Finders, keepers for this treasure

By A TIMES EDITORIAL
Published June 3, 2007

We've all heard the expression that possession is nine-tenths of the law. Well, it's not really true. Most of the time the law requires squatters to leave the private property they occupy, and possessors of stolen property to return it to its legitimate owner. That said, when it comes to ships sunk in the ocean depths a hundred or more years ago, outside any nation's territorial waters, and found only at great expense and effort, finders should be keepers.

Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc. is a Tampa-based shipwreck recovery company. It uses historical records, modern ocean floor exploration technology and a dollop of good luck to find ships laden with treasure that went down centuries ago. The company can spend years and tens of millions of dollars in its hunts. But when a ship is found, the cache can be very rich. In 2003, the company recovered the SS Republic, a ship that went down in 1865 in a hurricane near Georgia. That find generated $75-million.

Today the company claims to have found a number of wrecks and it is attempting to establish legal rights to salvage them. One of those might be a 17th-century ship code-named the Black Swan that Spain says sunk in 1641 while carrying Spanish funds. Odyssey has already recovered 500,000 silver coins from this wreck, though its identity has yet to be established.

Maritime lawyer James Goold, who is representing Spain, says the nation retains ownership of its property indefinitely and there is no abandonment by the passage of time. He says that Odyssey has no rights to any of the yield from the wreck. Greg Stemm of Odyssey says it has the better legal posture and that a judge will determine the equities of their claim.

Admiralty law is extremely arcane and each side has its own legal precedents to point to. But there is also something called the law of common sense, which says that personal property lost at sea for 366 years is no longer "owned." You lost it, you've stopped looking for it, and anyone who finds it after so long a period should be able to claim it without being accused of stealing.

Odyssey says that the Black Swan is not sitting in Spanish waters or the territorial waters of any nation. If historic recoveries of sunken vessels are to continue, then salvors who operate in international waters must be allowed to reap the rewards of their endeavors. Theirs is a high-stakes gamble, and as much as they might end up enriching themselves, these modern-day treasure hunters are also helping to fill in important pieces of the historical record. Odyssey has an educational arm that develops curricula and museum shows related to its research and discoveries.

The law should encourage further salvaging efforts, and not lock the secrets of the deep away until the nations who claim ownership deign to try to find and recover the property themselves. Otherwise, we may have to wait another 300 years.

[Last modified June 2, 2007, 21:18:33]