I’ve been watching an utterly fascinating show on the Discovery Channel called Treasure Quest, in which a marine exploration company searches for (and sometimes excavates) sunken ships. Their primary goal seems to be sunken treasure, but they seem to be interested in the historical/archaeological aspects of it, too.
Anyway, the show has obliquely mentioned a couple of times that at least one of their treasure finds is tied up in Spanish courts, with Spain (apparently) claming that anything found on the bottom of the sea of the coast of Spain belongs to the Spanish government.
Is this an intimidation tactic by the Spanish government, or is international law on their side? Also, what does US law say about sunken treasure? If I’m scuba diving off the coast of Miami and find some gold coins, are they mine to keep (after the IRS’ cut, of course)? Or does the US government get first crack?
Usually the issue is that the country that originally owned the ships and their cargoes claims that they still own them hundreds of years on. Since most of the classic “sunken treasure” type situations are from Spanish ships in the Caribbean, the Spanish government has been trying to make this kind of claim for years. I don’t know how recent cases have turned out, but IIRC they managed to get most of several major finds and now try to bully treasure hunter-types into giving them a cut. Hopefully some other posters will have more details.
I believe the argument is that ships owned by a government on government service are not subject to the laws of salvage, but remain the property of that government in perpetuity, including their cargoes. How strong that argument is under admiralty law, I could not say.
We had a thread recently on this topic: The Griffin: Maritime/Salvage Law Question