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Detectives of the Deep
Michelle Seaton
01/01/2006
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In 1693, HMS Sussex, an 80-gun warship, left Gibraltar for Savoy, a small
duchy in what is now northern Italy. With 10 tons of gold coins on board, the
ship was on a mission from the king of England to bribe the duke of Savoy to
continue his war against their common enemy, France. Although the Sussex was
just a year old and one of the finest vessels in the British fleet, it never
reached its destination. A sudden, violent storm sent it and its treasure to the
bottom of the Mediterranean.
 |  | | HARVEY KALTSAS’ team searches for the pirate
Spanish slave ship Guerrero, which sunk in 1827. (Top: Schooner Photos: Karuna Eberal. Bottom: Photograph courtesy Mel Fisher’s Treasures; Odyssey Marine Exploration.) |
The Sussex still lies off Gibraltar, submerged
in several thousand feet of water, accessible only to deep ocean submersibles
and robots. If historical documents are correct, and if the bulk of the treasure
it carried is in good condition, today the king’s bribe could be worth anywhere
from $500 million to $4 billion.
After spending seven years and several
million dollars searching, Greg Stemm believes his company, Tampa, Fla.-based
Odyssey Marine Exploration, a publicly traded, for-profit firm that searches for
and recovers valuables from old shipwrecks, may have found the Sussex and its
legendary treasure. After scouring 600 square miles of ocean floor,
archaeologists working for Marine Odyssey are so convinced that the site
contains the remains of the Sussex that the company has struck a deal with the
British government, which has a moral and proprietary claim on a military vessel
sunk in international waters. Under these terms, Odyssey may keep 80 percent of
the first $45 million of recovered treasure, then 50 percent of up to $500
million recovered and, finally, 40 percent above $500 million.
Exploring
sunken ships for artifacts, treasure or merely excitement has become an
expensive, high-stakes venture requiring vast reserves of time and money, along
with savvy diplomatic skills. The convergence of readily available historical
documents, advanced technology that enables searchers to map the ocean floor and
capital to back expeditions has transformed treasure hunting from an eccentric
hobby into a potentially lucrative gamble for even landlocked
investors.
 |  | | Top: GOLD AND silver coins brought up from the Nuestra Señora de
Atocha. Bottom: The SS Republic paddlewheel shows the effects of
more than a century beneath the sea. (Photography courtesy Mel Fisher’s Treasures; Odyssey Marine Exploration.) |
Today, there are thousands of divers searching for the estimated 3
million shipwrecks worldwide. Some search individually, while others form
companies that offer investors a stake in whatever treasure they find. Those
such as Stemm spend anywhere from a few hundred thousand dollars to a few
million dollars on boats and equipment. They hire historians to discover where
specific ships may have gone down, then enlist crews and divers or robotic
equipment to search the ocean floor for telltale signs of ships. Although few
ever achieve a significant return on this investment, the mere possibility of
finding historically significant—and wildly profitable—artifacts spurs them on.
“We’ve discovered U-boats, prehistoric ships, colonial shipwrecks, pirate
ships,” Stemm says. “This gives me the chance to be the underwater archeologist
I always wanted to be.”
Stemm was a marketing and advertising executive who
owned his own firm in Tampa. In 1986, he and his partner, John Morris, bought an
85-foot ocean research vessel and $1 million in equipment, including a remotely
operated vehicle, to search for shipwrecks and treasure. The next year they
purchased a treasure map from the renowned treasure hunter Robert Marx. The map
was literally a nautical chart with an X that marked the spot where Marx
believed there to be remnants of a Spanish galleon that had gone down during a
1622 hurricane.
Yet after two years of research and weeks of round-the-clock
searching, they could not find the wreck. Finally, one of Stemm’s researchers
resorted to an old trick. He found a large fish and startled it, hoping it would
dash to the nearest hiding spot—possibly the wreck they sought. Amazingly, it
worked. They found the remains of a galleon that contained 26 gold bars, 726
silver coins, thousands of pearls and archaeologically significant navigational
tools among a total of 20,000 artifacts. Although the haul was appraised at more
than $4.7 million, Stemm, Morris and Marx had spent $3 million to find
it.
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