REAL TREASURE

One of the most popular questions asked by non-divers of those that go under water is whether they ever found any treasure.

There is a frequently held misconception that every ship that makes passage across the ocean is loaded with bullion or that the captain's safe is stuffed with cash. People don't realise that  it is the job of the ship's agent to supply any cash required for port costs or crew wages when the vessel docks. However, the dream persists and it's a dream believed in by many divers.

People do find treasure, but it's not easy. Mel Fisher spent most of his life searching before he found the wreck of the Spanish treasure ship the Nuestra Señora de Atocha off the Florida Keys and untold riches were recovered. That's not counting the riches taken when a thief stole one of the gold bars that was later on display in the Mel Fisher museum in Key West.

Fisher knew that a fleet of treasure ships had sunk off Florida in 1715 but it took him and his crew 16 years before they found success. In 1985 they stumbled across a quarter of a million valuable artefacts, coins and gold bars with an estimated value of more than half-a-billion US dollars.

The HMS Edinburgh was sunk in 1941 in the Barents Sea while transporting Russian gold bullion from Murmansk to help pay for war supplies. Much of that gold was later discovered and recovered by Yorkshireman Keith Jessop and his divers. It was valued at more than one hundred million US dollars.

The so-called Nanking Treasure was composed of porcelain that had been transported along with a cargo of tea (the more valuable part of the cargo at the time) and this was recovered only after a lot of preparation. It was found in the wreck of a Dutch East Indiaman, the Geldermalsen, in 1981 and the porcelain was later sold at Christie's in Amsterdam. Its sale raised millions of Dutch guilders.

The same treasure hunter, Michael Hatcher, also discovered the wreck of the Tek Sing in 1999 and salvaged 350 000 pieces of Chinese porcelain that were auctioned in Germany in 2000 for 22.4 million Deutschmarks.

However, the diver's dream of the safe containing bullion on every ship that sinks continues, and it was noted that the first item even Jacques Cousteau lifted on visiting the wreck of the Thistlegorm in the 1950s, was the captain's safe. It is not recorded what was in it.

Sean McCabe, a commercial diver who often works at the underwater studio in Pinewood, the location of many scenes from films like Pirates of the Caribbean, heard about a safe that had fallen through the wooden planking of the pier at Southend-on-Sea in Essex. This was said to be the world's longest pleasure pier but it caught fire in 2005 and the safe had been lost when it fell through the burning floorboards into the water below. A pal of Sean's had recently discovered a small safe in the river Thames near London Airport and it had turned out to be “stuffed full” with American dollars. Dollar signs rolled in Sean's eyes once he got the salvage rights to the Southend Pier safe.

Sean hired massive lifting bags to raise the safe to the surface and an expensive crane to lift it from there. It proved to be a difficult and expensive job. When the safe was opened, it contained only £14 and some loose change to which Sean had the rights of 50 per cent.

Treasure doesn't have to be in precious metals, jewellery or cash though. Two diving instructors stocked the shop of their fledgling dive school with second-hand equipment by searching the bottom of an inland lake that was popular with divers who went there to practise techniques. They made it a point to visit early every Monday morning and regularly found many lost items, as did a diving instructor in Mallorca who went regularly to dive a remote bay that was a popular weekend haunt of rich boat owners. He found Raybans, an expensive Blancpain watch, towels, champagne glasses and notably, a Johnson 50 hp outboard motor that started on first pull once it was recovered to dry land. Other divers used to regularly search the shallow waters of the beaches in the Balearics with metal detectors and made a good living from selling the lost jewellery they found, that is until the authorities put a stop to it.

Commercial divers working in Scotland were surveying a stone pier. It had been subject to severe floods during winter and a restaurant that was built upon the pier had been totally washed away. Their job was to survey the remaining structure and make sure that it was still safe. It should have taken a couple of days but the job took a lot longer.

That's because the divers discovered the entire contents of the restaurant's wine cellar and its liquor store waiting to be collected from the muddy bottom of the loch. Collecting up all the bottles that were in perfect condition apart from damage to their labels took a lot longer than the survey. I don't suppose that any of them were returned to their rightful owner, by then the insurance company that covered the risk.

An English dive guide, working out in Egypt, spent six years removing brass fittings from the wreck of the Carnatic, a nineteenth-century P&O steam sailing ship that sank at Sha'ab Abu Nuhas in the Red Sea. The vessel had been carrying in excess of a million dollars’ worth of gold at the time, but it was salvaged soon after her sinking. He removed and raised portholes, brass lamps fitted with gimbals called angel lamps and even the brass compass binnacle; this latter treasure had to be left temporarily on the reef due to his running out of air and another British dive boat skipper took the opportunity to carry it on the final leg of its journey to the surface and to his own private collection of brass. However, despite this setback, he regularly shipped the stuff back to England where most of it is stored today in a garden shed.

The Egyptian authorities soon got wise to this once the local diving industry got properly under way and heavy penalties are imposed on anyone interfering with or removing artefacts, or even parts of coral reef, from anywhere in Egyptian waters.

Peter Collings discovered this when he was found carrying an empty nineteenth-century bottle from the Carnatic. Unfortunately for him, Collings was spotted by an Egyptian dive guide, who tried to take it from him and return it to the wreck. A dangerous underwater fight broke out. Peter later claimed he was merely moving the bottle to a safe hiding place so that nobody else would steal it. Doubly unfortunate for Mr Collings was the fact that the whole incident was recorded on video by another Egyptian dive guide, Khaled Katawi. Gamal Lamouny, owner of the boat from which both the Egyptian guides came, tried to have Collings arrested on a charge of attempted murder, but luckily for him nothing was done about it.

British war wrecks are often designated as war graves and protected. It is an offence to take anything from them. Leicestershire resident Duncan Keates found this out when he boasted on his Facebook page of a fancy porthole he had taken from the wreck of the HMS Duke of Albany, a Great War casualty. After a police investigation, he was found guilty at Kirkwall Sheriff Court and fined £1400. We don't know what happened to the rest of his group of 10 divers that were photographed posing in front of the dive boat Jeane Elaine with a huge pile of trophies, including several portholes and the maker's plate apparently liberated at the same time. No doubt they were subject to similar police scrutiny.

Alex Double came across an unidentified old wreck loaded with porcelain, or so he thought, while diving during a southern Red Sea trip to the waters of the Hanish Islands of the Yemen. A friend carried a couple of examples back to London for him to have them valued at Sotheby's. Alas, they turned out to be pristine examples of cheap chinaware typical of the early twentieth century and less than a hundred years old.

The best story of all, concerns a diver who wishes to remain anonymous for obvious reasons. He stumbled across the recent wreck of an expensive motor cruiser that nobody seemed to have reported. It is thought that it might have been used by people smuggling drugs from North Africa to Spain and had suffered severe damage in some sort of high-speed collision, possibly with the nearby rocks that broke the surface a hundred metres or so from the sheer cliffs that formed the coastline. He assumed that running without lights, a lone navigator might have lost concentration and hit the rocks at high speed in the darkness. There was no sign of any body but from the otherwise pristine condition of the wreck, events had occurred very soon before his discovery.

The solitary diver entered the smashed-up vessel as it lay on its side like some discarded toy and found a cupboard that was secured by a heavy padlock. Armed with the appropriate tools he broke the hinges that secured its door. It took many days to dry out the millions of Spanish pesetas he found in bundles stacked inside and a lot longer to exchange the notes in small amounts for the sterling equivalent back home in the UK.

The incidents of discovered treasure are few and far between and the legal risks can be considerable. I would suggest the best anyone can hope for is to stay safe and treasure the experience.