Stories of buried treasure and sunken vessels float through the mind of most children at one time or another in their life. And some children just never seem to grow up, continually searching for ships resting of the sea floor, laden with gold, silver, and jewels worth millions of dollars. Such is the story of the crew members of Odyssey Marine Exploration, a salvage company based out of Tampa, Florida, that scours the ocean floor all over the world to find sunken ships.
Recently, Odyssey brought back from an expedition 500,000 pieces of gold and silver from a location that it kept guarded and undisclosed. Claiming to have found the British ship named Merchant Royal, Odyssey says that the historic find is beyond any national territorial waters, thus claiming that they can keep their discovery.
The Merchant Royal is believed to have gone down in 1641 around the Western Approaches of the English Channel, somewhere near the Isles of Scilly. Returning from a voyage to Mexico with thousands of gold and silver coins, and jewels, the ship was commanded by Captain John Limbrey, who oversaw the 80 crew members on board. After the ship sank, the loss was so grave and important that proceedings at the House of Commons were interrupted to break the news.
Odyssey seems to have found the shipwreck late last year, since court records show that Odyssey Marine Exploration petitioned for exclusion rights to a salvage site about 40 miles off the southern coast of England. Just last month, the judge presiding over the petition granted Odyssey those exclusive rights. Although there is a possibility that the ship may not actually be the Merchant Royal, very few other ships were carrying that much in treasure. And since British waters only extend 12 nautical miles, the find did not have to be reported, although the British government was aware of the project near the Western Approaches. Odyssey did eventually report its findings, however.
Because of Odyssey’s concerns of security regarding the shipwreck site, they chartered a jet to carry to the United States hundreds of plastic containers overflowing with coins, each coin averaging a sale of at least $1000, and some fetching much more than that. Odyssey hopes to find even more treasure at the site using remote-controlled submarines to dive the shipwreck. Depending of who comes forward for some of the profits, Odyssey could retain up to 90% of the profits from the expedition.
Although Odyssey’s co-chairman, Greg Stemm, said, “Rather than a shout of glee, it is more being able to exhale for the first time in a long time,” Odyssey won’t even stop to take a breath. They have recently been awarded permission from the Spanish government to resume a suspended search for the HMS Sussex, which was leading a fleet of British ships through the Mediterranean in order to confront the French in battle in 1694 when it sank near the Strait of Gibraltar.
