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It's not exactly a process that goes off with a bang. More than three years after a Portland-area girl and her dad found a pair old cannons on the beach in Arch Cape, restoration on one of the cannons is finally finished and work has begun on the other. It's slow-going for sure, but patience has paid off in a number of clues to the first gun's origins. Tualatin beachcombers Miranda Petrone and her father, Michael Petrone, found the cannons in February 2008. Oregon Parks and Recreation took possession of the old guns, storing them in water tanks, then driving...

Even long before the times of Jesus and the Apostle Paul, Malta was the rocky knob at the western edge of the Roman Empire, the place where the leftovers of the Mediterranean Sea washed up and dug in. Prehistoric worshipers left mysterious stone structures. Phoenician traders planted their alphabet and Arabic-inflected language. Greeks added new words and traditions. Sailing across the water the Romans grandly called "Mare Nostrum," "Our Sea," a rich Roman governor arrived to add a mosaic-floored villa on a wind-swept hill with a view of the island curved like a pelican's beak to catch the peoples and...

Contractors are now planning to dismantle the beached and broken Davy Crockett right where it sits. Workers will encircle the 431-foot barge with a cofferdam, forming an enclosed area, and take it apart piece by piece. The original plan of floating it away to a dry dock proved to be untenable, marking another setback in an operation that’s already the most expensive shipwreck in Washington history. Until this week, federal and state authorities had been planning to cut the ship in two and float both halves away to a dry dock. But officials said they were unable to reach agreements...

WRECK OF EDMUND FITZGERALD: Remembering a maritime disaster After 35 years, wreck of the Fitz still intrigues Maybe it’s because no one knows for sure exactly what happened. Maybe it’s because so many lives were lost in an instant. Or maybe it’s because of the song. It was 35 years ago tonight when the Great Lakes freighter Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior. A generation has passed. Memories fade. But interest in the “Fitz” is still keen. DULUTH — Maybe it’s because no one knows for sure exactly what happened. Maybe it’s because so many lives were lost in an...

Team IDs ancient cargo from DNA For the first time, researchers have identified DNA from inside ceramic containers in an ancient shipwreck on the seafloor, making it possible to determine what the ship's cargo was even though there was no visible trace of it. The findings, by a team from MIT, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and Lund University in Sweden, are being reported in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Archeological Science. By scraping samples from inside two of the containers, called amphoras, the researchers were able to obtain DNA sequences that identified the contents of one...

Pill-popping ancients liked a good dose of vegetables, archaeobotanists have found after analyzing plant DNA in Greek-made pills from a 130 BC shipwreck. Though archaeologists have known about the ship since the 1980s, this is the first time researchers have had a crack at analyzing the drugs found onboard. Using the GenBank genetic database as their guide, they have found that the pills appear to contain carrot, parsley, radish, alfalfa, chestnut, celery, wild onion, yarrow, oak, and cabbage. Geneticist Robert Fleischer of the Smithsonian's National Zoological Park says that many of the ingredients match those described in ancient texts, New...

The Navy's greatest navigational tragedy took place in September 1923 at an isolated California coastal headland locally known as Honda Point. Officially called Point Pedernales, Honda is a few miles from the northern entrance of the heavily-traveled Santa Barbara Channel. Completely exposed to wind and wave, and often obscured by fog, this rocky shore has claimed many vessels, but never more at one stroke than at about 9 PM on the dark evening of 8 September 1923, when seven nearly new U.S. Navy destroyers and twenty-three lives were lost there. Just over twelve hours earlier Destroyer Squadron ELEVEN left San...

A team of marine archeologists using sonar scanners has discovered new underwater treasures in the Italian seas. Trading vessels dating from the first century BC to the 5th through 7th centuries AD were found in the waters of the Pontine Islands. Their cargoes were found to be intact. Italian culture authorities and the Aurora Trust, a U.S. foundation which promotes underwater exploration in the Mediterranean, discovered four shipwrecks resting on the seabed. The discovery was made in a beautiful stretch of sea off the tiny rock of Zannone, part of the Pontine Islands in central Italy. After the discovery, the...

For almost 112 years, the steamship rested in ghostly silence at the bottom of Lake Michigan, unknown and unseen until a group of divers kicked their way down to the deck and solved a perplexing maritime mystery. The deckhouses were gone, the smokestack was tipped over and a wheelbarrow used to move cargo lay on the boat's surface. Though the name couldn't be seen on the stern, the length of the vessel and unusual characteristics pointed to only one ship - the L.R. Doty. Until last week, it was the largest wooden ship that had been unaccounted for in Lake...

MILWAUKEE (AP) -- A great wooden steamship that sank more than a century ago in a violent Lake Michigan storm has been found off the Milwaukee-area shoreline, and divers say the intact vessel appears to have been perfectly preserved by the cold fresh waters. Finding the 300-foot-long L.R. Doty was important because it was the largest wooden ship that remained unaccounted for, said Brendon Baillod, the president of the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association.....

COROLLA, N.C. A shipwreck exposed on the beach by winter storms could date to a time of commerce between England and Jamestown in the early 1600s. Possibly the oldest known wreck on the North Carolina coast, the timbers and construction of the ship are very similar to the Sea Venture, the 1609 flagship of seven vessels that carr ied people and supplies to Jamestown, said Bradley A. Rodgers, a professor of archaeology and conservation in the maritime studies program at East Carolina University. Remains of the Sea Venture rest off the Bermuda coast after it ran aground there in 1609...

Fishing boat missing after searching for sailors from sunken ship SEOUL, April 3 (Yonhap) -- A fishing boat has vanished and is feared to have sunk after searching for sailors missing from last week's naval disaster, maritime police said Saturday. Police said they lost contact with the 99-ton boat, Kumyang 98, carrying nine people aboard, after receiving a distress signal at around 8:30 p.m. Friday in the area off the western sea border with North Korea, where the patrol ship Cheonan ship sank on March 26. The fishing boat was among 10 vessels mobilized to find the Cheonan's 46 missing...

...Archaeologists have described the vessel, which is thought to date back to around 900BC, as being a "bulk carrier" of its age. The copper and tin would have been used for making bronze -- the primary product of the period which was used in the manufacture of not only weapons, but also tools, jewellery, ornaments and other items. Archaeologists believe the copper -- and possibly the tin -- was being imported into Britain and originated in a number of different countries throughout Europe, rather than from a single source, demonstrating the existence of a complex network of trade routes across...

Amateur historian Rick Rogers just knows Europeans visited the islands two centuries before Captain Cook landed in 1778. Trying to prove it and convince professionals, that's another story. In the clear blue water 150 feet down, off Palemano Point on Hawaii's Big Island, Captain Rick Rogers swam along the ocean floor, concentrating on the light white swirls of staghorn reef below him. As tiny bubbles of air escaped from his tank, his black flippers propelled him above the coral, next to schools of reddish mempache and juicy turquoise uhu fish. The scene was breathtaking, but Rogers didn't care about nature....

MIAMI — A U.S. district judge has ruled that U.S. treasure-hunting company Odyssey Marine Exploration should return to Spain a fortune in old coins recovered from the wreck of a 19th-century Spanish warship. Judge Steven Merryday nevertheless directed that the return of the treasure to Spain be stayed until an appeals process in the case was concluded. Merryday's order backed a recommendation by a U.S. magistrate judge in June that Odyssey should hand over to the Spanish government nearly 600,000 silver and gold coins valued at some $500 million that it recovered from the wreck of the 19th-century Spanish warship...

34 years ago today, on November 10, 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald - aka "Mighty Fritz," - foundered and sank during a storm on Lake Superior. Launched on June 8, 1958, the Edmund Fitzgerald was the largest ship on the Great Lakes for the next 13 years

A shipwreck apparently containing toxic waste is being investigated by authorities in Italy amid claims that it was deliberately sunk by the mafia.An informant from the Calabrian mafia said the ship was one of a number he blew up as part of an illegal operation to bypass laws on toxic waste disposal.

Aboard a pontoon boat chugging past the marshland of Maryland's upper Patuxent River on a recent Saturday, Ralph Eshelman pointed to the spot where the muddy brown water hides a shipwreck nearly two centuries old, part of the American flotilla that defended the Chesapeake Bay when the British burned Washington during the War of 1812. Nearly 30 years ago, Eshelman helped direct a team of marine researchers who discovered the wreck, one of the war's most significant artifacts. After a limited, month-long excavation of the site east of Upper Marlboro in 1980, the wreck was reburied under four feet of...

A NOAA-led research mission has located and identified the final resting place of the YP-389, a U.S. Navy patrol boat sunk approximately 20 miles off the coast of Cape Hatteras, NC, by a German submarine during World War II. Six sailors died in the attack on June 19, 1942. There were 18 survivors. The wreck is located in about 300 feet of water in a region off North Carolina known as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic,” home to U.S. and British naval vessels, merchant ships, and German U-boats sunk during the Battle of the Atlantic. NOAA and its expedition partners...

Archaeologists will salvage a porcelain-laden ship that is believed to have sunk off the coast of southern China some 400 years ago, state media said on Wednesday, hoping to find out more about foreign trade during a period when the country tried to close itself off to the world. The ship is thought to be a merchant vessel and could contain some 10,000 pieces of porcelain, most made during the reign of Emperor Wanli (1572-1620) in the latter part of the Ming Dynasty, the official Xinhua News Agency said. About 200 pieces have already been recovered and some date back...