HANDS OFF THE BOOTY
first things first: Don’t call them treasure hunters. Of course, that’s what onlookers have always called colorful characters like Mel Fisher, who found the Spanish galleon Atocha off the Florida Keys in 1985. Gold and silver bars, coins, jewelry and emeralds were included in the discovery, a haul worth around $400 million. At Fisher’s online store, a coin from the Atocha, mounted in 14-karat gold, goes for $13,700.
But selling such historical prizes upsets people, says Jim Sinclair, a maritime archaeologist involved with the Atocha find. Academicians and regulators who want such treasures placed in museums, or preserved in situ, have a profound distaste for someone profiting from a discovery. “If you’re called a ‘treasure hunter’ by somebody in the archaeological community, them’s fightin’ words,” Sinclair says
Fewer and fewer people fit the oldschool paradigm personified by Fisher. By Sinclair’s count, there are only 15 to 20 US companies still organizing searches, and even they generally bring in independent contractors with different areas of expertise. “That culture either had to grow up and try to adapt, or go out of business,” Sinclair says.
“The great age of the treasure hunter is over,” agrees Sean Kingsley, marine archaeologist and editor in chief of Wreckwatch magazine. “As much as the public loves the idea of treasure hunting, organizations, led by UNESCO, have closed down any project with a whiff of monetization.”
Ironically, there has never been a better time to search for treasure. “There is more gold in the Gulf of Cadiz than in the Bank of Spain,” says Juan Manuel Gracia, president of the Association for the Recovery of Spanish Galleons, while Kingsley notes that “some great white whales, like the Merchant Royal, are still out there, lost somewhere off Cornwall, with a supposed $1.5 billion in shiny stuff.”
While historical records that provide clues (which are often unreliable) to the whereabouts of wrecks haven’t changed, the arrival of GPS gave searchers an unprecedentedly accurate tool compared to the paper maps still used in the 1980s, on which Mylar would be overlaid to make sense of undersea debris patterns that, thanks to hurricanes and strong currents, could span miles.
More recently, according to Sinclair,
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