Treasure Lost at Sea: Diving to the World's Great Shipwrecks - Softcover

9781552978726: Treasure Lost at Sea: Diving to the World's Great Shipwrecks
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The vast hidden world of sunken treasure.

With less than 2% of the world's ocean depths explored to date, a myriad of unimagined mysteries and treasures await discovery. Treasure Lost at Sea chronicles the excitement of underwater archaeology and search for treasure. The book recounts the major periods and geographic locations of shipwrecks.

Chapters include:

  • The classical world
  • Scandinavian shipwrecks
  • The age of discovery
  • The Spanish galleons
  • Bermuda, graveyard of ships
  • Privateers, pirates and mutineers
  • Deep-water shipwrecks (Bismarck, Titanic, and others)
  • Port Royal: The sunken city

The lively text details the potential treasure as well as the political turf wars, technological limitations, and forces of nature that threaten any mission's success.

Humanity's long history of exploration, civilization, trade and war is littered with sunken vessels. Colorful and richly illustrated, Treasure Lost at Sea will inspire a new generation of underwater archaeologists.

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About the Author:

Robert F. Marx began his underwater archaeological career as a U.S. Marine diver. He has participated in hundreds of search and salvage operations around the world and is the author of seven books including Sunken Treasure: How to Find It, Treasure Fleets of the Spanish Main and The Battle of the Spanish Armada.

Jenifer Marx is the author of Pirates and Privateers of the Caribbean and The Magic of Gold. She co-authored three books with Robert Marx: In the Wake of Galleons, The Underwater Dig and Deep, Deeper, Deepest.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction

From time immemorial, mariners have sailed the perilous seas. Archaeological evidence discovered on mainland Greece reveals that man had vessels capable of making open sea voyages in the Aegean more than 9,000 years ago. In the South Pacific, using outrigger canoes, the Neolithic Polynesians made impressive voyages as far north as Hawaii and as far south as New Zealand.

The sailors of past times were an intrepid fraternity, setting forth on uncharted seas for distant lands. Journeys by sea were measured in months or years. and the risks were great. Ten percent of all ships that embarked on long voyages were lost.

Since men first traveled on the seas, ships have sunk, carrying with them varied cargoes, maritime objects, weapons, implements and personal items. All over the globe, relics of civilizations that have long since vanished beckon from watery tombs. Like the artifacts that archaeologists patiently unearth on land, those found on underwater sites provide clues, often beautiful and sometimes poignant, for vividly reconstructing the past. Unlike many land sites, where the vestiges of the earliest cultures are covered by or mixed with those of succeeding eras, an ancient shipwreck is a historical time capsule. Most ships sank quickly, mortally wounded in storms or wrecked on hidden reefs or submerged rocks. Some wrecks were partially salvaged by contemporary or later salvors, especially ships laden with valuable cargo that had gone down in shallow water. Until recently, however, many of the most fascinating wrecks lay beyond our reach. Early salvors were limited to "fishing" a wreck with grappling devices, or by free diving or using rudimentary diving bells.

The identity of the first divers is shrouded in the mists of antiquity. As early as 4500 B.C., however, brave and skillful divers were reaching depths in excess of 100 feet (30 m), on a lungful of air, to retrieve such treasures as red coral and mother-of-pearl shells.

Tradition credits Alexander the Great with the first descent in a sealed waterproof container. This event reportedly took place in 332 B.C., off the island stronghold of Tyre, during his epic conquest of the world. A thirteenth-century French illustration shows the young Macedonian inside a candle-lit glass barrel. He is surrounded by numerous species of marine life and observed by a huge whale. Unfortunately, we have no idea what Alexander's contraption was really like.

The diving bell was actually invented before Alexander's time. Writing in 360 B.C., Aristotle noted its use by Greek sponge gatherers: "In order that these fishers of sponges may be supplied with a facility of respiration, a kettle is let down to them, not full of water, but air which constantly assists the submerged men. It is forcibly kept uptight in its descent, in order that it may be sent down at an equal level all around to prevent the air from escaping and the water from entering."

The Renaissance provides the next account of a diving bell. In 1531 salvors employed a bell in Lake Nemi, near Rome, in an attempt to locate two of the Emperor Caligula's pleasure galleys, which were said to have sunk laden with gold. The barrel-shaped bell, invented by the Italian physicist Guglielmo de Lorena, covered the diver's head and torso. It was raised and lowered by ropes, and a diver could walk about on the lake bed for nearly an hour before his air supply was exhausted.

In 1538 two Greeks designed a diving bell and demonstrated it at the Spanish court in Toledo before Emperor Charles V and 10,000 spectators. Larger than de Lorena's, this bell was spacious enough to accommodate both inventors, who sat on a plank bench. To the astonishment of the king and the crowd, the candles the Greeks had taken down with them were still burning when they surfaced.

News of the Toledo bell spread rapidly throughout Europe, stimulating the construction of many more. The diving bell was significantly improved in 1689 by Dr. Denis Papin, a French physicist, who devised a way to supply fresh air from the surface by means of a large bellows or pump. At about the same time, Edmund Halley, the famed English astronomer, built a diving bell that incorporated air-filled, leaded barrels with valves and tubes attached for transferring air into the bell. This was a more primitive method than Papin's but far more effective, because the pumps of the period were subject to frequent breakdowns and were not strong enough to deliver much pressure. Diving bells had a long reign, until the advent of the diving helmet in the nineteenth century, and were the main tool used to explore the underwater world, albeit in a very limited way.

The earliest mention of divers in quest of sunken treasure (defined as precious metals, money, jewels and works of art) is by Herodotus, a Greek historian who wrote around the middle of the fifth century B.C. He records that, near the beginning of that century, Xerxes, the king of Persia, had employed a Greek diver named Scyllias and his daughter, Cyane, to recover an immense treasure from several Persian galleys sunk during a battle with a Greek fleet. They brought up the treasure, but Xerxes reneged on the promised reward and detained them aboard his galley, doubtless for other diving jobs he had in mind.

Scyllias and Cyane jumped overboard in the midst of a storm and cut the anchor cables of the Persian ships, causing many of them to collide. The Persians attempted pursuit, but the culprits managed to escape by swimming underwater to Artemisium, a distance of nine miles (15 km), using reeds as snorkels.

By the third century B.C., diving for treasure on shipwrecks was so common among the Greeks that they had laws regarding the division of the finds. A diver received a tenth of the value of treasure recovered in 2 cubits of water or less (a cubit was about 20 inches [0.5 m]); a third of the value of recoveries between 2 and 8 cubits; and half the value of treasure recovered in depths in excess of 8 cubits. The part of the treasure not given to the diver was the property of the original owner; in the event of his death or dishonor, it became the property of the ruler from whose waters it was recovered.

Early in the sixteenth century, the Spanish established pearl fisheries on the islands of Cubagua and Margarita, off the northern coast of Venezuela. The supply of indigenous Carib divers was soon exhausted. Many died from European diseases. Others died from overwork at the hands of their greedy employers, who forced them to dive as many as sixteen hours a day. The first recorded strike in history took place in 1606 at Margarita Island when the divers ran out of tobacco, which they ate in the belief that it allowed them to stay underwater longer. After several divers were hung by their Spanish masters, the rest quickly resumed diving.

The next to be used as divers were enslaved Lucayan Indians, from the Bahamas, the first natives Columbus had encountered in the New World. The Spanish historian Oviedo, writing in 1535, described a visit to the pearl fisheries of Margarita where he observed the Lucayan divers, who were considered the best divers in the New World. He marveled at their ability, noting that they were able to descend to depths of 100 feet (30 m) and remain submerged for as long as five minutes. They had more stamina than the Caribs and could dive from sunrise to sunset, seven days a week, without appearing to tire. As Old World divers had done for millennia, they descended by grasping stone weights in their arms. They dove naked except for net bags around their necks, in which they deposited oysters they found on the bottom. So great was the demand for the Lucayan divers in the pearl fisheries that in only a few decades the Bahamas were bereft of their former inhabitants.

The Spaniards also used divers in salvage work. Every year from 1503 until the end of the colonial period in the early nineteenth century, ships from Spain carried supplies across the Atlantic to the settlements in the New Wo

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  • PublisherFirefly Books
  • Publication date2004
  • ISBN 10 1552978729
  • ISBN 13 9781552978726
  • BindingPaperback
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages192
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