Sure, but either we’re discussing the legal aspect of the situation, and then, it’s up to courts, treaties, whatever, and it’s a factual question. And nobody in the thread seems to know what rules might apply. Stating “IMO abandoned property is up for the taking” doesn’t cut it.
Or we’re discussing on whether or not treasure hunters deserve to keep what they found, basically in our humble and arbitrary opinion, and I’m perfectly allowed to compare treasure hunters searching for wrecks at sea and treasure hunters searching for tombs on land. And it happens that it’s not just because Peruvian law says so that I think treasure hunters shouldn’t search for and loot historical sites. So, I feel perfectly fine comparing both kind of treasure hunters. As I wrote, I’m not going to shed a tear if they end up with nothing.
Certainly if my ship filled with cargo sinks I’d say that it is still mine tomorrow and people should not go looting it. If I leave it there and do nothing and someone 200 years from now finds it I’d say it’s theirs since the original owner (me) is long gone and I have relinquished any claim to it. Maybe (and a big maybe) if my descendants have been actively looking for it for 200 years they might have a case that it was never abandoned.
As for a country laying claim again I would say if the country abandoned it then it is anyone who finds it. If the country really wants the wreck they certainly have the wherewithal to go get it.
As for the cemetery claims I find that kind of bogus. 200 years down the road I guarantee there is nothing left of the humans sitting at the bottom of the ocean and I would hardly call it a cemetery. That is in IMO anyway.
Definitely a factual answer, and I think the answer is that wrecks in international waters are open to salvage by any party…there is no ownership rights to such wrecks according to maritime law AFAIK. I’ll see if I can look that up when I get back to my hotel room tonight if no one else posts it before hand.
Well, you can certainly make any comparisons you like…but that doesn’t mean they make much sense.
C’est la vie. I feel a bit more sympathy for the treasure hunters from the OP than you do…and a whole lot less sympathy for the greedy governments trying to pull a fast one and swipe the loot.
Obviously the courts entertained other people claiming a piece of the treasure. The court ruled against them because it felt they had either clearly abandoned their claim by not actively maintaining paperwork (insurance companies) or were too far removed (Columbia) but they got their day in court and were not rejected out of hand. Sounds like someone else could make a claim on the loot without having found it given sufficient attachment to the find.
Why? What is the essential difference between historical valuable items in a ship and the same items on land? If I think individuals have no business digging up the latter, why should I think differently in the former case?
And greed isn’t the motivation of treasure hunters? Obviously, it is, since otherwise they wouldn’t have an issue giving up what they found. Why should I have a particular sympathy for their brand of greediness?
By what right? The government has done nothing to locate, secure, curate, or recover the property. Moreover, most of those ships were insured by private firms or the government and the costs were written off and paid for long ago. If you are maintaining that the original owner was the government, then how about the peoples of the region that the gold was mined in using slave labor? Or the Spanish who oversaw it and melted it into bullion? You can keep going back until it’s raw material, it’s pointless.
The commissioners of the vessel are dead, and the remains have no value other than historical significance. The Insurance company might have a claim but they have failed to perform any of the tasks that the government failed to do. So again, other than “I said it was mine” what argument does the government have?
Why characterize it as “greed”? By that token any job anyone does is just them being greedy.
Salvaging is an expensive undertaking. They assume a lot of financial risk in going out and looking for stuff. If they find nothing they still had to pay for the boat and crew and all that and it can take them months or more of effort. If they go to the effort why should they not profit from their work?
No, it’s a matter of an item on land being ‘owned’ by the country where that item sits and having the right to decide if and how those items will be excavated and preserved. An item in the deep ocean isn’t owned by anyone and probably would never be found but for groups like Odyssey searching for them.
You see the difference?
Who said anything about greed? While I’m sure you have no sympathy (or even innate understanding) of greed as a motivator, I’m curious why you would have more sympathy for government greed as opposed to personal greed. Ah…never mind, strike that. I can see perfectly well why government greed wouldn’t bother you but the personal type would set your teeth on edge.
Maybe. Anyway, my point was that you can’t say that the government/insurer/whatever is greedy because it wants the loot while ignoring the fact that the motivation of the treasure hunter was also to get his hands on the loot. How does he get the moral high ground?
Well…a thief too might put a lot of work into breaking in a house. It doesn’t make him deserving of the loot. Or, in my more similar example, it applies also to tomb looters who might put a lot of efforts into locating and excavating an historical site.
Again, treasure hunters know what legal problems they might face. They’re doing this job for profit. I see nothing particularly noble in their job, at the contrary. If they insist on trying, that’s their privilege. If they lose the loot following a court decision, I’ve zero issue with that.
Maybe it all falls down on the view one has of treasure hunters. If you view them as noble adventurers and I view them as greedy looters (somehow caricaturing in both cases), we’re unlikely to agree on what they deserve for their efforts.
They don’t have to. The shipwrecks are lost, not abandoned.
Typically if insurance pays a claim ownership is transferred to them, or the property is destroyed.
You can go back as far as you like but you will never find the salvager in the list of potential owners.
The argument isn’t “I said it was mine”, the argument is that “it is mine, and always has been”. I don’t understand the confusion. Retaining ownership of lost property is undisputed in our legal and moral code.
I don’t see where freelance scavangers have any claim at all. Just because you find something doesn’t mean it’s yours. I see it as being comparable to archaeological finds. Shipwrecks should get the same protection from the looting of artifacts, destruction of a historically significant sites and, in some cases, out and out grave robbing. These people should get real jobs.
Treis, I don’t understand your point of view at all. If somebody finds something that has been “lost” for longer then anyone living has even been alive, I don’t see how that law is even applicable. There is a difference between “lost” and “lost at sea” The former implies that it might be found, the latter is code for " It’s gone man, let it go." That property is considered destroyed and treated as such. I take issue with the idea that a person cannot leave his or her property abandoned and not have recourse, but a government ostensibly can. That claim is only as good as the power to physically secure it, and in most of these cases, they can’t do that because they can’t be arsed to even figure out where the bloody thing is. I have NO sympathy for governments that can’t be bothered to secure these valuable sites.
Nobody would care if it was a few broken plates and some silverware, but as soon as money comes into the picture suddenly there is all sorts of moral codes? I don’t buy it for a second.
Archaeological artifacts are not free for the taking for nyone who digs them up. Why should shipwrecks be any different? Stealing the gold from a shipwreck is no different than looting a Pharaoh’s tomb.
Yes, and I said so much previously, if you reread my posts. From a legal point of view, if there’s a factual answer about who owns what, then, post it. I don’t have the knowledge necessary to answer this question.
But in the post you were responding to, I was referring to my own perception of the issue. Which is that I don’t see much difference. I don’t like people looting historical sites on land, so I don’t like people looting historical sites at sea, either.
As for “probably would never be found but for groups like Odyssey” : how would you know? Obviously, the existence of the wreck and its approximate location is known, or else, Odyssey wouldn’t be able to locate it. There are plenty of archaeological sites on land that are known to exist and yet not precisely located, and/or excavated. They aren’t lost forever. Someday, they will be searched. It’s the same with wrecks. Maybe it will take another century for a purely scientific expedition to search for them. So what?
A recent example would be search for French explorer La Perouse ships. People had a vague idea about their whereabouts, but only recently were they actively searched. It might have been done 50 years ago or 50 years later. Again, so what? Why should I prefer the job to be done by “treasure hunters”?
You said something about greed. You wrote : “and a whole lot less sympathy for the greedy governments trying to pull a fast one and swipe the loot” And precisely, I feel the same about “treasure hunters” : “greedy hunters trying to swipe the loot” . I don’t see them having a particular right to benefit from the content of a ship lost at sea.
And yes, I suspect you can see perfectly why I’ve less of an issue with governments keeping whatever is found. Loot owned by a government will benefit everybody and will be displayed in museums.
Also, the motivations being different, the enterprise will be conducted differently, in all likelihood with scientific, historical and archaeological concerns being given prominence. I’ve no such guarantee with private individuals or companies doing the same. And the existence of pure looters with zero concerns besides the monetary value and the ease of sell of the ship’s content (like, recently, a Greek wreck in the Mediterranean sea) certainly doesn’t help me thinking otherwise.
Even assuming that “Odyssey” gives a great importance to such scientific concerns, I don’t see much reason to encourage such enterprises, generally speaking, in the same way I wouldn’t want to encourage private companies wanting to search for yet undiscovered sites on land, with the expectation of turning a profit.
I don’t see how the passage of time changes anything. The ship was lost 5 seconds after it sunk, 5 days, 5 weeks, 5 years, 5 centuries, and would have been lost 5 millennia from now. The passage of time doesn’t change something from being lost.
There’s no logical, legal, or moral reason to make this distinction.
No, it’s considered lost, and is treated as such. Again, there is no logical, legal, or moral reason to consider a shipwreck as destroyed property.
(1) The property isn’t abandoned, and (2) Private owners have the same legal rights to shipwrecks as sovereign governments.
They can’t secure it because the property is lost. I don’t understand the difficulty in this concept.
Funny how people tend to value valuable things, and not value things that don’t have value.
Somehow, I suspect some people would care about broken plates and silverwares. Those people would be archaeologists, and the governments that employ them, and probably not treasure hunters. That’s precisely part of the problem.
Are there not privately funded museums who employ professional archeologists? Surely they have the right to conduct excavations in international waters just as much as federally funded ones.
And surely if I find your wallet lying on the ground, I have as much right to it as you do. Particularly if you and I both knew it was yours. And if you knew I had found it, I would be astonished if you, you greedy person, demanded that I give it back to you, when I did all the work of finding and picking it up and you didn’t!