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| Detectives of the Deep |
Finders Keepers
Michelle Seaton
01/01/2006
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As soon as Mel Fisher brought up the first haul of gold and silver coins worth
$400 million from the wreck of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha off Key West, the
state of Florida laid claim to the treasure and took Fisher to court. The legal
battle dragged on for years, and cost the Fisher family $2 million—even before
they had sold any treasure. “We gave our lawyers gold bars as collateral while
they argued our case,” Kim Fisher, Mel’s son, recalls. The case was appealed all
the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the Fisher family prevailed. Yet, to
sidestep further legal hurdles, the family cut a deal with the state of Florida,
giving it at least 15 percent of everything the family finds. “Since then, we’ve
had a great relationship with the state,” Fisher says. But legal troubles
continued. Even after Mel Fisher recovered the treasure, sold the coins
internationally and created his own heritage museum to display artifacts and
reproductions, the federal government sued Fisher for the damage his expeditions
caused to the sea grasses in a marine sanctuary near the dive site.
 | | A DIVER finds a gold bar at the Atocha site.(Photograph Courtesy Mel Fisher’s Treasures.) |
“That
find changed a lot of minds. Governments began to realize, ‘Hey, if we are more
proactive, we can make some money from this,’” says David Bright, president of
Nautical Research Group, a firm in Flemington, N.J., that explores and assesses
shipwrecks purely for scientific purposes.
“In essence, governments are
laying claim to all undiscovered shipwrecks,” maintains Peter Hess, a maritime
attorney in Wilmington, Del., who represents divers hoping to keep the artifacts
they recover. Maritime law has always dictated that salvage operators should be
entitled to a monetary reward for recovering items lost at sea. If the objects
have been abandoned or have no clear owner, the law has traditionally granted
salvagers the right to sell and profit from their finds, or at least keep
souvenirs. More and more often, that courtesy is being denied.
A number of
historians believe that governments should restrict diving at archaeologically
rich wrecks because treasure hunters will strip the wrecks without preserving
important historical data. For example, the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) adopted a convention for the
Protection of Underwater Property in 2001. If it is ratified by member nations,
the convention would forbid the sale of artifacts recovered from shipwrecks in
international waters worldwide. In the United States, many states have increased
the territory in which they might lay claim to wreckage under the water. The
state of Michigan, for example, has claimed all wrecks in the Great
Lakes.
The wrecks of U.S. military ships are off-limits to divers once they
have been identified. Violators can face fines and penalties of up to $100,000 a
day, and they can expect any items found to be confiscated. “Finding the
treasure may be the easiest part of your travels,” Bright points out. “Then you
have to deal with the governments and the lawsuits. You might not see that money
for decades. What Mel Fisher did and the deal he cut with the Florida state
government couldn’t be done now.”
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