9.
PHOENIX SHIPWRECK
Forty-seven Chinese tourists, including 13 children, tragically perished one July afternoon
in 2018 when the diving boat they were on capsized in the waters off Phuket, Thailand.
The vessel, called the Phoenix, was on its way back to the coast after a snorkeling trip
with 101 passengers aboard.
There was a storm warning in effect for later that day, but it’s unclear whether the captain
knew about it.
Maybe the captain knew about it and ignored it.
Before the Phoenix could reach dry land, it encountered thrashing waves measuring at least
10 feet (3 meters) tall.
The boat should have been able to handle these uncomfortable conditions, but it had major
construction and design flaws that caused it to sink.
One problem was loose concrete blocks were being used as ballast.
When the boat began swaying, they slid from side to side in the bilge, making the listing
even worse.
There was also only one watertight door on the vessel when there should have been four.
The windows smashed against the impact of the pounding waves because they weren’t
as durable as they were supposed to be.
The authorities were unaware of these issues.
They made these discoveries months after the wreck when they raised the Phoenix from 137
feet (42 meters) beneath the waves.
Thai officials blamed the boat’s Chinese owners for its noncompliance with the law,
even though the government had inspected and approved it for commercial use.
To add insult to injury, the owners auctioned the wreck off, which many saw as disrespectful
to the victims of the tragedy.
8.
RARE ROMAN AMPHORAE
In early 2021, archaeologists announced the discovery of a rare Roman shipwreck off the
Greek island of Kasos.
Along a major maritime trade route between Crete and Karpathos, Kasos is the southernmost
island in the Aegean Sea.
It was once home to populations from the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures.
Dating back to sometime between 200 and 300 A.D., crews loaded the sunken vessel with
ceramic amphorae, a tall ancient Greek or Roman jar with two handles and a narrow neck.
They were once likely filled with oil, according to the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports.
The ongoing Kasos Maritime Archaeological Project made the discovery.
They have spent the last four years focusing on finding, recording, salvaging, and studying
submerged artifacts around the island.
A team of nearly two dozen scientists and technicians conducted over 100 dives throughout
their investigation of the ancient wreck.
The team logged over 200 hours of diving time.
Besides the Roman ship, the team identified three other wrecks, including one laden with
Hellenistic era amphorae dating back to the first century B.C.
They dated another even older shipwreck back to the fifth century B.C., while the third
vessel is from modern times.
7.
LONG LOST BEER INGREDIENTS During the 1980s, an amateur diver named Steve
Hickman encountered a sunken ship, the Wallachia, off the Scottish coast.
It had collided with another vessel and capsized back in 1895 right after departing from Glasgow.
Crews fully loaded the ship with cargo, including thousands of bottles of different kinds of
alcohol.
The cold water helped to preserve the booze while it sat on the seafloor for over a century
before Hickman found it.
After discovering the wreck, he returned to it periodically to retrieve whiskey, gin,
and beer, collecting dozens of bottles over the years.
A team accompanied Hickman during one of his dives to the Wallachia last year and collected
a few bottles.
They handed them over to scientists at BrewLab, a company that specializes in beer quality.
The team found live yeast in three bottles of beer, and they used it to try replicating
the original recipe.
Throughout the process, they discovered that the beer contained a long-lost yeast strain
that is no longer used today.
At the last update, they were looking into whether it could be useful for improving modern
brewing.
6.
HMS PANDORA WRECK The British launched the Royal Navy ship,
HMS Pandora, in 1779.
It became famous for hunting down and capturing 14 mutineers in the South Pacific who had
seized control of another British Royal Navy vessel called the HMS Bounty.
Shortly into its return voyage to Europe in 1791, the Pandora ran aground on the outer
Great Barrier Reef.
It sank the following morning, killing 31 crew members and four of the captured mutineers.
Colonial officials in New South Wales, Australia, didn’t bother trying to salvage the wreck.
A trio of explorers rediscovered the long-forgotten Pandora in 1977.
The ship quickly became known as one of the most significant shipwrecks ever found in
the Southern Hemisphere.
Marine archaeologists from the Queensland Museum carried out several excavations between
1983 and 1999.
They recovered the skeletal remains of several crew members and fancy shoe buckles, buttons,
wax seals, and a one-of-a-kind 18th-century stamp belonging to the ship’s First Lieutenant
John Larkin.
The team only explored a portion of the wreck.
Much of the vessel remains buried in what archaeologist Peter Gesner described as a
“marine Pompeii.”
But raising the Pandora would be a time-consuming and costly endeavor.
The price of recovering the copper-sheathed hull alone was estimated at around $60,000,000
in 1998.
It would undoubtedly cost a lot more now.
So it’s unlikely that anyone will ever bring the entire wreck to the surface.
Nobody knows if there are plans to continue excavating it.
5.
THE MAID OF HARLECH In 2007, a family of beachgoers spotted a
World War II-era American fighter plane poking out from the sand and water along the coast
in North Wales.
Nicknamed the Maid of Harlech, it was the long-forgotten plane’s third appearance
in 65 years.
The Lockheed P-38 Lightning aircraft was being piloted by 24-year-old Second Lieutenant Robert
F. Elliott when it crash-landed on September 27, 1942.
Its left engine lost power less than an hour into Elliott’s flight.
When he attempted an emergency landing, the right engine also malfunctioned, and the plane
landed in two feet (61 cm) of water.
Elliott survived, but investigators accused him of being careless and blamed him for the
crash.
The case received little publicity and the U.K.’s beaches were closed to the public
for obvious safety reasons.
Meanwhile, the military banned the press from discussing any rumored Allied disasters.
There’s no evidence that any visitors encountered the wreck after the beaches reopened, and
the authorities have always kept its location quiet to prevent people from disturbing it.
While the aircraft’s guns have been removed, it still carries its fuel load.
Nobody ever saw The Maid of Harlech again until the 1970s, when it became partially
uncovered from the six-and-a-half feet (2 meters) of sand that normally covers it.
This happened again in 2007, when a family of beachgoers stumbled upon the plane, and
again in 2014.
If you’re hoping to glimpse firsthand this World War II relic, good luck finding it.
You would need perfect timing with shifting sands and waters, and its location remains
a closely guarded secret.
During the Maid of Harlech’s most recent 120-day appearance, local aviation historian
Matt Rimmer remained on guard to make sure that nobody interfered with it.
Have you ever tried to get a peek at something you weren’t supposed to?
Share your experience in the comments.
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4.
APOLLO 11 ROCKET ENGINES Apollo 11 is the famous space mission that
put men on the moon for the first time.
When it launched on July 16, 1969, it deposited its Saturn V F-1 rockets into the Atlantic
Ocean.
They remained there until a team from Bezos Expeditions, an exploration company owned
by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, found them.
After locating the rockets 14,000 feet (4,267 meters) beneath the waves using deep-sea sonar,
the team inspected them using remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs.
They encountered a tangled, timeworn mess of parts strewn across the seafloor.
But there was only one way to tell how intact the engines were, and if they were from Apollo
11.
It would be by removing them from the water and performing in-depth analysis.
This was easier said than done.
As Bezos pointed out in a statement, the parts slammed into the water at high velocity and
had sat in salt water for 40 years before the team recovered them.
But he also acknowledged that manufacturers made the rockets of durable materials and
seemed hopeful about the prospect of identifying their origins.
In early 2013, Bezos Expeditions raised a collection of parts including two of the engines.
NASA launched the Sixty-seven Saturn V F-1 rockets between 1967 and 1973, so the team’s
next task was to verify whether the ones they brought to the surface were actually from
Apollo 11.
They confirmed this several months later via the parts’ extremely worn and barely detectable
serial number.
3.
BLACK SWAN PROJECT In 2007, a company called Odyssey Marine Exploration
privately flew $500,000,000 worth of treasure from Gibraltar to its headquarters in Tampa,
Florida.
Company officials refused to reveal the origins of the cryptic hoard, which included 17 tons
(15.4 metric tons) of mostly silver coins.
Altogether, the trove contained well over a half-million pieces.
The company admitted that the coins mostly came from a single shipwreck, but that there
were coins from other wrecks thrown into the mix.
Most of the coins are likely uncirculated, according to rare coin expert Nick Bruyer,
who examined several thousand of the pieces.
It was later revealed that Odyssey filed legal paperwork for rights to salvage the wreck
of a Spanish warship called the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes.
The ship sank off the Portuguese coast during a battle in 1804.
The Spanish government claimed ownership of the sunken vessel and fought the case.
Because they minted some coins in Lima, the Peruvian government also claimed dibs on the
treasure.
The court ultimately ruled that the hoard rightfully belongs to Spain.
Courts ordered Odyssey to turn it over to the Spanish government and to pay over $1,000,000
for what they called “bad faith and abusive litigation.”
Subsequent dives led by Cartegena’s National Museum of Underwater Archaeology (ARQUA),
which is managed by Spain’s Culture Ministry, began in 2014.
The first of three expeditions so far yielded thousands of artifacts as researchers ventured
into the heart of the ship.
The find included “anchors, iron and bronze cannon, copper and tin ingots, a silver dinner
service and cutlery, silver candlesticks, a gold pestle, and others,” according to
a report from the University of Warsaw.
The treasures show what early 19th-century life was like, making their scientific and
historic value immeasurable.
Researchers believe the ship sank before Spain joined France in the Napoleonic Wars against
Britain, which started after the breakdown of the 1802 Treaty of Amiens between France
and Britain.
2.
FOREIGN SURVEILLANCE DRONE While working in the Yellow Sea just north
of Shanghai last year, a fisherman felt a powerful pull on his net.
He hauled it in, thinking he had just caught a large amount of fish, only to discover that
he had snagged a strangely shaped black device measuring about 10 feet (3 meters) long.
It somewhat resembled a surfboard and was equipped with 10 horizontal fins and an array
of antennas and solar panels.
Unsure of what the object was, the man turned it over to the local authorities.
Photos show that it looks a lot like a Wave Glider, a reconnaissance drone used by several
militaries, including the U.S. Navy and the British Royal Navy.
The discovery is both strange and alarming since militaries sometimes use these devices
for obtaining oceanographic data for submarine and anti-submarine warfare.
This is according to military commentator Song Zhongping.
Speaking with the South China Morning Post, he described the surveillance drone as a “great
threat to China’s national security.”
But China is evidently just as guilty of using this type of equipment to monitor other countries.
In late 2020, an autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV, resembling the Chinese-built Sea Wing
glider, was found in Indonesian waters off Selayar Island.
Nobody came forward to claim ownership of it.
It may surprise you to learn that the discovery of unclaimed surveillance devices is a somewhat
frequent occurrence, or it’s at least not as unusual as one might think.
For example, in October 2020, Her Majesty’s Coast Guard (HMCG) collected a device much
like the Wave Glider on the U.K.’s Isle of Tiree.
Of course, no government owned up to being responsible for it.
1.
GRANITE HEAD OF CAESARION Better known by his nickname, Caesarion, Ptolemy
XV Caesar was the last pharaoh of Egypt’s Ptolemaic Dynasty and Cleopatra’s illegitimate
son with Julius Caesar.
He reigned alongside his mother, who groomed him as her planned successor until she took
her own life in 30 B.C.
Caesarion continued ruling on his own for a short time until the Roman Emperor Octavian
had him executed.
Someone supposedly strangled him, although many historians have called the exact circumstances
of his death into question.
There are very few surviving images of Caesarion.
One of these rare depictions came as an enormous granite head that was raised from the harbor
of Alexandria in 1997.
Dating back to the first century B.C., researchers found it in a section of the ancient city
that was submerged by earthquakes and tidal waves.
The head was likely once part of a full-bodied statue of the ruler.
Researchers have also found many other fascinating treasures among Alexandria’s underwater
ruins, including the marble head of the Roman princess Antonia Minor, a sphinx, several
shipwrecks, and more.
Which of these things rescued from the ocean was most interesting to you?
Let us know in the comments.
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