back to article Science sub spots lost Revolutionary-era SHIPWRECK

A submersible carrying out scientific research on the deep ocean bed off the Carolina coast has happened across an unexpected bonus: a Revolutionary-era shipwreck that nobody had known lay in the area. The wreck was sighted a week ago when researchers from Duke University, North Carolina State University and the University of …

  1. et tu, brute?

    "undisturbed and well preserved"

    Looks like a pile of junk to me, but maybe that's just me...

    1. Captain DaFt

      Re: "undisturbed and well preserved"

      Well, to be fair, "well preserved" to you and me means "intact".

      To an Archeologist, "well preserved" means "enough bits to easily figure out what it was".

  2. getHandle

    My dream job

    Would be working on projects like this. Completely different to what I do now and not at all practical in my present circumstances, but still some kind of romantic ideal. Maybe I read too much Clive Cussler growing up.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: My dream job

      Well, if you work in such projects, believe me, it won't happen to you anything that happens in the childish Cussler monkey-written novels.

  3. Fink-Nottle

    Lacks credibility

    Marine lab director Cindy Van Dover's statement didn't contain a single 'arrr' or 'yarr'. The terms 'avast' and 'ahoy'and 'shiver me timbers' were also conspicuous by their absence. I bet she doesn't even have a peg leg!

    1. Doctor_Wibble
      Pint

      Re: Lacks credibility

      Absolutely right, a report on something that is clearly a mixture of timelines and alien artefacts - note the amphora and the edge of a ceremonial batleth clearly visible, all completely glossed over by someone from the 'Who' Institute(!), how much more of a big flashing neon 'hidden in plain sight' sign does anyone want?

      Beer, because I despair at our collective inability to see these things and the best thing for sorrow is (being topical here!) to drown it, though mainly because that's fun to do rather than necessarily being effective.

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        Re: Lacks credibility

        "all completely glossed over by someone from the 'Who' Institute(!),"

        One wonders if the spokesperson (PC!!) went by the title "Doctor".

    2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Lacks credibility

      It is well known that the best female pirates prefer "barbequed billygoats!" when they feel an interjection is warranted.

  4. Turtle

    I was hoping...

    "Marine boffins spot 'undisturbed, well preserved' GHOST SHIP on deep sea floor"

    I was hoping to see a picture of one of the ghosts and all I got was a picture of a fat kid on his way to childhood diabetes.

    So sad.

    1. chris swain

      Re: I was hoping...

      Spot on, no ghost ship just a wreck and what's with the fat kid?

      Poor show.

      1. Robert Helpmann??
        Childcatcher

        Re: I was hoping...

        The "fat kid" is Jeff Cohen who seems to have slimmed down a bit in the last 30 years. The movie the pic was pulled from is Goonies. The bit in the caption about One-Eyed Willy was also a hint. I gather you've never heard of it? Next you'll be saying you've haven't watched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

        1. Turtle

          @Robert Helpmann?? Re: I was hoping...

          Good for Jeff Cohen if he slimmed down! Childhood obesity is a big problem here in the USA, which has been severely exacerbated by the potentially-lethal nutritional advice - hopefully but not necessarily superseded by sane and not-potentially-lethal health advice - that having kids on a high-carbohydrate diet is good.

          And I *have* heard of The Goonies - but only in the context of it being on a list of one of ten most disturbing children's movies ever made. I'd actually like to see it for exactly that reason.

          1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

            Re: @Robert Helpmann?? I was hoping...

            And I *have* heard of The Goonies - but only in the context of it being on a list of one of ten most disturbing children's movies ever made.

            That list must either have been based on a rather odd definition of "disturbing" (or perhaps of "children's movies"), or have been compiled by someone tragically ignorant of the state of world cinema. I doubt Goonies (which I've seen a few times and find to be pleasant and inoffensive entertainment, for its genre) even places in the top hundred.

            Hell, they cut the giant octopus from the released film. If you don't even have a giant octopus, how disturbing can you be?

        2. chris swain

          Re: I was hoping...

          @ R Helpmann: Have heard of it, never seen it for much the same reason as I've never read Harry Potter. Being an adult (some may disagree, LOL) I no longer have the inclination to indulge in children's entertainment. I have seen Chitty Bang Bang though as that coincided with my childhood.

      2. Dabooka
        FAIL

        Re: I was hoping...

        'and what's with the fat kid?'

        So much fail.....

        1. This post has been deleted by its author

  5. harmjschoonhoven
    Linux

    And in other news

    water is still wet. There are an estimated 3 million shipwrecks on the bottom of the oceans with a total area of 361 million km². So the average distance from wreck to wreck is 10 km and much less in the well-trodden shiplanes.

    BTW, I am a fan of deep-sea exploration.

    Penguin, because they love the sea too.

    1. Martin Budden Silver badge

      Re: And in other news

      The Doom Bar in Cornwall has 600 wrecks in 1 km2. You'd think with that many it would be easy to stumble across a wreck there, but you won't find any. Sand is funny stuff.

      1. Unep Eurobats
        Pint

        Re: And in other news

        Yeah, I've got wrecked on Doom Bar too.

    2. hapticz

      Re: And in other news

      at last, some metrics we can all consume. the scale of our oceans compared to the average size of those human made floaty things really is quite remarkable. when we think of Fukishima spewing tons of Cesium into the deep blue sea, we often lose sight of our own final demise.

  6. arctic_haze
    IT Angle

    Ship to wreck

    To wreck, to wreck

    To wreck, did I build this ship to wreck?

    1. PNGuinn
      Coat

      Re: Ship to wreck

      ??

      I've been wrecking my brains trying to understand that comment....

      1. VeganVegan
        Pirate

        Re: Ship to wreck

        I too have been searching the flotsam, jetsam, not to mention the wrack that are floating in my brain, trying to decipher the meaning of his comment.

      2. ChaoticMike
        Megaphone

        Re: Ship to wreck

        I'm guessing it's a reference to the latest waxing from popular teenage rocking combo 'Florence and the Machine ', complete with leather-lunged vocal performance...

        1. arctic_haze

          Re: Ship to wreck

          Correct.

          I believe the IT angle of this piece of news makes as much sense as the song.

  7. joeldillon

    Britain wasn't exactly a liberal democracy in 1800. One could quite reasonably argue that Napoleon wasn't particularly more oppressive than the people he was fighting (and, of course, during the Napoleonic wars Britain was still a-ok with slavery too).

    1. Thesheep

      Britain was OK with the slave trade...

      ... well only until 1807 when the Slave Trade Act was passed. Although that wasn't quite the same as abolishing slavery, it did push things forwards.

    2. phil dude
      Boffin

      History...

      ...is written by the winners.

      P.

  8. Slocum

    "During the period which the shipwreck appears to be from, some of Britain's North American colonies had just freed themselves (though not, of course, their slaves: for many years the only way an American slave could become free was to escape to British territory) from cruel British oppression. "

    Provided, of course, that they did not escape to British territory in the West Indies, where slavery persisted until 1833 (at which time the remaining slaves weren't actually freed outright but converted into indentured servants). And the British governor didn't free slaves during the Revolutionary War outright, but only conditionally on their joining the British army and fighting on the British side. It was a tactical move. On the other hand, some northern states in the U.S. began abolishing slavery even before the war ended (Vermont 1777, Pennsylvania 1780, Massachusetts, 1783) -- though in the latter two cases, the abolition was gradual rather than immediate. And what about British Canada? Some American loyalists fled there with their slaves and kept them for decades more. In Ontario, the Imperial Act of 1790 guaranteed that slaveholders could keep their 'property'.

    So if the U.S. had remained British, the slaves in the north would likely have remained enslaved a generation or two longer than they in fact did (at least until 1807 and perhaps until 1833), while those in the south would have been freed a generation sooner (1833 vs 1865). Neither side was covered in any glory with respect to slavery.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      No moral high ground anywhere in the slave trade

      Until enlightenment thinking finally got around to seeing it off, as it did at different times in different places. The results of this shameful chapter in human history still resonate today as can be seen by the recent confederate flag issue in the US.

      The intersection of post enlightenment industrialisation with a pre-existing slave trade run, I gather, by Arab traders and African rulers was an example of the burgeoning western global capitalism taking advantage of new opportunities whilst humanity waited for the legislature to catch up.

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: No moral high ground anywhere in the slave trade

        Until enlightenment thinking finally got around to seeing it off

        Sure, if by "[E]nlightenment thinking" you mean capitalism. Eric Williams and others make a strong case that slavery was dismantled due to its relative economic inefficiency; and Paul Gilroy and Robert J. C. Young, among others, have shown how the Enlightenment episteme was quite capable of accommodating the apparent contradictions of slavery with its tenets. (Scientific racism, for example, existed to justify the perpetuation of slavery within an Enlightenment milieu.)

        More extensive and incisive critiques of the complicity of Enlightenment philosophy per se with slavery and colonialism can be found in the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and various others.

        I don't want to endorse a reductive materialist theory of the gradual reduction1 of slavery in the European-influenced world; economic forces weren't solely responsible, and the cultural work done by people making philosophical and moral arguments against slavery should not be discounted. Nor, of course, should the individual efforts of protesters, organizers, politicians, and others. But there's good reason to believe that government-sanctioned slavery in Europe, its colonies, and its former colonies ended when and how it did in large part because capitalism is a far more effective way of extracting value from labor.

        1It's by no means gone entirely, as any number of groups that study human trafficking can attest.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: No moral high ground anywhere in the slave trade

          Don't doubt it for a second re: the economic argument and I did allude to the rapacious capitalism that drove the enlightenment. I also agree that progress has been slow; over time things get better but there is undoubtedly much still to do.

  9. chris swain

    Nice to see the headline is now corrected

    Ghost ship, my a..e

  10. ratfox
    Paris Hilton

    Genuinely oppressive?

    How was Napoleon's empire more genuinely oppressive than the British one? I believe a number of your ex-colonies would beg to differ.

  11. chris swain

    El Reg headline editors working overtime?

    No longer ghost ship nor napoleonic era but revolutionary era, aren't we due a Georgian sometime soon?

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