Desiree
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« Reply #1 on: October 06, 2013, 01:57:36 am » |
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Hi Riven, you brought up the SS Jesmond, wow, what a story! I wonder if we will ever find out the truth about it..?
FROM
ATLANTIS, the Eighth Continent
By Charles Berlitz
If a great empire once extended over a large, now submerged area, it would be logical to expect that some vestiges of it would remain on the Atlantic floor and could be identified by exploring the bottom in a deep-dive submersible. On the other hand, it would be even more convincing if parts of the drowned lands could reappear at sea level, temporarily or pemanently visible in the light of day.
A very curious example of this possibility occurred in March 1882. Unlike many alleg- ed sightings of Atlantean ruins before that time, it was well reported in a ship's log and also in the press. It concerned the encounter of a steamship with an uncharted island in heavily traveled sea lanes and the unusual material that was found there by the ship's captain and his crew.
The vessel was named the S.S. JESMOND, a British merchant ship of 1495 tons, bound for New Orleans with a cargo of dried fruits from its last port of call in Messina Sicily. The Jesmond was captained by David Robson, holder of master's certificate 27911 in the Queens' Merchant Marine.
The Jesmond passed through the Straits of Gibraltar (the ancient Pillars of Hercules) on March 1, 1882, and sailed into the open sea. When the ship reached the posit- ion 31degree 25'N, 28degree 40'W, about 200 miles west of Madeira and about the same distance south of the Azores, it was noted that the ocean had become unus- ually muddy and that the vessel was passing through enormous shoals of dead fish, as if some sudden disease or underwater explosion had killed them by the millions. Just before evening on the first day of encountering the fish banks, Captain Robson noticed smoke on the horizon which he presumed came from another ship.
On the following day, the fish shoals were even thicker and the smoke on the horizon seemed to be coming from mountains on an island directly to the west, where, according to the charts, there was no land for thousands of miles. As the Jesmon approached the vicinity of the island, Captain Robson threw out an anchor at about twelve miles offshore to find out whether or not this unchartered island was surrounded by reefs. Even though the charts indicated an area depth of several thousand fathoms, the anchor hit bottom at only seven fathoms.
When Robson went ashore with a landing party, they found themselves to be on a large island with no vegetation, no trees, no sandy beaches, bare of all life as if it had just risen from the ocean. The shore they landed on was covered with volcanic debris. As there were no trees, the party could clearly see a plateau be- ginning several miles away and smoking mountains beyond that.
The landing party rather gingerly headed toward the interior in the direction of the mountains, but they found that progress was interrupted by a series of deep chasms. To get to the interior would have taken days. They returned to their landing point and examined a broken cliff, part of which seemed to have been split into a mass of loose gravel, as if it had recently been subjected to great force. One of the sailors found an unusual arrowhed in the broken rock, a disco- very that led the captain to send for picks and shovels from the ship, so that the crew could dig into the gravel.
According to what he told a reporter from the Times Picayune in New Orleans, where he later docked, he and his crew uncovered "crumbling remains" of 'massi- ve walls." A variety of artifacts uncovered by digging near the walls for the better part of two days included "bronze swords, rings, mallets, carvings of heads and figures of birds and animals, and two vases or jars with fragments of bone, and one cranium almost entire...." and "what appeared to be a mummy enclosed in a stone case....encrusted with volcanic deposit, so as to be scarcely distinguished from the rock itself." At the end of the following day, much of which was spent getting the rock sarcophagus aboard the Jesmond, Robson, now worried about un- certain weather, decided to abandon his exploration of the island and resume his course.
Several reporters examined Captain Robson's unusual finds and were informed by him that he planned to present the artifacts to the British Museum. Unfortunately for Atlantean research, however, the log of the Jesmond was destroyed during the London blitz of September 1940, along with the offices of the Jesmond's owner, Watts, Watts and Company, Threadneedle Street.
There is apparently no record at the British Museum of their having received Robson's unusual collection, although it is, of course, possible that the artifacts are filed in the capacious attics and basements common to all great museums.
Nor was the island ever heard of again, existing only in the sworn testimony of the captain and crew of the JESMOND.
There is, however, some corroboration of the incident: Captain Robson was not alone in reporting the sighting of the mysterious island. Captain James New**** of the steam schooner WESTBOURNE, sailing from Marseilles to New York during the same period, reported on arrival in New York of having sighted a large island at coordinates 25degree30'N, 24degreesW. New****'s report appeared in the "New York Post", April 1, 1882.
If the coordinated given by both captains were correct, the mystery island would have measured 20X30 miles in area. The volcanic activity that brought an island of this size to the surface would have killed, probably through heating the oceanic water, an enormous quantity of fish, just as Captain Robson reported.
The miles of dead fish, fanning out from the area first reported by Robson, were also commented upon by a number of other ship captains and appeared in a varie- ty of newpapers, including the"New York Times". One captain suggested that the kill could be explained by the wreck of a fishing vessel, however unlikely this ex- planation might be.
For, the quantity of dead fish, as estimated by the British institute of Oceanogra- phy, covered 7,500 square miles of the Atlantic and comprised at least half a million tons.
Crew members of various vessels that passed through the floating fish identified them as tilefish, cod, red snapper, shad and many others. Some adventurous souls among the sailors sampled a number of the fish and suffered no ill effects. They stated that the fish were "hard and proved excellent food."
One might speculate that these hordes of fish did not immediately rot, since they had been "pre-cooked" by the volcanic heat generated by the rising of the island from the ocean floor.
Since Captain Robson's brief viewing of allegedly Atlantean walls, recognizable features of buildings, walls and roads have been reported with increasing fre- quency from various parts of the Atlantic. They have often been observed by pilots, who have overflown them in their scheduled flights and have not had per- mission to depart from their flight plans to investigate further by circling, in order to photograph chance sightings that, in any case, may have been illusory.
During WWII, several pilots on military flights between Brazil and Senegal, formerly French West Africa, said they saw what looked like clusters of buildings or "cities" under the ocean surface, near the St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks (1degreeN, 30degree West). Other pilots and observers flying the same route, have reported seeing what appeared to be underwater stone walls and ruins at approxmiately 6degreesN, 20degrees W, near the Sierra Leone Rise.
Although it would be easy to discount these claims, by supposing that the pilots reported clouds or shadown on the ocean, (it is relatively easy for imaginative in- dividuals, pilots or otherwise, to visualize fantasies in the sea or sky), neverthe- less, it is also true that some of the subsurface islands in the Atlantic, especially the flat-topped seamounts that rise suddenly from the ocean floor, come fairly close to sea level, in a number of places.
At certain times of the day, a special slant of the sun's rays in the afternoon and a low rate of diatoms in the sea could make parts of the ocean, over such seamounts clear enough to catch a glimpse of former human settlements built on large sea- mounts, when they were once islands. In the Western Atlantic, near the United States, pilots of both scheduled and charter flights have remarked on pyramidal formations, stepped terraces and walls on the ocean floor, between the Bahamas and Florida.
A Pan American pilot has described seeing an archway in a submerged wall, about sixty feet from the surface. Charter pilots have described underwater roads, leading eastward out to sea, from the coast of Yucatan, which they foll- owed until the roads were lost in deep water, but which presumably continued to other destinations, now beneath the sea.
An expanse of stone ruins, several acres in area and apparently white, as if they were marble, was reported off the northern coast of Cuba by the late Leicester Hemingway, former resident of Cuba and brother of the famous novelist, but these ruins are located well within Cuban waters and are, therefore, inaccessible to American divers.
A number of rather convincing photographs have been taken from the air of what appears to be underwater stonework on the Bahama Banks and off the Caribbean coast of Mexico, but no aerial photographs have yet been made availa- ble of sunken cities in the mid-Atlantic.
However, within the last several years, a number of unusual photographs have been taken, not from aircraft, but from submarine cameras, lowered from research ships.
Pictures of apparently man-made ruins, photographed at much greater depths than ever before, have been obtained by oceanographers not engaged in looking for Atlantis, but simply photographing the sea bottom, in the general area of the legendary island continent.
The vessels and the oceanographers were from the USSR, a nation far from Plato's Atlantic Sea.
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