A GHOSTLY gallery of Scotland’s most famous shipwrecks has been revealed.
More than 20 of the country’s sunken relics of the sea have been
mapped by a diver then turned into undersea landscapes by an artist.
Rod Macdonald, one of the country’s best known divers, says the sea is revealing more details of the sunken ships as they erode.
He has surveyed and researched 25 lying in Scottish waters for his new book, Great British Shipwrecks.
Rod
provides a dramatic account of the ships’ time afloat and their eventual
sinking, with each wreck being illustrated by marine artist Robert
Ward, of Muchalls, Aberdeenshire.
His journey starts with the famous shipwrecks at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands – where the German fleet was scuttled in 1919.
Also
included is the legendary WWI British cruiser HMS Hampshire, on which
War Secretary Lord Kitchener perished on a voyage to Russia in 1916.
It rests in over 200 feet of water off Marwick Head to the north west of Orkney.
The
famous West Coast shipwrecks ,such as the steamships Thesis, Hispania
and Shuna, and cargo ship Rondo in the Sound of Mull are featured. There
are the renowned wrecks of the Dutch steamship SS Breda, lost near Oban
in 1940, and the WWII minelayer HMS Port Napier off Skye. The wreck of HMS Port Napier which lies off Skye
Rod
also reveals the haunting remains of HMS Pathfinder, the first Royal
Navy warship to be sunk by a U-boat torpedo during WWI. It lies in the
Forth.
Rod, 53 said: “The authorities at first attempted to cover up the true cause of the sinking.
“They
feared the affect that knowledge of the loss of such a ship to a U-boat
torpedo would have because it revealed just how vulnerable to torpedo attack British warships were.
“Pathfinder
was thus reported, at first, to have been mined. The Admiralty came to
an agreement with the Press Bureau, which allowed for the censoring of all reports.
“But other newspapers soon published an eyewitness account from an
Eyemouth fisherman who helped in the rescue and confirmed rumours a
submarine had
been responsible, rather than a mine.
“The
true story eventually came out and the sinking of Pathfinder by a
submarine made both sides in the conflict aware of the potential
vulnerability of large ships to attack by submarines. There were only 18
survivors.
“Small personal
items – a brass sextant in the bridge area and brass light cages and
lanterns – are strewn about, and all over the wreck are the reminders
that this was a warship.
“On the main section of the wreck, the deck collapses downwards towards the seabed.
“Here,
there is an ancient large gauge net lying over parts of it. The Royal
Navy draped a net over the wreck just after the sinking to catch any
bodies floating free from it and it may be part of that net that
remains.
“Some of the wrecks I have dived over 50 times – and brought back photographs and video for Rob to draw his illustrations.”
Rod said Scapa Flow was the still the top dive site in Britain and attracts around 4000 divers a year.
But more and more divers are also heading to St Abbs Head and
Eyemouth where underwater surveys for offshore wind farms have revealed
up to 100 new wrecks.
More than 40,000 dives are now carried out in the area each year.
? Great British Shipwrecks by Rod Macdonald is published by Whittles Publishing.
Enlarge PhotoAssociated
Press/United States Coast Guard, Colby Buchanan - This Nov. 28, 2012
photo provided by The United States Coast Guard shows a WWII minesweeper
on the Mississippi River near St. Louis, Mo.
ST. LOUIS (AP) — From sunken steamboats
to a millennium-old map engraved in rock, the drought-drained rivers of
the nation's midsection are offering a rare and fleeting glimpse into
years gone by.
Lack of rain has left many rivers
at low levels unseen for decades, creating problems for river commerce
and recreation and raising concerns about water supplies and hydropower
if the drought persists into next year, as many fear.
But for the curious, the receding water is offering an occasional treasure trove of history.
An old steamboat is now visible on the Missouri River near St. Charles, Mo., and other old boats nestled on river bottoms are showing up elsewhere. A World War II minesweeper, once moored along the Mississippi River as a museum at St. Louis before it was torn away by floodwaters two decades ago, has become visible — rusted but intact.
Perhaps most interesting, a rock
containing what is believed to be an ancient map has emerged in the
Mississippi River in southeast Missouri.
The rock contains etchings believed to be up to 1,200 years old. It
was not in the river a millennium ago, but the changing course of the
waterway now normally puts it under water — exposed only in periods of
extreme drought. Experts are wary of giving a specific location out of
fear that looters will take a chunk of the rock or scribble graffiti on
it.
"It appears to be a map of prehistoric Indian villages," said Steve Dasovich,
an anthropology professor at Lindenwood University in St. Charles.
"What's really fascinating is that it shows village sites we don't yet
know about."
Old boats are turning up in several locations, including sunken steamboats dating to the 19th century.
That's not surprising considering the volume of steamboat traffic that once traversed the Missouri and Mississippi
rivers. Dasovich said it wasn't uncommon in the 1800s to have hundreds
of steamboats pass by St. Louis each day, given the fact that St. Louis
was once among the world's busiest inland ports. The boats, sometimes
lined up two miles deep and four boats wide in both directions, carried
not only people from town to town but goods and supplies up and down the
rivers.
Sinkings were common among the wooden vessels, which often were poorly constructed.
"The average lifespan of a steamboat on the Missouri River was five
years," Dasovich said. "They were made quickly. If you could make one
run from St. Louis to Fort Benton, Mont., and back, you've paid for your
boat and probably made a profit. After that, it's almost like they
didn't care what happened."
What often happened, at least on the Missouri River, was the boat
would strike an underwater tree that had been uprooted and become lodged
in the river bottom, tearing a hole that would sink the ship. Dasovich
estimated that the remains of 500 to 700 steamboats sit at the bottom of
the Missouri River, scattered from its mouth in Montana to its
convergence with the Mississippi near St. Louis.
The number of sunken steamboats on the Mississippi River is likely
about the same, Dasovich said. Steamboat traffic was far heavier on the
Mississippi, but traffic there was and is less susceptible to river
debris.
Boiler explosions, lightning strikes and accidents also sunk many a
steamboat. One of the grander ones, the Montana, turned up this fall on
the Missouri River near St. Charles. The elaborate steamer was as long
as a football field with lavish touches aimed at pleasing its mostly
wealthy clientele. It went to its watery grave after striking a tree
below the surface in 1884.
The U.S. Coast Guard and Army Corps of Engineers urge sightseers to
stay away from any shipwreck sites. Sandbars leading to them can be
unstable and dangerous, and the rusted hulks can pose dangers for those
sifting through them.
Plus, taking anything from them is illegal. By law, sunken ships and their goods belong to the state where they went down.
While unusual, it's not unprecedented for low water levels to reveal historic artifacts.
Last year, an officer who patrols an East Texas lake discovered a
piece of the space shuttle Columbia, which broke apart and burned on
re-entry in 2003, killing all seven astronauts aboard. And the remains
of a wooden steamer built 125 years ago recently were uncovered in a
Michigan waterway because of low levels in the Great Lakes.
But treasure hunters expecting to find Titanic-like souvenirs in
rivers will likely be disappointed if they risk exploring the lost
boats.
"It's not like these wrecks are full of bottles, dishes, things like
that," said Mark Wagner, an archaeologist at Southern Illinois
University-Carbondale. "If there was anything on there in the first
place, the river current pretty much stripped things out of these
wrecks."
Such was the case with the USS Inaugural, a World War II minesweeper
that for years served as a docked museum on the Mississippi River at St.
Louis. The Great Flood of 1993 ripped the Inaugural from its mooring
near the Gateway Arch. It crashed into the Poplar Street bridge, and
then sank.
In September, the rusted
Inaugural became visible again, though now nothing more than an empty,
orange-rusted hulk lying on its side not far from a south St. Louis
casino.
A pond where Pope Benedict XVI likes to pray and feed the fish has
inspired a new children's book published by the Vatican on Wednesday
that his closest aide described as a window into the pope's soul.
"The Mystery of the Little Pond" tells the story of a young goldfish and his
fondness for "the man in white" who feeds him bread during the summer
months when Benedict stays at his summer residence of Castel Gandolfo
near Rome.
The pond, which is set in some ancient Roman ruins on the grounds of
the palace, also features a statue of the Virgin Mary -- described by
the goldfish in the book as "a very important woman" when he sees her
reflection.
"You can discover the Holy Father's soul in this pond," Monsignor
Georg Gaenswein, the head of the papal household and personal secretary
to the nature-loving pope, said at a presentation of the book near St
Peter's Square.
"The message is between the lines. I recommend parents read this book
aloud to their children and they will discover the mystery of the
pope," he said.
The 24-page book is by Russian-born Natalia Tsarkova, the official
portrait artist of the Vatican, who wrote the text and painted the
illustrations.
The back cover of the book, which is only available in Italian for
the moment, features a photograph of the pope feeding the fish at the
pond.
The book also won endorsements from Antonio Paolucci, director of the
Vatican Museums, and Saverio Petrillo, the manager of Castel Gandolfo,
who said the peaceful pond had been a place of prayer for several past
popes.
Petrillo said John Paul II in particular was fond of the place but
not all of Benedict's predecessors showed the same love for animals as
Benedict -- Paul VI (1963-1978) had to be persuaded not to eat the frogs
from the pond.
Just
like a scene out of "Antiques Roadshow," a woman in Hartford, Conn.,
turned in an old rifle to her local police station's gun buy-back, only
to discover the gun was worth anywhere from $20,000 to $25,000. The
woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, inherited the gun from her father
who had brought it home with him from Europe as a memento from World
War II.
The two officers conducting the gun buy-back, who are resident gun
experts for the Hartford Police Department, informed the owner she was
in possession of a Nazi Assault Rifle, the first of its kind, that dates
back to 1944.
The gun is called a Sturmgewehr 44, literally meaning "storm rifle," and
is the first "modern assault rifle ever made, eventually replaced by
the AK 47 in 1947 by Russia, who copied the German design of the
Sturmgewehr 44," Officer Lewis Crabtree, one of the two officers who
discovered the gun, told ABC News.
"It's like finding the Babe Ruth of baseball cards," said Officer John
Cavanna. "The rarity, it was made for such a very short period."
Most people, however, who aren't avid gun fans would have no idea what role this gun played in history.
"If you were to look at the gun and didn't know anything about guns, you would think it was garbage," Crabtree said.
That is essentially what the owner thought the gun was, bringing it to
the station knowing full well it would be put into a smelter, melting
the gun down into an iron brick.
"People turn in guns for a variety of reasons," Cavanna told ABC. "They
don't have a good way to secure it, they have kids around their home, or
they don't know how to use it. This is an anonymous way for someone to
take an unwanted firearm and get it off the streets. We then give them a
$50 or $100 gift card to Wal-Mart."
Crabtree attributes gun accidents to ignorance and carelessness. The
anonymous gun buy-back program is aimed at preventing people from
running into potentially dangerous situations with a gun they don't know
how to use or work.
This seems to be the reason the woman who dropped off the historic rifle.
"Her father passed away. The gun was in her closet," Cavanna said. "She did not know it was a machine gun.
"If the gun had been in the closet loaded, any second you could hit the
wrong level and discharge a fatal round," he said of the Sturmgewehr 44.
This German-made machine gun can fire 500 rounds in minutes, according to Cavanna, who is also a gun range master.
At the time the officers received the gun, it was in such disrepair that
it was inoperable, unable to shoot a bullet even if the gun had been
loaded. Cavanna said ammunition would have to be especially made for
this gun.
The unnamed owner of the gun has left the valuable artifact at the police station for safe keeping.
"We did not take the gun in for the gun buy-back program," Crabtree
said. "If we took it as part of the buy-back, we would have no choice
but to destroy the gun. We don't want to destroy that gun."
The owner intends to sell the Sturmgewehr 44.
"It sounds like her family could use the money," Cavanna said.
CHICAGO (WFLD/CNN) -- On this 71st anniversary of the attack on Pearl
Harbor, a World War II-era plane has been brought back to the surface
of Lake Michigan on Friday.
The plane has been lying on the bottom of the lake for nearly 70
years. The Naval Aviation Museum Foundation is sponsoring the recovery.
The aircraft crashed during training near Waukegan, IL in December 1944.
World War II-era plan found at the bottom of Lake Michigan. (Courtesy: WFLD/CNN)
