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, Scientific, 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."
Finding a needle in a sea stack
Locating sunken ships is still a laborious, time-consuming task, but it's becoming much easier and faster with the aid of sophisticated technology. Exploration techniques vary greatly, depending on depth and other variables. Here are some devices that would be used in a shipwreck search.
1 Global positioning system (GPS). The boat's GPS receiver captures satellite signals that provide latitude and longitude coordinates, which help define a search grid on the sea floor.
2 Side-scan sonar. The sonar sends out sound pulses that are reflected back by hard objects on the bottom. These return echoes are recorded, digitized, and sent up the cable to the onboard computer. The computer's plotting software "paints" the acoustic images on the screen, which is overlaid with the geographical coordinates received from the GPS satellites.
3 Magnetometer. Essentially an undersea metal detector, the magnetometer is a passive device that "reads" the Earth's magnetic field for anomalies or distortions. It is sensitive only to iron, significant because objects on wrecks are often wrought from the metal. The magnetometer relays data to the surface for real-time viewing and analysis.
4 Remote-operated vehicle (ROV). An ROV is controlled from a computer aboard the surface vessel. Mounted with powerful halogen lamps, wide-angle and zoom color TV cameras, and video and data links, it can spend hours on the sea floor, gathering detailed information about a wreck site. The robot feeds these data to the surface vessel in real time.
[Illustration labels]: Side-scan sonar; Magnetometer; Shipwreck; ROV
Drawing not to scale
Sources: Marine Sonic Technology Ltd., Geometrics Inc., Deep Sea Systems International Inc.
Research by John Englund
[Map is not available.]
Lost and found
Here are a few examples of the many significant shipwreck sites around the world:
1 Brother Jonathan. Sank near Crescent City, Calif., in 1865; found in 1993. A recent auction of coins from this wreck netted $5.3 million.
2 Whydah. Sank near Wellfleet, Mass., in 1717; found in 1984. Its artifacts were recently shown at the National Geographic Society, but many museums have refused them.
3 DeBraak. Sank near the mouth of the Delaware Bay in 1798; found in 1984. The salvaging of this British warship left it severely damaged, and many of its artifacts were lost.
4 Queen Anne's Revenge. Sank off the North Carolina coast in 1718; found in 1996. Blackbeard's ship, discovered by a private firm but later turned over to North Carolina.
5 SS Central America. Sank off the coast of the Carolinas in 1857; found in 1988. The hunt for this ship inspired a 1998 book, Ship of gold in the Deep Blue Sea.
6 I-52. Sank in the mid-Atlantic in 1944; found in 1995. This Japanese submarine, which was sunk by U.S. Navy planes, is thought to contain a cargo of 2 tons of gold.
7 Melkarth. Found in 1998. This 2,500-year-old Phoenician trading vessel was discovered in about 3,000 feet of water just east of the Strait of Gibraltar.
8 Skerki Bank expedition. In 1997, eight wrecks were found in this 20-square-mile reef in the central Mediterranean Sea. Among those were five ancient Roman trading vessels.
9 Tektas Burnu. An ongoing expedition near the Turkish city of Cesme, in the Aegean Sea. The crew is excavating a fifth-century B.C. shipwreck of unknown origin.
This story appears in the October 4, 1999 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.