NewsBreak Original

The HMS Birkenhead, captained by Robert Salmond, was an iron-hulled paddle steamer that had set sail from Portsmouth, England to Cape Town, South Africa. The passengers consisted mostly of soldiers going to fight in the Frontier War in South Africa.

In 1982, the excavation of a preconstruction site at 175 Water Street in Manhattan, New York revealed the hull of an 18th-century merchant ship that was buried 21 feet under the street level.

The MV Goya was a Norwegian vessel commandeered by the Germans when they invaded Norway during the Second World War. As part of Operation Hannibal, it was repurposed by the nazis to transport civilians and military troops.

Lauded for its speed and its ability to cross the Atlantic in a mere nine days, the 284-foot-long American paddle steamer named the SS Arctic was one of the most celebrated of the four steamers owned by the Collins Line. On September 27, 1854, the steamer was en route from Liverpool, England to New York when it collided with another steamship, The Vesta, near Newfoundland.

On December 6, 1917, the SS Mont Blanc, heavily laden with a highly volatile cargo consisting of wet and dry 2300 tons of picric acid, 500 tons of TNT, and 10 tons of guncotton collided with a Norwegian ship resulting in what is now referred to as the Halifax Explosion.

MV Doña Paz was a Japanese-built and Philippine-registered passenger ferry that sank after colliding with the oil tanker Vector on December 20, 1987. The Dona Paz was en route to Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, from Leyte Island when the collision with the tanker happened.

The worst maritime disaster in US maritime history occurred on April 27, 1865, when the SS Sultana exploded on the Mississippi River killing 1,168 people. The SS Sultana was a side-wheel commercial steamboat constructed out of wood normally tasked with transportation in the lower Mississippi. Even though it only had a capacity of 376 passengers, on the day of the tragedy the steamboat was carrying 2,137 passengers which was six times its normal capacity. This is an excerpt that describes the reason for the overcrowding on the SS Sultana: "The American Civil War had ended just weeks before, and repatriated Union prisoners of war, having endured hellish conditions in Confederate military prisons, were eager to return to their homes in the North."

In 1945, the German populace who found themselves in the path of the advancing Soviet Union army were scrambling to get out rather than find themselves at the mercy of the Soviet forces. A massive evacuation effort called Operation Hannibal was set into motion in order to transport civilians, soldiers, and equipment back to safety via the Baltic Sea.

There have been millions of shipwrecks throughout history, and each perfectly remained intact within the folds of the giant water beds holding wealth that no eyes had ever seen. With the recent advances in technology, several such shipwrecks have resurfaced the water or have managed to show the treasures they once bore.