US News Cover Story - Treasure Hunting
Miki
Story 10/4/99
The race for riches
Under the sea, treasure hunters and scientists battle for history's bounty
Phil Masters never cared for the 9-to-5 life. He endured years of long
commutes and white-collar drudgery at a New York City electrical-supply
wholesaler-until the onset of "male menopause" in 1977. On the verge of
turning 40, he meditated on a life wasted. "I had a pretty wife, a nice
house in the suburbs, a dog, the white picket fence," recalls Masters. "But
my wife always asked, 'Why aren't you happy?' Because to me, it was a trap.
I had a wanderlust that couldn't be satisfied."
Before he started selling fuses to support his family, Masters, a lifelong
history buff, had dreamed of scouring the seas for lost doubloons. And as
middle age approached, he was again conjuring visions of gold-filled chests.
"I'd always said to my kids, 'Whatever you choose to do with your life, do
something you have a passion for,' " he says. After an adulthood of quiet
suffering, he finally heeded his own advice; he quit his job and moved to
Florida to learn the secrets of hunting sunken treasure.
Since then, Masters, now 62, has recovered shillings from the Feversham, a
British frigate sunk off Nova Scotia in 1711. The company he founded,
Intersal, has located a vessel believed to be Queen Anne's Revenge, flagship
of the dread pirate Blackbeard, who terrorized 18th-century trade routes.
And after a dozen years of searching, Masters believes he's finally nearing
his Holy Grail: the Spanish galleon El Salvador, lost in 1750 off the coast
of North Carolina, filled with 89,200 pounds of cocoa and 240,000 silver and
gold pesos. "I want to make El Salvador a household name," he gushes,
envisioning a lucrative marketing binge of limited-edition replicas,
traveling exhibits, documentary videos, and high-priced auctions. "I want to
make it as big a name as Titanic."
Like-minded entrepreneurs, intoxicated by the romance of high-seas tragedy,
are scrambling to find sunken vessels. Literally millions of ships, from
prehistoric dugouts to rubber-clad German U-boats, still lie submerged, and
the latest generation of survey equipment, diving gear, and aquatic robots
puts even the deepest wrecks within reach. "There are no depths of the ocean
that are unavailable to anyone who wants to explore them," says John
Lawrence, chief executive officer of the salvage firm Seahawk Deep Ocean
Technology. "Even if there's a basketball on the ocean floor, you can find
it with the right amount of money." The spectacular finds mount each year,
from the Civil War-era steamer Brother Jonathan, discovered in 1993, to the
World War II Japanese submarine I-52, whose cargo-4,409 pounds of gold
bullion-is still to be recovered. And some of the richest "graveyards" are
just now being tapped, as Third World nations grant search rights in
exchange for a share in the loot.
But scientists fear that catastrophe looms behind the mad dash for wrecks, a
craze regulated by murky laws. Archaeologists charge that salvors are
ruining priceless "time capsules" of the deep and demand that legislators
act quickly to save the planet's cultural heritage. "An archaeological
project is intended to preserve and record as much scientific data as
possible; a commercial salvage project is intended to make a profit," says
J. Barto Arnold of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA) at Texas A&M
University-College Station. "Many times, treasure salvors may call
themselves 'underwater archaeologists.' But would you go to an amateur brain
surgeon?"
Though they may lack advanced degrees, treasure hunters have unfettered
access to search tools, now cheaper and more powerful than ever. Most
shallow-water operations rely on magnetometers, which detect iron
objects-cannons, anchors, screws-by reading the disturbances they cause in
Earth's magnetic field. First developed to hunt submarines during World War
II, "mags" are now sensitive enough to find tiny objects buried under layers
of sand. A basic one costs around $16,000, over $10,000 less than a decade
ago. Large-area, deep-water surveys often use side-scan sonars to produce
acoustical snapshots of the ocean floor. Side scans, which resemble svelte
torpedoes, detect objects protruding from the bottom, such as masts or
hulls. Current models can map 100 square miles a day and sense objects as
small as oil drums 3 miles below the surface. Instead of registering results
on analog gauges, both mags and side scans now feed data into shipboard
computers that correlate "hits" to global positioning system coordinates,
eliminating the time-consuming, imprecise task of placing buoys over
potential targets.
State of the art. The most technologically impressive tools are remotely
operated vehicles (ROVs). Once a rarity among private salvors, today they
are available to well-financed companies working on hard-to-reach wrecks.
"The ROVs that we used to use were all [one of a kind] beta pieces of
equipment," says Greg Stemm, director of operations for Odyssey Marine
Exploration of Tampa. "Today they are almost mass produced, and they are
much more powerful"; though they may still cost from $100,000 to over $2
million, the latest robots are many times more precise and reliable than
their forerunners. Last fall, an Odyssey robot outfitted with a video camera
discovered a 2,500-year-old Phoenician trading vessel in the
Mediterranean-code-named "Melkarth," after the Egyptian god of sailors-at a
depth of 3,000 feet. And it was an ROV that, in 1989, enabled Ohio-based
engineer Tommy Thompson to recover 3 tons of gold from the Central America,
a steamer lost off North Carolina in 1857; the ship, a longtime target of
salvors, was so loaded with riches that its sinking contributed to a major
U.S. bank panic.
But cutting-edge exploration is only as good as the research behind it.
Treasure hunters have become experts at sifting through archival material to
track down wrecks. Jack Haskins, a Florida-based salvor with a strong
knowledge of Castilian Spanish, makes frequent pilgrimages to the Archivo
General de Indias in Seville to pore over captains' letters and cargo
manifests. "Spain was a great bureaucracy," says Haskins, who is currently
studying the fate of a 1711 fleet lost in Cuban waters. "They wrote
everything down and sent it back to the king in triplicate." Masters
pinpointed Queen Anne's Revenge by digging up depositions from a 1719 pirate
trial, in which surviving members of Blackbeard's crew mention the vessel's
resting place near Beaufort, N.C. He also analyzed shifts in the local
inlet's size and shape over the past century, the result of dredging by the
Army Corps of Engineers. "I may be an average diver, but I'm a great
researcher," boasts Masters, who prefers the title "maritime historian" to
"treasure hunter."
The top-flight gear and solid tips have propelled salvors into a golden age.
A few of the ships they find bear fabulous treasure, like La Capitana, a
Spanish galleon that ran aground off Ecuador in 1654. In 1997, a team led by
Herman Moro, an Arlington, Va., gardener, pulled thousands of silver coins
and bars from the wreck. Most finds, however, are notable mostly for
historical value, such as the Empress of Asia. A British luxury liner turned
troop transport, the ship was hit by Japanese dive bombers near Singapore in
1942; 52 years later, it was salvaged by Michael Lim of Technical Diving
International, who found guns, porcelain, and Army uniforms.
Grave robbers? Regardless of what is recovered, many archaeologists shudder
at the thought of for-profit companies tinkering with wrecks. George Bass,
INA's archaeological director, has been an outspoken critic of salvors, whom
he likens to grave robbers. "One cannot tear down Mount Vernon and sell the
bricks as souvenirs in the name of free enterprise," he says, "so why should
we allow so-called entrepreneurs to destroy and sell the nails from, say,
the flagship of John Paul Jones?" Bass, currently excavating a fifth-century
B.C. shipwreck near Tektas Burnu, Turkey, believes underwater archaeological
sites should be accorded the same protection as, say, American Indian burial
grounds.
Stories of wrecks mauled and artifacts destroyed are legion in
archaeological circles. Among the most notorious is the case of the DeBraak,
a British warship that sank off Delaware in 1798. Salvors are said to have
tossed nonglittering items back overboard, such as an 18th-century Royal
Navy stove, one of only two in existence. When the ship was raised by cranes
in 1986, an avalanche of artifacts slid out, falling back into the sea. "The
majority of wrecks I've encountered have seen some heavy activity," says
James Delgado, executive director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum. Recently
visiting the brig Somers near Veracruz, Mexico, Delgado was aghast to
discover that treasure hunters had pillaged the ship, which endured the only
mutiny in United States naval history and inspired Herman Melville to write
Billy Budd. They had ripped into the stern and looted guns, swords, and the
ship's chronometer.
But even the slightest misstep can ruin irreplaceable data. Cheryl Ward, an
archaeobotanist at INA, collects seeds, pollen, and plant residue from
ancient ships. "I've studied perfumes and spices from a shipwreck from the
time of King Tut," says Ward. "I go and I look at how that perfume was used,
how it shows up in economic documents and religious documents, even in
paintings on walls." She worries that careless salvors simply discard these
important clues to the past, since they have no value on the auction block.
Of particular concern is the increasing number of Third World governments
cutting deals with salvors. Cuba has recently granted two Canadian
companies, Visa Gold Resources and Terrawest Industries, permission to
search its waters; in return, the Cuban government is promised 50 percent of
any treasure recovered. Archaeologists believe poor countries lack the
resources to prevent terrible abuses and point to the Baltic as a worst-case
scenario. This American cargo ship, lost off the Bahamas in 1866, was
ransacked in 1992 by salvors, who blew holes in the hull and destroyed
crates and crates of housewares. "Can anyone name a single country that has
realized any dramatic change in its national wealth by believing such
promises?" asks Bass. "Rumor has it that the only people who make money from
such deals are the officials who give the permits."
Salvors admit that sins were common in the past but insist that many
modern-day operations respect the historical value of wrecks. "In 1950s-type
salvage, you'd go out to a wreck, you'd go out with a clamshell [a digging
device with two hinged jaws], you'd take what's good, and everything else
was dumped overboard," says Steven Morgan, president of Mar-Dive Corp. and a
35-year veteran of the business. "We don't do that anymore. We run projects
that are protective of the sites. Today, a salvor is an archaeologist." To
obtain state permits for their work, treasure hunters must agree to properly
conserve artifacts and leave the wrecks intact. In Florida, for example,
companies are required to submit regular archaeological reports, and all
"nonvaluable" artifacts-everything not made of precious metals or jewel
encrusted-are made available to the state for study. (Florida also receives
a 20 percent cut of the treasures.)
Some salvors have learned that a touch of archaeological sensitivity can
fatten their bottom line. "Everything we lose to a museum or give to a
government is overshadowed by the publicity we get," says Mar-Dive's Morgan,
"so that our 5,000 coins that are left are worth 20 times what they would
have been. . . . It gives them a pedigree." Reluctant to line the pockets of
treasure hunters, many museums spurn artifacts recovered by them. Several,
for example, have refused to display the treasures of the Whydah, a famed
pirate ship discovered off Wellfleet, Mass., in 1984. "It's no different
than an art museum being approached by an art gallery saying, 'Won't you
lend your name to these paintings, to drive up their value?' " says Delgado.
"We don't want to be partners in the marketing or trafficking of
archaeological materials."
But the Internet has allowed salvors to move treasures without museum seals
of approval. Several firms now eschew auction houses in favor of selling
directly to consumers. "You can literally 'own' a piece of history," reads a
pitch on Mel Fisher's Treasure Hunting Site, named for the late salvor who
discovered the Spanish galleon Atocha off the Florida Keys in 1985. Visitors
can purchase silver coins for prices ranging between $775 and $3,000-or
settle for a toothpick wrought from the Atocha's silver bars for only $45.
Treasure hunters are also learning how to mount their own brand of museum
shows. RMS Titanic Inc., the doomed ocean liner's legal salvor, recently
licensed the exclusive worldwide rights to exhibit artifacts to SFX
Entertainment, a giant event promoter; the deal is worth a minimum of $8.5
million per year. Masters believes there are similar millions to be made
from Queen Anne's Revenge, even though it holds few items of real value.
"The name of Blackbeard is already pre-sold," he says. "There are few names
in history that have as much sex appeal." He dreams of producing a four-part
documentary on the pirate chieftain, as well as offering replicas of
artifacts found aboard the ship. He is especially keen on selling copies of
an antique syringe, which Blackbeard's crew may have used to inject
themselves with mercury, the cure du jour for syphilis in 1718.
Odyssey's Stemm thinks film rights and exhibitions can be major revenue
generators, and perhaps even replace artifact sales as the main source of
income for salvors. "There are probably many ways to profit from shipwrecks
without actually salvaging," he says. "There's arguably been more money made
from the Titanic from the video [footage] than any salvage that's ever been
taken from a shipwreck." To encourage lower-impact treasure hunting, Stemm
helped found the Professional Shipwreck Explorers Association (ProSEA), a
trade group whose members swear to uphold a strict code of ethics-for
example, they agree "to ensure that no artifacts of archaeological
significance are recovered from a shipwreck unless funds are made available
for their conservation, cataloging, and storage."
"We can police each other much better than a government can," he says. "If
one of our members does something unethical in the Indian Ocean, we can cut
them off. . . . We can say to countries that work with commercial salvors,
'Don't hire these guys.' "
Treasure hunters inside and outside ProSEA say scientists must learn to
share the oceans. The only chance archaeologists have of protecting sites,
they argue, is to work with the private sector, which discovers the majority
of wrecks. "We need to get along, because we're always going to be out
there," says Tom Gidus, founder and sole proprietor of Florida's Recovery
Salvage Inc. "We have the funding, which is the difficulty they run into."
Masters adds that treasure hunters are passionate about preservation and
welcome the aid of scientists who understand the financial realities of
shipwreck exploration. "Some archaeologists call the selling of artifacts a
sacrilege," he says. "I call it a necessity."
No compromise. But archaeologists remain reluctant to join forces. George
Bass calls the financial argument "the big lie," pointing out that scores of
archaeological projects secure funding each year. And INA's Ward believes
compromise is not an option. "As soon as you start talking about selling
objects, you enter the commercialization of the past," she says. "You can't
stop that tide, and that's something that won't be acceptable to
archaeologists. . . . We have to take the high road."
Salvors insist that attitude is dooming some shipwrecks to decay, as the
elements take their toll while waiting for painstaking scientific study.
"Their argument is often just leave it down there until they have the
funding," says Gidus. "They don't acknowledge that every day stuff stays
down there, it gets destroyed." But archaeologists counter that wrecks are
much more resilient than salvors claim, and excavation should take place
only when it can be done properly. "We are, by nature, cautious," says Ward.
"We know there will never be another Roman shipwreck."
In the United States, laws governing shipwrecks are sketchy. The Abandoned
Shipwreck Act of 1987 (ASA), drafted partly in response to the DeBraak
debacle, granted states ownership of abandoned wrecks within 3 miles of
their coasts. Yet Congress failed to define "abandonment," leading to a
flurry of conflicting court decisions. The most recent case adding to the
confusion concerned the Brother Jonathan. The Panama-to-Canada ferry for
Gold Rush prospectors wrecked off Crescent City, Calif., in 1865; among the
223 dead were Abraham Lincoln's physician and the commander of Union troops
in the West. A salvage firm, Deep Sea Research, found the vessel in 1993,
and California claimed it under the ASA. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled
the state had to demonstrate physical "possession" of the ship to assert
ownership. The two sides settled in March, with California getting a 20
percent cut of the coins and the right to monitor future excavations.
There are also questions over whether foreign wrecks in American waters can
be deemed abandoned. At the debate's center is Ben Benson of Sea Hunt Inc.,
who invested over $1 million of his personal fortune to locate two Spanish
galleons off Virginia. Before he could commence salvage, Spain, at the
behest of the U.S. Justice Department, claimed the wrecks as sovereign
property. The United States, says Jim Gould, a lawyer representing Spain,
wants to accord foreign ships the same treatment it would like for its own
sunken vessels. "The important principle is that these ships are military
gravesites, and anything that is done with them must respect those
sensitivities," he says. Peter Hess, Benson's attorney, detects a darker
motive: "Their goal here is to control all the Spanish shipwrecks in United
States waters, so their own government-funded archaeologists can go out
there and treasure hunt with public funds." In April, a federal judge ruled
that the Juno, lost in 1802, is still Spain's, but La Galga, lost in 1750,
could be salvaged by Benson, thanks to a 1763 treaty in which King Charles
III renounced all his North American possessions. An appeal is pending.
In the works. There are even rumblings of an international ban on treasure
hunting. The United Nations Educational, cientific, and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) is discussing an edict that would outlaw the
commercial salvage of any shipwreck more than 100 years old. There is also
talk of ordering that all artifacts be returned to their countries of
origin. Outraged treasure hunters have formed an organization, the Institute
of Marine Archaeological Conservation (IMAC), to lobby against the measures.
"[UNESCO] really has no concept of private property or ownership," complains
Hess, who is active in IMAC. "They don't understand [that] some of the best
archaeological work has been done by the private sector." Even if the ban
comes to pass, there are serious doubts about how effectively governments
can police three quarters of the Earth's surface.
As the UNESCO delegates bicker, more immediate legal troubles are on the
mind of Phil Masters. He expects to be sued by several competing parties
trying to stake a claim the instant he finds El Salvador. And he predicts a
good five to 10 years will elapse before the ship yields all its riches, a
process that will require an additional $5 million to $10 million in
capital. Yet he couldn't be happier, awakening early each morning in his
cramped house across from a used-car lot, preparing for another day of
magnetometer runs-it beats, by a country mile, riding the subway to a desk
job. "The hunt and the passion for history is really what keeps me going,"
he says. "The actual discovery will be somewhat anticlimactic."
But $124 million worth of treasure will tickle even the purest heart, and
Masters, who wears a 1737 gold escudo around his neck, is no exception. "You
can't believe how people react when they see some gold," he says. "They get
a whiff, and they become animals." With a twinkling eye, he adds, "I look
forward to being like that."