Underwater treasures: exploring the wreck of a 16th-century galleon that sank off
the Philippine coast.
Drawing up an inventory of Ming dynasty porcelain found in a 16th-century shipwreck.
Since
profit is the treasure-hunters’ only motive, and every day of exploration costs a
small fortune, they are in a hurry to bring up whatever can be sold, even if it means
destroying everything in their way.
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Finders Keepers
and Military Exceptions
Patrick O’Keefe, an Australian lawyer and
cultural heritage specialist, says the discovery of the Titanic was a turning point.
Exploration teams now have the technology to go anywhere and to excavate at once-unthinkable
depths. “International regulations are urgently needed because no wreck is safe anymore,”
he says.
But the international community is lagging far behind the technology. Some countries
have more or less successfully established rules on underwater archaeology within
their territorial waters (usually 12 miles, or 22 km., from their coasts). However,
few are developing the resources to carry out their own undersea explorations. In
international waters, anything goes. Individuals are entitled to keep what they find,
and every ship that is “saved” belongs to whomever discovered it, in keeping with
the maritime tradition of “salvage on the high seas.”
But UNESCO’s
Lyndel Prott says, “the wrecks aren’t saved when they’re found by a treasure-hunter.
On the contrary, they’re the ones who endanger them.” The 1982 Convention on the
Law of the Sea barely touched on the issue of underwater treasure.
UNESCO
has drawn up a planned convention that would ban all commercial use of underwater
wrecks. Unfortunately, the world’s major maritime and technological powers–the United
States, Britain, France and Japan–want to keep their hands free and look askance
at any attempt to take away their freedom of action.
Their navies cite the tradition that warships forever belong to the country that
launched them to keep others from touching their wrecks, even when they are four
centuries old. The United States used this argument to win its right to the wreck
of the Alabama, a Confederate privateer sunk by the Union navy off the French port
of Cherbourg towards the end of the American Civil War. And what about a Spanish
galleon wrecked in the Portuguese Azores? When is a wreck deemed to have been abandoned
by its country or its owner?
Two meetings of specialists–a third has been set for July 2000–have so far failed
to sort out the mess, or to obtain a firm political commitment from the international
community to lay down the law in Davy Jones’s locker.
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New technology means shipwrecks
swallowed up by the deepest waters can now be reached. But who owns the precious
finds? Some countries allow a free-for-all of plundering
 The world’s biggest museum lies
under the sea. Over the centuries hundreds, perhaps thousands of ships–nobody has
even a remote idea how many–have sunk in storms or the heat of battle, bringing Roman
amphorae, gold bars, cannons and crates of Chinese porcelain with them.
Maritime trade began booming in the sixteenth century: the ships of the Dutch East
India Company made 8,000 round-trip voyages to China in a 200-year period. But until
the mid-twentieth century, there was no way reach this underwater museum, and the
world’s oceans were like a gigantic safe containing civilisation’s treasures.
Two of the oldest ships found recently came to a grim end just over 2,700 years ago,
when they were probably on their way from Tyre to the Pharaohs’ Egypt laden with
wine-filled amphorae. American underwater archaeologists Robert Ballard, who discovered
the wreck of the Titanic, and Lawrence Stager, of Harvard University, found the two
Phoenician vessels, each less than 20 metres long, off the Israeli coast in June
1999.
They had been asked to locate an Israeli submarine, the Dakar, which sank in 1969,
taking its 69 crew members down with it. Two small underwater robots, Jason and Medea,
descended to 300 and 900 metres to film and inspect the Phoenician vessels, which
led to the discovery that they were still in an excellent state of preservation.
The deeper the water the less oxygen, so wrecks there are much better preserved than
those closer to the surface, according to Ballard. “The great depths, the absence
of sunlight and the great pressures seem to preserve history far more than we thought,”
he says. A 3,300-year-old ship was found off Turkey in more shallow waters, and two
more Phoenician vessels, dating from the seventh century BC, were located near Murcia,
Spain, but all were in much worse condition.
The discovery of the two wrecks off the coast of southern Israel came as a surprise
because historians were unaware that the Phoenicians conducted trade along that route.
A wine decanter (showing that wine was decanted in those days), stone anchors, food
crockery and a censer were found among Tyrrhenian amphorae typical of the period,
which allowed researchers to roughly determine the date the ships went down as well
as where they sailed from.
“More important discoveries should come in the near future that could significantly
alter our understanding of ancient maritime trade,” predicts Ballard. The discovery
off Sicily of Roman ships dating from between 100 BC and 400 AD has already confirmed
a long-disputed theory according to which the Romans were quite capable of sailing
in deep water a long way from the coast.
A
question of ownership
Yet until only
half a century ago, when the autonomous deep-sea diving suit was invented, it was
still impossible to go anywhere near deep-sea wrecks. In 1952 Jacques Cousteau led
the first underwater archaeological expedition off Marseilles, which was a very busy
Mediterranean port in Roman times. His team brought up Greek and Roman amphorae,
which puzzled specialists at first because they were at least a century apart in
age. Then the divers realized they had been excavating two wrecks that had sunk one
on top of the other.
At that time, no laws or official bodies regulated underwater archaeological exploration
in France or anywhere else. In 1966 President Charles de Gaulle’s minister of culture,
André Malraux, set up an underwater archaeological exploration division and
made it compulsory to declare finds in French territorial waters.
In 1989, two years after a similar law had been passed in the United States, France
adopted legislation that gave
the state sole ownership rights to all sunken treasures found in its territorial
waters. Until then, it had been possible to share them. As a result, the number of
declarations plummeted from about 250 a year to under 50. Seven years later, the
government tried to counter the
drop by announcing rewards of up to 200,000 French francs (approximately $30,000)
for discovering such treasures, depending on its scientific value. But those rewards
are rarely paid: explorers risk breaking the law since a single amphora can fetch
up to 10,000 French francs ($1,500) on the market.
Unaware amateur divers think amphorae do not “talk.” That is a big mistake, because
they do. They can tell us when the wreck occurred, the nationality of the crew and
how the cargo was shipped. And the discovery of amphorae is what usually indicates
that an ancient wreck is nearby, concealed in the sand.
For the 14 centuries between 700 BC and 700 AD, these large jars were used to transport
wine, oil, pickled products, spices, tea and other goods. After that, hundreds of
years went by before vessels once again began carrying items–cannons and porcelain
this time–that future archaeologists and treasure-hunters could use as clues to detect
the locations of shipwrecks. The years in between are a blank, either because wrecks
disintegrated or remain invisible, or because maritime trade collapsed.
Site
leasing to private investors
For example,
a barnacle-encrusted cannon tipped archaeologists off to the presence of a wrecked
French fleet off Venezuela’s Las Aves islands. King
Louis XIV had dispatched the warships to drive the Dutch out of the Caribbean. Commanded
by Count Jean d’Estrées, the French looted Tobago before heading to Curaçao,
where they would have defeated the Dutch had not half the 13 warships and 17 privateers
sunk in a storm on May 11, 1678. Five hundred of the 5,000 crewmen were drowned and
1,000 died of starvation or disease after being stranded on desert islands. The disaster
put an end to France’s dream of ruling unchallenged in the Caribbean, which quickly
became a haven for pirates.
Though they no longer fly the skull and crossbones, pirates are still there today.
About 15 years ago, a Venezuelan, Charles Brewer-Carias, and an American, Barry Clifford,
one of the world’s best-known shipwreck hunters, found the French flagship Le Terrible,
which had 70 cannon and a crew of 500, amid other wrecks at the site.
Clifford says he was shocked by the lease of the site to a private investor. “The
Venezuelan people will someday look back in horror at what is being permitted to
happen to Las Aves,” he says. Venezuela, which does not have a public archaeological
body that could explore the site, gave a construction company called Mespa exclusive
permission to excavate and sell whatever they could find. “We had an archaeologist
on board the research vessel,” says the firm, which admits it wants to make a profit
by setting up a discovery “industry”.
“In every single case where countries have issued permits for treasure hunting, they
have always ended up the losers,” says Florida archaeologist John de Bry. “Piracy
is alive and well.” Mespa thinks it can find Count d’Estrées’ and his officers’
personal valuables, but archaeologists doubt a war fleet would have been carrying
much “treasure.” However, they fear the historical and archaeological value of items
will be lost, as well as the wreck’s position.
The wrecks also cast light on how ships were designed and built in the days French
minister Colbert was creating a royal navy and an entire industry around it. Recording
the exact position of the various items on the sea’s floor before bringing them up
to the surface is an extremely delicate, costly and time-consuming task. All underwater
exploration is very expensive and comes without any guarantee of success.
Since profit is the treasure-hunters’ only motive, and every day of exploration costs
a small fortune, they are in a hurry to bring up whatever can be sold, even if it
means destroying everything in their way. Some even use explosives to reach what
they want.
They have no interest in items that cannot be sold but which may be of inestimable
value to historians, such as a pottery shard bearing an inscription that may provide
clues about a ship’s route, a piece of shoe that can tell much about how the sailors
dressed or a skeleton showing wounds or nutritional deficiencies. The hull of the
Maurithuis, which sank off Guinea on its way back from China in 1609, was still lined
with nearly 20,000 plates of almost pure zinc, showing that Chinese metallurgists
were very far ahead of their European counterparts.
The problem of granting exploration permits is much greater in Portugal’s Azores
island chain, which has one of the world’s biggest concentrations of wrecks because
it was a necessary stopover for ships crossing the Atlantic. Portugal’s museum of
archaeology has listed 850 sunken Spanish and Portuguese ships there, many loaded
with gold.
Eighty-eight of them lie in the Bay of Hangra de Heroismo, where the British treasure-hunter
John Grittan showed up in 1972, eventually spending two months in jail and being
banned from exploring. Nearly a quarter of a century later he returned–after the
law changed to allow private firms to explore–as manager of Arqueonauticas, chaired
by Rear Admiral Isaias Gomes Texeira, one of the first companies to obtain an exploration
and excavation permit.
One of the most famous treasure-hunters, Florida-based Bob Marx, joined the undertaking,
lured by a deal giving him half of whatever was discovered at a depth of up to 50
metres and 70 per cent of what was found further down. “This law has sacrificed our
history to money,” says Francisco Alves of the national archaeology museum. Meanwhile,
the Spanish are frantically poring over legal documents to see if they have a right
to save galleons that are their own heritage.
Sometimes treasure-hunters hit the jackpot. One of them, the impetuous Michael Hatcher,
netted about $15 million from the piecemeal sale of Chinese porcelain he found in
the wreck of the Dutch ship Geldermalsen, which sank in the China Sea in 1752. Christie’s,
the world’s biggest auction house, sold the pieces off for a while but then quietly
stopped, probably because of the controversy and legal problems raised.
Hatcher claims he found the wreck in international waters, but researchers say it
was lying within Indonesia’s territorial limits. Jakarta opened an investigation,
and one of the investigators drowned in a diving accident at the site, adding to
the detective novel aspect of the case. Eventually the Indonesians dropped the enquiry,
but rumours tied that move to the corruption of the Suharto family then ruling the
country.
“All this money going around just makes matters worse because it is recycled to pay
for new explorations,” says Lyndel Prott, a legal expert on world heritage matters
with UNESCO. “Countries allow the kind
of pillage of their underwater treasures that they would never tolerate on land.”
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