Latest news with #underwaterarchaeology
CBS News
21 hours ago
- Science
- CBS News
Underwater archaeologist James Delgado reveals the stories behind history's most haunting shipwrecks
Renowned underwater archaeologist James Delgado appeared on "CBS Mornings" on Friday to discuss his new book, "The Great Museum of the Sea," and reflect on more than 50 years of searching for historic shipwrecks around the world. Delgado, who has investigated more than 100 shipwrecks globally, gained international attention in 2019 when he discovered the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to arrive in the United States. The discovery was later featured in a "60 Minutes" segment with Anderson Cooper. The archaeologist's fascination with shipwrecks began in childhood while growing up in the San Francisco Bay area, where he learned about ships from the 1849 Gold Rush. He said locating shipwrecks requires extensive preparation. "It takes a team. And that team includes oceanographers, people that understand currents. We're also looking at old records and charts. You're also trying to understand the forensics of it," he said. The process involves analyzing factors like ship speed and sailing patterns. Once located, the wrecks often don't match popular expectations. "We have great images that people think of as shipwrecks, but there are a pile of rockets and timber and anchor, and then you go, all right, what exactly am I looking at here," he said. In his book, Delgado describes the sea as "the largest museum on Earth" and argues that every shipwreck has a story to tell. "I think the most important thing for people to remember about shipwrecks is that it's okay for them to have different meanings," Delgado said. "Some people like them because they inspire you with the stories of bravery. Others are tragic and sad. For some, they're the graves of family. But for others, they're a great opportunity to dive and to explore." The archaeologist has also explored the Titanic, describing the experience as overwhelming despite the ship's fame. "Nothing prepares you for seeing 'Titanic,'" he said. After a 2.5-hour descent in a Russian submersible, with pressure so intense that "a regular styrofoam coffee cup gets squeezed down" when strapped to the outside, Delgado said the anticipation suddenly disappeared when the ship appeared. "There it was looming out of the darkness," he recalled. "This massive hull rising twice as high as the ceiling here. Still painted but streaked with rust and rusticles that are orange and yellow and red. And then a porthole that's open and another closed." Delgado described one particularly eerie moment: "One of the spookiest moments — because 'Titanic' is a ship of the dead — is when I first looked through the porthole, 2.5 miles down, the lights — I could see a face looking back at me in the porthole. It was my own reflection." He reflected on the ship's enduring power: "This ship sitting on the bottom ruined and deteriorating still is the stage upon which some of the most powerful drama played out that we all know about with the shipwreck. And you're there." "The Great Museum of the Sea" is available wherever books are sold.
Al Arabiya
2 days ago
- Al Arabiya
US couple risk France trial over stolen shipwreck gold
An 80-year-old US novelist and her husband are among several people facing a possible trial in France over the illegal sale of gold bars plundered from an 18th-century shipwreck, after French prosecutors requested the case go to court. Eleonor 'Gay' Courter and her 82-year-old husband Philip have been accused of helping to sell the bullion online for a French diver who stole it decades ago, but have denied knowledge of any wrongdoing. Le Prince de Conty, a French ship trading with Asia, sank off the coast of Brittany during a stormy night in the winter of 1746. Its wreck was discovered more than two centuries later, in 1974, lying in 10 to 15 meters (32 to 49 feet) of water near the island of Belle-Ile-en-Mer. The wreck was looted in 1975 after a gold ingot was discovered during a site survey. Archaeologists in the 1980s discovered fine 18th-century Chinese porcelain, the remains of tea crates, and three Chinese gold bars in and around the shipwreck. But a violent storm in 1985 dispersed the ship's remains, ending official excavations. Years later in 2018, the head of France's underwater archaeology department Michel L'Hour spotted a suspicious sale of five gold ingots on a US auction house website. He told US authorities he believed they hailed from the Prince de Conty, and they seized the treasure, returning it to France in 2022. Investigators identified the seller as a certain Eleonor 'Gay' Courter, an author and film producer living in Florida. 40-odd dives for gold Courter said she had been given the precious metal by a couple of French friends, Annette May Pesty, today 78, and her now deceased partner Gerard. Pesty had told the 'Antiques Roadshow' television series in 1999 that she discovered the gold while diving off the west African island of Cape Verde. But investigators found this to be unlikely and instead focused on her brother-in-law, now 77-year-old underwater photographer Yves Gladu. A 1983 trial had found five people guilty of embezzlement and receiving stolen goods over the plundering of the Prince de Conty. Gladu was not among them. Held in custody in 2022, he confessed to having retrieved 16 gold bars from the ship during around 40 dives on the site between 1976 and 1999. He said he had sold them all in 2006 to a retired member of the military living in Switzerland. But he denied ever having given any to his American friends the Courters. He had known the author and her husband since the 1980s, and they had joined him on holiday on his catamaran in Greece in 2011, in the Caribbean in 2014 and in French Polynesia in 2015, investigators found. The Courter couple were detained in the United Kingdom in 2022, then put under house arrest. French investigators concluded that they had been in possession of at least 23 gold bars in total. They found they had sold 18 ingots for more than $192,000, including some via online sale platform eBay. But the Courters claimed the arrangement had always been for the money to go to Gladu. 'Profoundly nice people' A prosecutor in the western French city of Brest has requested that the Courters, Gladu and Annette May Pesty be tried, according to a document obtained by AFP on Tuesday. An investigating magistrate still has to decide whether or not to order a trial, but prosecutors said a trial was likely in the autumn of 2026. The US couple's lawyer, Gregory Levy, said they had had no idea what they were getting into. 'The Courters accepted because they are profoundly nice people. They didn't see the harm as in the United States, regulations for gold are completely different from those in France,' he said, adding the couple had not profited from the sales. Lawyers for the other suspects did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment. Courter has written several fiction and non-fiction books, some nautical-themed, according to her website. One is a thriller set on a cruise ship, while another is her real-life account of being trapped on an ocean liner off the Japanese coast during a 2020 Covid quarantine.
