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January 30, 2007
Shipwreck Yields Cargo of Treasured Porcelain
By Karla Klein Albertson
For The Philadelphia Inquirer
Next week in Amsterdam, Sotheby's will begin selling 76,000 pieces of Chinese Export porcelain recovered from a circa 1725 shipwreck off the coast of present-day Vietnam. Because it was bound for the western market, the cargo reveals the era's fads and fashions in Europe, and precise details about the arduous journey made by goods in demand.
The tale of the Cau Mau shipwreck involves connoisseurship, a treasure-hunting adventure suitable for television, and the legendary East India Trading Company (which itself has recently resurfaced in Pirates of the Caribbean dialogue).
Today, we'd be short on shoes, hair dryers and electronics without massive container shipments from Asia. What's surprising is that while the journey 250 years ago was infinitely more dangerous, huge cargoes made it through to English and Dutch retailers.
"In the 18th century, if it took two years to get something, it was still worthwhile doing," says Marcus Linell, Sotheby's Export-porcelain expert in London. "There was this incredible passion in Europe, and America as well, for tea and for coffee - stimulating drinks that were not alcoholic. And if you want to drink a hot drink, unless you have porcelain to drink out of, it's something of a problem."
Along the Eastern seaboard, the social life of well-to-do families revolved around entertaining, and eating, drinking and being merry in proper fashion required the latest porcelain. George Washington, for one, wrote his London agent about an expected shipment of a "Compleat sett fine Image china."
The goods - Chinese Export with figural decoration - finally arrived in March 1758 and became the best "china," a term that derives from its origin in Ching-te Chen. Pieces from the original service are on display in the new Museum at Mount Vernon; even closer is the superb Hodroff Collection of Chinese porcelain on display at Winterthur.
In addition to tea and coffee wares, Chinese factories produced punch bowls (Washington had several), serving platters, tureens for soups, decorative urns, and figurines. In many cases, the decoration and forms were designed to appeal to European taste, or even custom-made to order.
The cargo to be sold at Sotheby's Monday through Wednesday includes thousands of tea bowls, teapots, jugs, mantel vases and figural pieces, such as a rare ewer in the form of a monkey. Though many pieces were recoverable in good condition, the sale also includes lots of fascinating "sea sculptures" - nested porcelain pieces welded together by encrustations.
The sale is being held in Amsterdam because the wreck took place on the trading route of the Dutch East India Company, as the loaded junk made its way from Canton to the trading center at Batavia (modern-day Jakarta).
"Inevitably in the days of sail, shipping porcelain was a risky venture," Linell says.
"The cargo was an accidental find by Vietnamese fishermen. They pulled up their nets, and there was porcelain in them. They quickly discovered that the porcelain was valuable, and they went out day after day trawling for porcelain. In fact, they brought up 35,000 pieces."
When news of the find reached the Vietnamese press in 1998, Linell says: "The government jumped in, mounted an official salvage operation, and forced the fishermen to return what they had found." Eventually, 130,000 pieces were recovered from one ship, an indication of the huge amounts that were exported each year.
Sotheby's "Made in Imperial China" catalog (available at www.sothebys.com, along with auction information) will be an important reference for collectors. The volume contains information-filled essays by Vietnamese and Dutch scholars on the ship's route and cargo. Encouraging for collectors are the estimates for these artistic bits of history - some lots are under $500, many are under $1,000.
The trade in Chinese Export porcelain is still an active one shared by American, English, European and Asian sources. One of the best-known local dealers is Elinor Gordon of Villanova, exhibiting at New York's Winter Antiques Show through Sunday and at the Philadelphia Antiques Show in April.
London dealers Michael and Ewa Cohen were exhibitors at the New York Ceramics Fair Jan. 17-21, where they sold a fine pair of Kangxi period vases and a delightful figurine of two dancers.
The Cohens specialize in the more spectacular pieces, such as large vases two to four feet high, decorated fish tanks, and massive chargers. A current prize is a very large punch bowl, made for the American or European market, decorated with a "Four Seasons" scene copied from an Italian engraving. Price: $140,000.
Sunken treasures have turned up before, Michael Cohen says: "We ended up selling 22,000 pieces from a cargo about 20 years ago."
And it seems American and Swedish consumers had similar tastes back in the heyday of Chinese Export porcelain. "In one year in the mid-18th century, the Swedish East India Company brought in six million pieces," Cohen adds.
Such porcelain still demands a premium. But with import numbers like these, there are enough examples on today's market that every collector of 18th-century antiques can have a piece for the china cabinet.
Posted by victoria at 01:45 PM
January 25, 2007
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Posted by victoria at 11:15 AM
January 24, 2007
Shark Attack Survivor Describes being Almost Swallowed Alive
By The Assosciated Press
SYDNEY, Australia — A diver who was almost swallowed head first by a huge shark said Wednesday he survived by poking the animal in the eye, and credited the lead-lined vest he was wearing as saving him from being chomped in half.
Abalone diver Eric Nerhus, 41, described Tuesday's terrifying attack by a shark estimated by witnesses to be three metres long off the fishing town of Eden, about 400 kilometres south of Sydney.
Nerhus was working with his son and other divers collecting the shellfish when the shark struck from nowhere at about eight metres below the surface, grabbing him by the head and shoulders, he said.
``Half my body was in its mouth,'' Nerhus told Australian television's Nine Network.
Nerhus said he fought desperately.
``I felt down to the eye socket with my two fingers and poked them into the socket,'' he said. ``The shark reacted by opening its mouth and I just tried to wriggle out.''
``It was still trying to bite me. It crushed my goggles into my nose and they fell into its mouth.''
He said he managed to finally escape the shark's jaws after jabbing at its eye with a chisel he used to chip abalone from rocks, and was still holding despite the attack.
Nerhus, who estimated he spent two minutes inside the shark's mouth, said his chest was protected from the shark's rows of teeth by a lead-lined vest used to weight him down in the water.
As he swam to the surface in a cloud of his own blood, Nerhus said he could still see the shark and feared it would attack again.
``It was just circling around my flippers, round in round in tight circles,'' he said. ``The big round black eye, five inches wide, was staring straight into my face with just not one hint of fear, of any boat, or any human, or any other animal in the sea."
He was helped into his boat by his son, and rushed to hospital, where he was being treated for severe cuts to his head, torso and left arm.
An expert said the shark that attacked Nerhus probably mistook him for a seal, which are common in waters off southeastern Australia and attract sharks to near the coast.
Grant Willis of the Sydney Aquarium said that after the shark bit Nerhus, it probably realized ``he didn't taste anything like a seal — sort of a bit bony and horrible and nothing like a seal at all — so possibly it spat back out.''
``He's had a run-in with one of the ocean's most formidable predators and he's lived to tell the story,'' Willis said. ``He's a very, very lucky man.''
Scientists say there are an average of 15 shark attacks a year in Australian waters — one of the highest rates in the world — and on average just over one per year are fatal.
Posted by victoria at 04:46 PM
January 16, 2007
Thousand year old Shipwreck to be Raised
China plans to salvage a ship that sank more than a thousand years ago in the South China Sea.
Song Jiahui, director of the salvage department for the Ministry of Communications, told a news conference the ship will be lifted from the sea as a whole.
Song says it would be the MOC's largest salvage operation.
The sunken ship, named the South China Sea-I, dates back to the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127 A.D.). It was discovered in 1986 and divers have been exploring the wreck since then.
The salvage operation will be launched in the first half of this year by the city of Guangzhou's salvage bureau. A ship capable of hoisting 4,000 tons will be used to lift the wreck.
However, Song neither explained how the ship has remained intact after a millennium underwater nor provided the ship's general location, how much water it is under or how large it is.
Source: Xinhua
Posted by victoria at 02:56 PM
January 03, 2007
Scientists Studying USS Arizona's Trapped Oil
The Sea Hunters dove the wreck of the USS Mississinewa, an oil tanker sunk off Palau during WWII. The US Navy returned to the vessel in the 90's to remove oil leaking for the ship, by Hot Tapping. To watch video from of the Mississinewa check out the Featured Video on the Home Page, Find it on the Shipwreck Map or search the Live Dive archives.
By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post
WASHINGTON — For 65 years, the wreck of the USS Arizona has been leaking oil from its grave at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, staining the water, visitors often say, as if it were the ship's blood.
The leaks come from about 500,000 gallons of thick, bunker C fuel oil that remain trapped in the deteriorating hulk — oil whose "catastrophic" release experts now think is inevitable.
Even as the nation recently observed the 65th anniversary of the attack that plunged the United States into World War II, scientists at a federal research center in Gaithersburg, Md., are trying to predict when the release might happen. In five years? Or 50? And to do that, they are building a model of the ship: not of plastic and glue, but of data.
The experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology think it is the first mathematical model to simulate the deterioration of a sunken ship and could be used to predict the deterioration of hundreds of wrecks around the country.
Similar models, which are run with ultra-powerful computers, are used to forecast the weather, design cars and simulate crashes.
"To my knowledge, nobody has published or spoken of modeling the deterioration of sunken ships," said Timothy Foecke, a metallurgist at the institute who is supervising the work.
"What we're trying to do is ... predict stability of shipwrecks," Foecke said. "In particular, we're working on the Arizona, but it also has application to hazardous wrecks ... all around the coast, dating back to World War I. There's ships with munitions, with hazardous cargoes, with all kinds of different things."
The work is part of the USS Arizona Preservation Project, headed by the National Park Service and the USS Arizona Memorial.
"The overall project goal is to model and characterize the deterioration processes ... to predict when we may have potential structural collapse," said Matthew Russell, project director. It is impossible to remove the oil from the ship because that would disturb what he said is "an enormous tomb."
READY TO SAIL
On Dec. 6, 1941, the Arizona took on 1.2 million gallons of heavy fuel oil at its berth in Pearl Harbor. The ship was scheduled to make a Christmas trip back to the West Coast the next weekend. The fuel, which was so heavy it had to be atomized for use in the engines, weighed 4,000 tons and was stored in more than 200 tanks, or bunkers, spread across four deck levels throughout the vessel.
In the Japanese attack the next morning, a 1,700-pound bomb plunged through the ship's deck, detonating in an ammunition compartment. The explosion obliterated a section of the Arizona's bow, blasted backward toward the stern and vented out the smokestack. It also set much of the oil on fire, burning for three days.
The battleship — three times the size of the Statue of Liberty — settled to the bottom in 34 feet of water, along with the bodies of more than 1,100 sailors and Marines.
The Arizona, which was launched in 1915, is 91 and has been submerged for six decades.
Science is not sure how the metal in old ships fares for long periods under water.
The Civil War submarine CSS H.L. Hunley, which sank in 1864, was surprisingly intact when it was raised from the protective mud off the harbor of Charleston, S.C., in 2000.
The turret of the USS Monitor — which sank in the Gulf Stream off Cape Hatteras in 1862 — was in worse shape when it was recovered in 2002.
COMPUTER MODEL
Sooner or later, though, submerged metal wrecks are reduced to "an iron ore deposit," Foecke said.
To assess that process on the Arizona, he and guest institute scientist Li Ma have built a "finite element model." They took the ship's blueprints, carved out an 80-foot section from the middle and entered its dimensions into a computer.
They then used special software to break the section into about 200,000 data blocks, or elements, and entered what they knew about the properties of the metal, corrosion and damage.
Scientists also entered into the model what they knew about external forces on the vessel: such things as pressure from the water, the bottom, gravity and waves.
The result is like a single frame from a movie, Foecke said, and it then becomes possible to play the movie, by adjusting the data, and see how it might turn out.
Foecke, who keeps pieces of the Arizona's steel hull in an office safe, says the model is not perfect.
It "will give us a time frame within which we can expect (the ship's) failure and the general type of failure — upper decks breaking down, lower decks erupting up, hull tipping in or out — but not exactly where," he wrote in a recent e-mail.
CORROSIVE INSTABILITY
Foecke said an early version of the model has been run, gradually "corroding" the metal thickness in small increments. When it was thinned 75 percent, parts of the structure grew unstable, but that kind of corrosion is not expected to happen for 10 or 20 years, he said.
"We think that nothing serious is going to happen for about 10 years, plus or minus years," Foecke said.
When the structure collapses, Foecke said, the oil will "erupt" toward the surface.
"It's going to break the wreck up and open," he said. "The oil does have buoyancy, and it's trying to find a way out, and there's quite a lot of it."
Even though Pearl Harbor is fairly industrialized, Foecke said, a big leak would create "a huge mess."
A spill of 100,000 gallons of jet fuel in 1987 fouled a mangrove swamp and a wildlife refuge, and took two months to clean up, according to news reports of the time.
Douglas Lentz, National Park Service superintendent of the Arizona Memorial, said extensive plans are in place should a large leak occur.
But Russell, the project director, thinks any Arizona collapse would take place gradually. "There won't be any single, serious collapse that releases all the oil," he said. "But we're trying to get an indication of when the first wave of releases may occur."
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Posted by victoria at 01:46 PM
