By Adam Goodheart
Aboard the Seahawk, the crew refer to their quarry as "the Cambridge," although this is not the vessel's real name. (Their business is one that requires a certain amount of discretion.) Its story, however, is no secret: It was an 80-gun English ship of the line, sunk in a storm while carrying a shipment of money to the Duke of Savoy. The sunken warship remained largely forgotten until several years ago, when a researcher combing Britain's Public Record Office came across documents that told of the Cambridge's demise. The researcher was employed by Odyssey Marine Exploration, a publicly held, Florida-based company that specialized in looking for deep-water wrecks around the world. When copies of the documents arrived at Odyssey's headquarters in Tampa, they captured the particular interest of one of the company's two founders, Greg Stemm.
Stemm fits none of the usual stereotypes of the Florida treasure hunter. He is trim and bearded, energetic but not overbearing; he wears no Spanish doubloons around his neck, no raw emeralds set in 14-karat pinkie rings. But then, the term "treasure hunter" makes Stemm wince-he is rather, he says, "a commercial archaeologist." (Even the word "treasure" is to be avoided; he prefers to talk about "intrinsically valuable trade goods.") Stemm is positioning himself as the pioneer of a new strategy of for-profit shipwreck salvage, one that will satisfy both the demands of his investors and the even more stringent requirements of archaeologists. It is a treacherous strait to be navigating.
"The radical preservationists say we're just out for the gold," he says. "But believe me, if I'd wanted to get rich quick, there are a lot of ways I'd have done it before going into the shipwreck business."
On this particular Saturday afternoon, there are no immediate prospects of gold in the offing. The Seahawk is in port for repairs, and Stemm and I have gone out for a drive together, through the Spanish checkpoint that guards the causeway to Gibraltar, down the coastal highway, and then up among the medieval towns in the backcountry of Andalusia. The hills here were stripped bare of trees many centuries ago-in part, perhaps, to build the very galleons that salvors now so avidly seek.
"You know, the UNESCO treaty would ban anyone from selling off any object from a shipwreck that was more than a hundred years old," Stemm says. "Can you imagine how that would work in a place like this, if anything that was more than a century old had to be left untouched and preserved exactly as it was forever? And if you were never even allowed to sell it? Nobody suggests that kind of rule when it comes to old buildings, or antiques, or coins. It's absolutely ridiculous. But for some reason, they think they can apply it to what's underwater."
Stemm knows about the UNESCO treaty firsthand: Last June, he was a member of the U.S. delegation to the conference in Paris. His inclusion outraged some traditionalists in the archaeological community, but it also reflected a growing consensus, especially among U.S. federal preservation officials, that cooperation with responsible private salvors may be the best way to protect deep-water sites. Stemm, in turn, is attempting to steer salvors toward embracing proper archaeological techniques. Last year, he helped found a group called the Professional Shipwreck Explorers Association, which demands that its members adhere to a code of ethics, including requirements that excavation of any significant shipwreck be carried out by a qualified archaeologist, that any information from the site be made public, and that artifacts be sold only after they have been "subjected to thorough study and investigation."
"You can't just leave the wrecks down there," Stemm says. "Given the technology that exists now, it's like putting $100 million worth of gold in a box by the side of the road and writing on it 'Please do not disturb.' The artifacts are either going to be brought up legally, under the auspices of a government, in an archaeologically correct manner, or somebody's just going to come and do it at night. It's human nature."
Stemm and his business partner, John Morris, got their start in underwater exploration as entrepreneurs, not archaeologists: In the 1980s, they used ROVs to investigate recently sunk vessels off Florida, working for insurance companies that suspected foul play. Then they met Robert Marx, a well-known treasure salvor, who stoked their fantasies of sunken gold-and sold them, for $10,000, a map with an X on it. Just as Marx had promised, that X turned out to mark the resting place of a 1622 Spanish galleon, which lay 400 meters deep off the Dry Tortugas. Over the next several years, Stemm's company used ROVs equipped with mechanical arms and suction cups to bring up thousands of artifacts, which ranged from pearls, gold bars, and pieces of eight to navigational instruments, pottery, and even some human remains. The entire operation was supervised by archaeologists, including Florida preservation officials, whom Stemm had invited to participate even though the wreck was in international waters, where the state had no legal authority.
That project impressed even some harsh critics of commercial salvage, including George F. Bass, the Texas A&M professor who's often called the founder of modern nautical archaeology. "I thought Greg Stemm was actually doing it better than some professional archaeologists who excavate sites and then never publish them," Bass says. (A staff archaeologist has prepared a lengthy report with many color illustrations that will be published on CD-ROM.) The venture did not, however, prove very profitable from a business standpoint, owing partly to all of the painstaking archaeological work. Stemm's company spent several million dollars recovering the artifacts and eventually sold the entire collection for $3 million to a Miami jewelry company that plans to open a private treasure museum.
Still, Stemm is setting even more ambitious goals for the Cambridge. Since it was an English naval vessel, he's sought the permission of the British Ministry of Defence, which has provisionally agreed to cooperate with Odyssey in return for about a quarter of the artifacts recovered; these would probably be mainly "cultural artifacts," such as the sailors' personal effects, rather than treasure. (Stemm says the only objects sold would be coins and similarly abundant items that could simply be photographed and documented rather than kept in perpetuity.)
If the Cambridge is found, the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth, England, plans to send archaeologists to observe and help with the excavation. "We're taking the view that the technology is so advanced now, and in the reach of everybody, that the underwater landscape is completely different," says the museum's director, Campbell McMurray. "We're ready to recognize that, provided we can be assured that the relevant scholarly disciplines are observed, it could be possible for us to come to an accommodation."
One morning during my stay in Gibraltar, I meet up with Stemm and Morris along the waterfront, at some old abandoned boathouses-remnants of the time when this harbor was a way station for almost every eastbound vessel in the Royal Navy-that the two men have their eye on. They're hoping to buy the property from the local government and turn it into an international center for conservation of shipwreck artifacts, a sort of laboratory-cum-museum. "We'd fill this whole space with display cases," Stemm says, gesturing dramatically across a pavement thick with pigeon droppings. "We could have a conservation tank down there"-he points to the foot of the old boat ramp-"just picture 30 or 40 cannons in the water. That wall over there we could open up to put in big windows that would draw people in off the street."
I'm trying to be tactful, so I pose my question a bit cautiously: "Would there, uh, conceivably be some kind of showroom where people might be able to buy, say, coins from the Cambridge?"
"Not 'conceivably,'" Stemm corrects me. "Necessarily. That'll be what makes all the rest possible."