Booty Call

The treasure hunt is back, stoked by fresh advances in deep-sea technology and an old-fashioned lust for loot

Tucker's dives have turned up everything from millions in gold to the remains of a Confederate ship.  Heinz Kluetmeier

We split, we split! -- Farewell my wife and children! -- Farewell, brother! -- We split, we split, we split!
-- William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Hunting for shipwrecks has long been a spectacularly speculative endeavor, a business in which starry-eyed, web-footed dreamers tap investors for huge amounts of money, spend it prolifically (sometimes profligately) and, odds are, find nothing. The difficulties of even locating a treasure ship in the dark world of the ocean bottom -- about which we know as much as, say, Pluto -- are enormous, never mind the tasks of excavation and preservation and the gnarly questions of ownership. Seafaring nations took it seriously when one of their ships carrying gold and silver from the New World went down, but crafts that sank in water at depths below about 50 feet, beyond the reach of divers, were essentially lost, presumably forever.

But forever is no more. Technological advances -- deep-water submersibles, ROVs (remote-operated vehicles), GPSs (global positioning systems), side scan sonar technology -- have brought new depth to gold digging and, with it, the promise of billions in booty. Governments, which heretofore found shipwreck retrieval about as reliable a means of generating revenue as carting taxpayer money to Vegas and dumping it on 18 black, are now interested in going after their sunken ships, or, at least, going into business with someone who will do it for them. The top names in the field -- the foremost among them being Robert Ballard, the Mystic, Conn., marine archaeologist who in 1985 famously located the Titanic in more than 12,000 feet of water southeast of Newfoundland -- are actively searching for wrecks. Ballard recently found a 2,400-year-old sailing ship, probably of Greek origin, remarkably well preserved in the Black Sea, but, alas, with no riches inside it.

In the biggest ongoing treasure-hunting news, sometime later this summer an ROV belonging to Odyssey Marine Exploration of Tampa is scheduled to begin its descent to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea near the Strait of Gibraltar. It will be guided by surface controls to an unassuming pile of rusted cannon and artifacts a half mile deep that the Odyssey searchers hope belong to the HMS Sussex, a British gunship that lost a battle with the elements three centuries ago. The Sussex is believed by some -- especially by those who are hunting for it and also by the British government, with which Odyssey made a prediscovery deal granting the company a cut of any gold or artifacts found at the site -- to hold the richest cache of any shipwreck yet discovered, as much as $4 billion worth of gold coins.

The search for the Sussex illustrates the new deep-water direction in shipwreck hunting, one unknown a half-century ago by the pioneers of the game. To be sure, some shallow-water projects are still going on. For the last 16 years Phil Masters, a respected salvor from North Carolina, has been searching on and off in 20 feet of water for El Salvador, a Spanish merchant ship that in 1750 wrecked on the Outer Banks. History's most famous treasure ship, Nuestra Señora de Atocha, much of which was discovered off Key West in 1985 after a 16-year search by the late Mel Fisher, remains a shallow-water source of booty for Fisher's company. But some salvors believe that anything in shallow water worth taking has already been taken (or, in the case of the Atocha, over which Fisher and the state of Florida battled for several years before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the shipwreck hunter's favor, is legally spoken for) and that the only place to find major league loot is beyond the reach of divers.

How much wealth is hidden way down deep? Greg Stemm, Odyssey's cofounder, guesses that there could be three million lost ships in the world's oceans, a figure he bases on 1,000 ships going down per year over the last 3,000 years. Major Grant Walker, a shipwreck expert and history professor at the United States Naval Academy, says that in one five-year period, from 1870 to 1875, England alone lost 5,000 ships. Even conservative estimates put the figure of lost treasure ships in the hundreds of thousands.

What that adds up to in undiscovered plunder is incalculable but most assuredly mind-boggling. Though much of the frame of a sunken ship will disappear -- rotted away by salt water or eaten away by the voracious teredo worm -- silver can be wiped clean, and gold never changes no matter how long it rests in a watery purgatory. Crazed men carrying pans committed atrocities in search of a gleaming mineral in California's rivers and streams; the only thing that has kept sunken treasure in place was the impossibility of getting to it. Increasingly, wreck salvagers can get to it, and that has piqued the interest of governments. Three years ago Spain, with the assistance of the U.S. Justice Department, went to a federal appellate court and legally established its claim on two of its frigates (La Galga and Juno) found off the coast of Virginia, snatching them from the paws of a private salvor.

The deal between Odyssey and the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence took almost seven years to complete. Eighty percent of the first $45 million worth of Sussex treasure would go to Odyssey, accounting for the fact that the company is assuming all of the financial risk. The next $455 million would be split evenly between the company and the British government, with the Brits receiving 60% of any plunder above $500 million. "The hardest-fought negotiation was the over-$500 million," says Stemm, whose company expects to spend as much as $4 million on the search-and-recovery effort. "They insisted on getting more than 50%, and we finally gave in." That gives you an idea of how much treasure the British think might be found.

For the most part, though, the pioneers of the business cast a jaundiced eye on this new deepwater world. They had a simpler answer to the ownership question: We find it, we keep it.

In the early 1950s, while Mel Fisher was still a nearsighted California chicken farmer, a man named Teddy Tucker was sifting through the plunder of the hundreds of ships that had met their doom on Bermuda's treacherous reefs. It was there in 1955 that he hauled up from a Spanish wreck a magnificent gold cross studded with emeralds, somewhat of a shot heard round the world in treasure diving. As soon as Tucker found the gold cross, he knew he would never have any other job except treasure hunter. He sold the piece -- as well as several other pieces of booty -- to the Bermuda government for $150,000. (Years later, when Bermuda was shipping the cross to a maritime museum, someone stole it and replaced it with a plastic one; the original has never been found.)

A short and powerful man, his bronzed skin mottled with sun-darkened freckles, Tucker and his wife live about 25 yards from the water's edge in Bermuda's Mangrove Bay. He can walk out his front door and stare across the bay to a wharf where scenes were shot for The Deep, a 1977 movie about the perils and rewards of treasure hunting that was perhaps better remembered for Jacqueline Bisset languidly skin-diving in a white T-shirt.

To some in the modern shipwreck-hunting business, Tucker, like Fisher, is admired for his guts but branded as a pillager interested only in lucre. There is about Tucker an air of the bulletproof rogue, a man much like Romer Treece, the character played by Robert Shaw in The Deep, a salty scamp, equal parts hero and scoundrel. Like the fictional Treece, Tucker, the son of a naval architect, carries knowledge that can only come from decades of exploring an unknown world through the fog of a scuba mask or tracing the path of a wreck from centuries-old scrub marks in the coral. Among other things, Tucker can hold forth on the chemical composition of ceramic pots; naval history; oxidation rates of various metals; deep-sea bugs and worms; tides anywhere on earth; and ancient shipbuilding. The museum he founded near Hamilton, the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute, stocked with Tucker-found treasure, is as edifying to the academician as it is thrilling to the wide-eyed tourist.

But this man who knows so much now operates with bound hands. Under a Bermuda law enacted within the last couple of years, if Tucker locates a shipwreck within 200 miles of the island, he is legally obligated to get a permit, hire a licensed marine archaeologist to examine the site with him and explain to a committee why he should be allowed to do the excavation under the guidance of the archaeologist. It's as if Madame Curie needed permission to fiddle around with a Bunsen burner, and Tucker will simply not play an old game by new rules. "These days, when I look for something, I just don't find it," he says, a twinkle in his eye. "The men who made treasure hunting weren't these archaeologists, who are as full of crap as a bunch of Christmas turkeys. And they weren't these government people, these bureaucrats." He steps nimbly aboard one of his boats, Miss Wendy. "They were men with dreams."

It was just after 9 a.m. on Feb. 11 when Mike Piranio's metal detector started beep-beep-beeping. The 56-year-old scuba diver, one of a half dozen or so under the employ of Mel Fisher Enterprises, dug into the soft sand of the ocean bottom and wrapped his hands around a long, narrow object encased in a coarse, half-inch-thick block of shell and sand. His heart raced. Piranio knew it wasn't gold -- that precious mineral is inert and nothing clings to it -- but it was exciting to find anything that no human hand had touched for almost 400 years. He surfaced, 35 feet straight up, raised his mask and climbed onto the deck of the J.B. Magruder, which was anchored 36 miles due west of Key West. It was a beautiful morning, made more beautiful by the find.

Three decades ago a treasure hunter likely would have chipped away the casement right there on the ship and seen what little piece of history had been dug up. But these days call for more care. Andy Matroci, the Magruder's captain, examined the piece and figured it to be the blade of a sword or some kind of prying tool. He fastened a yellow tag around it, marked CCC 531543. The object was then preserved in a barrel of seawater, where it would remain until the ship came to shore the following day.

The Atocha divers are now following a trail that heads northwest, working an area about six miles from where the main treasure was found on July 20, 1985, a spot marked by a green spar buoy. At that point, Fisher had been looking for what he called "the mother lode" or "the main pile" for a decade and a half, all the while reciting his daily mantra: "Today's the day." To those who had followed from afar Fisher's seemingly quixotic quest for the Atocha, the man was a bit of a harmless loon. But around Key West, Mel was everybody's friend, the local hero, the constable of hopes and dreams. Only once, in 1975, six years after he began his Atocha obsession, did Fisher consider abandoning the search. That's when one of his salvage boats capsized in the middle of the night, spilling three sleeping people into the Atlantic -- son Dirk, 25; Dirk's wife, Angel; and another diver named Rick Gage. They all drowned. "Dad thought about giving it up then," says Kim Fisher, one of two siblings in charge of the family business, "but we knew that Dirk and the others would want us to keep going."

And on they've gone. Some on the Fisher team believe that the stern of the Atocha -- where the clergy and nobility were housed, along with their personal effects -- will be found in one piece. The divers refer to the stern as "the other mother." Others aren't that optimistic, but it's a fact that about one quarter of the treasure listed on the Atocha manifest has not been found. "If that amount of treasure were on another ship," says Matroci, "that alone would be enough to say, 'Let's go look for it.'"

The fourth floor of Fisher's museum in Key West is the repository for Atocha treasure. Everything pulled from the ocean is taken there, photographed, cataloged and preserved in fresh water with an electrolyte solution. It might be a fastener worth next to nothing, it might be a 10-foot-long gold chain worth $300,000, a piece that was pulled up last year. On a recent day it was CCC 531543, which turned out to be not a sword or a tool but a long-handled cooking skillet. "We do sound archaeology here," says Kim Fisher, "no matter what anyone thinks." True, but there's a fairyland aspect to it all, too. Touring the museum offices, you see amazing stuff just lying around on desks and shelves: a 35-pound cannonball, gold bars worth as much as $50,000 and, most astonishing, gleaming silver bars, the 300-year-old Spanish tax stamps and shipping information still legible.

It's impossible to get a handle on who has made what from the Atocha. Pat Clyne, the executive vice president for Mel Fisher Enterprises, estimates that more than a handful of investors have become millionaires and many more have made six figures. Matroci bought a $250,000 home in Key West by selling off treasure (he got $30,000 for one gold coin in mint condition) and recently acquired a new Toyota truck through a treasure trade. Certainly the Fisher family doesn't need to find the "other mother." But 18 years after the discovery, and five years after Mel's death from cancer, the operation shows no sign of slowing and, for all the changes in the game, seems as lively as ever. It took all those years to find it, but the Atocha now seems bulletproof, the gift that keeps on giving, invulnerable to the protests of marine archaeologists, seductively reachable without high-tech gadgetry yet, thanks to the '82 Supreme Court ruling, out of the reach of governments and rival salvors. "Even if we spend every penny looking for the rest of the Atocha," says Kim, "we couldn't imagine giving up what my father started." He looks up, above the door in his museum office, where a small sign celebrates THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MEL. TODAY'S THE DAY. "He'd want us to keep going."

The quests for the Atocha and the Sussex illustrate the old and the new of treasure hunting, the former a romantically obsessive (or obsessively romantic) search of a dreamer, the latter a combination of high-tech investigation and high-stakes business deal. Still, the Sussex has its mysteries. Its true mission was largely secret when it went down in a ferocious storm in 1694, carrying 10 tons of gold and 550 crew members, only two of whom survived. The Brits were loath to make public what had happened, for the gold was earmarked as a bribe to the Duke of Savoy, a powerful man and a mercenary to the core of his soul. Great Britain wanted his allegiance so he would not side with France in the ongoing War of the League of Augsburg. But the bribe never arrived, Savoy sided with France and the war ended in a stalemate. Some historians believe that England almost certainly would have triumphed if Savoy had fought on its side, relegating France to a historical nonentity on the order of Luxembourg.

Stemm decided to pursue the Sussex nine years ago when a researcher produced a document from the French consul in Livorno indicating that the ship had gone down with a large quantity of money. "He [the researcher] needed money, and we paid him off quickly," says Stemm, who refuses to divulge what he paid for the tip. There are hundreds of men and women like Odyssey's Deep Throat, language experts who comb government and naval archives in England, Spain, France and Portugal, looking for anything -- exchequer reports, ship manifests, personal letters -- that might provide a clue to the riches borne by a sunken ship. Later, during his negotiations with the British, Stemm felt even better about the Sussex's potential lucre when he found out that the Bank of England had been formed specifically to help the exchequer pay back the debt from the Sussex loss, which it didn't finish doing until 1994.

Not everyone in the shipwreck world is sanguine about the precedent set by the prediscovery deal between Odyssey and the British government. Tucker says he would sooner sell his soul than agree to such an arrangement. "We go down and find it, and they take it out of our hands," says Tucker. "That's a wonderful system."

When the Odyssey searchers begin their work, Tucker will not exactly be rooting against them, but he won't exactly be cheering them on, either. "Lots of times you think you have something and you have nothing," he says. "Other times you think you have nothing and you have something." The old treasure hunter puts his hands on his hips and stares across Mangrove Bay. "Lots of mysteries down there. Lots of mysteries."

Issue date: July 7, 2003

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