Posted on 11/05/2006 2:15:14 PM PST by grjr21
Taking a company public is risky. Searching for buried treasure is chancier. Staking a claim on government artifacts may be plain lunacy.
Put them together, however, and you have the makings of a viable treasure-hunting business. Or so hopes a group of Bucks County entrepreneurs, who took their shipwreck salvage business public last year and now have an international fracas on their hands.
Sovereign Exploration Associates International Inc., of Newtown, believes it has pinpointed off the coast of Nova Scotia a trove of 19th-century artifacts and coins from the White House and U.S. Treasury that the British plundered during the War of 1812.
The company says the long-missing loot may have gone down on a British 18-gun brig, the HMS Fantome, which sank in 1814 off the coast of Halifax, then a key British port. Historians say the missing artifacts would have immeasurable historic value, but no documents have turned up proving or disproving the Fantome actually carried them.
None of that bothers modern treasure hunters. Their age-old pursuit long has been grist for Hollywood films, childhood games and seafaring eccentrics. Now, swashbuckling entrepreneurs are giving the high-risk business a 21st-century makeover in a bid for investors and public respect.
The Fantome itself is gone, pulverized in the turbulent Canadian waters that have claimed hundreds of ships. But Robert D. Baca, the entrepreneur from Ivyland Borough who runs Sovereign and held the sole license to explore the site, said its divers had found about 60 pre-1814 U.S. and British coins, cannonballs and musket shot, and copper buttons and copper sheathing embossed with English naval or royal emblems.
Baca, a onetime medical-device marketer, cautions in interviews that Sovereign still lacks proof it found the Fantome. Then he tantalizes with tales of lost U.S. treasure, including 200-year-old White House silverware and rare silver dollars minted in Philadelphia.
Sovereign's "pile," in salvage speak, has set off a transatlantic storm. A Halifax-based documentarian, John Wesley Chisholm, began criticizing the company last year even as he himself considered filming - not excavating - the site. Chisholm said Canada "should not be farming out our own marine cultural heritage to treasure hunters. We should do it ourselves, or we should do it with oversight."
Then earlier this year, the British government staked its own claim and persuaded Nova Scotia museum authorities to withdraw Sovereign's salvage permit. Britain "wants to protect the remains of our servicemen and women who have lost their lives serving their country," the British Embassy said.
There may be a hitch: Nobody died when the Fantome hit a shoal and took hours to sink. A British Embassy official in Ottawa, speaking on condition he not be identified by name, said London is concerned about remains of any Britons in the area strewn with other British wrecks. The official emphasized Britain was not claiming any U.S. booty itself: "Stolen fair and square? We're not saying that."
Nova Scotia is demanding 10 percent of the value of items recovered, as allowed under provincial law. It has impounded the items Sovereign found so far.
The U.S. government wants its stuff back, if it's there, but for the moment is officially on the sidelines. "If items are recovered, the U.S. will work with the U.K. and Nova Scotia on their return," said James K. Foster, a U.S. Embassy spokesman in Ottawa.
Sovereign, for its part, wants any valuable coins and documentary rights but promises to hand over historic artifacts, Baca said. Company officials plan to meet British authorities in London soon, although resolving the standoff and retrieving and verifying any artifacts likely will take several years, he said.
You can't tell me that the British don't have big brass ones.
I couldn't say that with a straight face.
Am I the only one who saw the title and expected the Clintons to be involved somehow?
Silly....it's 1812 booty.
You know damn well it's Bush's Fault
No you're not.
I had to double check the date and I still won't swear he didn't
Ping - thoroughly modern?
That would be "Wretches to Riches".
Sovereign's "pile," in salvage speak, has set off a transatlantic storm. A Halifax-based documentarian, John Wesley Chisholm, began criticizing the company last year even as he himself considered filming - not excavating - the site. Chisholm said Canada "should not be farming out our own marine cultural heritage to treasure hunters. We should do it ourselves, or we should do it with oversight."Luckily, now Chisholm's just a broken man on a Halifax pier...
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