Treasure hunters

The quest for shipwrecks and sunken treasures is serious business. What are the riches that these men comb the ocean floors for?

In 1744, HMS Victory, the flagship of King George II’s fleet and the mightiest and most technically advanced vessel of its era, sank in the English Channel during a severe storm. For over two centuries, historians pored over records, and numerous search expeditions were launched to locate the wreckage of the vessel. The ship which sank with a substantial amount of gold and silver was believed to have run aground on the rocks off Alderney in the English Channel. Three years ago the mystery was finally solved. A private deep-ocean shipwreck exploration firm, Florida-based Odyssey Marine Exploration, discovered HMS Victory 100 km from where everybody thought it had sunk. It was spotted using an underwater robot with cameras sitting on the ocean floor thousands of metres below the surface.

“Historically, HMS Victory was a great find,” says Greg Stemm, co-founder and CEO, Odyssey Marine Exploration. “Financially, the biggest success so far has been the SS Republic, a Civil War-era shipwreck which was lost during a hurricane in 1865. We located the wreck in 2003 and recovered about $75 million worth of gold and silver coins. It took a year-and-a-half to conduct the complete excavation,” says Stemm who is gearing up for what Odyssey claims was one of its most ambitious treasure hunting seasons (in 2008) — to show the recovery of some of the greatest shipwreck treasures ever lost at sea and believed to be valued at more than one billion dollars.

According to the United Nations, there are over three million shipwrecks on the earth’s ocean floor. Many of these galleons went down with precious cargo — gold and silver coins, jewels, and artifacts — worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The oceans have so far revealed only a few of these prized shipwrecks. The quest for many others is still on. Besides Odyssey, there is Maine-based Sub Sea Research which was founded in 1984 and had announced the discovery of the richest ever shipwreck worth about $4 billion. West Indies-based Deep Marine Salvage also lists its targets of interest as sunken cargos of precious and non-ferrous metals such as gold, silver, platinum, copper, zinc and tin.

Stemm distinctly remembers Odyssey’s first ever discovery — the ‘Tortugas shipwreck’. “We were a very small team back then. We acquired a nautical chart marked with a penciled ‘x’ showing the location where, in 1965, a fisherman snagged in his deep-water net two large Spanish olive jars dating to 1622. In the 1960s the technology to explore the deep-ocean did not exist,” he says.

“Using the map and information provided, we conducted a side-scan survey of the area (sending sound waves down to the ocean floor to create an image of a large area), and were able to locate the site and (in 1990-91) successfully excavate nearly 17,000 artifacts at a depth of 1,500 feet below the surface.”

And this year, Odyssey discovered the SS Gairsoppa and SS Mantola under a contract with the UK government. A British cargo steamship, SS Gairsoppa was carrying seven million ounces of silver from Calcutta to London when she sank in 1941.

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So far none of these firms has turned its attention towards shipwrecks that might be lying in the waters off the Indian coast or in the Indian Ocean. “There is hardly any treasure hunt in Indian waters,” says Sila Tripati, maritime archaeologist with the Goa-headquartered National Institute of Oceanography (NIO). “The maritime archaeologists at NIO have dived up to 25 metres in Indian waters. Deep-sea exploration requires special diving gear and equipment,” he adds. Tripati also says that the rivers of India discharge a huge amount of sediment into the sea during monsoon, thus any wreckage would get buried deep and become difficult to find. That might, in a way, help preserve the shipwrecks better. Besides, historical records of shipwrecks are very well documented by European countries, says Tripati. Despite these challenges Stemm feels that “there are some interesting opportunities for deep ocean mining in the Indian Ocean and off India that will likely prove to be an opportunity to pursue in the future.”

Marine archaeologists have over the years expressed concern about these treasure hunts. Many feel that such free-for-all ‘gold rush’ damages ancient ships which are also of great archaeological and historical significance.

Questions are also being raised about exploration companies staking claim over and selling the coins and artifacts recovered from the shipwrecks.

Thus, the ownership of the ‘Black Swan’ and its treasure — the largest historic deep-ocean treasure recovered to date, with over 17 tons of silver and hundreds of gold coins — is being fought between Odyssey and Spain in a court of law. ‘Black Swan’ is an example of the complex laws that are applied to deep ocean shipwrecks. “The jurisdiction that applies to a shipwreck waters just depends on what court you take it into in the world,” says Stemm. “Unesco has laid certain guidelines for the preservation of the underwater cultural heritage. These should be followed,” says Tripati. “Marine archaeology is a science and hence it should be dealt with by maritime archaeologists and scientists. Private firms are in it for the business.”

Every private exploration firm, however, says it has an in-house team of archaeologists and researchers and follows archaeological protocols. “We have found hundreds and hundreds of shipwrecks. Most of them we only do a photo mosaic study and we don’t pick up artifacts. We just make a record of the shipwreck,” says Stemm.

“We do an archaeological plan and then carefully pick up every artifact noting exactly the position that it came from and we videotape every second of the recovery.”

Once recovered, the artifacts go to the conservation lab. “We sell the non-archaeological artifacts like coins to pay for the archaeology and the bills at Odyssey,” says Stemm. Cost of a project can run into millions of dollars, depending on where the shipwreck is located and its condition. Cultural collections, like artifacts which may have belonged to people, parts of a ship and navigational instruments and armament, are put on display. “We loan these to museums or store them as a study collection for scientists and historians.” One such exhibition, SHIPWRECK!, has been travelling around the US. Stemm rues that gold and silver treasures tend to get most of the headlines, though Odyssey — which is featured in Treasure Quest on Discovery Science every Sunday — has also discovered many other shipwrecks ranging from ancient Roman and Phoenician shipwrecks to German U-boats. “From a site in the English Channel, we recovered what may be the oldest carpenter’s rule in existence using a logarithmic scale.”

Several websites, meanwhile, claim to sell authentic shipwreck coins, some of them for as little as $50. Each of these offers an authentication certificate and lifetime guarantee. Tripathi cautions against buying such antiques and coins without verifying their authenticity from experts. If laws governing shipwrecks are complex, the online businesses which have sprung up around them too are tricky.