Shipwrecked stories from Baltic

Riikka Alvik rests her chin in her palm as she imagines the last terrifying moments of the life of a 13-year-old girl trapped in a cabin on the St. Mikael as it mysteriously sank in the icy Baltic.

"We found her skeleton," says Alvik, a marine archaeologist and curator with Finland's National Board of Antiquities.

"She never got out. Think of the panic she felt as the cabin filled with icy water - it was November, after all."

November 1747, that is.

It is Alvik's life's work to piece together the histories of shipwrecks, stories she finds more meaningful and valuable than any sunken treasure.

Finland's coastline is so treacherous that even modern-day sailors must strictly adhere to maps to navigate the labyrinth of islands, shallow water, skerries and rocks that have doomed countless boats over the centuries.

And yet the waters have low levels of corrosive salt, a unique absence of ship-eating worms and very little sunlight, all of which create ideal conditions for preserving sunken wrecks.

There are 1,500 confirmed wrecks in Finnish waters and nearly half of them are more than a century old, according to the Board of Antiquities, but most experts believe the actual number to be much higher. Alvik says new sightings are reported every year. "Seeing an intact ship on the bottom of the sea is heart-stopping," says Rami Kokko, a marine archaeologist who has made countless dives to the bottom of the ocean. AFP