Shipwrecks

Imagine holding a piece of history in your hand, a golden treasure culled from a Spanish galleon that was driven by a hurricane onto the deadly coral reefs off the Florida Keys in 1622. The Nuestra Senora de Atocha, laden with the heaviest consignment of royal and private treasures from the New World, was buried by the forces of nature and shrouded in secrecy by the sea for more than 3 1/2 centuries before being discovered by explorer Mel Fisher in 1985.

ROME -- The operator of the Costa Concordia cruise ship, which struck rocks and partially sank off Italy last year, killing 32 people, agreed  Wednesday to pay a $1.3-million fine to avoid a possible criminal trial. A judge in Tuscany accepted the plea agreement for Costa Crociere , a division of Miami-based Carnival Corp. , in connection with the shipwreck off the island of Giglio in January 2012. The company will not face trial, but a hearing is scheduled Monday in Tuscany to determine whether six of the firm's employees --  including the vessel's captain, Francesco Schettino , who is accused of steering the vessel ontothe   rocks --  must stand trial on charges that inclu de manslaughter.

The Italian newspaper La Repubblica says it has found the site of a "phantom shipwreck" believed to be the graveyard of about 283 illegal immigrants who tried to reach Italy in 1996 and whose fate has been hushed up for years. The ship sank in waters off the southeastern tip of Sicily, near the town of Portopalo, but was never found. The identity card of a victim was caught recently in a fisherman's net, and the newspaper used a robot to search for the wreck.

NEW YORK - Ang Lee, the famously meticulous director of "Life of Pi," originally had planned to hire a survival consultant to infuse the allegorical tale of a boy's oceangoing raft journey with a tiger with a dose of realism. Then he read Steven Callahan's riveting 1986 memoir, "Adrift," detailing his own perilous life-raft adventure in the Atlantic. In Callahan, Ang and screenwriter David Magee saw a guide who understood and could articulate the metaphysical themes they were hoping to explore in the film.

Canadian authorities say they intend to stop an operator from salvaging a 19th-Century Lake Erie shipwreck that he believes contains $60 million in gold. Steven Morgan, of San Pedro-based Mar Dive Corp., said his company has claim to the steamer Atlantic, which sank in 1852 in Canadian waters west of Buffalo, N.Y.

Dropping 25 feet to the bottom, Steve Lawson began weaving his way lazily through the kelp toward the Palos Verdes shore. The sand below him was strewn with rusted debris--the wreck of the Dominator, a World War II liberty ship that went aground in 1962. The vessel is a favorite stop for the California Wreck Divers club, of which Lawson is a member. Pounded for 25 years by surf, the wreckage now is a heap of rubble spread thinly over several hundred yards.

A group of divers recently revisited the scene of a long-ago maritime disaster. As they descended toward the bottom off Anacapa Island, the bits of encrusted wreckage strewn across the sand evoked a story that many of them already knew by heart. It was on Dec. 2, 1853, that the Winfield Scott went down. Just a day out of San Francisco, Capt. Simon F. Blunt was attempting to shave some time off his run to Panama by navigating between the Channel Islands, rather than seaward of them.

A group of divers recently revisited the scene of a long-ago maritime disaster. As they descended toward the bottom off Anacapa Island, the bits of encrusted wreckage strewn across the sand evoked a story that many of them already knew by heart. It was on Dec. 2, 1853, that the Winfield Scott went down. Just a day out of San Francisco, Capt. Simon F. Blunt was attempting to shave some time off his run to Panama by navigating between the Channel Islands, rather than seaward of them.

Scuba diving off the coast of Santa Rosa Island one day, Don Morris came across an archeological puzzle: the scattered remains of a ship. As the Channel Islands National Park archeologist, Morris had spent years researching shipwrecks around the islands off the Ventura County coast. But he had no record of a ship sinking at that spot. Then a volunteer came across a paragraph in an obscure 1931 Coast Guard document: "received word by radio that the W. T. & B No.

In the brackish waters of the archipelago that stretches 300 miles along Finland's southern coast, more than 600 sunken ships dating back to the Viking era make up a little-visited underwater museum recounting the Baltic region's seafaring tragedies. The rock- and island-strewn channel that narrows to less than 50 miles in places was a major trading route from Western Europe to St.

The blame game surrounding the wreck of the Costa Concordia has spread like ripples on a tranquil Mediterranean bay. Eight days after the hull of the liner was ripped open by a rocky outcrop, the dynamics of the brutal interruption of a starry-night cruise past a small Tuscan island aren't clear. But that hasn't stopped an almost unseemly rash of finger-pointing. There appears to be no doubt about the personal responsibility of Capt. Francesco Schettino, who has acknowledged bringing the 1,000-foot-long floating city startlingly close to the craggy coast of Giglio island, leading to a Friday the 13th tragedy that has so far claimed 12 lives, including a woman whose body was recovered Saturday from a submerged ship corridor.

Sherwood Schwartz, the comedy writer and producer who created "Gilligan's Island" and "The Brady Bunch," which have remained two of the most enduringly popular TV series in worldwide syndication, died Tuesday morning. He was 94. Schwartz, who began his more than six-decade career by writing gags for Bob Hope's radio show in 1939, died of natural causes at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said his son Lloyd. Schwartz once said he created "Gilligan's Island," which aired on CBS from 1964 to 1967, as an escape from his seven years on "The Red Skelton Show," for which he served as head writer and won an Emmy in 1961.

In the fall of 1996, a private treasure-hunting company discovered a shipwreck in shallow waters a mile off the coast of this colonial fishing harbor. Divers found a bronze bell dated 1705, an English musketoon gun barrel, and 18th century cannons and cannon balls. North Carolina's top marine archaeologists were pretty sure the wreck was the Queen Anne's Revenge, the cannon-heavy flagship of the notorious pirate Blackbeard that ran aground here in 1718. But being scientists, they used buzzkill qualifiers such as "believed to be" and "consistent with" to describe the wreck.

As the sun rises over the Port of Long Beach, two hard-hat divers step off the edge of a harbor patrol dive boat and splash into the murky waters a half-mile offshore. Their mission: to investigate the sonar blips that suggest there is a large submerged object menacing a busy shipping lane. They disappear in a profusion of bubbles, descending 46 feet in 30 seconds to the ocean floor. A remote-controlled rover with a video camera plunges with them, so the crew can monitor their every move.

"Devolved" is a wan spoof of TV's "Lost" and "Survivor" as seen through the prism of high school dynamics. Writer-director John Cregan covers the basics of character, situation and theme here but never finds his comic footing, resulting in a debut feature that's more tired than inspired. After a whale-watching expedition goes bad, a group of San Diego high school seniors becomes shipwrecked on a desert island off the coast of Mexico, where the popular kids face off against the "unpopulars" in a battle for supremacy.

One South Korean diver died and another was hospitalized as rescuers Wednesday continued to search for survivors of last week's mysterious naval ship sinking, attempting three times to enter the hull of the sunken patrol vessel. The South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff said a 53-year-old diver perished after losing consciousness 80 feet down in the turbulent water of the Yellow Sea. It was not clear whether the accident took place inside the downed ship. Another diver was injured after he too lost consciousness in the murky depths.

Nine explorers this summer will survey the wreck of the largest 19th-Century steam sailing ship, taking the first step toward raising it from beneath the polar ice cap off Alaska, the leader of the expedition said Wednesday. "It's like an underwater time capsule," project director Dan W. Shirey said of the 177-foot whaler Orca, which is thought to lie perfectly preserved in the Chukchi Sea. "You couldn't have asked for a gentler shipwreck."

The remains of a Japanese mini-submarine that participated in the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor have been discovered, researchers are to report today, offering strong evidence that the sub fired its torpedoes at Battleship Row. That could settle a long-standing argument among historians. Five mini-subs were to participate in the strike, but four were scuttled, destroyed or run aground without being a factor in the attack. The fate of the fifth has remained a mystery.

The remains of a Japanese mini-submarine that participated in the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor have been discovered, researchers are to report today, offering strong evidence that the sub fired its torpedoes at Battleship Row. That could settle a long-standing argument among historians. Five mini-subs were to participate in the strike, but four were scuttled, destroyed or run aground without being a factor in the attack. The fate of the fifth has remained a mystery.

Underwater archaeologists said Monday that they have found a virtual time capsule of life during Canada's Klondike Gold Rush: a sunken Yukon River stern-wheeler so well-preserved that researchers can document the last minutes of the five-man crew as well as their life aboard the primitive cargo-hauler. The door of the steam boiler on the A.J. Goddard was open, and slightly charred wood found inside suggested the crew was trying to build up a head of steam, perhaps to break loose from an ice jam. An ax remained on the deck after one crew member hefted it to chop the rope used to tow a barge, a sign of their frantic attempts to escape the ice floe.