some words occur only in certain sections, or in only a few pages; others occur throughout the manuscript. There are very few repetitions among the thousand or so "labels" attached to the illustrations. In the herbal section, the first word on each page occurs only on that page and may be the name of the plant.

On the other hand, the Voynich manuscript's "language" is quite unlike European languages in several aspects. Firstly, there are practically no words comprising more than ten glyphs, yet there are also few one- or two-letter words. The distribution of letters within words is also rather peculiar: some characters only occur at the beginning of a word, some only at the end, and some always in the middle section. While Semitic alphabets have many letters that are written differently depending on whether they occur at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a word, letters of the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek alphabets are generally written the same way regardless of their position within a word (the exception being the Greek letter Sigma).

The text seems to be more repetitive than typical European languages; there are instances where the same common word appears up to three times in a row. Words that differ only by one letter also repeat with unusual frequency.

There are only a few words in the manuscript written in a seemingly Latin script. On the last page, there are four lines of writing that are written in (rather distorted) Latin letters, except for two words in the main script. The lettering resembles European alphabets of the 15th century, but the words do not seem to make sense in any language. Also, a series of diagrams in the "astronomical" section has the names of ten of the months (from March to December) written in Latin script, with spelling suggestive of the medieval languages of France or the Iberian Peninsula. However, it is not known whether these bits of Latin script were part of the original text or were added later.

Illustrations

A detail from the "biological" section of the manuscriptThe illustrations of the manuscript shed little light on the precise nature of its text but imply that the book consists of six "sections", with different styles and subject matter. Except for the last section, which contains only text, almost every page contains at least one illustration. Following are the sections and their conventional names:

Herbal. Each page displays one plant (sometimes two) and a few paragraphs of text—a format typical of European herbals of the time. Some parts of these drawings are larger and cleaner copies of sketches seen in the "pharmaceutical" section (below). None of the plants depicted are unambiguously identifiable.

Astronomical. Contains circular diagrams, some of them with suns, moons, and stars, suggestive of astronomy or astrology. One series of 12 diagrams depicts conventional symbols for the zodiacal constellations (two fish for Pisces, a bull for Taurus, a hunter with crossbow for Sagittarius, etc.). Each of these has 30 women figures arranged in two or more concentric bands. Most of the females are at least partly naked, and each holds what appears to be a labeled star or is shown with the star attached by what could be a tether or cord of some kind to either arm. The last two pages of this section (Aquarius and Capricornus, roughly January and February) were lost, while Aries and Taurus are split into four paired diagrams with 15 women and 15 stars each. Some of these diagrams are on fold-out pages.

Biological. A dense continuous text interspersed with figures, mostly showing small naked women bathing in pools or tubs connected by an elaborate network of pipes, some of them clearly shaped like body organs. Some of the women wear crowns.

Cosmological. More circular diagrams, but of an obscure nature. This section also has foldouts; one of them spans six pages and contains a map or diagram, with nine "islands" connected by "causeways", castles, and what may be a volcano.
Pharmaceutical. Many labeled drawings of isolated plant parts (roots, leaves, etc.); objects resembling apothecary jars drawn along the margins; and a few text paragraphs.

Recipes. Many short paragraphs, each marked with a flower- or star-like "bullet".

Purpose
The overall impression given by the surviving leaves of the manuscript is that it was meant to serve as a pharmacopoeia or to address topics in medieval or early modern medicine. However, the puzzling details of illustrations have fueled many theories about the book's origins, the contents of its text, and the purpose for which it was intended.

The first section of the book is almost certainly herbal, but attempts to identify the plants, either with actual specimens or with the stylized drawings of contemporary herbals, have largely failed. Only a couple of plants (including a wild pansy and the maidenhair fern) can be identified with some certainty. Those herbal pictures that match pharmacological sketches appear to be clean copies of these, except that missing parts were completed with improbable-looking details. In fact, many of the plant drawings in the herbal section seem to be composite: the roots of one species have been fastened to the leaves of another, with flowers from a third.

This three-page foldout from the manuscript includes a chart that appears astronomical.Brumbaugh believed that one illustration depicted a New World sunflower, which would help date the manuscript and open up intriguing possibilities for its origin. However, the resemblance is slight, especially when compared to the original wild species; and, since the scale of the drawing is not known, the plant could be many other members of the same family, which includes the common daisy, chamomile, and many other species from all over the world.

The basins and tubes in the "biological" section may seem to indicate a connection to alchemy, which would also be relevant if the book contained instructions on the preparation of medical compounds. However, alchemical books of the period share a common pictorial language, where processes and materials are represented by specific images (such as eagle, toad, man in tomb, couple in bed) or standard textual symbols (such as circle with cross); and none of these could be convincingly identified in the Voynich manuscript.

Astrological considerations frequently played a prominent role in herb gathering, blood-letting and other medical procedures common during the likeliest dates of the manuscript (see, for instance, Nicholas Culpeper's books). However, apart from the obvious Zodiac symbols, and one diagram possibly showing the classical planets, no one has been able to interpret the illustrations within known astrological traditions (European or otherwise).

A circular drawing in the "astronomical" section depicts an irregularly shaped object with four curved arms, which some have interpreted as a picture of a galaxy that could only be obtained with a telescope. Other drawings were interpreted as cells seen through a microscope. This would suggest an early modern, rather than a medieval, date for the manuscript's origin.

History

The history of the manuscript is still full of gaps, especially in its earliest part. Since the manuscript's alphabet does not resemble any known script, and the text is still undeciphered, the only useful evidence as to the book's age and origin are the illustrations—especially the dress and hairstyles of the human figures and a couple of castles that are seen in the diagrams. They are all characteristically European, and based on that evidence, most experts assign the book to dates between 1450 and 1520. This estimate is supported by other secondary clues. In 2009 the material used to write the manuscript was carbon-dated to between 1404 and 1438.

The earliest confirmed owner of the Voynich manuscript was Georg Baresch, an obscure alchemist who lived in Prague in the early 17th century. Baresch apparently was just as puzzled as we are today about this "Sphynx" that had been "taking up space uselessly in his library" for many years.[11] On learning that Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit scholar from the Collegio Romano, had published a Coptic (Ethiopic) dictionary and "deciphered" the Egyptian hieroglyphs, Baresch sent a sample copy of the script to Kircher in Rome (twice), asking for clues. His 1639 letter to Kircher, which was recently located by Rene Zandbergen, is the earliest mention of the manuscript that has been found so far.

It is not known whether Kircher answered the request, but apparently, he was interested enough to try to acquire the book, which Baresch apparently refused to yield. Upon Baresch's death, the manuscript passed to his friend Jan Marek Marci (Johannes Marcus Marci), then rector of Charles University in Prague, who a few years later sent the book to Kircher, his longtime friend and correspondent. Marci's cover letter (1665 or 1666) is still attached to the manuscript.

There are no records of the book for the next 200 years, but in all likelihood, it was kept, with the rest of Kircher's correspondence, in the library of the Collegio Romano (now the Pontifical Gregorian University). It probably remained there until the troops of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy captured the city in 1870 and annexed the Papal States. The new Italian government decided to confiscate many properties of the Church, including the library of the Collegio. According to investigations by Xavier Ceccaldi and others, just before this happened, many books of the University's library were hastily transferred to the personal libraries of its faculty, which were exempt from confiscation. Kircher's correspondence was among those books—and so apparently was the Voynich manuscript, as it still bears the ex libris of Petrus Beckx, head of the Jesuit order and the University's Rector at the time.

Beckx's "private" library was moved to the Villa Mondragone, Frascati, a large country palace near Rome that had been bought by the Society of Jesus in 1866 and housed the headquarters of the Jesuits' Ghislieri College.

Around 1912, the Collegio Romano was apparently short of money and decided to sell (very discreetly) some of its holdings. Wilfrid Voynich acquired 30 manuscripts, among them the manuscript that now bears his name. In 1930, after his death, the manuscript was inherited by his widow, Ethel Lilian Voynich (known as the author of the novel The Gadfly and daughter of famous mathematician George Boole). She died in 1960 and left the manuscript to her close friend, Miss Anne Nill. In 1961, Anne Nill sold the book to another antique book dealer, Hans P. Kraus. Unable to find a buyer, Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale University in 1969.

Authorship

Many names have been proposed as possible authors of the Voynich manuscript. Marci's 1665 cover letter to Kircher says that, according to his late friend Raphael Mnishovsky, the book had once been bought by Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia (1552–1612), for 600 ducats— 66.42 troy ounce actual gold weight, around US$ 30,800 as of 2005. According to the letter, Rudolf believed the author to be the Franciscan friar and polymath Roger Bacon (1214–1294).

Even though Marci said that he was "suspending his judgment" about this claim, it was taken quite seriously by Voynich, who did his best to confirm it. His conviction strongly influenced most deciphering attempts for the next 80 years. Mnishovsky died in 1644, and the deal must have occurred before Rudolf's abdication in 1611—at least 55 years before Marci's letter.

The assumption that Roger Bacon was the author led Voynich to conclude that the person who sold the manuscript to Rudolf could only be John Dee, a mathematician and astrologer at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, known to have owned a large collection of Bacon's manuscripts. This theory is also conveyed by Voynich manuscript scholar Gordon Rugg. Dee and his scrier (mediumic assistant) Edward Kelley lived in Bohemia for several years, where they had hoped to sell their services to the emperor. However, Dee's meticulously kept diaries do not mention that sale and make it seem quite unlikely. If the Voynich manuscript author is not Bacon, the connection to Dee may just disappear. It is possible that Dee himself may have written it and spread the rumour that it was originally a work of Bacon's in the hopes of later selling it.

Dee's companion in Prague, Edward Kelley, was a self-styled alchemist who claimed to be able to turn copper into gold by means of a secret powder that he had dug out of a Bishop's tomb in Wales. As Dee's scrier, he claimed to be able to invoke angels through a shewstone and had long conversations with them—which Dee dutifully noted down. The angel's language was called Enochian, after Enoch, the Biblical father of Methuselah; according to legend, he had been taken on a tour of heaven by angels and had later written a book about what he saw there. Several people (see below) have suggested that, just as Kelley may have invented Enochian to dupe Dee[citation needed], he could have fabricated the Voynich manuscript to swindle the emperor (who was already paying Kelley for his supposed alchemical expertise).

Fabrication by Voynich
Some suspected Voynich of having fabricated the manuscript himself. As an antique book dealer, he probably had the necessary knowledge and means, and a "lost book" by Roger Bacon would have been worth a fortune. However, many consider the expert internal dating of the manuscript and the recent discovery of Baresch's letter to Kircher as having eliminated that possibility.

Still, internal dating is often highly speculative and depends on many assumptions that may themselves be lacking in hard factual support. There has also been debate over the results of the internal dating, with some scholars suggesting a more modern date. Further, Baresch's letter (and Marci's as well) only establish the existence of a manuscript, not that the Voynich manuscript is the same one spoken of there. In other words, these letters could have been the motivation for Voynich to fabricate the manuscript (assuming he was aware of them), rather than as proofs authenticating it.

But if Voynich fabricated the manuscript, the question arises as to why neither he nor his widow ever attempted to sell it. Fame rather than fortune might be speculated as a motive, but that would not explain why Voynich's widow never attempted to sell the manuscript after his death. All things considered, most who have studied the history of the manuscript do not believe that Voynich fabricated the document.

Other theories
A photostatic reproduction of the first page of the Voynich manuscript, taken by Voynich sometime before 1921, showed some faint writing that had been erased. With the help of chemicals, the text could be read as the name "Jacobj `a Tepenece". This is taken to be Jakub Horčický of Tepenec, who was also known by his Latin name: Jacobus Sinapius (1575–1622). He was a specialist in herbal medicine, Rudolph II's personal physician, and curator of his botanical gardens. Voynich, and many other people after him, concluded from this "signature" that Jacobus owned the Voynich manuscript before Baresch and saw in that a confirmation of Mnishovsky's story. Others have suggested that Jacobus himself could be the author.

However, that writing does not match Jacobus's signature, as found in a document located by Jan Hurych in 2003. It is possible that the writing on page f1r was added by a later owner or librarian and is only this person's guess as to the book's author. (In the Jesuit history books that were available to Kircher, Jesuit-educated Jacobus is the only alchemist or doctor from Rudolf's court who deserves a full-page entry, while, for example, Tycho Brahe is barely mentioned.)

Moreover, the chemicals applied by Voynich have so degraded the vellum that hardly a trace of the signature can be seen today; thus, there is also the suspicion that the signature was fabricated by Voynich in order to strengthen the Roger Bacon theory.

Jan Marci met Kircher when he led a delegation from Charles University to Rome in 1638, and over the next 27 years, the two scholars exchanged many letters on a variety of scientific subjects. Marci's trip was part of a continuing struggle by the secularist side of the university to maintain their independence from the Jesuits, who ran the rival Clementinum college in Prague. In spite of those efforts, the two universities were merged in 1654, under Jesuit control. It has therefore been speculated that political animosity against the Jesuits led Marci to fabricate Baresch's letters, and later the Voynich manuscript, in an attempt to expose and discredit their "star" Kircher.

Marci's personality and knowledge appear to have been adequate for this task; and Kircher was an easy target. Indeed, Baresch's letter bears some resemblance to a hoax that orientalist Andreas Mueller once played on Kircher. Mueller concocted an unintelligible manuscript and sent it to Kircher with a note explaining that it had come from Egypt. He asked Kircher for a translation, and Kircher, reportedly, produced one at once. The only proofs of Georg Baresch's existence are three letters sent to Kircher: one by Baresch (1639), and two by Marci (about a year later). It is also curious that the correspondence between Marci and Kircher ends in 1665, precisely with the Voynich manuscript "cover letter".

However, Marci's secret grudge against the Jesuits is pure conjecture: a faithful Catholic, he himself had studied to become a Jesuit, and, shortly before his death in 1667, he was granted honorary membership in their Order.

Raphael Mnishovsky, the friend of Marci who was the reputed source of Bacon's story, was himself a cryptographer (among many other things) and apparently invented a cipher that he claimed was uncrackable (ca. 1618). This has led to the theory that he produced the Voynich manuscript as a practical demonstration of his cipher and made poor Baresch his unwitting test subject. After Kircher published his book on Coptic, Mnishovsky (so the theory goes) may have thought that stumping him would be a much better trophy than stumping Baresch and convinced the alchemist to ask the Jesuit's help. He would have invented the Roger Bacon story to motivate Baresch. Indeed, the disclaimer in the Voynich manuscript cover letter could mean that Marci suspected a lie. However, there is no definite evidence for this theory.

Leonell C. Strong, a cancer research scientist and amateur cryptographer, believed that the solution to the Voynich manuscript was a "peculiar double system of arithmetical progressions of a multiple alphabet". Strong claimed that the plaintext revealed the Voynich manuscript to be written by the 16th-century English author Anthony Ascham, whose works include A Little Herbal, published in 1550. Although the Voynich manuscript does contain sections resembling A Little Herbal, the main argument against this theory is that it is unknown where Ascham would have obtained such literary and cryptographic knowledge.

In his book, Nick Pelling proposed that the Voynich manuscript was written by Antonio Averlino (also known as "Filarete"), an Italian renaissance architect. According to Pelling's theory, Averlino tried to reach Constantinople around 1465 and enciphered in the Voynich manuscript some of his own works about various engineering topics to be able to export his knowledge to the Ottoman Turks past Venetian border guards.

The theory is based mainly on circumstantial evidence. Pelling conjectures that the manuscript is enciphered with an extremely convoluted cascade of methods, designed to render the resulting cipher text similar to a medieval document in an unknown language, complete with apparent consonant-vowel pairing of letters and fake page references. He also claims most of the marginalia were part of the original document, but have ended up corrupt because later owners tried to emend the faded text, when they incorrectly guessed the original meaning.

There is some tenuous speculation that a young Leonardo da Vinci may have authored the Voynich manuscript.

Multiple authors
Prescott Currier, a US Navy cryptographer who worked with the manuscript in the 1970s, observed that the pages of the "herbal" section could be separated into two sets, A and B, with distinctive statistical properties and apparently different handwritings. He concluded that the Voynich manuscript was the work of two or more authors who used different dialects or spelling conventions, but who shared the same script. However, recent studies have questioned this conclusion. A handwriting expert who examined the book saw only one hand in the whole manuscript. Also, when all sections are examined, one sees a more gradual transition, with herbal A and herbal B at opposite ends. Thus, Currier's observations could simply be the result of the herbal sections being written by one author over a long period of time.

Hoax?

A plant illustration from the manuscriptThe bizarre features of the Voynich manuscript text (such as the doubled and tripled words), the suspicious contents of its illustrations (such as the chimeric plants) and its lack of historical reference support the idea that the manuscript is a hoax. In other words, if no one is able to extract meaning from the book, perhaps this is because the document contains no meaningful content in the first place.

The argument for authenticity, on the other hand, is that the manuscript appears too sophisticated to be a hoax. While hoaxes of the period tended to be quite crude, the Voynich manuscript exhibits many subtle characteristics which only show up after careful statistical analysis. These fine touches require much more work than would have been necessary for a simple forgery, and some of the complexities are only visible with modern tools. The question then arises: why would the author employ such a complex and laborious forging algorithm in the creation of a simplistic hoax, if no one in the expected audience (that is, the creator's contemporaries) could tell the difference?

Various hoax theories have been proposed over time:

In 2003, computer scientist Gordon Rugg showed that text with characteristics similar to the Voynich manuscript could have been produced using a table of word prefixes, stems, and suffixes, which would have been selected and combined by means of a perforated paper overlay.

The latter device, known as a Cardan grille, was invented around 1550 as an encryption tool, slightly after the estimated creation date of the Voynich manuscript. Some maintain that the similarity between the pseudo-texts generated in Gordon Rugg's experiments and the Voynich manuscript is superficial, and the grille method could be used to emulate any language to a certain degree.

In April 2007, a study by Austrian researcher Andreas Schinner published in Cryptologia supported the hoax hypothesis.

Schinner showed that the statistical properties of the manuscript's text were more consistent with meaningless gibberish produced using a quasi-stochastic method such as the one described by Rugg, than with Latin and medieval German texts. However, this comparison is valid only for plain text in European languages, or text enciphered with a simple substitution cipher, while analysis suggests a much more complex enciphering method and/or non-European origin of the underlying text of the Voynich manuscript (see Letter-based cipher and Exotic natural language below).

In late 2007, Claude Martin claimed that the Voynich manuscript is a hoax based on a convoluted anagramming algorithm for numbers. For example, the sequence 345678 would be retranscribed into 643875. While such a method would produce text somewhat similar to that of the Voynich manuscript, it's hard to explain why such a difficult and time-consuming procedure would be used for a hoax. In Martin's own words: "...the ciphering method that we have just analyzed does not seem in accordance with those used in the Middle Ages, at the time of Trithème, Vigenère, Cardan or Roger Bacon."

Recent evidence
Researchers at the University of Arizona performed C14 dating on the manuscript and showed that the parchment on which the manuscript was written was made between 1404 and 1438, according to Walter Koehler.[20] In addition, the McCrone Research Institute in Chicago found evidence that the ink was added to the parchment around the same time as the creation of the parchment itself, suggesting that it is an authentic ancient document.[20]

Language
There are many theories about the Voynich manuscript's "language". Here are some:

Ciphers
The Voynich manuscript is written in an unknown script.According to the "letter-based cipher" theory, the Voynich manuscript contains a meaningful text in some European language, that was intentionally rendered obscure by mapping it to the Voynich manuscript "alphabet" through a cipher of some sort—an algorithm that operated on individual letters.

This has been the working hypothesis for most deciphering attempts in the twentieth century, including an informal team of NSA cryptographers led by William F. Friedman in the early 1950s. Simple monoalphabetic ciphers can be excluded, because they are very easy to crack; so deciphering efforts have generally focused on polyalphabetic ciphers, invented by Alberti in the 1460s. This class includes the popular Vigenère cipher, which could have been strengthened by the use of nulls and/or equivalent symbols, letter rearrangement, false word breaks and so on. Some people assumed that vowels had been deleted before encryption. There have been several claims of deciphering along these lines, but none has been widely accepted—chiefly because the proposed deciphering algorithms depended on so many guesses by the user that they could extract a meaningful text from any random string of symbols.

The main argument for this theory is that the use of a strange alphabet by a European author can hardly be explained except as an attempt to hide information. Indeed, Roger Bacon knew about ciphers, and the estimated date for the manuscript roughly coincides with the birth of cryptography as a systematic discipline. Against this theory is the observation that a polyalphabetic cipher would normally destroy the "natural" statistical features that are seen in the Voynich manuscript. Also, although polyalphabetic ciphers were invented about 1467, variants only became popular in the 16th century, somewhat too late for the estimated date of the Voynich manuscript.

According to the "codebook cipher" theory, the Voynich manuscript "words" would actually be codes to be looked up in a "dictionary" or codebook. The main evidence for this theory is that the internal structure and length distribution of those words are similar to those of Roman numerals—which, at the time, would be a natural choice for the codes. However, book-based ciphers are viable only for short messages, because they are very cumbersome to write and to read.

Micrography
Following its 1912 rediscovery, one of the earliest efforts to unlock the book's secrets (and the first of many premature claims of decipherment) was made in 1921 by William Newbold of the University of Pennsylvania. His singular hypothesis held that the visible text is meaningless itself, but that each apparent "letter" is in fact constructed of a series of tiny markings only discernible under magnification. These markings were supposed to be based on ancient Greek shorthand, forming a second level of script that held the real content of the writing. Newbold claimed to have used this knowledge to work out entire paragraphs proving the authorship of Bacon and recording his use of a compound microscope four hundred years before Leeuwenhoek. However, John Manly of the University of Chicago pointed out serious flaws in this theory. Each shorthand character was assumed to have multiple interpretations, with no reliable way to determine which was intended for any given case. Newbold's method also required rearranging letters at will until intelligible Latin was produced. These factors alone ensure the system enough flexibility that nearly anything at all could be discerned from the microscopic markings. Although evidence of micrography using the Hebrew language can be traced as far back as the ninth century,[21] it is nowhere near as compact or complex as the shapes Newbold made out. Close study of the manuscript revealed the markings to be artifacts caused by the way ink cracks as it dries on rough vellum. Perceiving significance in these artifacts can be attributed to pareidolia. Thanks to Manly's thorough refutation, the micrography theory is now generally disregarded.

Steganography

This theory holds that the text of the Voynich manuscript is mostly meaningless, but contains meaningful information hidden in inconspicuous details—e.g. the second letter of every word, or the number of letters in each line. This technique, called steganography, is very old, and was described by Johannes Trithemius in 1499. It has been suggested that the plain text was to be extracted by a Cardan grille of some sort. This theory is hard to prove or disprove, since stegotexts can be arbitrarily hard to crack. An argument against it is that using a cipher-looking cover text defeats the main purpose of steganography, which is to hide the very existence of the secret message.

It has been suggested that the meaningful text could be encoded in the length or shape of certain pen strokes. There are indeed examples of steganography from about that time that use letter shape (italic vs. upright) to hide information. However, when examined at high magnification, the Voynich manuscript pen strokes seem quite natural, and substantially affected by the uneven surface of the vellum.

Exotic natural language
The linguist Jacques Guy once suggested that the Voynich manuscript text could be some exotic natural language, written in the plain with an invented alphabet. The word structure is indeed similar to that of many language families of East and Central Asia, mainly Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese), Austroasiatic (Vietnamese, Khmer, etc.) and possibly Tai (Thai, Lao, etc.). In many of these languages, the "words" have only one syllable; and syllables have a rather rich structure, including tonal patterns.

This theory has some historical plausibility. While those languages generally had native scripts, these were notoriously difficult for Western visitors. This difficulty motivated the invention of several phonetic scripts, mostly with Latin letters but sometimes with invented alphabets. Although the known examples are much later than the Voynich manuscript, history records hundreds of explorers and missionaries who could have done it—even before Marco Polo's thirteenth century voyage, but especially after Vasco da Gama sailed the sea route to the Orient in 1499. The Voynich manuscript author could also be a native of East Asia who lived in Europe, or who was educated at a European mission.

The main argument for this theory is that it is consistent with all statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript text which have been tested so far, including doubled and tripled words (which have been found to occur in Chinese and Vietnamese texts at roughly the same frequency as in the Voynich manuscript). It also explains the apparent lack of numerals and Western syntactic features (such as articles and copulas), and the general inscrutability of the illustrations. Another possible hint is two large red symbols on the first page, which have been compared to a Chinese-style book title, inverted and badly copied. Also, the apparent division of the year into 360 degrees (rather than 365 days), in groups of 15 and starting with Pisces, are features of the Chinese agricultural calendar (jie qi). The main argument against the theory is the fact that no one (including scholars at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing) could find any clear examples of Asian symbolism or Asian science in the illustrations.

In late 2003, Zbigniew Banasik of Poland proposed that the manuscript is plaintext written in the Manchu language and gave a proposed incomplete translation of the first page of the manuscript.[22]

Jim Child, a linguist of Indo-European languages, has proposed that the manuscript is written in an early German language. [23]

Glossolalia

A page from the biological section showing "nymphs"In their book, Kennedy and Churchill hint to the possibility that the Voynich manuscript may be a case of glossolalia, channeling or outsider art.[24]

If this is true, then the author felt compelled to write large amounts of text in a manner which somehow resembles stream of consciousness, either due to voices heard, or due to his own urge. While in glossolalia this often takes place in an invented language (usually made up of fragments of the author's own language), invented scripts for this purpose are rare. Kennedy and Churchill use Hildegard von Bingen's works to point out similarities between the illustrations she drew when she was suffering from severe bouts of migraine—which can induce a trance-like state prone to glossolalia—and the Voynich manuscript. Prominent features found in both are abundant "streams of stars", and the repetitive nature of the "nymphs" in the biological section.

The theory is virtually impossible to prove or disprove, short of deciphering the text; Kennedy and Churchill are themselves not convinced of the hypothesis, but consider it plausible. (In the culminating chapter of their work, Kennedy states his belief that it is a hoax or forgery, whilst Churchill, acknowledging the possibility of a synthetic forgotten language, as advanced by Friedman, or forgery to be preeminent theories, concludes that if the manuscript is genuine, mental illness or delusion seems to have affected the author).[24] One of the drawbacks of this theory is that it fails to explain the deliberate structure of the manuscript and the carefully crafted astrological and botanical sections.

Constructed language

The peculiar internal structure of Voynich manuscript "words" has led William F. Friedman and John Tiltman to arrive independently at the conjecture that the text could be a constructed language in the plain—specifically, a philosophical or a priori language. In languages of this class, the vocabulary is organized according to a category system, so that the general meaning of a word can be deduced from its sequence of letters. For example, in the modern constructed language Ro, bofo- is the category of colors, and any word beginning with those letters would name a color: so red is bofoc, and yellow is bofof. (This is an extreme version of the Library of Congress Classification used by many libraries—in which, say, P stands for language and literature, PA for Greek and Latin, PC for Romance languages, etc.)

This concept is quite old, as attested by John Wilkins's Philosophical Language (1668), but still postdates the generally accepted origin of the Voynich manuscript by two centuries. In most known examples, categories are subdivided by adding suffixes; as a consequence, a text in a particular subject would have many words with similar prefixes—for example, all plant names would begin with the similar letters, and likewise for all diseases, etc. This feature could then explain the repetitious nature of the Voynich text. However, no one has been able yet to assign a plausible meaning to any prefix or suffix in the Voynich manuscript.

In his book Solution of the Voynich Manuscript: A liturgical Manual for the Endura Rite of the Cathari Heresy, the Cult of Isis (1987), Leo Levitov declared the manuscript a plaintext transcription of a "polyglot oral tongue".[25] This he defined as "a literary language which would be understandable to people who did not understand Latin and to whom this language could be read." His proposed decryption has three Voynich letters making a syllable, to produce a series of syllables that form a mixture of Middle Dutch with many borrowed Old French and Old High German words.

According to Levitov, the rite of Endura was none other than the assisted suicide ritual for people already believed to be near death, famously associated with the Cathar faith (although the reality of this ritual is also in question). He explains that the chimerical plants are not meant to represent any species of flora, but are secret symbols of the faith. The women in the basins with elaborate plumbing represent the suicide ritual itself, which he believed involved venesection: the cutting of a vein to allow the blood to drain into a warm bath. The constellations with no celestial analogue are representative of the stars in Isis' mantle.

This theory is questioned on several grounds. First, the Cathar faith is widely understood to have been a Christian gnosticism, and not in any way associated with Isis. Second, this theory places the book's origins in the twelfth or thirteenth century, which is several centuries earlier than most experts believe based on internal evidence. Third, the Endura ritual involved fasting, not venesection. Levitov offered no evidence beyond his translation for this theory.

The Mystery of the Missing Ships

When the Arctic Sea disappeared in August, 2009, the UK Daily Telegraph put out an article documenting other missing ships.

Mary Celeste: A brigantine merchant ship discovered in early December 1872 in the Atlantic Ocean unmanned and apparently abandoned, in spite of the good weather. The ship had only been at sea a month and had six months of food and water on board. Cargo was virtually untouched and personal belongings were still in place. It is often described as the archetypal ghost ship. Made famous by Arthur Conan Doyle's short story "The Marie Celeste"

HMS Sappho: A royal Navy brig that went missing off the Australian coast in 1857-8. It was part of a British squadron patrolling the coast of West Africa to suppress the slave trade. Following a diplomatic incident with an American ship, it was sent to Australia. It sailed under Commander Moresby, but failed to arrive. Late in 1858 rumours began spreading in England it had been wrecked on an island off the coast of Australia, that some had been rescued and Captain Moresby had gone insane. Naval authorities believe it most likely hit the rocks and islets in Bass Strait or she capsized during severe gales.

USS Cyclops: The loss of the Proteus-class US Navy ship and 306 crew and passengers without a trace sometime after March 4 1918 remains the single largest loss of life in US Naval history not directly involving combat. The ship's fate still remains a mystery, with no wreckage ever found.

After making an unscheduled stop in Barbados for supplies, Cyclops set out for Baltimore, and was sighted on March 9 but was then never seen or heard from again. Its disappearance is often credited to the Bermuda Triangle.

MV Joyita: A merchant vessel that mysteriously disappeared in South Pacific in 1955. The vessel used to patrol Hawaii's Big Island until the end of WWII. On Oct 3 1955, it left Samoa's Apia harbour bound for the Tokelau Islands, about 270 miles away. Her departure was delayed because her port engine clutch failed. The ship eventually left on one engine, with 16 crew and 9 passengers. Five weeks later, it was sighted partially submerged with no trace of any passengers or crew, with four tons of cargo also missing.

The Flying Dutchman: The most famous of ghost vessels, apparently seen off the Cape of Good Hope. According to folklore, it is a ghost ship that can never go home, doomed to sail the oceans forever. According to folklore, the captain, facing down a mutiny, killed the leader and threw him overboard. Stormy clouds parted and a shadowy figure appeared condemning the ship to an eternity on the seas. It is usually spotted from afar, sometimes with a ghostly light. The story of the Flying Dutchman was turned into an opera, while more recently, the ship was used in The Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, where it was captained by Davy Jones, played by Bill Nighy.

Lady Lovibond: Said to have been wrecked on February 13, 1748, and reappear off the Kent coast every 50 years. The ship was at sea because her captain, Simon Peel had just been married and was celebrating. According to legend, one of the crew, some say the helmsman, became smitten with the captain's new bride, Annetta, and flew into a jealous rage. He murdered the captain and steer the ship onto the treacherous Goodwin Sands, killing everyone aboard. It is said the ship is seen on the anniversary of the disaster.

The Jenny: A British schooner that became frozen in an ice-barrier of the Drake Passage in 1823, only to be rediscovered years later by a whaling ship, the crew onboard preserved by the Antarctic cold. The crew of the whaler discovered the last entry in the captain's log, reading: May 4, 1823. No food for 71 days. I am the only one left alive.

Octavius: A ghost ship, probably legendary and not actual. Found west of Greenland by the a whaler in 1775, the boarding party found the entire crew below deck, dead, frozen and almost perfectly preserved, much like The Jenny. The captain's body was supposedly still at the table in his cabin, pen in hand. Supposedly the vessel had left England for the Orient in 1761, and successfully arrived at its destination the following year. The captain then gambled on a return, with the unfortunate result of being trapped in sea ice north of Alaska. The ship was never seen again after its encounter with the whaler.

Carroll A. Deering: A five-masted commercial schooner found off North Carolina in 1921, with its crew missing. The Deering may have been a victim of mutiny or piracy. On January 31, 1921, it was sighted run aground on Diamond Shoals, an area off the coast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Rescue ships found that the vessel had been completely abandoned. The ship's log, navigation equipment and the crew's personal effects were gone. The US Government launched an extensive investigation into the disappearance of the Deering. A number of theories surrounded the disappearance of the crew, including piracy, Russian communists and paranormal activity. The investigation wound up in 1922 with no answer.

Baychimo: The Baychimo, a steel 1,322 ton cargo steamer that was built in 19914 in Sweden, used to trade with Inuit settelements in Canada.

On October 1 1931, the vessel became trapped in pack ice. The crew briefly abandoned ship, returning two days later when it broke free of ice. It became mired again on October 8 and the Hudson's Bay Company sent aircraft to retrieve the crew. However 15 of the 22 crew remained behind, intending to wait out the winter. In November a blizzard struck, after which there was no sign of the ship. The skipper assumed it had sunk. Over the following months however, there were various sightings by Inuit hunters. While the crew managed to retrieve the most valuable furs on the vessel before abandoning it, it did not sink. Over the next several decades there were numerous sightings. The last recorded sighting was by a group of Inuit in 1969, 38 years after she was abandoned. Her fate is unknown.