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ANCIENT SHIPWRECKS YIELD BOTH PRIZES AND BITTER CONFLICTBY PHILIP TRUPP |
The wind was freshening and thunderheads lifted over the horizon when I accompanied a crew of underwater
archaeologists last June on a special mission into the past. We were churning through the choppy waters of
Biscayne National Park, just south of Miami. Twelve miles out and 30 feet down was a window on history, the
remains of the 18th-century British warship HMS Fowey. While our Park Service dive boat plowed toward
that historic wreck, I watched a black waterspout forming in the Gulf Stream. It may have been on just such a
day in 1848, I reflected, that the Fowey, heavily armed and carrying a contingent of captured Spanish
seamen, struck a reef.
The impact of that collision opened the ship's hull and for a long time the Fowey hung there, unable to move,
until wind and tides lifted her off and carried her to a place five miles north called Legare Anchorage. Captain
Francis William Drake knew his ship was dying and ordered her stripped and scuttled. She sank to the
bottom and eventually disappeared beneath the sand. There, the Fowey lay entombed and all but forgotten
until October 4, 1979, when she became the object of a court battle between a spear fisherman named Gerald
Klein, who thought he had discovered her, and the National Park Service, on whose submerged lands she lay.
Shortly thereafter, a preliminary U.S. District Court injunction was issued to prevent Klein from disturbing
the wreck. The Park Service's archaeologists were delighted, because to them careless sport divers and
greedy treasure hunters are pirates who loot wrecks for personal gain. Klein, on the other hand, was
disappointed. He viewed the court ruling as grossly unfair, an abridgment of freedom and a slap in the face to
anyone who longs to search for dreams at the bottom of the sea.
The debate is not limited to the remains of the Fowey. There are thousands of other shipwrecks in American
waters. Dozens of marine archaeologists and thousands of treasure hunters want to get at them in different
ways and for different reasons. Money is at stake, of course, but so, even more important, is history. Sunken
vessels are archaeological time capsules. On land, antiquities are subjected to, and often destroyed by, the
ravages of wind, rain and erosion. Many a ship on the bottom of the sea, however, is like a mammoth
preserved in glacial ice complete with skin, hair, tusks and even food in its gullet. Properly exhumed, a
shipwreck can tell us a great deal about what life was really like a long time ago.
George R. Fischer (p. 84), research archaeologist with the Park Service's Southeast Archaeological Center in
Tallahassee, is in charge of excavating and documenting the Fowey. At 46, he is a solid, sometimes
stolid-looking academic with a decideclly acerbic wit and an ailing back. Outwardly he appears imperturbable,
but mention treasure hunters and he explodes with a string of epithets. Mention underwater archaeology in
general, though, or the Fowey in particular, and Fischer grows positively enthusiastic.
Floating above the site in the gin-clear water, I found myself extraordinarily touched by the scene. After 235
years on the bottom, the Fowey looks nothing like a ship. For more than two centuries her timbers have made
meals for worms, and the few objects that remain on the bottom resemble a deceptive pattern of shapes and
shadows in the sand. It took a while before they made sense to me: the object that appeared to be a large
stone half-buried in the sand was a cannon; a conglomerate that at first appeared to be a lump of broken
coral finally emerged as a collection of tiles from the galley. That straight object encrusted with sea growth
was actually a cutlass-still in its scabbard. Long dark shapes, on closer inspection, turned out to be fragments
of the ship's timbers. And, most amazing, another sword, encrusted with coral, was thrust upright in the sand,
as if a lost seaman had cast a final oath, then plunged his weapon through the silent sea. |
Reconstructing history with bottles, buttons
A grid of yellow lines had been laced back and forth across the exposed portion of the vessel, and tied off into
square sections, marked with numbered floats. Inside the sections, archaeologists were gently fanning away
the sand with their hands, finding ceramic shards,
buttons, broken green wine bottles and a small encrusted object-possibly a knife. They sealed their finds in
plastic bags marked with the number of the grid section where they had been recovered. Back in the dry-land
laboratory, the finds would be correlated with the grid sections and studied in relation to one another.
Gradually, as the archaeologists continue methodically to dig deeper and deeper, the life of the vessel will
take shape.
It will be a long time before the artifacts are displayed for the public to see, and George Fischer, for one, is in
no hurry. When his crew finish the present stage of work, the Fowey will be covered with sand to stabilize her
and make her less tempting to treasure hunters. "It may be years before we're through," Fischer explains.
"Until then, the safest place for her is right where she is now-on the bottom."
Treasure hunters do not agree. They argue that many historic wrecks-those more than a century old- lie in
shallow water where storms and wave action can destroy and scatter their remains. If we wait for the scholars
and scientists to get around to those that are left, the treasure hunters say, most of the wrecks will be lost.
There are archaeologists who say that's nonsense. "If shallow water is not good for wrecks," scoffs one,
"there wouldn't be so many wrecks still in shallow water." Shipwrecks are as safe in the sea, says another,
"as pickles in a barrel."
Serious treasure hunters tend to be flamboyant and entrepreneurial by nature. Using their savings or
investor capital and sometimes taking real risks, they often search for years before hitting pay dirt-if, indeed,
they ever do. To hear them tell it, almost as soon as a treasure hunter finds a wreck and applies for a salvage
permit, the archaeologists appear to block the permit, waving sheaves of court orders. But although some
treasure hunters portray archaeologists as claimjumping vultures, some archaeologists say it is actually the
treasure hunters who drag each other into court. "In Florida, it's like a wild frontier," says Barto Arnold, an
archaeologist for the state of Texas. "There actually have been gun battles between treasure hunters over
sites."
"Thou shalt not sell the goodies!"
If an undisciplined treasure hunter were allowed to work a wreck like the Fowey, Fischer warns, it could only
end in disaster. Huge holes would be blasted in the sand by large formidable-looking tubes called
"mailboxes." These devices direct the wash from a boat's propellers toward the bottom, and in 30 minutes
can cut through about five feet of sand. The Fowey's timbers would be scattered, artifacts would be collected
without any particular relationship to each other or where they lay in the hull, so that the characteristics of
the vessel would be jumbled and incomprehensible. The swords would be sold, the cannons left to rust in
obscure marinas, and the non-negotiables swept aside in search of the mother lode. No marine archaeologist
can endorse such methods. "Remember," says George Fischer, "the first commandment is: Thou shalt not
sell the goodies!"
For centuries Europeans dived for treasure (and sold the "goodies" freely) but their swimmers had no face
masks or goggles or a reliable source of air. Those handicaps severely hampered their effectiveness. The
breakthrough that gave birth to modern underwater archaeology and large-scale treasure diving was the
invention of Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus (SCUBA) by Emil Gagnan, a French inventor,
and Jacques Cousteau. Introduced in the United States in the early 1950s, SCUBA made it possible to
explore the sea with relative ease and safety. Thereafter, the dream of finding sunken treasure came true
with a rush.
One of the first big-time treasure hunters, Kip Wagner, was a former Ohio building contractor who lived near
Vero Beach, Florida. Walking along the shore Wagner discovered a handful of Spanish silver reals in the
sand. By 1959, he obtained a state salvage permit and was bringing up portions of the Spanish flota that sank
off the east coast in 1715. In a few years, he and his associates recovered several hundred thousand dollars
worth of silver and gold coins and formed a corporation known as Real "8," Co., Inc., after the Spanish name
for the pieces of eight they had found.
At about that same time, serious historians were diving on wrecks, too, but the state of Florida was becoming
increasingly alarmed about the destruction of sites by commercial interests. In the mid-'60s it passed some
tough salvage laws and set up a special agency to enforce them. That, as much as anything else, lit the fuse
of today's treasure wars.
The most famous treasure hunter of them all, Melvin A. Fisher (p. 84), president of Treasure Salvors, Inc., in
Key West, has very definite views on the recovery of artifacts. "It's really simple," he says. "It takes money
to do the kind of work we do. So we have investors, and we operate under free enterprise."
It was investor capital, millions of dollars pumped in over two decades, that led Fisher to the discovery in
1971 of one of the richest Spanish treasure wrecks of all time, the 1622 escort fleetgalleon, Nuestra Senora
de atocha. The atocha and her sister ship, Santa Margarita, identified a few years later, produced a dazzling
treasure trove: thousands of silver and gold coins, silver bars weighing more than 70 pounds, gold bullion, an
emerald cross, golden chains, assorted jewelry and a rich assortment of nonprecious objects. Altogether, the
wrecks have produced more than $20 million worth of artifacts, but this may be only a fraction of the total;
the rest still lies under 20 feet of sand in the Marquesas Keys, nearly 40 miles from Key West.
It is hard sometimes for Fisher to say whether his discoveries were a blessing or a curse. He has been the
subject of admiring books and TV specials; he has even been honored by Queen Sophia of Spain. But this
61year-old former chicken farmer from Indiana says he is not a wealthy man (his investors have claimed a
substantial share of his finds) and he has endured much criticism. Archaeologists call his salvage techniques
"piratical" and "destructive." There have been tragic personal losses, as well. In 1975, Fisher's son, Dirk,
daughter-in-law, Angel, and diver Rick Gage were drowned at the Atocha site when their tugboat sank.
The same year, Fisher's career became bizarrely complicated. In an action unrelated to the Atocha operation,
the U.S. Supreme Court clarified Florida's seaward boundaries. That change put the Atocha and the Santa
Margarita, lying far offshore in the treacherous quicksands of the Gulf of Mexico, under federal jurisdiction
on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). As a result, the state salvage permit originally issued to Fisher
suddenly became void. Initially this was cause for celebration at Treasure Salvors' headquarters, because
Florida now could no longer claim the 25-percent share of the finds that state law requires. But then the
Department of the Interior moved to exercise its own control over the situation. When Fisher filed claim in
admiralty court to the Atocha-the customary procedure whenever a wreck is found in federal waters -Interior
intervened and claimed title to the ship. Fisher was allowed to continue his work and to keep possession of
his atocha artifacts but, technically, they were placed under the custodianship of the admiralty court and he
could not sell them.
Thus began a series of court battles which rocketed Fisher into the public eye as a kind of American folk
hero. He becanre, to some at least, the "little guy" whose hard-gotten gains were threatened by a vast and
avaricious bureaucracy. In the end, Fisher won when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision of the late
Judge William O. Mehrtens, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Mehrtens ruled
on August 21, 1978: "The finding of a great treasure from the days of the Spanish Main is not the cherished
dream of only the United States and Florida citizens; countless people from other lands have shared such
thoughts. It would amaze and surprise most citizens of this country, when their dream, at the greatest of
costs, was realized, that [government] agents . . . would, on the most flimsy grounds, lay claim to the
treasure."
Surprised by the Mehrtens decision, the U.S. Department of the Interior appealed, but the appeals court
upheld the earlier ruling. If Interior wished to assert its authority over historic properties on the OCS, new
legislation had to be passed by the Congress.
Almost as if on cue, Congressman Charles E. Bennett (D., Florida) introduced a bill in 1979 proposing federal
ownership and control of all sunken vessels and artifacts on the OCS and in state waters. As a founder of the
Fort Caroline National Memorial Museum in Jacksonville and a writer of eight history books, Bennett was
inclined toward preservation and the cautious, painstaking methods of the scholars. Anyone wanting to
excavate a wreck would be bound by archaeological guidelines to be drawn up by the Interior Department.
Bennett's motive was clear and simple: "I don't care about gold or treasure or the money end of it. It's the
history I'm after."
His bill failed to pass in 1979 but, undaunted, Bennett has reintroduced different versions in every Congress
since then. The latest is H.R. 69, which has gained some favor among the tiny community of marine
archaeologists-there are only about 50 fulltime professionals in the country-who are clamoring for effective
legislation to end the wasteful looting of sunken vessels for amusement or profit.
No one is more passionate about this than former Florida state underwater archaeologist Wilburn A.
"Sonny" Cockrell (p. 82). To some of his peers he is known as a "purist" and a man obsessed. Cockrell has
a few genuine horror stories to tell. He says he has seen galleons disappear almost overnight, and years of
frustration in a losing battle against treasure hunters have embittered him.
The incident that initially fired his passion was the destruction, during a few weeks in the early 1970s, of an
18th-century Spanish galleon by treasure hunters and sport divers. The vessel, thought to be the San Jose,
was down in shallow water off the Florida Keys near Islamorada. "The San Jose was beautiful," he recalls.
"It could have been an underwater park. I can show you pictures of my son swimming through the eye of a
huge anchor, and there were cannons and actual ribbing. It was incredible-before they raped it."
On behalf of the state of Florida, Cockrell waged a long campaign against treasure hunters that resulted in
costly litigation, much of it against Mel Fisher. At last count, Florida had spent $350,000 in legal fees trying
to recoup its alleged share of Fisher's finds, and had nothing to show for it. The Miami Herald, in a recent
editorial headlined "Burying Treasure," observed impatiently that the state was "paying a high price for a
case of improbable merit." That kind of press coverage, in Cockrell's view, is at least partly responsible for
continuing public indifference toward the need to protect historic wrecks. "People see shipwrecks as
something to be mined," he complains, adding: "This myth that treasure hunters are real archaeologists is
nothing short of immoral."
George Bass (p. 84), founder of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology and a professor of anthropology, is a
real archaeologist. He was trained in classical archaeology before he learned to dive. Over the years, Bass
(SMITHSONIAN, February 1978) and his colleagues have excavated dozens of shipwrecks around the
world, salvaging all sorts of artifacts-not to sell but to study. His finds have helped fill in major gaps about the
history of shipbuilding and commerce in the Middle East and elsewhere. In 1977, for example, one of his
teams excavated a 900-year-old wreck in the Aegean Sea, near Marmaris, Turkey, recovering a huge
collection of exquisite glassware, Greek coins, anchors, cooking ware, bronze buckets, Greek amphorae
containing seeds, almonds and lentils, and even a plate with chicken 7 bones. The project provided
researchers with invaluable information about IIth-century trade which, had the artifacts been dragged up
and sold, would likely have been lost. "Archaeologists don't just recover things," Bass says. "That's mere
salvage. The real job is in the scientific reconstruction of history."
Another dramatic example of historical reconstruction is England's recently recovered Mary Rose, flagship
of King Henry VIII, which sank off Portsmouth in 1545. The 415-man vessel incorporated some dramatic
innovations in ship design and gunnery, but even more intriguing are its many clues to how crew members
lived. The men took on board various items for their own entertainment. The remains of a musical pipe and
some fiddles have been recovered, along with gaming boards for backgammon and chess. Food remains show
that officers dined well on mutton, pork and fresh vegetables served on pewter plates, whereas the crew ate
stewed meat from wooden trenchers and bowls. The skeleton of a professional archer, together with 2,500
recovered arrows and 139 longbows-some so well preserved that they can still be used-attest to the
previously unknown fact that Henry's celebrated Tudor bowmen fought at sea in the 1500s.
From a scholarly point of view-indeed, Bass emphasizes, from the public's point of view-it is impossible to put
a price tag on such evidence. That, Bass says, is why "it is just plain wrong to sell artifacts." But treasure
hunters don't see it that way. Salvage is a costly business and investors require some return on their
investments. Even the law-abiding and history-conscious British are willing to make some trade-offs. At
present, they are selling slivers of timber from the Mary Rose, using the funds to finance further work.
That arrangement does not bother most preservationists because the slivers being sold are not of any value
archaeologically. But some divers and archaeologists are willing to consider more provocative compromises,
as long as they enable the work to go on. Robert Marx, 47, is a pioneer in the archaeological diving field who
believes the true name of the game is "dig we must." All the marine archaeologists in the world, Marx
claims, cannot make a dent in the job that needs to be done, and those who cling to the concept of total
control may be cheating themselves and the public. Marx helped write Jamaica's antiquity law which gives
the government 75 percent of its submerged patrimony. He is often employed by foreign governments that
fund his work through the sale of duplicate artifacts and materials considered nonessential to an overall
study. The policy, Marx says, is a mix of common sense and simple economics.
Many scholars assert that treasure hunters undercut the feasibility of compromise by the reckless way they
conduct their underwater digs. Marx points out, however, that some excavating techniques once totally
unacceptable in scholarly circles are now practiced by the very people who once condemned them. A few
years ago, for example, no self-respecting academic would have dreamed of using plastique, but treasure
hunters used it. These days, the explosive is employed in special situations by archaeologists, as well.
Marx and others who occupy a middle ground in the controversy over shipwrecks believe that some treasure
hunters, at least, have not been given enough credit for the good archaeological work that they do. Mel
Fisher employs a marine archaeologist, R. Duncan Mathewson III (opposite), who studied at the University
of London and served as director of excavations for the Institute of Jamaica. Mathewson dislikes selling
artifacts and has had a running battle with Fisher on the subject. Although it is a battle that he loses,
Mathewson does document, photograph, draw and weigh each artifact Fisher salvages. He has managed to
document, for the first time, how a ship breaks up in shallow waters. He has also, he complains, paid a heavy
price for his ten-year association with a treasure hunter: some of his professional papers are not reviewed by
his peers, he is often invited to stay away from meetings and he has even been pressured to resign his
membership in academic societies.
In an educational sense, however, some progress is being made. Mel Fisher runs a preservation laboratory
and a museum in Key West; next year, he will put a touring show on the road so that people can see his
spectacular finds. As a result of his work on the Fowey, George Fischer of the Park Service will make public
new information on the nation's history. The Park Service has also created an underwater "trail" at Isle
Royale in Lake Superior, where divers may now descend through 70 feet of chilly water to the wreck of the
Monarch, an 1890 passenger/packet vessel, with a plastic map that tells underwater visitors exactly what
they are looking at. Nearby, divers may also visit the intermingled remains of two other ships in the unusual
park: the Cumberland, a graceful wooden sidewheeler that foundered on a reef and sank in 1877, and the
Henry Chisholm, which suffered the same fate 21 years later.
One thing the public still has not been educated about is the popular but erroneous notion that vast fortunes
may be gleaned from sunken treasures. Although many investors are attracted by lucrative tax write-off
possibilities, profits per se are hard to come by. Few if any treasures, in fact, have produced significant
revenues after costs. Yet even so, sport divers and treasure hunters continue to exploit wrecks and, as a
result, historical evidence continues to disappear.
Recently, for example, marine photographer Robert Holland visited the wreck of the Spanish merchant ship
San Anton do Brazil in the Bahamas, where he took the picture on the cover of this issue. At that time, three
corroded anchors were visible on the ocean floor. Later, Robert Marx, who originally found the wreck,
discovered that the site had been robbed. Holland subsequently found one anchor that looked just like those
he had photographed. It was hanging above the bar in a Miami restaurant.
Back in Washington, Congressman Bennett has once again introduced protective legislation. He is also
supporting another bill, the Historic Shipwreck Preservation Act, that would allow states to own historic
shipwrecks; this, in turn, would enable them to run their own preservation and study programs. The new bill is
generally favored by scholars because it opens the way to providing a genuinely archaeological framework
within which limited salvage permits may be granted.
There have been some seemingly encouraging developments in Florida, too. Officials there, under court
orders, have finally taken steps to end the treasure wars, dropping legal actions against Treasure Salvors,
Inc., and working out an agreement in which all parties presumably will act in the public interest. According to
Secretary of State George Firestone, the Fisher group will be allowed to work 12 wreck sites under
guidelines drawn up by a five-member committee appointed jointly by Treasure Salvors and the state.
Firestone is an optimist. For the future, he sees a mix of federal, state and private funding for marine
archaeology and he envisions hobbyists, professional archaeologists and treasure hunters working together.
Some academics who are familiar with the Florida situation do not share Firestone's rosy view of the future.
They talk about bribery and back-door political influence-peddling by treasure hunters and their big-money
investors. And there are open expressions of contempt by archaeologists for the notion of cooperating with
their longtime adversaries. "Why in hell should I work with a guy like Mel Fisher?" sputters one indignant
scholar.
Meanwhile, the fate of shipwrecks hangs in the balance. As this story went to press, George Fischer phoned
from Florida. He reported that in the last days of the Fowey dig someone stole in at night and jumped the site.
They dragged an anchor over the grid, blew a large crater in the sand, hacked away the protective layers of
coral growth from a barrel hoop and left it broken on the bottom. I remembered the delicate grid, the artifacts
quietly in their places, the true peace of the ocean and the ship's place in it. I did not want to imagine how it
looked now.