Robert Kurson: Curators Under the Sea
[Robert Kurson is the author of “Shadow Divers” and, most recently, "Crashing Through: A True Story of Risk, Adventure and the Man Who Dared to See."]
LAST month, a Florida-based treasure-hunting company made perhaps the richest undersea score ever. It discovered, somewhere in the Atlantic, a Colonial-era shipwreck containing more than 500,000 silver coins and hundreds of gold coins. Total estimated value, according to one coin marketer: $500 million.
In days of yore, pirates would have swarmed to such a bounty, declaring the treasure their own. Today, it attracts a new breed of raiders who believe just as strongly that the treasure is rightfully theirs — and who get just as angry when things don’t go their way. They are the academics — professors, curators, historians and others who study, archive and preserve historical artifacts. Many of them despise the commercial treasure hunters for, as they see it, rampaging through shipwrecks with little regard for the delicate history at hand.
They claim that because the professional treasure hunter’s first priority is to sell what he finds, artifacts will be rushed from shipwreck to market without being carefully preserved or photographed and cataloged to record their historic value. They charge that even if the treasure hunter cared to preserve and catalog his discoveries, he couldn’t, because he is not properly trained to do such subtle and delicate work.
One professor recently summed up these arguments by saying, “If these guys went and planted a bunch of dynamite around the Sphinx, or tore up the floor of the Acropolis, they’d be in jail in a minute.”
The same case was made in 1991, when two recreational scuba divers discovered a World War II German U-boat — complete with its 56-man crew — that had sunk just off New Jersey. No military expert or historian had known of this wreck, its sailors or its story, and so it fell to these two ordinary men to embark on a six-year, fantastically dangerous quest to solve the mystery.
As it happened, there was no treasure aboard this U-boat, but academics made virtually the same accusation: the divers, they said, were going to trample history in their quest to put a name on the warship.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. Not for the divers who undertook huge risks to preserve the U-boat. And not for treasure hunters, who have even greater incentives to be careful with their finds....
Read entire article at NYT
LAST month, a Florida-based treasure-hunting company made perhaps the richest undersea score ever. It discovered, somewhere in the Atlantic, a Colonial-era shipwreck containing more than 500,000 silver coins and hundreds of gold coins. Total estimated value, according to one coin marketer: $500 million.
In days of yore, pirates would have swarmed to such a bounty, declaring the treasure their own. Today, it attracts a new breed of raiders who believe just as strongly that the treasure is rightfully theirs — and who get just as angry when things don’t go their way. They are the academics — professors, curators, historians and others who study, archive and preserve historical artifacts. Many of them despise the commercial treasure hunters for, as they see it, rampaging through shipwrecks with little regard for the delicate history at hand.
They claim that because the professional treasure hunter’s first priority is to sell what he finds, artifacts will be rushed from shipwreck to market without being carefully preserved or photographed and cataloged to record their historic value. They charge that even if the treasure hunter cared to preserve and catalog his discoveries, he couldn’t, because he is not properly trained to do such subtle and delicate work.
One professor recently summed up these arguments by saying, “If these guys went and planted a bunch of dynamite around the Sphinx, or tore up the floor of the Acropolis, they’d be in jail in a minute.”
The same case was made in 1991, when two recreational scuba divers discovered a World War II German U-boat — complete with its 56-man crew — that had sunk just off New Jersey. No military expert or historian had known of this wreck, its sailors or its story, and so it fell to these two ordinary men to embark on a six-year, fantastically dangerous quest to solve the mystery.
As it happened, there was no treasure aboard this U-boat, but academics made virtually the same accusation: the divers, they said, were going to trample history in their quest to put a name on the warship.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. Not for the divers who undertook huge risks to preserve the U-boat. And not for treasure hunters, who have even greater incentives to be careful with their finds....