Lost Treasure on Line News Letter Vol. XI issue 1

[Ed - QUICKSILVER(appletree)]

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January

Volume XI
issue 1

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THer's News

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Discovery in the Deep
Divers discover the wreck of the long-lost bark Trajan, sunk outside Newport Harbor in 1867
NEWPORT — To the untrained eye, the scene that greeted John Stanford and Mark Munro 30 feet beneath Newport Harbor Saturday, Dec. 6, wouldn’t have looked like much: A massive pile of concretion and timbers covered in algae, seaweed, barnacles and anemones that rose up eight feet off the bottom and faded off into the murky distance. But for the two hardcore wreck divers and maritime historians, the modest scene was paydirt: They’d found the long-lost Trajan, a 125-foot bark loaded with lime that sank August 17, 1867.
The Trajan, one of thousands of ships that have gone down in Rhode Island waters since the days of the colonists, had been all but forgotten in the 141 years since she was lost. The men’s discovery that chilly December morning was the culmination of years of research, hard work and more than a bit of luck.
“As soon as we hit the bottom I knew we’d found it,” said Mr. Munro, an amateur shipwreck hunter who works as a technician at a nuclear power plant in Connecticut. “Ultimately, it’s a mystery until you find it and when you close the page on that mystery, it’s just a good feeling.”
“It was a thrill, to see it all the way through from nothing to actually seeing her on the bottom,” added Mr. Stanford, a Jamestown resident who’d heard stories of the Trajan for years and had always hoped to find her.
The divers’ discovery of the Trajan revives an important, but often overlooked, part of Rhode Island maritime history. While searches for Revolutionary-era frigates dominate much of the discussion around Narragansett Bay wrecks, the Trajan has more in common with the thousands of other wrecks that dot Rhode Island waters than her more famous counterparts.
Named for the Roman emporer Trajan, she measured 125 feet in length, was nearly 30 feet in the beam and drew 13 feet of water. Built in 1856 in the H. Merrian yard in Rockland, Maine, she was one of many vessels that transported freight up and down the East Coast, Cuba, New Orleans and beyond in the days when maritime freight played a key role in Rhode Island’s economy and that of much of New England.
At the time of her loss, the Trajan was carrying barrels of lime from Rockland to New Orleans. Lime, used extensively in plaster and mortar, is a dangerous cargo. Get it wet, and a chemical reaction could ignite the mineral and spark fire. Water won’t put it out, and so in the days of the Trajann lime captains’ only hope of saving their vessel was to snuff the flames by closing the hatches and killing the oxygen supply.
That’s exactly what happened as Trajan’s cargo began to smoulder one stormy day off Newport in 1867. According to an account written in 1871 by Newport writer Thomas Higginson, author of the local history “Oldport Days,” the crew steered the Trajan from off Newport into Newport Harbor after noticing the fire, and fought a valiant but ultimately fruitless battle to save her: “I never saw anything seem so extinguished out of the universe as that great vessel, which had towered so colossal above my little boat; it was impossible to imagine that she was all there yet, beneath the foaming and indifferent waves.”
In the coming years, the vessel’s hulk would be dynamited, partially salvaged and, ultimately, forgotten.
Then John Stanford showed up.
Mr. Stanford, an accountant for General Dynamics, spends most of his free time aboard his 28-foot Nauset Adventurer, searching for and diving on the hundreds of known wrecks that dot Rhode Island and Massachusetts waters.
He grew up in Rhode Island, bought his first boat as a teenager, and over the years has compiled an impressive diving resumé. He’s visited the sunken German submarine U-853 off Block Island, found and recorded shipwrecks modest and proud off Martha’s Vineyard, and has visited Truk Lagoon, a southern Pacific lagoon where dozens of Japanese war vessels were sunk by the United States during World War II.
Over the years, Mr. Stanford has compiled a formidable knowledge of Rhode Island wrecks, and the Trajan has long been one of them.
Mr. Stanford first heard of her in the early 1980s, when he stumbled across an old chart listing the location of wrecks in and around Newport. A small spot on the chart showed a wreck just west of Goat Island, and through research Mr. Stanford eventually determined it was likely the resting spot of the Trajan. Further research showed that though others had searched for her, she had never been found or, more likely, found but never identified.
For years, he and several diving friends searched for the wreck using rudimentary tools — mostly just a depth finder and long hours diving in locations they thought were the ship’s resting place. The result? Nothing.
But even those many failures brought their own successes. Though he and his friends, Al Langner and David Knibbs, didn’t find the Trajan, they found other anomolies in the area, including a stone ballast pile which they believe could have been the remains of one of several ships scuttled by the British when the French sailed into Newport in 1778.
“It was always something that we were looking for, but we never could find it,” said Mr. Stanford. “But I always remembered it and thought, ‘I’d love to find it.’”
The search took a crucial turn in the late 1990s, when Mr. Stanford found several old newspaper clippings that alluded to the wreck and the fact that its submerged hull may have fouled the keel of a deep draft pleasure yacht in 1901.
“Could this have been the Trajan? The evidence sure pointed that way,” he said.
He packed the knowledge away and decided to start the search anew one day.
Last fall, Mr. Stanford contacted his friend Mark Munro with a proposition to search for the wreck.
Like Mr. Stanford, Mr. Munro is a member of Sound Underwater Survey, a loose confederation of friends who live for finding and exploring old wrecks. He’s also a techie, and owns sophisticated magnetometer and side scan sonar equipment. Magnetometers work by finding ferrous metals, such as iron, on the bottom, and side scan sonar takes “pictures” of the bottom by bouncing sidewaves off the ocean floor and processing the sound of the returning echoes.
Mr. Stanford’s idea was to use Adventurer as a platform for Mr. Munro’s equipment.
“I said ‘Sure, let’s look,’” said Mr. Munro.
Armed with an approximate search area, the two set out in September to look for the wreck. It didn’t take long to record a target, but at first neither could say for sure whether it was the Trajan.
“We found something, but it could have been anything; there weren’t the usual straight lines you’d expect to see on a wreck,” said Mr. Munro.
Looking at the data back at home in Connecticut, though, he became more and more convinced that they’d found the Trajan.
“Once I overlaid the magnetometer (results) on the sonar image, and the age of the shipwreck, we decided we probably had it.”
There was only way to say for sure.
On Saturday, Dec. 6, the two donned drysuits and trailered Mr. Stanford’s 13-foot inflatable to the Fort Adams boat ramp. After a 10-minute trip out to the site, they dropped anchor, put on their dive gear and followed the anchor line down to the bottom. Mr. Stanford went first.
“I knew right away we’d found it,” Mr. Stanford recalls. “The wreck is mostly lime concretion 114 feet long by 55 feet wide, which is what you would expect knowing what we know about her. There were timbers coming up. It’s a pretty big field.”
Lobster pot lines hung off the pile, and where it met the muddy harbor floor, heavy ship timbers jutted out of the sand. Blocks of solidified lime that still retained the shape of the oak barrels that once held them littered the site, and the few fish around were all but oblivious to the visitors dressed in dry suits to ward off the water’s 45-degree chill.
The initial survey in September had yielded a strong magnetometer reading, and off one end of the wreck the pair found a small kedge anchor, about five feet long, that Mr. Stanford believes is probably one of the Trajan’s auxiliary anchors.
“Just seeing the lime was enough to confirm our suspicions of what it was,” she said. “I was psyched. I was like, ‘Hey, after all these years we finally found her. Mission accomplished.’”
What now?
In keeping with Rhode Island law, the pair didn’t take anything from the wreck, and don’t plan to. Instead, they videotaped their dive, took measurements of the debris field and now hope to share their information with others devoted to preserving Rhode Island’s maritime heritage, including the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project (RIMAP) and the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission.
“That’s really what this search was about,” said Mr. Stanford. “It’s just another puzzle in Newport’s seafaring past. We learned a lot about the lime trade, the local seafaring trade, and that’s enough.”
“It’s a fascinating history, and this is one small part. Every piece gives you a better picture of what things were like, and we’re happy to add to that.”
For more on the discovery of the bark Trajan, including side scan sonar images, magnetometer readings, an underwater video of the wreck site shot in December, and historical accounts of the vessel’s loss, see www.soundunderwatersurvey.com/SUS/Wrecks/trajan.htm
Courtesy of http://www.eastbayri.com

Artifacts Found at Colcord Bridge Site
Archaeologists say the artifacts could be up to 8,000 years old.
COLCORD, OKLA. — Archaeologists recently unearthed about 16,000 stone artifacts at a site for a new Delaware County bridge, offering scientists clues to how a prehistoric culture lived, a scientist said.
"It's another piece of the jigsaw puzzle," said archaeologist Grant Day, who supervised an excavation at Spavinaw Creek that ended in mid-December. "It's pretty rare that you get to find a piece of the puzzle. We don't know yet exactly where it fits, but we're going to find out with the analysis."
Day is a senior archaeologist and project manager for AMEC Earth and Environmental, a worldwide company that headed the roughly 20-day dig. A 12-person archaeological crew dug 54 holes during the project, finding as many as 1,000 artifacts in some of the 1-by-2-meter units, Day said.
AMEC will issue a preliminary report on its findings in January and spend up to a year putting the artifacts in prehistoric context, Day said. The lithics, or stone-made artifacts, are said to be from 2,000 to 8,000 years old and appear to have come from two campsites, he said.
Inhabitants likely harvested chert — a silica-rich, sedimentary rock — from nearby creeks to make tools, Day said.
"They could come here and camp, make nice arrow and spear points," he said. "They had the raw material available right there. They might have even packed some of that up for trade and taken it back to their main village to work on later."
Largely funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs — the bridge site is in the Cherokee Nation — the $200,000 excavation culminated a process that started in 2003, when a grinding basin and several arrowheads were uncovered during the bridge's design phase.
In the interim, Delaware County commissioners struggled to find money for the archaeology study, delaying by five years construction on a new bridge, they said. Construction on the new structure, which will replace a bridge built in the 1920s, could begin early next year and will be paid for by the Cherokee Nation, Commissioner Dave Kendrick said.
After the artifacts are washed and catalogued at an AMEC lab in Jefferson City, Mo., they eventually will be curated at the Institute of the Great Plains in Lawton, Day said. Analysis of the stone tools will tell archaeologists how they were used, he said.
"If we find a lot of scrapers, tools that show wear for scraping hides, you're right back to a hunting site," Day said. "If they were cutting tubers or collecting plant materials, their wear patterns on the tools would be different."
Courtesy of http://www.tulsaworld.com

Fortune Hunter Believes He Has Googled Gold
Californian is fighting heirs in Texas over the right to dig for it
If Nathan Smith's plan to search for a buried treasure near the Texas Gulf Coast using Google Earth and a metal detector sounds like a Hollywood movie, it should.
After all, Smith, a California musician, was inspired by the hit National Treasure movies starring Nicolas Cage. And like any good swashbuckling flick, there's a dramatic tale — this one involving cannibalized 19th-century sailors who supposedly left the pot of gold and silver behind in Refugio County in South Texas.
Trying to bankroll his art by becoming a treasure hunter like Cage's movie character also led Smith to the witness stand Monday in Houston's federal courthouse, where he testified in his quest to get U.S. District Judge David Hittner to order that he has title to a shipwreck he says is buried under muck near the Mission River.
He's ready to hire people to unearth the ship he thinks was laden with gold when it veered away from an 1822 hurricane and sank into mud about 160 miles southwest of Houston. But he gets to dig only if Hittner finds that the site is in navigable waters. Otherwise, anything underneath it belongs to the family who claims to own the land and is in court opposing any excavation.
"I've been seeking the Lost Dutchman's gold mine, the Franklin Mountains treasure, Jesse James' buried treasure, Belle Starr's iron door, the Lost Peg Leg gold and numerous others," testified Smith. He said his three years of treasure hunting have not yielded any treasure. "Most of these are in very secluded places and very dangerous," he said.
Smith, who testified that he's played with Junior Wells, Buddy Guy and Mick Fleetwood, said he thinks he's found the James loot in Oklahoma. But he said he also thinks there is a death trap in the form of a teetering rock half the size of the courtroom just outside the entrance.
He said he became interested in the South Texas treasure from the book Lost Treasures of American History, which says a barkentine ship got lost up a creek near Refugio, half the sailors died on the way and the other half died at the hands of a local cannibal tribe.
The story goes on, he says, to say Comanche Indians found the gold and buried some of it after they, too, ran into the cannibals and fled. Some of the boat stayed above ground and was made into a house by area settlers, the tale goes on, Smith said.
He acknowledged on the stand, however, there's nothing to confirm this folklore.
Smith explained that using Google Earth from his home in Los Angeles, he spotted what he thought might be the outline of the vessel away from the creek where it was alleged to have run aground. The spot he found looks something like a shoe print. He contacted several experts about his find and drove to Texas to check it out, eventually with a metal detector.
"Where we walked, your honor, there was gold, there was silver. When you step off that area, you got nothing," said Smith about the metal detector results. He estimates the treasure to be worth $3 billion.
In the case Smith v. The Abandoned Vessel, the initial lawsuit and lots of other documents have been kept under seal. Lawyers conferred on the best way to keep the site's location a secret. Smith doesn't want to give away what he thinks he found, and the landowners don't want people swarming their property.
The main legal issue in contention is whether the spot Smith wants to dig is on land belonging to the estate of the late Marie O'Connor Sorenson, or whether it is considered navigable waters.
If it's navigable waters, the first person to find abandoned booty can ask the federal courts and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for permission to retrieve it. If it's part of the Sorenson land, only the heirs to the estate get to dig or allow others to do so. The site appears to be an oft-flooded muddy or wetlands-like spot near water.
In the trial, expected to continue today, lawyers will argue about the legal definition of navigable waters and whether this spot meets that definition.
"A person who walked into a bookstore and saw a book on treasure wants to do this," said Ron Walker, the Victoria lawyer representing the estate. "It's our property — we don't want anyone on our property to tear it up."
Walker said the family does not believe there is a ship there and notes that even the unproven folklore about the wreck places it more than 20 miles away.
Courtesy of http://www.chron.com

A Gold Mine of History
Arizona - If you regard museums as archaic collections of eBay rejects, you've never visited the Superstition Mountain Museum.
Take one of the more unexpected exhibits. It's called a loot bottle, a glass vial meant to hold flakes of gold for display. But this one holds something far more precious: sand. A plaque offers an explanation: "Elvis Presley lay 'wounded' in this sand alongside the chapel at Apacheland Movie Ranch filming Charro."
The sanctified sand is on display in that chapel, now known as the Elvis Presley Memorial Chapel, adjacent to Apacheland Movie Ranch Barn. Both structures, survivors of fires that destroyed Apacheland, are now part of the Superstition Mountain Museum.
The structures were taken down and rebuilt on the grounds of the museum. Wedding services can be performed at the chapel, but for fans of cowboy cinema, the weathered, shambling barn is the true cathedral.
Dozens of movies and television shows were filmed at Apacheland, including Arizona Raiders, The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Wanted: Dead or Alive.
Not many mountain ranges have their own museum. But not many mountain ranges are as drenched in legend, mystery and history as the Superstitions.
"We have exhibits on Native Americans, wildlife, ranching, mining, geology, military activity, Hollywood activity, the building of Roosevelt Dam and, of course, the Lost Dutchman Mine," says Kathy Johnson, executive director of the museum. "We have enough to wet your whistle but not enough to bore you."
The museum sprawls across 12 acres and includes a self-guided nature trail, a mill and lots of memorabilia, in addition to the chapel, barn and main building. Yet despite the diversity, some visitors come with a single-minded purpose.
"We do get the treasure hunters," Johnson says. "They come in to study our Lost Dutchman exhibit, which features 23 maps that allegedly lead to the mine."
Ah, yes, the Dutchman and his elusive gold. There are dozens of variations of the tale, but a common version goes like this: During the 1840s, the Peralta family of Mexico operated several mining claims, one a rich gold mine in the Superstitions. An expedition returning gold ore to Mexico was attacked by Apaches and all the miners perished.
Decades later, a Peralta descendant revealed the mine's location to Jacob Waltz, a German immigrant immortalized as the "Dutchman." Waltz worked the mine and allegedly killed anyone who happened by. On his deathbed in 1891, Waltz finally spilled his secret, providing sketchy directions to friends who were caring for him.
Thousands searched for the fabled hole without success. Grisly murders and strange disappearances followed, cementing the sinister reputation of the Supes.
"I think many people that only know this area because of the Lost Dutchman Mine are surprised to discover there's so much more to the Superstitions," Johnson says. "We try to provide different experiences. We hold seminars on native plants and their uses; we organize guided desert walks and have a lot of fun events through the year."
Beginning Jan. 8, the museum again offers its popular lecture series, "Legends and Lore of the Superstitions." The lectures are held every Thursday afternoon through March. Subjects range from facts and fiction about the Dutchman to the history of the Apache Trail to the mining of turquoise and gold.
"Manny Martinez is a well-known jewelry dealer, and he draws a big crowd," Johnson says. "People stay afterwards because they bring in their jewelry and have lots of questions. Clay Worst kicks the series off, and his lectures about the Dutchman and the mine are wildly popular."
An adventurer and prospector, Worst was drawn to the area by the Lost Dutchman Mine. His father went to Nome, Alaska, during the gold rush of 1900 and later became intrigued by the legend of the Dutchman. Clay Worst began exploring the Superstitions in 1947.
"I didn't keep a diary for the first 30 years. I wish I had," Worst says. "But I kept one for the second 30 years."
Worst is one of the founders of the Superstition Mountain Historical Society and the museum.
"We started with $10,000 in borrowed money, and within six to eight years we had the museum built and stocked, and owned it free and clear. We did it without the aid of taxpayer money or public funding of any kind. We're very proud of that," he says.
Worst opens the lecture series with his story of the life of Jacob Waltz. He combines historical data with personal knowledge. Worst's friend for many years was George "Brownie" Holmes, the son of Dick Holmes, who knew the Dutchman. After the talk, Worst tries to answer every question, except the one he's most frequently asked.
"People want to know where I think the mine is," Worst says. "Naturally, that's not information I'm eager to share. The only people who will tell you where the mine is are the ones who have no idea and know they don't have an idea. But it absolutely exists. I don't have a doubt."
Worst still takes to the hardscrabble country of the Superstitions when he can find time, which isn't often. At 79, Worst works his mine every day. He owns the Old Wasp Mine, founded in 1893.
"If you want to receive an education into the dark side of human nature, just get involved with a gold-mining operation," Worst says with a chuckle. "Gold does something strange to people."
Reflecting upon decades spent exploring some of Arizona's most fiercely scenic country, Worst says he wouldn't change a thing.
"My father remembered hiding under the bed when Sitting Bull jumped the reservation, while his father sat up all night with a shotgun. He lived long enough to see a man walk on the moon. Can you imagine what kind of life that was?"
A full and rich one to be sure. Like father, like son.