As the first European seafaring vessel to reach the east coast of Australia, the Endeavour – much like James Cook himself – has become part of Australia’s national mythology.
Tudor warship, part of a manuscript presented to Henry VIII in 1546 by Anthony Anthony.
British Library
More than 48 shipwrecks have been illicitly salvaged - and the figure may be much higher. Museums can play a key role in the protection of these wrecks, alongside strategic recovery and legislative steps.
Louis XVI giving final instructions to the Comte de La Perouse in 1785, before La Perouse embarked on his fateful expedition to the Southern Hemisphere.
State Library of NSW
The French La Pérouse expedition left Botany Bay in 1788, and then vanished, rumoured to be wrecked in the Solomon Islands. But an Indian newspaper article might reveal the fate of its survivors.
Chinese ceramics recovered from the 9th century Belitung shipwreck in Indonesia, now held at the Asian Civilisations Museum (Singapore)
ArtScience Museum Singapore
Archaeologists this week found that more than half of of HMAS Perth, a WWII wreck in Indonesia, has disappeared. It’s now a race to protect the millions of other wrecks and sunken cities lying under the oceans.
HMS Terror. Engraving by George Back.
via Wikimedia Commons
An assimilation of artistic, geographical and historical records offers the best reconstruction of the battle in which the Mary Rose sank yet.
Researchers compared the shipwreck history to tree ring data from slash pines to piece together the hurricane history over past centuries.
Grant Harley
In an attempt to better understand hurricanes, researchers recreate hundreds of years of hurricane records with Spanish shipwreck logs and tree ring data.
At Royal Holloway College at the University of London, Edwin Landseer’s picture “Man Proposes, God Disposes” (1864) is covered by a Union Flag every year during exams. Not because of any fears of cheating…
‘You take the front, I’ll take the back.’
EPA/Massimo Percossi
The huge Costa Concordia cruiseship is due to be righted in preparation for finally being towed away from the Italian island of Giglio. But why has lifting and removing the wreck taken so long, given that…
Are Jack Sparrow’s diaries in there somewhere?
Jurriaan Persyn
New research has shown that the Southern Ocean near Antarctica is filled with whale bone-eating worms, but it lacks wood-eating marine fauna, which are found everywhere else in the world’s oceans. This…
Vietnam’s shoreline hosts thousands of shipwrecks, but most their treasures are being lost to the Vietnamese.
Gavin White
Vietnam has thousands of kilometres of coastline, and may have thousands of shipwrecks. Many of these wrecks would be loaded with archaeologically fascinating and significant items. But the country has…
Submerged mysteries: only 14 of Australia’s almost 2,800 shipwrecks have been properly surveyed and excavated.
Flickr/miamism
The study and preservation of Australia’s neglected and decaying historic shipwrecks stands to leap in sophistication through a new multi-disciplinary project. Bringing in expertise from behavioural archaeology…