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