Posted on 11/30/2003 5:25:17 AM PST by sarcasm
t lay in darkness at the bottom of the Atlantic for more than a century, guarded only by the occasional shark. Now, the 150-year-old steamship has a visitor: a robot bristling with lights, cameras and mechanical arms that is picking its way through the wreckage, hauling up a fortune in gold and silver coins, eventually perhaps 30,000 of them.
The ship is the Republic, which sailed from New York in 1865, just after the Civil War, carrying 59 passengers and crew and a mixed cargo meant to help New Orleans recover from the war. About 100 miles off Georgia, battling a hurricane, it sank in waters a third of a mile deep.
Its cargo of lost coins, experts say, may now be worth up to $150 million; that would make it one of history's richest treasure wrecks, though far shy of the $400 million claimed to have been recovered in the 1980's from the Atocha, a Spanish galleon lost off Florida in 1622.
"It's a dream come true," said Dr. Donald H. Kagin, an expert on 19th-century coins who is advising the company that discovered the wreck. "There are piles of coins."
The company, Odyssey Marine Exploration of Tampa, Fla., announced the find in August and said it hoped to retrieve the coins. Today it is announcing that the treasure is real and is detailing its findings. So far, the company has retrieved more than 1,600 gold and silver coins. None are dated later than 1865, tending to confirm the wreck's identity, said Greg Stemm, the company's director of operations.
"For some reason, even the silver coins are in great condition," said Mr. Stemm, 46. "Part of it is surely the physical environment down there." The icy deep, explorers are finding, can often preserve objects, even precious metals like silver that normally corrode easily.
In the weeks ahead, the team expects to finish recovering coins and turn to salvaging other artifacts. Already, it has retrieved the ship's bell and hundreds of jars and bottles.
"It goes from pepper sauce to pickles to Champagne to mustard to patent medicine," Mr. Stemm said. "They're in beautiful condition and they tell a beautiful story of what the North thought the South needed after the war."
(He said he was puzzled about one thing. "It's the beginning of Reconstruction," he said. "In this valuable space, why were they sending down pickles?")
A public company, Odyssey sells stock and hopes to turn a profit mainly by setting up shipwreck museums and selling coins. It argues that coins have less archaeological value than cultural items like ship parts and navigational gear and that selling them is an ideal way to finance recoveries of purely historical interest.
Mr. Stemm says the company's mission is to haul up not just riches but enough artifacts to resurrect the spirit of forgotten ships and eras.
Not everyone agrees with this approach. While some academic experts praise it as a new window on the deep, others dismiss it as unprofessional and unscholarly.
Kevin J. Crisman, a marine archaeologist at the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University, said treasure hunters tended to inflate the estimated value of shipwrecks and to renege on promises to do archaeology. In the case of the Republic, he said, the prudent thing was to "wait until all the dust has settled."
Like many treasure hunts, the search for the Republic was a study in perseverance. For 16 years, Mr. Stemm and his colleagues probed the deep sea with sonar and robots, discovering scores of interesting wrecks and thousands of artifacts but never a mother lode.
Mr. Stemm and a partner, John C. Morris, bought their first marine robot in 1987, eager to hunt for deep wrecks rather than ones in shallow waters, where waves, storms and currents have thrown wreckage into disarray and where scuba divers often plunder what remains.
Their first big hit came in the Gulf of Mexico, near the Dry Tortugas, west of Key West. In the depths, they discovered a 17th-century Spanish merchant ship and hauled up not only pearls and jewelry but also wooden beams, olive jars and ballast stones, recording each item's position for archaeological analysis.
Although they excavated 17,000 artifacts, including gold chains and more than two dozen gold bars, the financial gains only just matched the millions spent on recovery.
Since then, Mr. Stemm and Mr. Morris, Odyssey's founders, have zeroed in exclusively on what appear to be rich wrecks, like the Republic.
Built in 1853, bearing tall masts as well as paddle wheels, it sailed from New York on Oct. 18, 1865. A storm hit off Georgia. For two days, the steamship fought wind and wave. Then the engine failed. The crew and passengers threw cargo overboard to lighten the ship. But the pumps failed and seawater poured in.
The Republic went down a week after it set sail. Most people made it into lifeboats and a raft: 42 men, women and children survived. But the cargo of money — $400,000 in coins, as described in newspapers of the day — went down with the ship.
Mr. Stemm and Mr. Morris began looking for the Republic in the early 1990's. But nothing came of the intermittent hunt until July when, some 100 miles southeast of Savannah, Ga., one of their sonars produced a ghostly tantalizing image. The company sent down a small robot. Its camera revealed a disintegrating hulk with identifiable parts like a paddle wheel and a giant steam engine.
At that point the team loaded the company's 250-foot recovery ship, the Odyssey Explorer, with advanced gear. Last month, the Explorer sailed into position over the decomposing wreck. Engineers lowered a tethered seven-ton robot.
In icy darkness at the bottom of the Atlantic, the robot took thousands of photographs, which the team made into a detailed photo mosaic to guide recovery work.
Near the wreck's bow, the team spotted a bronze bell. It was recovered and, though partly eroded, turned out to bear the letters "SSEE." The Republic was originally named the Tennessee, and the company in a statement said the bell positively identified the wreck.
Early this month, the team had the robot vacuum away sand from where the cache was believed to lie. A few coins appeared, then more. "They followed it like a trail of bread crumbs," Mr. Stemm said, "and came upon a cascade of gold coins."
To date, the company has recovered more silver than gold. "That caught us by surprise," Mr. Stemm said. He said Odyssey expected to find gold coins because silver was scarce in the Republic's day. Mr. Stemm noted that most of the coins they are finding now are gold.
Once numismatic experts have inspected the recovered coins, the company plans to release reports on their number, condition and value.
Mr. Stemm said Odyssey was talking to the company that insured the Republic's money shipment, adding that he expected the ship's finders would share some reasonable fraction of the proceeds with the insurer.
Dr. Kagin, who is an Odyssey investor as well as an adviser, said the company was different from its predecessors because it was public and would fully disclose its finds, work and revenues.
Mr. Stemm said Odyssey, after raising all the Republic's coins in the next few weeks, would then focus on archaeological recovery of other artifacts for a month or two.
After that, early next year, Odyssey plans to move its recovery ship to the Mediterranean over a wreck thought to be the Sussex, a British warship that sank in 1694. In partnership with the British government, the company plans to recover a cargo of coins that experts estimate might fetch as much as $4 billion, which would be a record haul.
"If real estate is location, location, location," Mr. Stemm said, "shipwrecks are research, research, research."
Not everyone agrees with this approach. . . . others dismiss it as unprofessional and unscholarly.
Kevin J. Crisman, a marine archaeologist at the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University, said . . . In the case of the Republic, he said, the prudent thing was to "wait until all the dust has settled."
There are always those who would nitpick others' prodigious efforts to bring these historical artifacts to light again. 135 years of "dust settling" isn'i enough? How about waiting until the Atlantic dries up?
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