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?"
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