Who owns the treasures of the sea?
Britain and Spain have both laid claim to controversial treasures in the deep seas -- and raised some tricky questions
By Ian Jack
THE GUARDIAN, LONDON
Thursday, Oct 25, 2007
Who owns the wealth that lies at the bottom of the sea? This week, the question arose in southern and northern oceans: in Antarctica, where Britain is planning to claim 386,000 square miles (1 million square kilometers) of seabed in the belief that they may contain exploitable oil, gas and minerals; and in the Bay of Gibraltar, where the Spanish navy forced a US salvage vessel into port at Algeciras.
The outcome of the British claim is opaque. It has still to be submitted to the UN, where it will be contested by environmentalists and by more adjacent countries such as Argentina and Chile. Besides, nobody has ever drilled for oil and gas at such depths in such seas. The Spanish story is complicated, folksier, but no less contentious. It demonstrates the human foresight, ingenuity and greed that marked a man such as Long John Silver.
The salvage vessel, the Odyssey Explorer, was confronted by the Spanish gunboat last Tuesday just as it left Gibraltar's 3-mile (4.8km) limit, which it had been sheltering inside for the past three months. If numismatists are to be believed, each coin might be worth US $500 to US $1,000, which would make the hoard the most valuable ever to have been taken from a wreck.
The Odyssey Explorer's owner, Odyssey Marine Exploration of Tampa, Florida, leads the world in the exploration and excavation of deep-sea shipwrecks. In May, the company reported it had completed "the pre-disturbance archeological survey and preliminary excavation of a colonial period shipwreck" at an undisclosed location in the Atlantic. More than 500,000 silver coins weighing 17 tonnes had been recovered, plus hundreds of gold coins and other artifacts. If numismatists are to be believed, each coin might be worth US$500 to US$1,000, which would make the hoard the most valuable ever to have been taken from a wreck.
It was shipped to Gibraltar and then flown to an undisclosed destination in the US. Odyssey Marine said the treasure had been recovered "in conformity with salvage law and the Law of the Sea Convention, beyond the territorial waters or legal jurisdiction of any country." But Spain was not so sure: By legal precedent, a government can lay claim to that government's ships' cargo, whoever found it, wherever it was found.
The Spanish government filed a case in the Tampa court contesting ownership, believing the wreck to be that of the Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes, which sank off Portugal in 1804. On Oct. 16, the Spanish seized the Odyssey Explorer not for its cargo -- that had already flown -- but because they thought it might contain documents and other evidence that would support their case in the Tampa court.
Odyssey Marine says the wreck lies 180 nautical miles (333km) west of Gibraltar but refuses to reveal the exact location. The company called the site Black Swan, after the book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the financial trader and "philosopher of randomness," who is a cult among London and New York brokers and hedge-fund managers. To Taleb, "black swans" are rare but consequential events that lie beyond the range of normal human prediction (Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns: the "portfolio protection strategies" that Taleb devises for hedge funds take these unquantifiables into consideration).
The search for shipwrecked treasure is, in fact, the opposite of a black swan. Success requires years of obsessive research in the archives, followed by years of trawling up and down square kilometers of ocean, all sustained by a stubborn belief in the trueness of old documents, local anecdote and lore about sea currents. But it is interesting that Odyssey Marine implies with this title both that is has stumbled on the world's most valuable wreck and that its business has secure moorings in Wall Street.
At least the latter is true. Treasure from shipwrecks is a thriving little industry. According to the American Mint, the US has 130 million coin collectors. Odyssey Marine is listed on the NASDAQ exchange. The boom is the product of undersea technology. When Robert Louis Stevenson was writing Treasure Island, what did we know of the seabed? Almost nothing beyond a few fathoms.
A few years before, in 1872, Britain had sent the Challenger to chart the depths of the Atlantic with sounding weights, but the deep sea bed remained invisible -- the least known part of the earth -- until the American oceanographer William Beebe got down to 923m off Bermuda in his bathysphere in 1934.
Now, thanks to unmanned submersibles, global positioning systems, powerful lights and remote-controlled movie cameras, all of it is knowable, if not yet intimately known. Its valleys and canyons turn out to be nature's lost property office. Robert Ballard disturbed no wreckage in 1985 when he found the Titanic 3,800m down, but his successors removed thousands of artifacts until an international moratorium was called in 2000: jewelry, crockery, a top hat, bank notes and half a dozen cigarettes incredibly preserved -- all of them came dripping to the surface.
Several thousand years of trade in the world above have deposited underneath an extraordinary, often useless, record of human endeavor. Most of it is ordinary -- the poet John Masefield's cargo of "Tyne coal/Road-rail, pig-lead/Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays" -- but ordinariness is no block to the interest of the historian or the amateur wreck-diver. Last month's issue of the Railway Magazine lists for the first time the 300 steam locomotives known to survive on the floor of the world's oceans, having fallen there when their transporting ships were sunk by bombs, torpedoes and storms.
Locomotives were a European and North American export trade and the undersea ruins of it have nothing more than historical value. It was gold and silver going the other way, particularly in the trade routes of the Spanish empire, that first motivated serious shipwreck exploration.
In 1985, after a 16-year search, the American Mel Fisher at last discovered off Florida Keys the wreck of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha, a Spanish galleon last seen when it sailed, loaded with coins, from Havana in 1622. Fisher brought up 150,000 coins to the surface. Common sense might suggest that such a number would have knocked the bottom out of the market in Spanish doubloons.
But the opposite happened. According to Odyssey Marine, whose marketing strategy seems based on Fisher's experience, a common Spanish piece-of-eight would often fetch less than US $100 before the Atocha's discovery. The rise since, to at least US $500, is inspired, Odyssey Marine said, by "the added collector interest generated by the publicity surrounding the find."
In the matter of Black Swan, however, there is no knowing the will of the Tampa courts. Spain didn't contest Fisher's hoard, but a few years later woke up to the notion that treasure found in international waters did not automatically belong to the salvors or, in the case of national waters, even to the state within whose waters it was found. In 2000, a US federal appeal court in Virginia took away rights to the wrecks of two Spanish frigates from their American discovers and awarded them to Spain.
It was perhaps awareness of this that led Odyssey to approach the British government as a partner in its next big project: Somewhere east of Gibraltar lies the British warship HMS Sussex, which dropped 1,000m to the bottom in 1694.
Odyssey believes that the wreck contains the world's largest sunken treasure -- gold coins alleged to be worth US $4 billion at today's prices, money sent by the English to buy the Duke of Savoy's loyalty in the nine years' war. Five years ago, Britain struck a deal that dismayed marine archeologists. In return for Odyssey's rights to explore and excavate, Britain would retain 20 percent of the proceeds up to $45 million, 50 percent of those between $45 million and $500 million, and 60 percent of the rest.
According to reports this week, the Spanish government suspects that the Black Swan hoard was got out of Gibraltar with British complicity. Who knows? The Gibraltar question and Britain's historic reputation as los piratos make Britain a popular target. On the other hand, there is no question that Britain has been dealing and will continue to deal with the enemy, without whose expertise and ambition the Duke of Savoy's bribe will continue to sink imperceptibly into the earth that first gave it up. Unbribed, he joined the king of France.
