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Astonishing fight over hidden treasure worth billions that anyone can find
The lure of sunken gold under the waves has wreck-hunting salvage investigators scouring the sea beds to make their millions – but ownership of the lustrous loot is always hotly contested
A treasure trove of gold coins, Chinese porcelain, emeralds and pearls worth £15 billion from sunken Spanish galleon San Jose has been discovered at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea.
Images of the 'holy grail' of shipwrecks were taken by salvage investigators this week, showing the final resting place of the warship. Its contents were bound for the Spanish treasury until it was ambushed by the British Navy three centuries ago.
Since then, adventurers have dreamed of finding its legendary loot – including 200 tonnes of gold, silver, gems and possibly diamonds – originally destined for Panama.
The lure of retrieving sunken gold has seen wreck-hunting treasure seekers go to extraordinary lengths - often in very controversial circumstances.
The Spanish frigate Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes was sunk by the British off the coast of Portugal in 1804 - taking with it millions of silver – known as pieces of eight – and gold coins, said to be worth £370 million.
A US treasure hunter, Odyssey Marine Exploration, scoured the sea bed in 2007 and recovered almost 500,000 of them, taking them back to America.
An ensuing legal battle resulted in the treasure returned to Spain, where it is now on display in a museum in Cartagena.
A notorious wreck hunter in 1988 fought for the new-found riches of the Californian gold rush, from the 'ship of gold," which sank off the coast of South Carolina in 1857.
The SS Central America was carrying 21 tonnes of gold nuggets, ingots, dust and coins when a hurricane sank it on its way from Panama to New York City - scattering the gold on the sea bed.
Treasure hunter Tommy Thompson used sonar to bring up thousands of gold bars and coins, worth around £220m today. He was jailed in 2015 after failing to disclose the whereabouts of the missing loot.
And while a judge earlier this year agreed to end his sentence, saying he was no longer convinced 'that further incarceration is likely to coerce compliance,' he immediately began a two year sentence for a related criminal contempt charge.
Finding sunken treasure is no mean feat - explaining why salvage companies want a cut of the spoils.
Shipwreck detective Nigel Pickford, a maritime historian and author of Samuel Pepys and the Strange Wrecking of the Gloucester: The Shipwreck That Shocked Restoration Britain, tracks down wrecks.
He tells The Mirror: 'I start with history books. I like to get back to original letters, diaries, journals, log books, particularly if there were other ships in the fleet which had log books. Perhaps those involved in the sinking or battle.'
The San Jose, he says, was relatively easy to locate, because it was extremely well documented in log books of British ships involved in the skirmish. 'They could work out say within probably 100 square miles where that ship was,' he says. 'But now we're searching for wrecks in 10,000 square miles.'
According to the United Nations, there are at least three million shipwrecks lying across our ocean floors, not all contain treasure, but are still of historical interest.
As a maritime nation, many lie within our territorial waters.
'When you think that everything went by ship until quite recently, there are many shipwrecks around the British Isles that haven't been found. And there are some interesting aeroplane wrecks too – with gold on them,' says Nigel.
'There are probably millions of wrecks around the world. But there are many we can't touch – like the ones in shallow water around Europe, which obviously means they get looted instead.
'You'd be surprised how much is still being shipped around. It might not necessarily be gold coins, but they're still high-value cargos,' says Nigel.
But looters often beat bona fide recovery operators to the treasure. 'I was looking at a 17th century Dutch wreck recently which does have the location, and there are quite a lot of Spanish shipwrecks that are charted, but they're always in shallow water. These days I'm really only interested in deep wrecks,' says Nigel.
'Trawling destroys more shipwrecks than anything. Shallow shipwrecks may be easier to find, like the San Jose, but the deeper you go, the better the bounty.
'A shallow wreck might have been trawled through, dispersed, or looted. And wreck diving is dangerous. Things go wrong, and divers can only really go down to about 300ft. You can see much better using remote-operated vehicles (ROVs). And if you're looking in 15,000ft of water with an ROV, you can be fairly sure there won't be many people that have been there before.'
The type of ship also matters. Wooden wrecks like the San Jose will fall apart if touched.
'You just need to know where the cargo that you're interested in might have been stowed,' says Nigel. 'You can see from the photos, coins from the San Jose are all over the sea bed. A bit of excavation with your ROVs will bring that stuff up.
'But steel wrecks have quite a high chance of still being intact. You might have to open it up on the seabed in order to get to the cargo. The most important thing on a steel wreck is to know the stowage.'
Lost deep under the waves, gold treasure can look as good now as on the day it sank.
'Gold doesn't tarnish but silver does – it goes black, but it's not seriously damaged,' explains Nigel.
'I've been working on an East India cargo with a lot of porcelain, which is almost perfect. It is extraordinary what remains on a sea bed, particularly if it's really deep and there's no oxygen.'
Meanwhile, thousands of First and Second World War ships are on salvage hunters' radars.
'My father Thomas Henry Pickford was in the Navy Salvage Department during World War II,' reveals Nigel, a teacher until he joined the family business.
'There was a lot of gold coming out of Europe before the Germans invaded,' he explains. 'France, Belgium and Holland were all trying to get their gold out, as was Britain. We shipped all our gold over to Canada.'
British steam merchant vessel RMS Gairsoppa was hit by a German U-boat in February 1941 and went down with 85 men and a cargo full of silver bullion.
A US exploration firm recovered 48 tons of silver worth £150 million in 2011, making it one of the largest and heaviest recoveries of precious metal from a shipwreck.
Passengers on board the passenger ship SS City of Cairo to Brazil didn't know their ship was carrying the multi-million pound cargo.
When the ship was hit by German torpedoes in November 1942, 109 people perished and its huge cache of Indian silver rupees, bound for melting for war materials in Britain, lay undisturbed until a British expedition discovered them 1,000 miles off the African coast in 2011.
One of the treasure wrecks Nigel was involved in salvaging was the £32m of silver bullion that went down with the SS Tilawa en route to East Africa in November 1942.
Japanese submarines torpedoed the ship, which was known as the Indian Titanic, killing 280 and more than 2,000 silver bars, due to be minted into coins, plunged to the sea bed near the Seychelles.
'I worked on a ship in the Indian Ocean with a very, very large cargo of bars of silver. That was technically extremely successful,' adds Nigel.
But while a British team successfully retrieved the treasure, a court ruled the bullion belonged to South Africa.
Many shipwreck finds end in a tussle between the countries who owned the ships, the country where the treasure was found, and the salvage companies, who want their share of the bounty.
And not just anybody can dive for treasure. 'There's all sorts of permits needed these days, especially environmental permits,' says Nigel.
'A country's territorial waters extend 12 nautical miles out, then there's the contingent zone which goes out another 12, then economic waters which can go out to 200 miles. Increasingly, nations are claiming control of all shipwrecks within economic waters.
'A friend of mine had his ship seized in Spain's territorial waters. He's adamant he was outside them. In UK waters you probably wouldn't get arrested in quite the same way, but it's best working in international waters.'
Even once a sunken wreck is found, many countries choose to leave the treasure where it is.
In 1771, a Dutch ship loaded with precious works of art destined for Catherine the Great of Russia was caught in a storm and sank.
'It was found off the coast of Finland in 1999,' says Nigel. 'But the archeologists say no one should touch anything. I don't know if the paintings have survived.'
Famous sunken treasure ships yet to be discovered include the 16th century Portuguese carrack Flor de Mar, which sank off Malaysia laden with treasure on its way to the king, and a British 17th century galleon, The Merchant Royal, which was carrying £1bn in gold sits untouched 30 miles off the coast of Cornwall.
Nigel says: 'Personally, I wouldn't waste my time with the Flor de Mar. I would be worried that a lot of the cargo has been pillaged.
'But I've looked for the Merchant Royal three times – it's a fantastic wreck. I'm sure I know where it is now!'
And there's the Portuguese galleon Santa Rosa, which sank off Brazil after a gunpowder explosion in 1726.
Nigel enthuses: 'It has a very, very valuable cargo of gold. Probably even more gold than the San Jose.'
A treasure hunter's work is clearly never dull!
