The treasure of the oceans: rise of the salvagers
The buccaneering ways of yesteryear are returning to the oceans, as salvage
teams compete to get their hands on the most valuable shipwrecks
By Jonathan Brown and Esther Walker
Published: 29 October 2007


Captain John Limbrey was a not poor man. When his ship the Merchant Royal
put into Cadiz harbour for repairs in January 1637, his personal fortune
was estimated at 100,000 gemstones. But in the buccaneering and avaricious
spirit of the times, he could not pass up the opportunity to make a little
more.


For this powerful veteran of the treacherous trans-Atlantic trade routes,
opportunity came knocking when fire broke out on board a ship employed to
transport silver coins, ingots and gold to 30,000 Spanish troops stationed
in Flanders. Limbrey was only too happy to offer his and his crew's
services and in August 1641 his 700-ton vessel set sail for the Netherlands
in convoy with its sister ship the Dover Merchant. What followed was one of
the great calamities of the mercantile era.


The Merchant Royal sprung a leak 35 miles off Land's End and sank in heavy
seas with the loss of 18-crew and its entire treasure chest. It is
estimated this was equal to one-third the value of the national exchequer.
The Long Parliament, then on a revolutionary collision course with Charles
I, was interrupted with the news while pamphlets carried breathless
accounts of the disaster.


Limbrey was devastated by the loss, not only of his men but also of his
treasure, though he recovered sufficiently to play a pioneering role in the
ruthless colonisation of Jamaica, a key staging post in the slave trade for
the next two centuries.


But if 17th-century mercantilism was a mucky business, an unexpected legacy
bequeathed by ill-starred ships such as the Merchant Royal is proving
equally contentious and conjuring the kind of drama and romance that only
sunken galleons, treasure seekers and lost booty can.


There is mounting concern among marine archaeologists, academics and
heritage groups at the activities of commercially driven salvage teams
currently scouring the ocean floor checking out the worth of the estimated
three million wrecks that languish there. Not all of them are laden with
glittering baubles, but there are enough – around 3,000, according to some
estimates – to drive the kind of high risk, get-rich-quick adventure
business that would have set Captain Limbrey's pulse racing.


But the search for submarine treasure is running into choppy seas. This
month the master of the Odyssey Explorer, a diving support vessel owned by
the Nasdaq-listed company Odyssey Marine Exploration, was arrested and put
in jail in Algeciras in Spain.


In May, Odyssey stunned the world when it announced that it had recovered
500,000 silver coins weighing 17 tons from a vessel it would describe only
as the fictional "Black Swan" after the 1942 swashbuckling Hollywood
classic of the same name. The coins, said to be worth £250m, were taken to
Gibraltar and then on to Florida where the question of ownership is now
being settled in the courts.


The British media were certain that the booty came from the Merchant Royal.
The Spanish press remain equally convinced that it was instead recovered
from the Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes, a Spanish warship sunk by the
British off Portugal.


Odyssey refuses to reveal exactly where it found the treasure, insisting it
cannot identify with certainty the vessel on which it was found. The
scrutiny of the bounty continues.


But campaigners say the different reactions by British and Spanish
governments reveal that when it comes to their respective underwater
cultural heritage, the two nations are oceans apart. Spain has already
lodged a counter claim with the Floridian court seeking ownership of the
coins, and has taken steps to stop and search the Explorer. In Madrid,
ministers have been engaged in some serious sabre rattling describing the
treasure seekers as "modern pirates."


"Nobody can come and sack our patrimony, as if on top of that they were
doing us a favour. We will follow and persecute them no matter where,"
thundered culture minister Cesar Antonio Molina.


The British government, by contrast, has agreed to a lucrative deal
splitting the proceeds with Odyssey if it recovers the war chest of another
sunken ship, the HMS Sussex, which went down off Gibraltar in 1693 with
£250m in today's money on board.


Dr David Gaimster, general secretary of the Society of Antiquaries,
believes time is running out for the world's most important wrecks with the
ever-growing fleets of private treasure hunters taking to the seas
bristling with the latest in sonar, GPS and remotely operated vehicles.


"For generations these hugely important sites were safe because they were
too far down to be safely reached. But improvements in technology mean they
are now quite easily accessible. These irreplaceable cultural resources are
now being stripped. They are not being archaeologically recorded but looted
for profit with the bullion and other precious metals being melted down or
sold to collectors ...with the result that they are lost for ever," he
said.


Odyssey, which recently signed a joint venture scheme with the Disney
organisation, says it operates to the highest legal and ethical standards.


The work to recover the coins at the Black Swan site has "diligently
followed archaeological protocols using advanced robotic technology and the
artefacts [were] ...now undergoing a meticulous conservation process by
some of the world's most experienced coin conservators," it says.


But making money of modern day treasure-seeking is proving problematic, and
recovering booty is not cheap, as the "serious" archaeologists know. This
month the Mary Rose Trust said it needed a further £35m to complete the
restoration of Henry VIII's warship raised from the Solent 25 years ago.


In its most recent financial statement, Odyssey reported a second-quarter
loss of more than £3m and falling revenue compared to 2006 though it still
seems to be attracting capital to back it. Last week it emerged that
Fortress Investment, a listed hedge fund, had injected £3.5m into the
enterprise.


Back in the UK pressure is mounting on the British Government to follow
Spain by signing up to the 2001 Unesco Convention on the Protection of the
Underwater Cultural Heritage. Continued resistance from the British and
United States governments, gave the green light to profiteers seeking to
scoop up the fabulous wealth languishing beneath the waves, it is claimed.


Britain opposes blanket protection for wrecks believing it should
concentrate on saving only the best. However, in 2005, on the bicentennial
anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, heritage groups issued the
Burlington House Declaration, calling on the Government to sign up to the
convention. It currently has 16 signatories – four short of the 20 it needs
to protect the vast majority of the world's wrecks.


More recent treasures are also at stake with sites such as Jutland, where
more than 8,000 British and German seamen died in the only full-scale sea
battle of the First World War, or the Titanic, also under threat.


For Robert Yorke, chairman of the Joint Nautical Archaeology Policy
Committee, organisations such as Odyssey operate with little more than a
"veneer of archaeology". "It is very difficult to recover seven tons of
coin without destroying the organic material such as the barber surgeon's
chest or the musical instruments that we found in the Mary Rose and tell us
so much about life at that time. That sort of archaeology is incompatible
with a ship that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a day to run and
when you are working with shareholders on the Nasdaq," he said.


Meanwhile, out in the Western Approaches off Cornwall, work to locate the
Merchant Royal continues. "They say they have a very large number of
targets – over 100. The situation is that now they can see these things and
nothing is safe and we have no control. It is very upsetting," said Mr
Yorke.