The Race for Riches
Under the sea, treasure hunters and scientists battle for history's bounty
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."
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