Archive for January, 2010
January 28, 2010 at 9:15 AM · Filed under Uncategorized
“A Sword for Pizarro sparkles…prepare to be entertained
and captivated.”
- Kim Cool, Scene Magazine
“This is a true thriller, like recovering gold from the bottom of the ocean.”
- Bob “Frogfoot” Weller, author of 9 books on Sunken Treasure.
“Combines the maritime adventure of Clive Cussler, the breezy escapism
of Jimmy Buffett, and the witty mystery of Robert B. Parker…”
- Lost Treasure Magazine
“Diver, treasure hunter, and anyone who enjoys a good
thriller will love a Sword for Pizarro….I give it 2 fins up!”
- Greg The Divemaster, Host of ScubaRadio”
A Sword for Pizarro has as many thrills as a roller coaster…”
- Cindy Vallar, Pirates & Privateers
“A Sword for Pizarro is a must read for everyone who has
dreamed of sunken gold or the thrill of strapping on a tank
and challenging the world’s oceans! I hope there is a sequel.”
- Mike Ange, author of Diver Down”
“…I’m having a hard time putting it down to go to training!”
- Scott D. Altman, NASA Astronaut – Commander STS-125″
Author Tom Ryan
http://www.holdfastbooks.com/order.htm
January 19, 2010 at 12:37 AM · Filed under Uncategorized
Annie, “OCEAN ANNIE” environment educator of the ocean, one of America’s leading inspirational speakers . She is founder of www.DiveIntoYourImagination.com. Her company changes the way a new generation views the ocean. As an underwater cinematographer and environment educator, Annie has created a series of award winning books, DVDs, motivational art series and has become a Les Brown Platinum Speaker.
Originally from Chicago, Annie has spent the past two decades living and working around the world. Traveling from Indonesia to Galapagos, Belize to Papua New Guinea, Annie has explored and documented life on our planet! Annie was inspired by her Grandmother words when she was 10 years old, “You have to travel when you are young because when you get to be my age, you can’t climb the mountains!”
Currently based in Santa Barbara, California, Annie works as a producer, photographer and motivational speaker. Specializing in the underwater realm she utilizes her skills as an underwater cinematographer, scuba diving instructor and USCG 100 ton boat captain on many of her assignments. Annie’s work has been published and broadcast worldwide, and the goal of Dive into Your Imagination is to be in every school around the world and giving the gift of the Ocean to all.
In the past two years, Annie has been on a public speaking tour reaching thousands of children, parents, professionals and corporations. Dive Into Your Imagination has received many awards including those from the Teachers’ Choice Award, Kids First endorsement, three iParenting Awards, and three platinum and one gold award from the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio 2009 Awards. In addition to this, Annie has written instructor training manuals, launched www.DiveIntoYourImagination.com, and her signature collection of images, posters, cards, magnets, window clings plus more partnering the ocean with inspirational messages.
Although she loved the movie, Finding Nemo® and the exposure it gave to our oceans, it was only a story. She wants to give our children the real story, expose them to real animals and teach about their natural history. Animals are so “animated” in their natural environment; they don’t need any stories but their own. This is why Annie created the Dive into Your Imagination series for kids, to get them out of the virtual world and into the real world. It is better than cartoons! She truly believes that kids will help educate their parents and many of the myths about our oceans and water will be dispelled. She wants kids growing up loving the water and all the animals because we protect what we love. This is a difficult concept for people to grasp, that everything we do on land affects our lakes, oceans and our planet. We look at a body of water and we don’t think of it as a living breathing organism that is the home to thousands of animals. Depending on our understanding and experiences, some people even fear Mother Ocean. This is what Annie hopes to change by transforming through entertaining education. Save Our Seas, a foundation from Geneva, helped Annie get the educational messages about our ocean out into the world!
She wants everyone to understand the importance of the ocean. It creates about 70% of the oxygen our planet needs for survival.
She has touched, moved and inspired children and adults by showing them how to “dive into their imagination” and to create the future they want to live. We are not creatures of our pasts and we can be anyone we want today. Our lives are filled with possibilities and choices if we are there to take them. She is teaching and empowering children to want to live on a healthy planet that they helped create.
Annie invites you to “Dive into Your Imagination!”
http://www.DiveIntoYourImagination.com
January 12, 2010 at 11:00 PM · Filed under Uncategorized
In the year 1837 German-born inventor Augustus Siebe, living in England, developed a Diving Helmet which was sealed to a watertight, air-containing rubber suit. The closed diving suit, connected to an air pump on the surface, becomes the first effective standard scuba dive equipment, and the prototype of hard-hat rigs still in use today. In his obituary Siebe is described as the father of diving.
Born in Saxony (Prussia) in 1788, little is known of his early years. He learned metalworking in Berlin and was an engineer and worked as an artillery officer in the army. After the battle at Waterloo he emigrated to England to settle in London as a precision engineer. He turned out to be at the right place at the right time. The economy was at her top in the middle of the 19th century.
Siebe Gorman & Co Ltd was a British company which developed scuba diving helmet and breathing equipment and worked on commercial diving and marine salvage projects. The company advertised itself as ‘Submarine Engineers’. It was founded by Augustus Siebe and his son-in-law, Gorman.
Siebe Gorman & Co was notable for developing the “closed” diving helmet of the standard diving dress and associated equipment. As the helmet was sealed to the diving suit, it was watertight, unlike the previous “open” helmet systems. The new equipment was safer and more efficient and revolutionised underwater work from the 1830s.
Standard scuba diving equipment was their main manufacturing operation, producing diving helmets in copper and brass. They also made frogman’s equipment for the British armed forces during World War 2, and later, sport scuba gear.
In 1828 Siebe got a patent on a rotating water pump. Sales numbers were formidable and Siebe had his first financial success. He moved to 5 Denmark street in Soho London. Siebe got married, had 9 children and his company went very well.
Around 1834 the Deane brothers consult Augustus Siebe to turn their “smoke helmet” into a real divers helmet. This helmet was succesfully used by Charles Deane in many salvage operations. He was not the only one, other divers used the Deane equipment as well. It was a young and clever engineer, George Edwards. After using the Deane gear for over a year, he suggested safety improvements.
His idea was to dress the diver in a full dress (instead of a short jacket) and clamp this dress, by means of 20 bolts, to the breastplate. Thus, the helmet could never flood again, even if the diver would stand on his head. The only thing Edwards wanted to reach was to improve safety underwater. Fot this reason he gave Siebe the full and free use of his diving dress design in 1838. Edwards did not take out a patent.
In 1839, Siebe produced the first diving helmet and dress, based on Edwards’ design. He used 12 equally spaced bolts to clamp the full dress to the breastplate. This was a huge success. In 1840, the helmet was used by the Royal Navy on the wreck of the Royal George. The diving team, lead by Colonel Pasley, was very satisfied with Siebe’s helmet. More than they were with Deane’s helmet. Pasley too suggested some improvements to the helmet. He suggested to seperate the bonnet and the breastplate by means of an interrupted thread facility. Siebe took over the advise and thus the basic design for all later diving helmets was born which was manufactured by Siebe Gorman & Co for many years.
* The first open dress. Air could circulate free through helmet and dress.
* The first closed dress. Everything was sealed of. There was no risk of filling up with water.
To the millions of diving enthusiasts , Augustus Siebe is known as the Godfather of Diving.
Siebe managed his business together with son in law Gorman – Which is one of the reason for the Company to be called as Siebe Gorman & Co. Also for that reason later nametags carried the name Siebe Gorman and Company on the breastplate of all helmets. The company is no longer in business. It was destroyed by a devastating fire.
Different types were made:
Siebe Gorman and Co manufactured 12 bolt, 8 bolt, 6 bolt, 3 bolt, 2 bolt, no bolt, flange and 12 bolt square corselet.
In some cases helmets were supplied with round side windows, a topflight, an extra air inlet, an extra air outlet on the corselet or corset. There are many different types of Siebe Gorman Helmets and its really difficult to identify each one of them wihtout proper knowledge. He also manufactured diving suits, diving boots, diving knives ( extremely rare), diving pumps among other gears under the same name. We have managed to recover one original catalogue of Siebe Gorman Products. The reproduction is available for purchase – please check our store page for further details.
We’ve come a long way baby!
January 2, 2010 at 2:54 AM · Filed under Uncategorized
Dr E. Lee Spence located his first shipwreck at the age of twelve; tales of pirate adventures inspired him to hunt for sunken treasure.
Dr. Spence’s archeology underwater has been funded by institutions such as, the Savannah Ships of the Sea Museum, the Caribbean Research Institute Ltd., Colombia, South America, the College of Charleston, the South Carolina Committee for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He recently received an honorarium from National Geographic for work he did on their atlas of the oceans. Dr. Spence is currently the president of the Sea Research Society and the vice president of the International Diving Institute.”
Spence served as Chief of Underwater Archaeology for Providencia, a 40,000 square mile archipelago in the Western Caribbean.
He has authored more than a dozen books, and has served as an editor for a number of nationally distributed magazines. He is also an award winning cartographer and has published a number of maps and charts dealing with shipwrecks and treasure.
Spence has traveled to a wide range of exotic places in the Far East, Europe, Central and South America. He explored castles, palaces, shipwrecks, ancient ruins, secret tunnels, and subterranean and underwater caves. He has dived in the Great Lakes, the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, and the Caribbean. He has been shot at, buried by cave-ins, tangled in fishing nets, pinned under wreckage, run out of air and lost inside wrecks.
Dr. Spence has discovered numerous historically significant shipwrecks, including the Civil War blockade runner, Georgiana and the Confederate submarine Hunley, a mystery for over one hundred years. In 1978, the Hunley was placed on the United States National Register of Historic Places as a result of Spence’s discovery. The wreck was raised in 2000. Her crew was still inside.
The State of South Carolina’s claim of ownership to the Civil War submarine Hunley rested in part of Spence’s 1970 discovery of that vessel and his subsequent gift of his salvage rights to the State. Spence’s gift of his rights was made in September of 1995 at the official request of the Attorney General of South Carolina and the South Carolina Hunley Commission.
Inboard profile and plan drawings, after sketches by W.A. Alexander (1863) H. L. Hunley, suspended from a crane during its recovery from Charleston Harbor, August 8, 2000. Photograph from the U.S. Naval Historical Center.
Spence considers his identification of Charleston born banking and shipping magnate George Trenholm as the “Real Rhett Butler” to be the most interesting non-shipwreck discovery. Trenholm’s fleet of fast steamers earned today’s equivalent of over one billion dollars running munitions, medicines, and merchandise through the Federal blockade. By the end of the Civil War, Trenholm was a major figure in the Confederate government. The United States actually charged Trenholm with treason and claimed he had made off with and concealed hundreds of millions in Confederate assets. Trenholm died without revealing his secrets. Spence is currently trying to uncover them.
Dr. Spence’s work has been written up in hundreds of periodicals including: Life; Skin Diver; People; Treasure; Civil War Times; New York Times; USA Today; the London Sun; Vi Menn (Norway); La Stampa (Italy); Heutzu (Germany); MacCleans (Canada); and Tresors de l’histoire (France). He has also been on numerous radio and television shows, both here and abroad, including NBC’s Today Show.
“El Encanto Treasure” tumbaga gold, pre-Columbian death mask, with ornate headdress, breast plate, etc. These pieces were found near El Canto Colombia in 1938, brought into the U.S. in 1974, and were purchased from Miguel Hoyos in 2009, Dr. Spence hopes to return them to Colombia. The green is from the copper used in alloying the gold.
Lee’s collection of masks & figures, pre-Columbian style art and artifacts.
Lee with skull and pre-Colombian tumbaga gold death mask.
Coins from Spanish shipwreck sank in 1800 near Ecuador.
One wreck contained over 10,000 clay smoking pipes.
Bronze mortar, most likely utilized to make gunpowder, dated 1586
One of a dozen portholes recovered from wreck of a civil war era (1860s) side wheel steamer, had run aground and burned. Found north of Fort Pierce Inlet, Florida.
Assorted bottles 18th and early19th century. Square bottles were used for medicines. The bottle shown in the center is a style known as a “Dutch Gin Bottle.” Gin was first sold as a medicine, thus the square shape of most gin bottles even today. The left of the shells was a snuff bottle. The wide mouth jars behind were for non-liquid medicines. Several bottles have seals denoting the owner and/or the date.
Pre-Colombian jars and effigies
The small bronze cannon on right was recovered from a 1786 French wreck in Haiti. It would have been loaded with stone and used as a swivel mounted shotgun.
The middle cannon, believed to be Spanish from a wreck found in the Philippines. At some point in its history Chinese characters were inscribed near the touch hole, possibly captured and used by Chinese pirates before it sank.
The cannon on the left also Spanish, from the Philippines.
This German World War II era sextant is marked with the emblem and swastika of the third Reich.
Spanish silver goblet made in the “new world” by Native American craftsmen
Taino Indian bowl found by North Caribbean Research divers (directed by Lee Spence) near Monte Christi, Dominican Republic in 2008.
As a historian, Spence believes the biggest key to success on any expedition is the archival research that precedes it. Spence calls historical research “his drug of choice” and says, “In today’s world, time is the most expensive part of a salvage expedition. Man-hours spent in the archives can cut hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of time from the field phase of most projects.
All pictures, except those of the Hunley, are copyrighted by Lee and Lauren Spence and are being used with their permission.
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