World War II Kittyhawk fighter found in Sahara, shedding light on pilot's fate

From MSNBC World News: World War II Kittyhawk fighter found in Sahara, shedding light on pilot's fate
A remarkably well-preserved fighter plane that crashed in the Sahara Desert during World War II has been found 70 years later, shedding new light on the pilot's struggle to survive.

The American-made Curtiss P-40 Kittyhawk was discovered by a Polish oil worker, Jakub Perka, who was exploring the desert in Egypt, The Telegraph newspaper reported. It was about 200 miles from the nearest town.

It is believed that the pilot, Dennis Copping, 24, ran into trouble while flying in 1942, but still managed to land the plane on the sands, the paper said.

Military historian Andy Saunders said that the British flight sergeant "must have survived the crash" because a photograph of the plane showed a parachute had been put up on the side of the plane, apparently as a form of shelter, The Telegraph reported.

"The radio and batteries were out of the plane and it looks like he tried to get it working. If he died at the side of the plane his remains would have been found," Saunders added. "Once he had crashed there, nobody was going to come and get him. It is more likely he tried to walk out of the desert, but ended up walking to his death. It is too hideous to contemplate."

He said the discovery was "the aviation equivalent of Tutankhamun's Tomb."

Air enthusiasts excited
The Vintage Wings of Canada website speculated that the plane had a mechanical problem, ran out of fuel or that the pilot simply got lost.

The website said there seemed to be a growing consensus that the plane's serial number was ET 574, based on what could be made out from photographs. If this is confirmed, the website said it was possible that Canadian flying ace James "Stocky" Edwards had previously flown the fighter.

The plane's cockpit is in remarkable though dusty condition.

"To say we, at Vintage Wings, are excited by this find in an understatement," the website said.

It expressed concern the plane had been "seriously vandalized -- a travesty the whole aviation world seems unable to stop."

Michael Creane, of the Royal Air Force Museum in London, U.K., told NBC News that it was "incredible" the plane had not been submerged by the shifting sands of the desert.

He said they were "hell bent" on bringing the aircraft to the museum, although he said there were "lots of hoops to jump through."

Civil War ironclad stands between Savannah, harbor dredging

I've already shared a couple of articles about this, here's another:

From Reuters: Civil War ironclad stands between Savannah, harbor dredging

(Reuters) - A Confederate ironclad warship, scuttled by its crew to prevent it from falling into Yankee hands, will be salvaged before the long-planned dredging of the mouth of the Savannah River to handle big, modern commercial container ships.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in charge of the dredging project, can't say how long it will take, but Savannah won't be able to handle new super-sized container ships coming through the Panama Canal in 2014 before its harbor is dredged.

The wreck of the Confederate States Ship Georgia lies 40 feet below the surface of the river under a layer of silt. The ship was scuttled by Confederate sailors in 1864 to prevent it from falling into the hands of Union General William T. Sherman's troops as they approached Savannah.

After the ship is raised, dredging can begin for the $653 million project to deepen Savannah's harbor, river and shipping channel out to sea from 42 feet to 47 feet. The project, which has been studied for 15 years, is underfunded and does not yet have full approval from the Army Corps.

Savannah District Corps spokesman Billy E. Birdwell said it would cost about $14 million to remove the wreck of the ironclad warship.

Both the Union and Confederate navies had ironclads, 19th-century wooden warships covered in heavy iron plating, and they played a part in several dramatic sea battles in the Civil War.

The wreck is owned by the U.S. Navy and the boundary between South Carolina and Georgia runs right through the site, Birdwell said. Although the Corps has had an agreement since 1984 with both states not to dredge within 50 feet of the wreck, the ship has been damaged by previous dredging, Birdwell said.

"That's how it was discovered in the first place," he said. "We struck it with a dredge."

Salt water has destroyed its wooden hull, but the ship's iron casement, the part that was above the waterline when the vessel was a floating Civil War battery, still exists, he said. The wreck is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Corps plans to contract marine archeologists to survey, salvage and conserve the historical artifact.

"This is not a hiccup," Birdwell said. "We were planning all along for the CSS Georgia. It's part of our cultural heritage.

"We don't see it as an obstacle," he said. "We just see it as something we need to do."

FLOATING WEAPONS BATTERY

The ship never saw battle in the open sea, Birdwell said. Its engine was too weak to propel the ponderous vessel quickly forward, so it was used as a floating weapons battery.

Built in the Savannah shipyards in 1862, the 250-foot long ship helped protect the river approaches to the city during the next two years of the Civil War, according to the Naval Historical Center's website.

Savannah, the fourth largest container port in the nation according to the Department of Transportation, is among several South Atlantic ports that want to deepen their shipping channels for super-sized container ships expected to come through the expanded Panama Canal starting in 2014.

Savannah's port lies 21 miles from the ocean and environmentalists have filed lawsuits to block the dredging, which they say could severely impact the marshy river shore along the course of the project, as well as parts of the river upstream toward Augusta.

The Corp's final decision will not be made until the end of this year, Birdwell said. Georgia Ports Authority Executive Director Curtis Foltz said the entire project was expected to be finished by 2016, though some officials said that is optimistic.

Dredging is expected to take two to five years after the project starts, Birdwell said, and could begin as soon as next year if funding is secured.

Committed funds from the state and the Corps total just over $184 million, port officials said. The cost of environmental mitigation, which includes removal of the CSS Georgia, building fish passageways and installation of a "bubbler" system to boost oxygen levels in the river, will be 42 percent of the project's total price tag, Birdwell said.

The deadline for public comments on the Corps' final environmental impact statement, issued this spring, is May 20.

Exactly when the ironclad survey will start and how long it will take to get the ship out of the river is "hard to pin down exactly," Birdwell said. "It's not an overnight process."

The Corps has found two other old ships in the channel: Eclipse, a 100-year-old steel-hulled sailing pilot boat, and Undine, an 1867 English-built clipper ship.

It has no plans to raise them, Birdwell said.

At what price progress? $14 million -- to raise a Civil War ship

From Los Angeles Times: At what price progress? $14 million -- to raise a Civil War ship
ATLANTA -- In certain quarters of the American South, it's common to hear complaints that the remnants of the old Confederacy are an impediment to progress.

In the old port town of Savannah, Ga., the remnants are iron-clad, and lying at the bottom of the Savannah River.

The Associated Press reports that an iron-sided Civil War shipwreck, the CSS Georgia, is getting in the way of a major plan to deepen Savannah's port, a $653-million project that will help Georgia capitalize on the huge cargo ships that will pass through an upgraded Panama Canal in the next couple of years.

The ship, the CSS Georgia, was sunk in 1864 by Confederate forces to keep it from being captured by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, whose Yankee forces captured Savannah in December 1864.

The AP's Russ Bynum reports that the Army Corps of Engineers will head up a plan to raise the Georgia, at a cost of $14 million to taxpayers. Personal effects from the era may still be on board. So could live explosives that run the risk of blowing up.

Proponents of the deepening project say it will benefit Georgia's economy. Environmentalists fear the dredging will harm freshwater wetlands and threaten the city's drinking water supply.

In dusty library, a link to heroic past

From NewsTelegram.com: In dusty library, a link to heroic past
PROVIDENCE — Day after day, a tall, shy woman weaves her way unnoticed through the earnest and learned campus swirl of Brown University. She enters the hush of a library, then promptly vanishes from sight.

Down goes Marie Malchodi, 48, who attended but never graduated from Brown, down to the library's subterranean warrens, where she works as a "book conservation technician." She sweeps her long dark hair into a bun, pierces it with a paint brush, and starts her day, caring for ancient books and ephemera that are sensitive to the touch.

A few weeks ago, Malchodi opened yet another leather-bound book, one of more than 300,000 rare volumes in the hold of the John Hay Library. With surgical precision, she turned the pages of a medical text once owned by Solomon Drowne, class of '73 (1773, that is.). And there, in the back, she found a piece of paper depicting the baptism of Jesus. It was signed:

"P. Revere Sculpt."

Ye gods! Had Marie Malchodi, of Cranston, R.I., book conservation technician, just made contact with Paul Revere, of Boston, silversmith? Revere, who knew of the fiery need to share vital information, would have appreciated Malchodi's galloping reaction, which was:

''I have to show this to somebody."

Malchodi is more spiritually attuned to books than her Orwellian job title might suggest. She came to Brown as an undergraduate in the early 1980s, but life wound up demanding her study. Soon she was working in a College Hill bookstore rather than reading in a college library, and making cabinets rather than writing papers about her beloved Romantics.

One day she saw an advertisement for a bookbinding and conservation job at the university. She has been here ever since - though mostly underground - inspecting old books, submitting to their long-ago stories and vanishing to where now is then and then is now.

In the ensuing 20 years, gray has come to her hair and a husband and twin girls have come to her life, yet wasn't it all just yesterday? When Wordsworth thrilled her heart? When Wordsworth lived?

A year ago, Malchodi was assigned to check the condition of thousands of rare books about to be shipped to an off-campus annex. In a basement room made smaller and louder by the air ducts looming from the ceiling, she tended to her task, sitting on a stool set beside a collection of dusty, rolled-up maps, all needing to be vacuumed, and all with titles like "Madeira and Mamore Railway Plan of the Rio Madeira at San Antonio."

The job sometimes took longer than necessary, because of that tendency of hers to get lost in things: illustrations in children's books, brittle newspaper clippings, and, especially, handwritten notes from the long dead. She feels the rush of intimacy as the distance in time collapses.

Now here, on a small cart, were another 177 books, all from the collection of Drowne, a physician and polymath who distinguished himself during the American Revolution. "Watts's Logick." ''Kalm's Travels." ''Plague and Yellow Fever."

Next up: an 1811 edition of "The Modern Practice of Physic," by Dr. Robert Thomas, a champion of purgatives as a cure for disease. Malchodi examined the red leather cover, the gold tooling on the spine. Then she pulled out that piece of paper.

The engraving, titled "Buried With Him By Baptism," shows John the Baptist raising Jesus from the River Jordan under a blazing sun, while people in vaguely Colonial attire watch from shore. And in the lower right corner appears the name of an American Revolution icon.

Who knows how long this papery wisp lay hidden in the musty stacks at the century-old Hay Library? In the section reserved for the history of science. Near a microscope and a skull. Across from a copy of Darwin's monograph on the "sub-class Cirripedia" (Barnacles, that is.).

What Malchodi knew was that she had to sound the alarm. With some hesitancy - "because I don't want to bother her" - she approached the raised desk of Rachel Lapkin, a library materials conservator who was immersed in stabilizing the leather of an 18th century Chinese dictionary.

Lapkin, who actually enjoys her colleague's enthusiasm, studied the print and found it fascinating, even bizarre. "I think we should look into that," she said.

The basement brain trust decided that the print must be shown to Richard Noble, the rare books cataloger, whose office takes some doing to reach. So, with the discovery safely inside Thomas' celebration of purgatives, Malchodi began her journey through an underground labyrinth, carrying the volume as a deacon might carry the Bible.

Out of her basement work space and past some lockers. Past discarded wooden catalog cabinets. Down some steps to the subbasement. Past some metal book shelves and a "Do Not Remove" sign. Down more steps and through the tunnel that crosses beneath College Street. Up to Noble's office, in Cataloging and Acquisitions. Carefully carrying that Revere - if it was a Revere.

And Noble had stepped away for lunch.

An hour or so later, Malchodi returned. "She said, 'I found this,' and presented it to me with a big smile," Noble recalled. "She let me discover what was inside. She let me have that much fun."

Noble's first reaction was to say that the engraving was just crude enough to be a Revere. Then he held the engraving up to the light as a test. It had the faintly ribbed look of paper produced from the slurry pulp made of rags, signaling that it was mostly likely handmade paper from the 18th century.

Yes. A Revere.

This could very well mean that the patriot - who had nurtured t he seeds of rebellion with his engraving of the Boston Massacre of 1770 - had cut the scene into a flat copper plate; filled the grooves with ink, perhaps by pressing it in with the palm of his hand; wiped away the excess with circular sweeps of a small cloth; and used a hand-operated press to produce the engraving.

''That was a nice moment," Noble said.

It turned out that Malchodi had uncovered only the fifth known copy of this particular engraving, which is "a bit of a curiosity in Revere's work," according to Lauren Hewes, the curator of graphic arts at the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester, Mass. She said that while Revere carefully documented his prosperous and prolific career as an artisan, he made no mention of this piece, and so the exact date of the engraving is unclear.

''It sits outside of what we think of when we think of Paul Revere," she said. "It wasn't all patriotic topics - he did a lot more than that."

How the engraving came to be in the possession of Solomon Drowne is still being researched; his descendants have some theories. And its monetary worth is probably only a few thousand dollars, but that is hardly what matters.

''It's really a great moment," Hewes said. "That moment of discovery."

Malchodi made her discovery on a Thursday. On that Friday, she was back at work beneath the verdant Brown campus. Inspecting old books, vacuuming old maps, opening herself to time's collapse.

Civil War shipwreck in the way of Ga. port project

From Yahoo News: Civil War shipwreck in the way of Ga. port project SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — Before government engineers can deepen one of the nation's busiest seaports to accommodate future trade, they first need to remove a $14 million obstacle from the past — a Confederate warship rotting on the Savannah River bottom for nearly 150 years.

Confederate troops scuttled the ironclad CSS Georgia to prevent its capture by Gen. William T. Sherman when his Union troops took Savannah in December 1864. It's been on the river bottom ever since.

Now, the Civil War shipwreck sits in the way of a government agency's $653 million plan to deepen the waterway that links the nation's fourth-busiest container port to the Atlantic Ocean. The ship's remains are considered so historically significant that dredging the river is prohibited within 50 feet of the wreckage.

So the Army Corps of Engineers plans to raise and preserve what's left of the CSS Georgia. The agency's final report on the project last month estimated the cost to taxpayers at $14 million. The work could start next year on what's sure to be a painstaking effort.

And leaving the shipwreck in place is not an option: Officials say the harbor must be deepened to accommodate supersize cargo ships coming through an expanded Panama Canal in 2014 — ships that will bring valuable revenue to the state and would otherwise go to other ports.

Underwater surveys show two large chunks of the ship's iron-armored siding have survived, the largest being 68 feet long and 24 feet tall. Raising them intact will be a priority. Researchers also spotted three cannons on the riverbed, an intact propeller and other pieces of the warship's steam engines. And there's smaller debris scattered across the site that could yield unexpected treasures, requiring careful sifting beneath 40 feet of water.

"We don't really have an idea of what's in the debris field," said Julie Morgan, a government archaeologist with the Army Corps. "There could be some personal items. People left the ship in a big hurry. Who's to say what was on board when the Georgia went down."

Also likely to slow the job: finding and gently removing cannonballs and other explosive projectiles that, according to Army Corps experts, could still potentially detonate.

That's a massive effort for a warship that went down in Civil War history as an ironclad flop.

The Civil War ushered in the era of armored warships. In Savannah, a Ladies Gunboat Association raised $115,000 to build such a ship to protect the city. The 120-foot-long CSS Georgia had armor forged from railroad iron, but its engines proved too weak to propel the ship's 1,200-ton frame against river currents. The ship was anchored on the riverside at Fort Jackson as a floating gun battery.

Ultimately the Georgia was scuttled by its own crew without having ever fired a shot in combat.

"I would say it was an utter failure," said Ken Johnston, executive director of the National Civil War Naval Museum in Columbus, Ga., who says the shipwreck nonetheless has great historical value. "It has very clearly become a symbol for why things went wrong for the Confederate naval effort."

As a homespun war machine assembled by workers who likely had never built a ship before, the CSS Georgia represents the South's lack of an industrial base, Johnston said. The North, by contrast, was teeming with both factories and laborers skilled at shipbuilding. They churned out a superior naval fleet that enabled the Union to successfully cut off waterways used to supply Confederate forces.

Despite its functional failures, the shipwreck's historical significance was cemented in 1987 when it won a place on the National Register of Historic Places, the official listing of treasured sites and buildings from America's past. That gave the Georgia a measure of protection — dredging near the shipwreck was prohibited.

Still, a great deal of damage had already been done. The last detailed survey of the ship in 2003 found it in pieces and its hull apparently disintegrated. Erosion had taken a large toll, and telltale marks showed dredging machinery had already chewed into the wreckage.

Salvaging the remains will likely move slowly.

Divers will need to divide the site into a grid to search for artifacts and record the locations of what they find. The large sections or armored siding will likely need to be cradled gently by a web of metal beams to raise them to the surface intact, said Gordon Watts, an underwater archaeologist who helped lead the 2003 survey of the shipwreck.

The Army Corps' report also notes special care will be needed find and dispose of any cannonballs and other explosive projectiles remaining on the riverbed.

"If there is black powder that's 150 years old, and if it is dry, then the stability of it has deteriorated," Watts said. "You'd want to be as careful as humanly possible in recovering the stuff."

Once the remains of the Georgia are removed from the river and preserved by experts, the Army Corps will have to decide who gets the spoils. Morgan said ultimately the plan is to put the warship's artifacts on public display. But which museum or agency will get custody of them has yet to be determined.

Right now the Confederate shipwreck legally belongs to the U.S. Navy. More than 150 years after the Civil War began, the CSS Georgia is still officially classified as a captured enemy vessel.

Tanzania: Treasure Shattered With Dynamite

From All Africa (an opinion piece): Tanzania: Treasure Shattered With Dynamite
The effects of dynamite fishing are not always obvious. The sea, before and after the life has been shattered out of it by dynamiting, sort of looks the same -the waves are still amazing, the water still changes color with the sky and that happens within the overall sameness of its shape. Most of us spend little time under the water so we do not see the rubble.

It is hard to quantify the costs of dynamite fishing. Longitudinally we can notice at the fish market, that the big fish and lobsters that used to be there are no longer; you can notice how expensive even smaller ones have become.

Do we notice that the local fishermen are suffering before we just let them fade away as they become poorer and poorer and their sons become thieves for lack of work?

As I tried to think of a way to quantify the damage, to compare what the life was like before the dynamiting, and now... I thought to July 1989 when I made two trips to Mbudya Island.

The dynamite fishing had already begun. Already the rubble was rolling, around this small island off the coast near Kunduchi but also the life and beauty were so exquisite, it was as if it would always be there.

The law that is in place now came in 1994 - the Marine Parks and Reserves Act that prohibits collecting from places like Mbudya. In Section 10: Other Regulations, it states 22.-(1) No person within a marine park or reserve shall, except in accordance with terms and conditions specified in the regulations or them provisions of this Act- (b) gather, collect or, remove any fish, animal, aquatic flora, or vegetation, whether live or dead, or any sand, minerals, or aquatic substrate. That includes shells and coral.

I wish I had understood, but I was not aware that I should not take shells. Now I find it obvious that shells need to be allowed to stay on the beach. Even when Mollusca are dead, their beautiful skeletons serve important ecological functions. They serve as homes for hermit crabs for example and become substrate for corals and other creatures, and then sand. But 23 years ago, unaware, while walking along the beach I randomly picked up shells. There were so many. I did not feel greedy.

I wasn't concentrating on the task. Many types of shells were so common I did not bother to save one. Those were beautiful amazing days, and I made notes of what I saw in my journal.

In 1989 I noted (but did not collect the shells of: oysters, scorpion shells, many pairs of sunrise Tellins of several different colors, abalone, Pen shells, many cowry species, mussels, mitre shells, several cone species, bubble shells, dog whelks, tulip shells, conches, violet snails, periwinkles, wentle traps, turret and top shells, Venus shells, surf clams, cockles, coral snails, ark shells, cuttlefish bones and others.

I saw alive (and did not take): chitons, Keyhole Limpets, top shells, oysters, cones, nerites, and pheasant shells. The examples I picked up and put in my pocket were a non-scientific sample; perhaps we could say it was an aesthetic sampling, reaching out for whatever caught my eye. I brought the shells home, as many people do. After some time admiring them I put them in a clear plastic candy box.

They were a treasure of beautiful colors and gorgeous rounded shapes. I put the treasure box onto a back shelf. I never collected shells after that. Yesterday I thought of that box for the first time in years. I had to search for it, in different storage areas, but I found it. The box was dirty but inside, the shells are still glistening.

I took the box to a colleagues's house. She spends a lot of time by the sea; she's a sailor, and a kayaker; at dawn she is usually walking on the beach. And she likes looking for shells. She has been studying shells here for 2.5 years, and been many times to Mbudya.

We compared: the shells I had collected casually over two days visiting Mbudya in July 1989, with the shells my colleague had documented in the same area between September 2009 - April 2012. I will tell you about it next week, but here is a hint: in the amount of time it took to collect a treasure chest from Mbudya in 1989, my colleague in 2012 would expect, to find "one good shell and the rest will be pieces".

Australian billionaire to build Titanic replica

From CNN: Australian billionaire to build Titanic replica
(CNN) -- An Australian mining magnate has commissioned a Chinese shipyard to build a replica of the ill-fated Titanic, complete in every detail but equipped with modern technology to prevent a repeat of the original's fateful maiden voyage 100 years ago.

Clive Palmer, a Queensland mining billionaire with strong links to China, told Australian media that he had signed a memorandum of understanding with CSC Jinling Shipyard to build the ship.

He said construction of the luxury cruise ship would begin next year and the ship would be ready to sail in 2016.

"It will be every bit as luxurious as the original Titanic but of course it will have state-of-the-art 21st century technology and the latest navigation and safety systems," he said in a statement.

The new vessel is due to make its maiden voyage from London to New York in late 2016. The cost of the construction of the new vessel has not been revealed, a spokesman for Palmer told Australian media.

"Of course, it will sink if you put a hole in it," Palmer said at a press conference. "It is going to be designed so it won't sink. But, of course, if you are superstitious like you are, you never know what could happen.''

The original Titanic -- the largest ship of its type at the time -- sank 100 years ago this month when it struck an iceberg on the night of April 15, 1912, on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. More than 1,500 people perished in the disaster, which captured the popular imagination. The ship had been vaunted as "unsinkable."

The mining magnate from Queensland owns a luxury resort on Australia's Sunshine Coast and plans to build a fleet of luxury liners.