[MSN] The big business of treasure hunting is selling off the world's maritime heritage-and it's perfectly legal.

[Museum Security Network Mailing list]

Volume 60 Number 4, July/August 2007  
by Heather Pringle  

The big business of treasure hunting is selling off the world's maritime
heritage-and it's perfectly legal.

Images:
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On the afternoon of October 24, 1865, Civil War veteran William T. Nichols
witnessed a scene aboard the steamship Republic more terrifying than many of
the horrors he had recently witnessed in battle. While en route from New
York to New Orleans, the ship, which was carrying 80 passengers and coins
then worth a reported $400,000, sailed through a fierce hurricane,
sustaining grave damage. As the wind howled, the vessel lurched sickeningly
from side to side, rapidly taking on water. The crew struggled heroically to
save it. "I cannot describe in words the impression which [the event] made
upon my mind," wrote Nichols, a former army colonel, to his wife. "It was
desperation intensified." A day later, Republic sank off the coast of
Georgia. At least 14 passengers perished. 


(Ken Feisel)
Settling on the ocean floor, the wreck rested undisturbed for nearly 140
years, preserving rare details of the Reconstruction era, "a brief period of
American history for which there are few known shipwrecks," says Robert
Neyland, an underwater archaeologist at the Naval Historical Center in
Washington, D.C. In the 1990s, however, an American shipwreck-recovery firm,
Odyssey Marine Exploration, Inc., began methodically searching for Republic.
It sent out a research vessel loaded with remote-sensing gear, and in the
summer of 2003, the company finally located wreckage from the ship in
international waters at a depth of some 1,700 feet. Under maritime law,
salvage companies are permitted to keep the ships they find in international
waters, provided no one else claims jurisdiction over the vessels. So
Odyssey staked a claim to Republic in a U.S. federal court, obtaining legal
ownership. Then, with a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), the firm raised
more than 51,000 gold and silver coins from the site, as well as thousands
of other artifacts, including hair-remedy bottles, mustard jars, children's
slates, and ink wells. To help finance its operations, Odyssey began selling
many of these finds to eager collectors, earning millions in revenues.
Impressed, Fortune Small Business magazine put the firm on its cover with
the headline: "Treasure Inc.: How an Entrepreneur Went Hunting for Sunken
Gold-and Found a $20 Million-a-Year Business." 

If a private corporation had targeted such an important site on land in the
United States and hawked many of its artifacts, heritage activists would
have been up in arms, asking hard questions about the commercial
exploitation of the country's cultural history. But there was no public
protest over the fate of Republic, and very little criticism in the press.
Moreover, this was not an unusual state of affairs-treasure hunters often
sell off shipwreck artifacts with scarcely a whisper of opposition. As a
journalist who has been writing about archaeology for 25 years, I find this
disturbing. Why isn't there more of a hue and cry against nautical treasure
hunting? Why does this industry seem to operate so freely? In search of
answers, I began closely examining the problem a year ago. I found, to my
dismay, that we have created a bizarre double standard for terrestrial and
marine sites, turning a blind eye to the fate of the world's shipwrecks. In
much of the world's oceans, treasure hunting is a perfectly legal
enterprise. 

Nautical archaeologists have long raised the alarm about this worrying state
of affairs, but their warnings have gone largely unheeded. The discipline of
maritime archaeology developed after World War II. With the field being so
new, many legislators and members of the public still do not realize how
much knowledge can be gleaned from the scientific investigation of a wreck,
including the conservation and careful analysis of artifacts. The problem is
further compounded by public perception: A certain swashbuckling, pirate
glamour cloaks the operations of many treasure hunters. 

To better understand treasure hunters and their operations, I paid a visit
to Paul Johnston, curator of maritime history at the National Museum of
American History in Washington, D.C. Since the early 1990s, Johnston, a
nautical archaeologist, has tracked the activities of treasure hunters
around the world, amassing an impressive archive of business prospectuses,
investor contracts, auction catalogues, reports, articles, correspondence,
and other documents. Johnston offered to share this information with me, and
I gladly took him up on it. Each morning of my visit, Johnston, a burly man
with alert, dark eyes and thinning, gray hair, greeted me at the museum's
security checkpoint and led me up to his office. Decorated with prints of
sailing ships and a map from his recent excavation of the sunken yacht of
King Kamehameha II in Hawaii, it was kind of a shrine to the nautical world.


Johnston's files revealed the broad spectrum of treasure hunting-from small
fly-by-night operations to large sophisticated corporations whose directors
include wealthy European nobles. And as we discussed the main players,
Johnston mentioned two major trends in the industry he had noticed. "I
definitely see a major movement toward deeper-water search and recovery," he
said, leaning back in his chair. For many years, treasure hunters stuck
mainly to the shallows, where divers equipped with scuba gear could work
easily. But increasingly, firms are shifting their focus to wrecks thousands
of feet below the surface. There they retrieve gold coins or antique
porcelain dishes by using ROVs equipped with video cameras and manipulator
arms, all under the watchful eyes of highly trained technicians. And the
steep cost of deepwater operations has led directly to the second trend that
Johnston observed. "I see a more businesslike approach to treasure hunting,"
he told me, "where charismatic individuals are being replaced by
corporations who have great funding and great technical ability." 

Johnston could not say with certainty how many of these firms are currently
combing the sea floor in search of wreck sites. Some companies operate in
secrecy, only publicizing their activities when their finds go to auction.
He estimated, however, that "there are probably somewhere under a dozen
serious treasure hunters worldwide." While some employ archaeologists to
assist in their operations, these researchers contribute relatively little
to scientific knowledge of ancient seafaring and ship design, as compared to
publicly funded archaeologists. 

Let me give an example. In the late 1990s, Texas A&M archaeologist Filipe
Castro and his colleagues excavated the wreck of a seventeenth-century
merchant ship off the coast of Portugal. Since then, Castro has diligently
attempted to reconstruct the vessel from hull to rigging, and test its
seaworthiness-something no treasure hunter has done, due to the grinding,
time-consuming analysis required. In pursuit of this goal, Castro has
published two scientific books and 26 articles on the wreck, and has
completed six archaeological reports. His students have written a master's
thesis and a doctoral dissertation on related topics, and Castro continues
to study the wreck, presenting his findings in scientific journals. By
contrast, Odyssey Marine's work on Republic is little known to the
archaeological community-even though, as the company cofounder, Greg Stemm,
pointed out to me, "Our budget on a monthly basis is more than the Institute
of Nautical Archaeology's annual budget [at Texas A&M University]." To date,
Odyssey's scientific staff has published just one book-on bottles recovered
from the ship. Of the five reports they have written on Republic, none
appears to have been published, although the company says it plans to post
them online. Moreover, Odyssey has now moved on to other shipwreck projects,
the most notable being the search for a treasure-laden seventeenth-century
British warship, HMS Sussex, off the coast of Spain. 

At heart, says Larry Murphy, chief of the Submerged Resources Center in the
National Parks Service, Odyssey and other such firms are about turning a
profit. "What's going on is that you are excavating sites under a commercial
timeframe, making commercial decisions about profit and loss, and you are
collecting artifacts for sale." 

Just how much of an impact has the treasure-hunting industry had on the
world's underwater sites? It's a difficult question to answer because no one
has ever compiled statistics on the total number of sites worldwide and the
number that have been damaged or disturbed by treasure hunters. But
archaeologist Don Keith, president of the Ships of Discovery research
institute at the Corpus Christi Museum of Science and History, thinks that
the movement of treasure hunters into deeper waters is a very worrying sign.
Indeed, one study that he and colleague Toni Carrell completed suggests that
treasure seekers have so depleted shallow-water wrecks that they are now
increasingly forced to target ships lying far below the surface. It's a
situation, explains Keith, that parallels the excesses of the oil industry.
Just as in oil prospecting, once you have found all the easy-to-reach
fields, you have to spend a lot more money to find the difficult,
hard-to-work ones. 

Keith is known among his colleagues as a thoughtful and deliberate man, with
a wry sense of humor. Like many in his profession, Keith has long worried
about the toll that treasure hunters are taking on the world's historic
shipwrecks. In 1998, he read a Scientific American magazine article
explaining how petroleum geologists estimate the amount of oil left in the
ground, and it dawned on him that he could apply the same technique to gauge
the number of shipwrecks left in the seas. 

 Is the world running out of shipwrecks? One recent study shows that in
three parts of the world-coastal Florida, Sussex County in England, and
along the various trade routes of the East Indiamen ships-half of all known
shipwreck sites were discovered before the mid-1970s. Borrowing a
mathematical model developed for the oil industry, the study suggests that
shipwrecks are a rapidly declining resource. [LARGER IMAGE] 

During the 1950s, American geophysicist Marion King Hubbert set out to learn
how much petroleum remained in the lower 48 states. In 1956, he observed
that the volume of oil that a particular oilfield produced tended to form a
predictable bell curve over time. Peak production occurred once about half
the crude in a given field was exhausted; after that, the rate of oil
extraction started tapering off. So Hubbert developed a mathematical model
to forecast when this halfway point would be reached. Today, geologists can
gauge the decline of oilfields in a region by using the Hubbert Model. 

To examine the situation with shipwrecks, Keith and Carrell began searching
for regional statistics on the numbers of discovered wrecks and the dates on
which they were found. They came up with detailed figures for two
geographical regions-the coasts of Florida in the United States and the
waters off Sussex County in England-as well as the famous trade routes that
East Indiamen ships once plied between Europe and Southeast Asia. The pair
then applied the Hubbert Model to all three statistical sets, which covered
the period from 1960 to 1998. "In each case," says Keith, "the curve for
shipwreck discoveries came out showing that the time between 1974 and 1976
was the peak." Such findings, he suggests, point to the immediate need for
strong conservation measures. "We concluded that more than half of the
shipwreck sites that will ever be found have already been found. So the
resource is being depleted very quickly, and when it's gone, it's gone."
Indeed, Keith and Carrell's data suggest that at the current rate, all wreck
sites off the coasts of Australia, Europe, Great Britain, Canada, the United
States, and in the Caribbean islands will have been found and exploited in
just another 30 years. 

I think Keith and Carrell's study shows clearly why treasure hunters are
spending so much money to recover artifacts from deepwater sites. Just as
oil companies now invest heavily in wresting crude from costly sources such
as the Canadian tar sands, commercial salvors are now increasingly forced to
look for historic shipwrecks in some of the most inaccessible parts of the
ocean. During the 1960s, treasure hunters spent just a few dollars a day
hunting for gold coins on a fleet of Spanish galleons that sank in shallow
waters of the Florida coast. Working Republic-with ROVs, a crew of 40, and
all the other technology-cost tens of thousands of dollars a day. 

So how do treasure hunters raise enough money to chase after the world's
ever-diminishing number of shipwrecks? As we sat over lunch in the museum's
staff cafeteria one day, Paul Johnston offered a colorful primer. Generally,
he explained, small private corporations target affluent investors. As the
prospectuses in Johnston's files disclose, they focus on individuals who
earn more than $200,000 annually and who possess a net worth exceeding $1
million-people who can readily afford to lose their investment. Often, says
Johnston, the owners of these companies call on affluent friends to help
round up prospects. In one case, Johnston wangled an invitation to a private
event held for Robert Marx, a legendary treasure hunter who claims to have
found a Roman ship off the coast of Brazil. The hostess, says Johnston, "was
a wealthy Philadelphia woman with strong social connections. As I remember,
she was some kind of princess, from a deposed Eastern European monarchy." At
the gathering, Marx "showed a movie of his work, told some stories, then
said he was looking for another ship and that it would be a good investment
opportunity, although you could lose every penny. Then he told the story of
the ship, with some embellishments." 

Blessed with charm and the gift of gab, successful treasure hunters often
possess an uncanny ability to latch onto investors. For more than 20 years,
legendary shipwreck-seeker Mel Fisher searched for Spanish galleons off the
coast of Florida, before finding the gold-laden Nuestra Senora de Atocha in
1985. But Fisher, who died in 1998, was almost equally renowned for his
prowess in attracting investors. He'd hunt for them as they bent their
elbows in the bars of Key West, and as they languished in senior-citizen
homes. As Cheryl Ward, an underwater archaeologist at Florida State
University told me, Fisher made a point of carrying a gold doubloon in his
pocket. When he'd meet someone for the first time, he'd drop it and let his
acquaintance pick it up. "He said when people touched it, they got gold
fever," recalled Ward. 

For these investors, Fisher often brandished a contract lasting just one
year. In it, he agreed to pay .01 percent of the treasure he raised in one
field season in exchange for an investment of $1,000. All payouts were to be
made in treasure, as opposed to cash, and Fisher was under no obligation to
raise all the gold he found in one year. Shortly after he found Atocha,
Money magazine investigated the soundness of such investments. While Fisher
claimed, for example, that the Atocha treasure was worth $400 million, Money
concluded that this figure was "almost surely wrong." All estimates of the
treasure's worth were supplied by Fisher or an associate, and were based on
the prices that starstruck tourists paid on impulse for coins in Fisher's
small museum gift shop in Key West, a place Money called, "the retail
bull's-eye." But the Atocha treasure commanded considerably lower prices in
independent coin shops, perhaps as little as 6 to 25 percent of the gift
shop prices. This was particularly bad news for Fisher's investors who had
to sell their payout-items of treasure-on the open market. 

By contrast, the large treasure-seeking corporations conduct their financial
affairs in a more conventional manner. Odyssey Marine Exploration, for
example, is publicly traded on the American Stock Exchange, and files
regular reports on its activities to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
These documents brim with details of complex financial maneuvers and a
network of subsidiary companies. And as befits a large private corporation,
Odyssey is hungry for profit and open to partnerships. In 2002, the firm
signed a highly controversial deal with the British government to find and
recover artifacts from HMS Sussex, a British naval vessel that is reputed to
have carried more than $1 billion (in today's dollars) worth of gold and
silver when it sank in 1694. If Odyssey is successful, it will split part of
the proceeds with the British government-a troubling precedent, I believe,
for a country that once prided itself on its naval and maritime heritage. 

Almost six years ago, the general conference of the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) recognized that
shipwrecks lying in international waters were in grave peril. It voted in
favor of adopting a new international treaty to safeguard them, the
Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage. Among its
many provisions, the convention states that "Underwater cultural heritage
shall not be commercially exploited," and it directs signatories to impose
sanctions on those who violate its measures. To date, 14 countries, from
Spain and Portugal to Panama and Mexico, have ratified the
convention-another six must do so before this treaty can take effect. 

The convention is not an ideal solution, but it is certainly a major step
forward for those intent on protecting the nautical past. Even so, many of
the world's leading maritime nations-including the United States and the
United Kingdom-have yet to ratify it. And as these governments drag their
heels, the clock continues to tick on the world's sunken ships. It's time to
put science ahead of the Almighty Dollar, and cultural heritage ahead of the
bottom line of private corporations. If we don't, we will truly be missing
the boat.

Heather Pringle is a freelance science journalist and author of Master Plan:
Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust.


C 2007 by the Archaeological Institute of America
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