http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090201/ap_on_bi_ge/shipwreck_discovery
In a larger vein, who do ship wrecks belong to? A company spends a fortune outfitting a ship ,then commits thousands of hours searching. When they find something governments demand a big share. When Mel Fisher found the Atocha he had to put the booty into a cell ,where competing government interests sliced off their shares. That bothered me. If he did not find it, it would still be sitting on the bottom decaying.
Most explorers are careful to map the bottom and do involved graphs to show where the artifacts were recovered. Then, they have to use the newest technology to preserve them. Do governments actually have a right to claim a share? I think not.
I have often wondered. But I believe because it was a British Man of war the government can still lay claim to it. I believe goverments claim riases above maritime law on salvage.
Ethically, they probably don’t have a leg to stand on having written off that cargo as lost long ago. Legally, I imagine that they can do as they please. I’d probably take a hit on it and sell the metal off to someone who doesn’t care where it cam from, or melt it down and sell it off in small amounts.
I suppose you have to wonder where certain lines can be drawn.
HMS Sheffield was carrying around 4 to 5 tons of gold, but when she was sunk, she was also a war grave.
Although her position was reasonably well plotted when sunk, it still took 10 days to find her once serious salvage attempts got under way. Salvage was on behalf of the UK government, who awarded the contract to a company which was successful.
HMS Victory is still recorded as having around 900 men missing - dead, obviously, and that makes her a grave as well as possibly holding a cargo of value.
The only differance between the two ships is age, except more died on Victory in the service of their country.
Ask yourself how US citizens would feel if attempts were made to salvage valuables from a WWII wreck in Pearl Harbour without any US involvement, somehow I doubt it would be popular.
Ship sink, and there can be a huge cost in terms of lives, there is another point, she was found in the English Channel, so it will at the very least be covered by UK or Franch law dependant upon the exact whereabouts.
In the case of cargo vessels, this would be insured, so losses belong to the insurance companies, whereas for warships there would be a differant owner, I am pretty sure that when cargo vessels have been found, the original insurance companies are usually quite forthcoming in coming to a partnership arrangement.
Pearl Harbor is within our territorial waters, though. In international waters, I suspect that there’s a world of difference, and I certainly feel much more strongly about the wrecks at Pearl Harbor than I do about sunken American ships elsewhere in the world.
I used to follow the legal adventures of various treasure hunters, and let me tell you, governments often behave despicably. I remember stories of guys who tried to get approvals to look for shipwrecks, only to be met with total indifference. The very smallest requests for help in searching for documents or getting legal opinions from the government would be ignored. They’d get verbal assurance that the government was not interested. Then if they’d find something, suddenly the government would charge in and declare that it was all theirs and the finders would be lucky if they stayed out of jail for ‘plundering’ what belonged to the government. Governments have even tried to grab what was clearly in international waters and had no prior claim or any kind of reasonable case for state ownership. Greed affects them just as it does everyone else.
Wonder why that should be, after all, the sailors are still as dead either way, their loss just as tragic, whether war or peactime.
Why was she carrying several tons of gold?
I suppose you are actually talking about the HMS Edinburgh. It carried gold from russia as payment for war material from the Allies.
Ah, thank you. I was wondering why the hell Margaret Thatcher was sending four or five tons of gold down to the Falklands!
I wonder what would happen if some salvagers tried to grab the nuclear warheads off some of the torpedoes of the sunken USS Scorpion.
There is well-established maritime law on this. That said, with very old wrecks, there is a never-ending tension between the protection offered to war graves and the rights of a salvager. Add tot hat claims of territorial seas and whatnot, you have a field that keeps kegs of lawyers employed.
What pisses me off is the wreck would still be sitting at the bottom of the ocean if the treasure hunter did not commit his time and money to the search. The country that wants it ,did nothing to bring it up.
Does this mean I can come into your house and take the music CDs you never use and the books you never read? Can I take a house which the owners do not use?
You seem to be unclear on the concept of property. It gives the owner of the property the right to do whatever he wants with his property, including nothing at all. It gives the owner the right to keep it as it is so that he has the choice of using it in the future as he sees fit.
If the owner would rather leave a shipwreck undisturbed for whatever reasons and the law gives him that right, why should anyone else have anything to say?
If aunt Edna was buried wearing her jewelry because that’s what the heirs wanted you have no right to take it just because “it is not being used”.
If I by accident drop a piece of jewelry overboard it does not become your property just because you found it.
I’d be careful on the snarking there. As far as I understand it, the concept of “property” is hardly absolute and inviolate, otherwise we wouldn’t have concepts like adverse possession, abandoned property, salvage and so on. In short, under some circumstances and for certain types of property, yeah, if you are failing to use something that’s ostensibly your property, another can lay claim to it. (Again, according to my layman’s understanding.)
My point is that what
really means is that the treasure hunter is doing is committing his time and money to steal what does not belong to him if the law recognises it is still someone else’s property.
You seem to be under the impression that the “law” is consistent and absolute regardless of country or jurisdiction. There is a reason that we have international waters, and a differing code of conduct in them. There is also a distinction to be made between property like goods and products and that of land or buildings. A government would be hard pressed to make an ethical claim to a piece of crockery lying at the bottom of the sea for two hundred years. Gold and silver are no different, the ocean is not a bank. With property, you have to make at least a token effort to secure or maintain it to lay a claim of ownership to it. So while it would be ethically, if not legally wrong for me to take that bit of jewelry you dropped knowing that you were looking for it actively, it wouldn’t be wrong for me to pick it up after you left it lying out on the ground for three years and had stopped looking for it two and half years ago and had collected the insurance on it.
No, but the next time I leave a book on a park bench for five years, have at it.
Governments having a hard time making “ethical” claims? Ethics never stops them.
Like Sam Stone I too used to read about the legal hassles treasure hunters would face. It is appalling really. I vaguely recall one case where someone found a substantial pile of sunken treasure. It had sunk ~300 years ago. Governments and just about everyone else descended on the treasure hunters like locusts. The country that flagged the ship, the companies that owned the ship (yeah…even though the same company did not exist its assets and ownership could be tracked so someone “owned” it still), the insurance company that paid off on the sunken ship ages ago, museums who wanted it for historical purposes, whose territorial waters it was currently in, individual families that might have had some claim to the money on the ship and so on. It was freaking shocking. Plague of locusts is barely hyperbole in this.
I too agree the stuff had been down there for hundreds of years and no one was looking for it. Treasure hunting on that scale is expensive and if someone wants to bother it should be theirs after all that time. But alas it does not work that way. At the end of it all I think the treasure hunters can demand payment for salvaging the thing (cover costs incurred in looking then looting the thing) but beyond that if they walk away with one dubloon I think they count themselves lucky.
Poor turn of phrase on my part . I know that ethics never stops them, that’s why I mentioned in my first response that I’d probably just loot the thing and disseminate it quietly.