Treasure News 2001 - 2003

Rough seas and tricky schedules caused the salvagers with Amelia Research and Recovery to postpone their work off Tiger Shores Beach, where a local surfer recently recalled a 25 year old sighting of a possible shipwreck.

So it's off for the winter to another wreck, just west of Key West. "That's our normal routine, to winter in the Keys," said John Popin, vice president of the treasure-seeking company. "We're itching to get going. We've just been sitting around."

Since the crew — and its four-story-high lift boat named the Polly-L — arrived on the Treasure Coast in September, there were only a few weeks when the seas were calm enough to perform the surveys needed to obtain a state permit for digging for artifacts and treasure.

Most of the time, the boat was stationed off Hutchinson Island, where researchers suspect the southernmost wreck from the 1715 Spanish treasure fleet is located.

Cold fronts whipped the seas into 8 to 10 foot waves, limiting the visibility needed for the final surveys. The crew had hoped to bring state divers aboard for an up-close meeting before permits were approved — but the weather and their schedules never matched, Popin said. "It's been so bad out there," he said. "We're going to put it off until the spring."

To make some money while killing time, the crew of the Polly-L even sailed up the Indian River Lagoon from its temporary spot south of the Ernest F. Lyons Bridge north to Fort Pierce to get a job fixing the discharge pipe at the St. Lucie Nuclear Plant.

It turned out the lift boat wasn't certified for that kind of work. But everything remains "in line" for the state permit to begin excavation on the site off Tiger Shores Beach this spring, Popin said.

Meanwhile, the crew plans to work the site of the Santa Margarita, a Spanish treasure ship that wrecked off Key West in 1622. Popin said they plan to use the same equipment they used in Stuart — a magnetometer — to find objects under the sand.

"There hasn't been a modern survey there for 15 years, and we got some new information on hot spots," he said. "Still, we're looking forward to getting back down to Stuart."

To collectors, the coins could be worth anywhere from several thousand dollars to $20,000 or $30,000 each. And here's the good fortune part: There are more where they came from. A whole lot more. Historical records indicate the Republic sank with 20,000 gold pieces - worth between $120 million and $180 million today. But based on early excavation of the site, coin expert Donald Kagin thinks there could be close to 30,000 pieces down there. Either way it will almost certainly turn out to one of the richest shipwreck cargoes ever recovered.

High-resolution photos snapped by a remote-controlled underwater vehicle show a massive pile of coins that looks like something out "Pirates of the Caribbean." "This is what we all dream about," said Kagin, an author and authority on U.S. coins who's been hired to catalog and preserve the treasure. How much could it all be worth? Kagin and John Morris, president of Tampa-based Odyssey Marine Exploration, say it's too early to tell. They're cautiously optimistic the booty could bump that $180 million mark.

"This is like predicting the presidential election at 9 o'clock in the morning," Morris said, looking up from a coin collector's price book. "We have a lot of indicators here that make it look really good, but there's a lot of work to do."

The discovery and salvaging of the Republic wreck, about 100 miles southeast of Savannah, is the culmination of more than decade of searching by Morris and his partner, Greg Stemm. The 250-foot Odyssey Explorer was purchased and equipped with powerful computers and video equipment after the wreck was discovered in July.

The heart of the project is Zeus, a sophisticated "remotely operated vehicle" - or ROV - that acts as the crews' eyes and hands at the wreck site 1,700 feet below. Driven by a 250-horsepower motor, the 7-ton apparatus is equipped with fiber-optic video and still cameras, and has robotic arms that can handle the most delicate finds. A vacuum system lifts the coins and other artifacts into a container for transport to the surface.

"It's as good as being down there," said project archaeologist Neil C. Dobson. "In fact, it's even better because you can get so close. It's the nearest you can get to getting the archaeologist on site."

Dobson is among the crew of 42 - Stemm calls them "deep-sea cowboys" - manning the computers and cameras and methodically excavating the site, which is mostly contained in a 40-by-120-foot area. A National Geographic film crew is aboard chronicling their every move.

Since bringing up the first artifact - a glass bottle - from the wreck Aug. 4, the Odyssey Explorer crew has recovered about 1,750 coins and 300 other artifacts, including portholes and the ship's bell. It could take another three months or so to finish up.

In addition to the coins, the S.S. Republic was carrying 59 passengers, thousands of bottles of everything from pickled fruit to stomach bitters, and various other cargo. The 210-foot sidewheel steamer, once part of the Union fleet, was taking the money and supplies from New York to New Orleans for post-Civil War reconstruction of the South when it went down in a hurricane on Oct. 25, 1865.

All passengers boarded life boats and got off alive, according to newspaper accounts, but the ship and its cargo settled on the sand at the bottom of the Atlantic, lost until Odyssey explorers detected it last summer after searching 1,500 square miles of ocean. Because the wreck is so far out in international waters, Odyssey doesn't need a permit. It has, though, been granted federal "admiralty arrest" of the site to make it illegal for others to lay claim to it.

The ROV has snapped about 7,000 pictures of the wreck and debris field, allowing the assembly of a detailed overhead photo map of the site. On a computer screen, they can zoom in tight on specific artifacts in the wreck and send the ROV directly to them for pickup."We're doing things that no government has ever done or no navy has ever done," Stemm said. "We're pushing the absolute limits of what you can do down there."

Founded in the mid-1990s, the publicly traded company made headlines last summer when it entered a historic partnership with the British government to excavate the wreck of the HMS Sussex, which sank in 1694 off Gibraltar while leading a British fleet into the Mediterranean Sea for a war against France and its leader, Louis XIV.

Historians believe the 157-foot warship was carrying nine tons of gold coins aimed at buying the loyalty of the Duke of Savoy, a potential ally in southeastern France. The Sussex's cargo could be more valuable than the Republic's, but Odyssey will have to share it with England: The company will get 80 percent of the first $45 million and about 50 percent of the proceeds thereafter. The Sussex project is on hold for now. There's treasure to be had closer to home first.

"One of the big risk factors of our company was always that we would run out of money before we recovered our first ship," spokeswoman Laura Lionetti Barton said. "Now we have income. Income! Our accounting department is going to go nuts."

The discovery of the gold coins, and their revelation by Odyssey, come at an opportune time for the cash-strapped company, which for years has survived on little more than proceeds from selling stock, private investments and even loans from officers and their families. Barton said cash from the sale of coins or other artifacts would help fund future salvage projects, as well as provide material for traveling exhibits, merchandising and television and video rights.

More urgently, Odyssey executives hope the discovery will spur the holders of warrants to buy 2.3-million shares of company stock. Priced at $2.50 per share, the warrants could bring the company almost $6-million in desperately needed cash but are scheduled to expire Nov. 21 if they aren't exercised before then.

Chances are the warrant holders will come through. Odyssey's over-the-counter stock has climbed from about $1.50 per share since mid July, when the company announced it might have located the Republic, to its closing price of $4.32 on Friday, up 13 percent for the day. The stock rose as high as $4.93 Friday in heavy trading.

Just how many gold coins may be on board, and their worth on the open market, was unclear. Odyssey researchers believe the 210-foot steamship was carrying gold coins with a face value of $400,000 when it sank en route to New Orleans. Though the denomination of the coins is unknown, coin expert Donald Kagin told Odyssey that a $20 gold coin from that era might have a resale value today of $6,000 to $9,000. If the entire cache were $20 coins, Kagin's estimate would translate to a take of $120-million to $180-million.

Some big "ifs" remain. "For example, if we pull up these crates, and they're filled up mostly with lead bars and a few coins on the top, we obviously have to issue a correction," spokeswoman Barton said. On a separate note, an insurance company that believes it is entitled to a share of Odyssey's find is in talks with the company.

But as it removes sediment from the decrepit ship, located 1,700 feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, Odyssey's crew is uncovering more than just coins. So far they have discovered what appear to be chalkboards, bolts of cloth and even game pieces. "We can count the dots on dominoes down there," Barton said. "That's how good the camera is we've got."

The viceroy of Peru had ordered the ship to set sail against the wishes of its captain, Juan de Lerma, and despite rumors of pirates prowling the waters. It was a fateful decision. But the Santa Maria had to reach Panama in time for its passengers and priceless cargo from the Royal Mint of Lima to catch the Spanish fleet before it left on its annual journey across the Atlantic.

The time was 1681, a period of fierce rivalry between Spain and England, and Capt. Bartholomew Sharpe, an infamous buccaneer, was on the hunt for ships to plunder. What happened when the Santa Maria crossed paths with Sharpe was so bloody that to this day Ecuadorians call the tiny island of Santa Clara "El Muerto" -- the dead man -- although the reason for the name has long been lost to memory.

Sometime in the mid-1990's, two brothers walking along Santa Clara's sandy shores spotted something in the surf. It was black and crusty, like a couple of small flat stones stuck together. One of the brothers, giving the objects little thought, stuck them in his pocket.

What the brothers had discovered was the key to the lost Spanish galleon's treasure: The black stones turned out to be pieces of eight, the stuff of pirate movies and romantic fiction. Now the hoard, worth an estimated $20 million to $100 million, is waiting to be excavated from the shark-infested Bay of Guayaquil, about 30 miles off the coast of Ecuador.

The fishermen's' discovery caught the attention of Roberto Aguiire, the wealthy owner of a tuna fishery, a man with ships, helicopters and enough time and money to bankroll a treasure hunt. Aguiire paid the brothers for their information, then spent two years procuring permits for a salvage operation from the Ecuadorian government. Meanwhile, divers he hired recovered thousands of coins scattered across the sea floor.

But while Aguiire set wheels in motion to recover the treasure, questions remained about exactly how much loot the ship had carried and whether it was worth the trouble and expense of salvaging. What needed to be done immediately was to establish the name of the ship, search old manifests and try to establish exactly what had been on board. But where to start looking?

Aguiire hired treasure hunter Joel Ruth of Indialantic, a marine archaeologist and nautical historian with a specialty in dating and restoring Spanish coins. A bookish, 50-year-old diver with an African parrot named Euclid, Ruth also has a knack for mixing caustic chemicals that can erase centuries of grime from ancient coins. It was Ruth, who through dogged, monotonous research discovered the name of the ship. He found a cryptic footnote on a copy of an old seafarer's map. "At this Island in this year of 1681 was cast away a rich ship." The island was Santa Clara -- El Muerto.

Ruth suspected that the reference to "a rich ship" referred to the Santa Maria De La Consolacion. The date was an invaluable clue, but he needed to find more maps and charts to confirm his suspicions. He turned to a noted author and expert, Sir Robert Marx of Brevard County. Marx, a former U.S. Marine, was knighted by both England and Spain for his work as a nautical archaeologist. He has written more than 800 scientific and popular articles and 50 books.

More digging produced another reference:

"In the year 1681, Captain Sharpe gave chase to a ship in this sea and thee was lost on fowle ground near S. Clara in her 100,000 pieces of eight besides Plate and other goods of value." Bingo! The Capt. Sharpe mentioned was none other than the infamous Bartholomew Sharpe. British and Spanish accounts of Sharpe's exploits survive, including what happened near Santa Clara. Sharpe gave chase to the Santa Maria -- 440 tons, with 26 iron and bronze cannons. Its captain, Lerma, tried to reach safe harbor but the "Devil Pirates," as the beleaguered skipper referred to them, gained on his ship.

In the 17th century there was no such thing as taking prisoners. "There were no POW camps or prisoner exchanges. It was the number-one incentive not to get caught by pirates," Marx said.

The Santa Maria struck rocks or a reef. It couldn't move and took on water. The crew and passengers scrambled into small boats and headed to Santa Clara island. Lerma, not wanting the treasure to fall into the hands of the British, ordered his ship set on fire. It burned and sank with its treasure, infuriating the pirates. They retaliated by beheading the crew and passengers -- an estimated 350 people. Sharpe's men later forced some native fishermen to dive for the wreckage. But after sharks devoured one of the divers, no one else would dive.

Still, the location of the wreck was the kind of information that was noted on old maps. Ruth's research turned up repeated references to the Santa Maria until 1821. "People have been looking for this wreck for centuries," Ruth said. Even though the general area was known, it was never enough to pinpoint the wreck, he said. "It's a big ocean, and they didn't have GPS [global positioning satellites] back then," Ruth quipped.

For six years, Aguiire's divers have scoured the sea floor. An arctic current makes diving in the water like swimming in an ice bath. "The oysters are delicious too," Ruth said. "But that's not what we go down for. We're looking for anything with a line, a geometrical shape. Nature doesn't work in squares. Squares and right angles can mean a wooden box or an ingot."

As of Saturday, more than 15,000 coins have been found on the sea bottom in a milelong, curved path resembling the "swoosh" of a Nike sneaker. They also have found pottery, ancient muskets and signal guns. Among the discoveries was a crate of 320-year-old iron shoes for mules. Ruth keeps one on his dinner table.

Before the ship was discovered last week, Aguiire was getting ready to give up, letting his permits expire. His divers were spending more time doing maintenance on the dive boats than on as treasure hunting. The breakthrough came in December when an Ecuadorian fisherman flagged the divers, asking for help, Ruth said. His net was caught on something in 30 feet of water.

A diver who went down couldn't believe what he saw -- massive wooden beams, showing signs of having been charred, and covered by centuries of sand and seaweed. "It's the galleon -- the whole galleon just sitting there, exposed," Ruth said. The diver videotaped the scene and took a sample of the wood about the size of a loaf of bread. Ruth hired a lab to check the age of the wood.

"I was skeptical," Ruth said. "I was thinking maybe it was something from a whaling boat -- maybe 100 years old. A galleon shouldn't be in such good shape." But the tests dated the wood as being about 370 years old, with a 40-year margin of error.

This had to be it, Ruth said; the Santa Maria was built by Spanish shipwrights in Ecuador just a few years before it was sunk in 1681. Marx said the find could be the most significant galleon discovery ever because it "appears to be a virgin wreck. Most shipwrecks have been picked over in antiquity."

Ruth headed to Ecuador on Oct. 2 to help with the final identification of the wreck. But by then, the turbulent ocean had "hidden her secrets again," Ruth said in an e-mail to the Orlando Sentinel. Where timbers and shell-covered boxes had been seen, there was nothing but bare sand. More equipment was brought in -- something akin to water cannons to wash away the sand. It took 20 days to clear enough to see what lay beneath.

New artifacts, including flints from muskets with crosses etched in them date the vessel to between 1649 and 1680. That, along with the thousands of coins scattered on the ocean and carbon-dating, is enough proof, Ruth said, to confirm the discovery is the wreck of the Santa Maria de la Consolacion.

"Consolacion Found" was the brief dispatch that Ruth sent to the salvage partners and the Ecuadorian government. Divers have been ordered not to move anything until more sand is cleared and a full photographic survey of the wreck can be made.

It is still anyone's guess what the treasure finally will be worth. Mingled with the wreck, the crew found dredge pipes with 50 years of coral growth. It could mean the shipwreck was looted in modern time. Or it could be debris left by the U.S. military, which occupied a nearby island during World War II.

Ruth and the other treasure hunters will have to retrieve what is there and take stock. But he knows that coins from a shipwreck with a bloody history will be worth a lot more than unidentifiable metal looted from the sea.

"The story and history behind it is what makes it valuable," Ruth said earlier this month. "And it's what make it worth looking for."

No one expected it to contain the treasure, dating from Alexander the Great's conquest of Afghanistan in 327BC. The vault was thought to hold £60 million of bullion hidden by the state bank more than a decade ago. "We opened one box and saw the gold," Karzai said. "Everything is safe and in its place."

Ashraf Ghani, the Finance Minister, said the treasure was probably the most important collection of antiquities in the world outside Egypt.

It lay in six tombs under the grassy wastes of northern Afghanistan until it was excavated in 1978 by a Soviet archaeologist on the eve of Moscow's invasion of the country, and was hailed as one of the greatest, and most valuable, archaeological discoveries of all time. It includes a collapsible gold crown, a solid gold pendant of Aphrodite and a dagger studded with scores of jewels.

Ghani said the vault had not been opened for decades despite efforts by the Taliban, who ruled Kabul from 1996 to 2001, torturing staff to reveal the code to get at it. "They were beaten almost senseless but did not reveal it," he said.

The surprise find is a boost for Afghanistan, where reconstruction has been progressing slowly and conditions for most people are still very bad.

The Project Archaeologist, Neil Cunningham Dobson, reported the recovery of the large bronze bell, which bears an inscribed ribbon with the letters "SSEE" clearly visible. The rest of the letters cannot be discerned until further conservation and cleaning. Ship's bells would typically carry the name of the foundry or the original name of the ship. The SS Republic was originally named SS TENNESSEE.

The company's vessel "Odyssey Explorer" and its work class remotely operated vehicle "ZEUS" have been at the Republic site since early October. The initial task of deploying the acoustic array has been accomplished and the preliminary site survey has been conducted. During this survey, the archaeologist spotted the ship's bell lying near the bow of the shipwreck and determined that its recovery would assist in confirming the name of the shipwreck.

"We are very pleased with the operation so far," stated Greg Stemm, Odyssey Co-founder and Director of Operations. "We have an excellent team that's been working very hard over the past month. Detailed exploration of the site has begun and we are simply amazed at the cornucopia of well-preserved artifacts lying down there."

The Odyssey Explorer is a 251-foot Class II dynamically positioned (DP) ship and state-of-the-art deep ocean archaeological platform. The centerpiece of Odyssey's system is ZEUS, a seven ton, 205 horsepower remotely operated vehicle (ROV). ZEUS is rated to 2,500 meters (8,200 ft) and has two Schilling seven-function Conan Force-Feedback manipulators, which provide for exceptional dexterity and fine control of delicate archaeological procedures.

Additional sea-bottom site measurement and positioning technology as well as archaeological recording and logging equipment have been integrated into the system to perform detailed archaeological excavation of the site.

The SS Republic was a sidewheel steamer that was lost in deep water in 1865 after battling a hurricane for two days. All the crew and passengers made it safely off the vessel, although a number of passengers eventually died on one of the rafts before they could be rescued. The ship, en route from New York to New Orleans, was reportedly carrying a large cargo of gold specie.

To begin the discovery process, a four-story-high, 74-foot-long lift boat is scheduled to arrive today off Tiger Shores Beach, near Stuart Beach. For the next week it will be about 200 yards off-shore, surveying the underwater area as the final step toward receiving a state excavation permit, said Doug Pope, president of the Amelia Island-based Amelia Research and Recovery.

Pope, whose company has investigated potential shipwreck sites from Sebastian to Jupiter -- and most recently in Fort Pierce -- learned of the new site from a Stuart native who reported he thought he saw cannons underwater while surfing 25 years ago. If the memory turns out to be accurate, Martin County historians say the shipwreck could be part of an 11-vessel Spanish fleet that wrecked in a hurricane in 1715.

So far, the ship from that fleet discovered farthest south was the Urca de Lima, found north of Fort Pierce's Pepper Beach Park, which now contains a state underwater archaeological preserve around the wreck. Other ships from that fleet have been discovered in Indian River County.

"We know we're the Treasure Coast, but I'm not sure the community has a full understanding of what that means," said Robin Hicks-Connors, president of the Historical Society of Martin County. "A ship of this historical significance -- 300 years old, right off our beaches -- is such an important part of our history, and we look forward to helping to preserve it," she said.

Some historians think the shipwreck off Stuart could be part of the 1715 Spanish fleet because topographer Bernard Roman -- on a 1760 map -- identified the location of that wreck as between the Sebastian River and the "Bleech-yard."

Hicks-Connors said the "Bleech-yard," named for white sand hills, is located on Roman's map as being near the Tiger Shores site, and could refer to an area that now includes the estate of Frances Langford, who lives in Rio.

The research work started earlier this year, when David Jordan, a Stuart native now living in North Carolina, contacted Amelia Research and Recovery. Jordan told the company he wants to put in his front yard one of the cannons he saw underwater while surfing 25 years ago.

In a written statement, Jordan detailed what he saw in October 1978, when he fell off his board while surfing after a major storm that likely moved the underwater sand bars. "I hit the water with my eyes closed and assumed I would hit sand, but I opened my eyes and in picture perfect view was right on top a stack of cannons that seemed to be coming from the sand bar," he wrote. Jordan also wrote that he returned to the same site twice -- once only seeing the top of a cannon and once having to dig with his hand about four inches to find a cannon, which was in about 10 feet of water.

After Jordan contacted Amelia Research and Recovery, researchers in June studied the area Jordan described, using a magnetometer, an electronic device that measures magnetic forces. That data was fed into a computer program that searches for anomalies.

The program found there were a number of potential objects just a few feet under the ocean's bottom -- including a few that were determined to be "older encrusted objects about 18 to 24 inches in diameter and 8 to 10 feet long that are in the exact location pointed out ... as a stack of cannons," according to Amelia Research documents. Amelia so far has received temporary exploration permits from the state, allowing the survey work that is beginning today, company president Pope said.

If the company receives final state permits, which could be granted within a month, Pope said he'll use highly advanced technology to explore for the shipwreck. Amelia's huge lift boat, called the Polly L, sits on four large poles that stand on 60-square-foot platforms on the ocean floor. After taking underwater photographs for the state Department of Environmental Protection, researchers will -- according to state permit standards -- use a vacuum-like machine to try to uncover the shipwreck.

If the shipwreck is deemed "historically significant," the archeologists onboard the lift boat will try to date the ship and determine the country of origin. A ship's bell is usually engraved with the name of the ship; the bell of the Urca de Lima, thought to be off Fort Pierce, was never found.

"The shipwreck belongs to the state of Florida. Our job is to investigate it, determine whether it is historically or commercially valuable and proceed at that point," Pope said. "If it is commercially valuable, (the state) generally gives 80 percent of the value to the salver."

Chris Horrell, an archeological assistant with the state Division of Historical Resources, said it's highly unlikely there will be any treasure on board. "Nine times out of ten it doesn't turn out to be anything at all," Horrell said. "Just because they may have found something or are looking for something does not mean there's a treasure vessel." More than a thousand ships sank off the Treasure Coast.

The S.S. Republic was carrying 59 passengers and 20,000 $20 gold coins from New York to New Orleans when it sank in a hurricane off Savannah, Ga., on Oct. 25, 1865, according to newspaper accounts and other historical records.

All the passengers boarded life boats and got off alive, but the coins -- intended to help pay for reconstruction of the South after the Civil War -- went to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean with the Republic. An expert has estimated they would be worth $120 million to $180 million today.

After searching for 12 years, Greg Stemm and John Morris of Odyssey Marine Explorations Inc. said Saturday that they found the wreck last month in 1,700 feet of water about 100 miles southeast of Savannah.

Documentation and excavation of the site using remotely operated robotic equipment is set to begin next month. Stemm said the Tampa-based company recently bought a 250-foot ship and a special robotic "remotely operated vehicle" to carry out the project.

"It's almost like having a hand down there," Stemm said of the apparatus. "You can literally feel the pressure when you're picking things up and moving them around."

Because the wreck is so far out in international waters, the company doesn't need a permit to begin work at the site. It has, though, been granted federal "admiralty arrest" of the site to make it illegal for others to lay claim to it.

Odyssey crews combed 1,500 square miles of ocean using a robotic vehicle, sonar and magnetometer technology to before finding the wreck they believe is the Republic, a side-wheel steamer that had once served in the Union fleet.

"After all the years of searching for this particular shipwreck, finally finding it with just an incredible team of folks, it's just an indescribable feeling," Stemm said.

Odyssey, a publicly traded company founded in the mid-1990s, has a number of shipwreck search projects in various stages. Stemm and Morris have performed only one other deep-water excavation, that of a Spanish wreck in the Dry Tortugas that yielded about $5 million in gold and thousands of artifacts.

The company made headlines recently when it entered a historic partnership with the British government to excavate the wreck of the HMS Sussex, which sank in 1694 off Gibraltar while leading a British fleet into the Mediterranean Sea for a war against France and its leader, Louis XIV.

Historians believe the 157-foot warship was carrying nine tons of gold coins aimed at buying the loyalty of the Duke of Savoy, a potential ally in southeastern France. The Sussex's cargo could be more valuable than the Republic's, but under the partnership Odyssey will get at most $45 million of the proceeds.

The company had planned to begin work on the Sussex next month but the Republic project will now take priority. The search crew of about 20 will expand to around 70 when the work begins.

"Its proximity to the U.S., the location of our equipment and the comparative weather windows between the Mediterranean and Atlantic make the choice to do the S.S. Republic project prior to the Sussex an easy one," Morris said.

Donald H. Kagin, author of "Private Gold Coins and Patterns of the United States," estimated that the $20 gold coins aboard the Republic would fetch between $6,000 and $9,000 each, based on the sale of coins from previous shipwrecks.

"That value would depend on the ultimate quality of the specimens, but if their condition proves to be comparable to other shipwreck coins from the period, it would make this the most valuable documented cargo ever recovered from a shipwreck," Kagin said in a company press release.

The richest haul previously came from the wreck of the S.S. Central America, which sank in a hurricane off the North Carolina coast in 1857 carrying a vast treasure of California gold.

That wreck surrendered about $100 million in gold in 1987, including the largest known ingot from the California Gold Rush, a 10-inch-long brick that sold for a reported $7 million.

The Republic went down a week after it set sail. Most 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.

Now, 138 years later, after a decade-long hunt in secrecy, a private company of sea explorers says it has found the wreck of the Republic in deep waters some 100 miles southeast of Savannah, Ga.

Ghostly video images from the seabed show a rudder, a paddle wheel buried in sediments, parts of a giant steam engine and hundreds of glass bottles and other artifacts.

The team's aim is to retrieve the money — perhaps 20,000 gold coins that experts say may now be worth up to $150 million. If so, they add, the recovery would be the richest salvage of a ship to date.

The team says it also wants to resurrect history by pulling up cultural artifacts and displaying them. "If we wanted to, we could go out with grab buckets and get all the gold in three days," said Greg Stemm, a founder of Odyssey Marine Exploration of Tampa, Fla., which found the wreck. Instead, he said, the company is planning an archaeological recovery.

The ship's identity was confirmed in the past few weeks, the explorers say, and recovery operations are to begin in September. The site is beyond the State of Georgia and the federal government's authority over cultural artifacts. State authority reaches 3 nautical miles and the federal government 24 nautical miles from shore.

In its dozen years at sea, the Republic was reinvented several times as it changed hands. It was a commercial ferry to Central America, a blockade runner for the Confederacy, a warship for the Union and a link to New Orleans after the war.

Mr. Stemm said that this history was probably unique for a 19th-century steamship. Resurrecting as much of that as possible, he added, "will enhance the value of the collection" of coins the company hopes to bring to market. "It's enlightened self-interest that compels us to do good scientific work," he said.

Some scholars may doubt that, saying for-profit archaeology can fail to illuminate the past. "Everybody says they're going to do the right thing, but often it doesn't work out that way," said John D. Broadwater, a marine archaeologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"Field work and recovery are the fun part," he said. "It's the years of analysis and conservation and preparation of a detailed report that usually trip people up. It's hard to get the commitments of time and funds to do all those things."

Discovery of the wreck, which lies about a third of a mile down in cold Atlantic waters, is part of a trend in which new technologies are opening up the sea's dark recesses. Almost anything lost at sea can now be found, given enough time, money and talent.

The Republic was built in the transitional age between sail and steam. Launched in Baltimore in 1853, it was 210 feet long and bore two masts, sails and a steam engine. The single piston, more than 6 feet wide, turned side wheels 28 feet across.

Historians say the steamship could carry up to 100 passengers and 5,000 barrels of cargo and began its career along the Atlantic seaboard in merchant trade.

In 1856, it hauled passengers to Nicaragua, according to "American Steamships on the Atlantic" (Associated University Presses, 1981). They included soldiers of fortune as well as would-be miners eager to join the California gold rush. The miners sought quick passage across the isthmus to waiting Pacific ships.

In 1861, the Confederates seized the ship as a blockade runner. When Union forces took New Orleans in 1862, they discovered it at the dock heavy with cotton. The North put in big guns. Vice Adm. David G. Farragut, using it as his flagship, sailed it up the Mississippi in his successful campaign to split the Confederacy in two.

After the war, back in New York, the ship was sold to a Northern steamship entrepreneur, who named it the Republic. Advertisements for the fateful voyage ran repeatedly in The New York Times before it sailed. "For New-Orleans Direct," they read. Passage "with unsurpassed accommodations," cost $60. After the hurricane struck, reports of the sinking trickled in.

"Disaster at Sea," read the Times headline of Oct. 30, five days after the sinking. A follow-up article on Nov. 3 quoted the Republic's captain, Edward Young, as saying the cargo had included "$400,000 in specie," or coins. "Everything on board, except what the passengers stood in, went down with the ship."

Some 130 years later, in the early 1990's, Mr. Stemm of Odyssey and his business partner, John Morris, were approached by a researcher who said he had good information on where the Republic lay. That sparked an intense search in shallow coastal waters, to no avail.

After a long pause in the hunt, the team did its own research, calculating how far survivors might have drifted in the Gulf Stream and where the ship most probably went down. A decision was made to expand the search area, and a new, more powerful kind of sonar, Mr. Stemm recalled, aided the renewed hunt.

Then, early last month, off Georgia, the sonar produced a tantalizing image. The team returned a week later with a high-resolution sonar for a closer look. The target appeared to be a sunken steamer, its side wheels casting eerie shadows.

On Aug. 2, the team returned to the site with a tethered underwater robot bearing lights and a video camera. After two days of frustration, the robot was finally moving across the seabed when it passed a big copper-clad rudder. Then a side wheel appeared and, finally, a view of the whole deteriorating hulk.

"It matches all the things we were looking for," said Ernie Tapanes, the project manager. "All the dimensions are right — the engine configuration, the double boilers, the size of the paddle wheels. I have no doubt whatsoever that this is our ship."

In all, the search had covered more than 1,200 square miles of the Atlantic seabed. To assert a claim, the team took a bottle recovered from the site to a federal courthouse in Tampa. Mr. Stemm said the court on Aug. 6 granted Odyssey exclusive salvage rights.

He added that Odyssey was talking to the company that insured the money shipment about how the profits from the recovery would be divided. The salvagers say they expect to retain most of it.

Donald H. Kagin, a coin expert in Tiburon, Calif., who is advising Odyssey, said the Republic's shipment might be worth $150 million to collectors if the mix includes many $20 gold pieces. "That would make it the greatest treasure ever recovered" from an old shipwreck, he said.

Mr. Stemm said recovery of the money might take from days to two months, depending on how the coins were packed. The archaeology, he added, would take another month or two.

After the Republic, Odyssey plans to move its recovery ship to the Mediterranean to reclaim what is thought to be the wreck of the warship H.M.S. Sussex, doing so in partnership with the British government. Experts estimate its cargo of coins might fetch as much as $4 billion.

Odyssey executives say they believe they have found a 19th century steamship, which it has code-named Bavaria, that sank with a large cargo of coins. To preserve its potential treasure, the company will say only that it found the wreck in the Atlantic along the southeast coast of the United States, somewhere between Charleston and Daytona Beach.

While searching for the ship that it has given the alias Bavaria, Odyssey said the crew found another ship about 40 miles off the northern coast of Florida that contained a large quantity of Chinese and English pottery, some dating back to the late 1700s or early 1800s.

If its claims in court are successful, Odyssey will be named temporary custodian of the site and granted exclusive access. Insurance companies, owners' descendants and others may lay claim to the items found on the ship, if they could prove that they had not abandoned ownership interest, but Odyssey would be in line to get a major share as a salvage award.

"Based on legal precedents, we would expect to receive at least 90 percent of the value of the recovered artifacts," said Odyssey co-founder Greg Stemm. Company officials said they would not comment on the expected value of the Bavaria cargo or on the history behind it until they have confirmed its identity.

While the Bavaria contains many of the characteristics expected of the ship Odyssey was looking for, including boilers and coal, the company will not be able to determine the age and identity of the ship until it does further examination. What appears to be modern trash was found on the ship, but Stemm said this is not unusual in a highly traveled sea lane.

"The story behind this shipwreck is fascinating," Stemm said. "We are already in discussions for sale of media rights to the story and production of a documentary with major media outlets."

Odyssey said it already has spent more than $1-million searching for and surveying the sites. Stemm expects the excavation to cost between $500,000 and $2-million. The funds will be raised by issuing more debt or stock or through project-specific financing. Excavation could begin as early as August, depending on the company's ability to raise the funds.

Odyssey, which went public in 1997, has boasted of other discoveries but has not yet recovered or tried to lay claim to items from any of the ships it has found. The company's Web site says that shipwreck excavation is "extremely speculative and of exceptionally high risk."

Site BA01 is an unidentified shipwreck believed to be a 19th Century steamship. The site exhibits many characteristics that would be expected of the shipwreck code-named "Bavaria." However, further exploration will be necessary to confirm the age and identity of the site. The "Bavaria" was a 19th century steamer that research indicates sank with a large cargo of coins. Additional information about the "Bavaria" project and this shipwreck site is available at www.shipwreck.net/bavaria.html.

Site BA02 is an unidentified shipwreck that contains a large quantity of Chinese and English pottery including well-preserved blue and white Chinese export porcelain dating from between the late 1700's to the early 1800's. This shipwreck is not the "Bavaria," although the site is believed to have potential archaeological and economic value. Photos and video clips from the inspections of this site are available at www.shipwreck.net.

The Odyssey team located the sites during 2003 "Bavaria" search operations, which were conducted from the company's research vessel, the RV Odyssey. During this operation approximately 1,000 square miles of seabed were surveyed using an advanced Edgetech Chirp side scan sonar and integrated Marine Magnetics Overhauser magnetometer technology. To date, a total of 23 targets have been inspected during the Bavaria search using a Phantom "Ultimate" Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV).

Odyssey is currently planning to mobilize a larger ship and large work-class ROV system to begin archaeological surveys and possibly excavation of both sites. Subject to financing and availability of the equipment, operations on these sites are planned to begin in the summer or early fall of 2003.

Historians believe the 157-foot warship was carrying nine tons of gold coins aimed at buying the loyalty of the Duke of Savoy, a potential ally in southeastern France. If the wreckage that was found half a mile underwater off Gibraltar is the Sussex, the robot could place a very valuable booty into baskets for lifting to the surface.

King William III had authorized "a million of money" in coins which now could be worth anywhere from $500 million to $4 billion, officials said. Such a find could also pioneer a new way of recovering sunken warships and their archaeological treasures around the world by creating alliances between governments and private companies.

Under international law, such vessels remain the property of the government that controlled them while in operation, no matter where they are found or by whom. But governments often lack the money or experience to conduct such searches themselves, leaving treasures vulnerable to scavengers who could pillage in secrecy and sell on the black market.

The search for the Sussex is the first time a government has made a deal with a private company for the archaeological excavation of a sovereign warship. The public-private Sussex recovery deal - reached earlier this year by the British government and a U.S.-based company, Odyssey Marine Exploration - has been criticized by some experts in Britain as setting a bad precedent for the search for archaeological treasures.

Spain also has said that Odyssey and the British government should seek its permission to continue the search, if the wreckage - whose exact location has not been disclosed - is in its territorial waters, defined as within 12 miles of its shores.

"If it is in Spanish waters, they will have to reach an agreement with the Spanish authorities to set the terms in accordance with international law and Spanish rule on the recovery of old ships," a Spanish Foreign Ministry official told The Associated Press.

Greg Stemm, Odyssey's director of operations in Tampa, Fla., and Lt. Cmdr. Richard Whalley of Britain's Ministry of Defense, who is overseeing the search operation for the British government, said they had not received such a warning from Spain's government. "We believe the wreck is in international waters," said Whalley. Stemm said that Spanish permission would be sought for any work in Spanish waters.

Stemm acknowledged that the partially buried wreckage that Odyssey crews found off Gibraltar after searching the region in four expeditions since 1998 may not be HMS Sussex, though he says the evidence gathered so far - including part of a cannon - suggests that it is.

George Lambrick, director of the Council for British Archaeology, has said archaeological issues will not remain a top priority under the public-private deal, derided as a for-profit salvage operation.

Stemm, whose company has long experience in deep-water recoveries, disagrees. "This operation is being done under the most stringent archaeological requirements set by the British government after months of review," Stemm said in London, where he met Wednesday with Ministry of Defense officials.

If gold coins are recovered, Odyssey will get 80 percent of the proceeds up to $45 million, 50 percent from $45 million to $500 million, and 40 percent above $500 million. The British government gets the rest. However, the government could keep the entire collection of artifacts intact by paying Odyssey a percentage of its appraised value.

A gold coin and a wooden ship's rudder bound with iron straps were taken from the ocean floor this week, said Rob Westrick, archaeologist for Historical Research and Development of Orlando. Unlike cannons or cargo that could have been lost or jettisoned overboard, a rudder strongly indicates the last resting place of a ship. "It's like the steering wheel of your car," Westrick explained. "Take that off, you're not going anywhere else."

The company, working under a state lease, is looking for the remains of either the Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion or the El Senor San Miguel. The two galleons were unaccounted for from a flotilla of 11 homeward-bound Spanish treasure ships lost after sailing from Havana in 1715. "It's still a puzzle," Westrick said Friday. "But these are two pieces and we're getting close."

The wrecks of seven other ships lost in a violent hurricane have been identified along the coast of present-day Indian River and St. Lucie counties, while historic records indicate two more damaged vessels tried to limp back to civilization and were lost at sea.

The company began salvage work in 2002, hoping to confirm its find as the first new 1715 ship located off the Treasure Coast in 30 to 40 years. Its divers soon came upon a pile of granite stones used for ballast by the type of ship they were hoping to have found.

The Historic Research and Development group ended operations last fall to avoid rough winter seas, then returned to its site Sunday. Westrick said a company diver found the rudder Tuesday, while snorkeling in shallow water near the shore.

The gold coin was found Wednesday. Westrick said it bears a Mexico City mint mark and strongly resembles a batch of coins minted in 1697 that bear the image of King Charles II of Spain. Westrick was encouraged by the coin, because its apparent date of creation places it before the known sinking date of the two ships for which his group is searching.

Under international law, Britain owns the salvage rights. An American company, Odyssey Marine Exploration, under the aegis of the Ministry of Defence, has said it will begin the salvage operation this summer. However, Spanish officials have warned Odyssey not to touch the vessel without their permission and have cast doubt on whether the wreck is that of the Sussex.

The fight has escalated, with Spain denying that Britain has its permission to explore the vessel. It has threatened to arrest or expel any British proxies who attempt to do so. A spokesman for the Spanish foreign ministry said: "We will expel them from Spanish waters or arrest them. It's a crime and we will open criminal proceedings against them. It's like a Spanish ship in the mouth of the Thames. They must have permission. We have given instructions to Odyssey to refrain from all search works without first obtaining permission from the Spanish government. We also warned them that they will not obtain permission for exploration without proving that the cargo of gold belongs to the Sussex, of which there are serious doubts."

Both Odyssey and the MoD believe that the wreck is the Sussex. An MoD spokesman confirmed yesterday that the salvage operation would begin in the summer. He added that Spain was aware that it must honour the internationally recognised law on wrecks so that it could exploit the hundreds of Spanish wrecks that have been discovered elsewhere. He cited two examples of Spanish ships in American waters that Spain had claimed.

The Sussex was part of a British fleet sent to the Mediterranean to contain the expansionist plans of Louis XIV, the Sun King. Historians believe it was secretly ferrying gold to buy the loyalty of the Duke of Savoy. It sank in 1694 in a storm in the Straits of Gibraltar with only two of its 500 crew and soldiers surviving. The location of the wreck has not been revealed but it is thought to lie off the coast of Cadiz.

The Spanish newspaper El Mundo said the looming dispute over the wreck would be "as hard as the Battle of Trafalgar." It asked: "Is this Spanish revenge in the 21st century for the British pillage of [Spanish] gold galleons sailing from America in the 17th century?"

Spanish officials said a 9 foot iron cannon retrieved from the wreck was not British, as claimed by Odyssey, but Dutch. British and Australian maritime archaeologists have also raised grave doubts about the wreck's identity. George Lambrick, director of the Council for British Archaeology, said he was not convinced it was the Sussex.

Odyssey's share of the spoils will be 80 per cent of the first £28 million raised. The next £319 million will be divided between the Treasury and the American company. The Treasury will then get 60 per cent of any further booty.

An agreement between the British government and a US company to excavate the wreck, which it believes is the 80-gun warship Sussex which sank in 1694 carrying up to 10 tonnes of gold, has enraged experts.

The Sussex and 12 ships in its fleet sank in storms in 1694 while on a secret mission to bribe the Duke of Savoy to act as an ally in a war against Louis XIV of France.

More than 300 years later it was the discovery of court documents suggesting that the Sussex was carrying a "million of money," which would be around 10 tonnes of gold coins, that drove an American company Odyssey to hunt for the wreck.

Tampa-based Odyssey Marine Exploration plans its excavation at a secret site off Gibraltar this summer and is hoping recent changes to its plans have dispelled archaeologists' misgivings.

Neil Cunningham-Dobson, the British archaeologist who led Odyssey's initial examinations of the site, told the Guardian at the end of last year: "Odyssey are one of the best and most reputable firms in the business and use the latest technologies."

Yesterday, however, George Lambrick, the director of the Council for British Archaeology (CBA), said serious concerns remained. Mr Lambrick said: "The whole arbitration process is still not one that gives us confidence in what ministers have told us, which is that the archaeological issues are paramount."

One of his key concerns is that the project is being promoted in the media to boost Odyssey's share price, while doubts about the archaeology and whether the wreck is the Sussex are being overlooked.

David Miles, English Heritage's chief archaeologist, said: "It is not certain it is the Sussex and there is some feeling that the wreck looks a bit small." He said while questions remain the MoD had "worked very hard" to bring more professional archaeology into the project.

Criticism of the Odyssey deal has won support from international experts. The Australian Institute for Maritime Archaeology described the project as a "horror story," which showed a "cavalier disregard" for heritage.

Mr Lambrick says a primary concern is the precedents the Sussex project might set. Greg Stemm, the co-founder of Odyssey, said he sees a "whole new industry emerging" as the "private sector will routinely help governments in managing their marine heritage."

Mr Miles said: "Deep water excavation is in many ways the new frontier for archaeology. There are some Greek and Roman vessels in the oceans that might hold amazing things for us. But if the private salvage industry is going to show us that it is responsible enough to take on these projects it must approach them in a serious manner."

Last night the Ministry of Defence said the government's position was that it was "most probably" the Sussex and defended the Odyssey deal. A spokeswoman said: "All of the archaeological value of the site will be respected and looked after properly." The archaeology will be at the forefront of the project and any excavation will involve only "accepted methodologies," she said. "This agreement will extend to the recording and observation of artefacts and their eventual conservation, publicity and exhibition, marketing and all other facets of this project."

The Government's case was set out in a letter to the CBA in November. Dr Lewis Moonie MP, a junior defence minister, said the government had taken a pragmatic course because the wreck's apparent location had been identified and "there was a risk sooner or later someone would attempt to salvage" it. Every effort would be made to ensure the project had "scientific merit," he added.

Earlier this month the MoD said it had listened "very carefully" to the CBA's "wise counsel." There is a new four-body advisory committee, the Sussex archaeological executive, on which the government and Odyssey will each have two representatives and there have been amendments relating to the conservation of artefacts and the clean-up of the site.

Mr Miles said: "The problem was that the Ministry of Defence started this as a salvage issue, when it should always have treated it as a heritage issue."

But Mr Lambrick has a fundamental problem with the project, which is that "you don't fund archeological research out of selling off the goodies that you are looking for, because it is a slippery slope into just pure treasure hunting and looting."

Among his concerns was how Odyssey might get at any gold as they approach it with robotic submarines. He said: "If the gold is in the hold then are they just going to smash their way through?"

In the deal Britain gets a share of the spoils on a sliding scale, which initially favours the Americans, who would get 80% of the first £28m. Anything more than this would be shared equally, up to £319m after which the Treasury share rises to 60%.

In addition to the television special, the agreement provides for the production of a one-hour documentary television program and home video/DVD release of the film by NGT&F. Also covered in the agreement are options for National Geographic to secure magazine rights, sponsor lectures, host the touring exhibition and participate in other Sussex media projects.

"The story of the Sussex and its excavation is really important, not only for the possible recovery of gold and artifacts, but also to test the viability of a new kind of public/private partnership in archaeology. National Geographic is delighted to be covering this important expedition," said Tim Kelly, president of NGT&F.

"We know the Sussex has a fabulous story to tell -- from the historical implications of her sinking to the high technology deep-ocean archaeological excavation of the ship and her cargo," said Greg Stemm, Odyssey co-founder. "National Geographic is the perfect media partner for this project and we're thrilled to have the opportunity to work with their world-class team."

HMS Sussex was a large 80-gun English warship lost in a severe storm in 1694. The story of her mission and effect upon the unfolding events of the late 17th and early 18th centuries presents a fascinating scenario to archaeologists, historians, and those with a general interest in European and international developments.

Built in the reign of William and Mary, HMS Sussex was escorting a large merchant fleet to the Mediterranean when she was lost. Research indicates that her Admiral also had orders to pay a large sum of money to the Duke of Savoy to continue the war against France. Evidence suggests that the payment, most likely consisting of tons of gold coins, was lost with the ship.

David Mindell, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is on the side of the archaeologists. Leaning over his workbench in the basement of his condominium a few blocks from Harvard Square, he is fine-tuning his latest invention to help them do their work more precisely: a wireless sonar system that can map the seafloor thousands of feet below the surface, where divers and global positioning system equipment cannot go.

Part of the device is plugged into a laptop in the electronics workshop that Dr. Mindell has set up at his home to accommodate computing marathons.

As data scrolled on the screen, Dr. Mindell declared the system ready for use. "It has a millimeter of jitter, but it's good to the cubic centimeter," he said. "Super, super accurate, far better than anyone else can measure in the ocean."

Dr. Mindell has just returned from a dress rehearsal of the system in the turbulent waters off Cape Hatteras, N.C., where the Monitor sank in 1862 and lay undiscovered for more than a century. The device worked well there, he said.

In a month he will pack up the equipment and head for the Black Sea and then the Mediterranean to explore, among other sites, a spot off the coast of Israel near Ashkelon where two Phoenician vessels sank in 1,300 feet of water around 750 B.C.

Dr. Mindell will be joining a large, collaborative expedition of archaeologists, scientists and engineers, led by Robert Ballard, known for his discovery of the wreck of the Titanic in 1985.

Dr. Mindell's devices will be lowered to the seafloor at the shipwreck sites and survey each site with a remotely operated underwater vehicle bristling with cameras and other equipment.

The wireless sonar system will provide a precise electronic grid for locating parts of the ship and other objects, similar to the physical grid - usually made of string - that is established at archaeological sites on land.

"Archaeology is about measuring accurately," said Brendan Foley, who recently received his doctorate after working with Dr. Mindell since 1997 and will be part of the expedition. "This system allows us to make accurate maps anywhere on the seafloor. It's an acoustic tape measure."

Deep-sea archaeology is a relatively new academic discipline that combines traditional humanities-based archaeology with engineering advances that enable precision work with remotely controlled equipment in places that humans cannot reach.

The interdisciplinary approach seems suited to Dr. Mindell, a historian of technology and an engineer who has pursued a combination of engineering and liberal arts since he majored in both English and electrical engineering at Yale University. "I've always done both kinds of work," he said, "in parallel."

The wireless sonar system is sealed in metal containers that are roughly the size of bread loaves. Outside each tube are analog microphones and speakers that receive and send pings. Inside are amplifiers to boost the signals, which are attenuated in salty water, and digital signal processing chips. Batteries provide both power and ballast.

To start the communication process, two sonar beacons are lowered and positioned on either side of the wreck. A similar transponder is placed on the remotely operated underwater vehicle that hovers above. The vehicle pings the beacons, they ping back, and the time interval is recorded to calculate the distance.

The remotely operated vehicle patrols back and forth in narrowly spaced parallel lines, capturing images of the objects on the bottom and determining their location on the grid.

Dr. Mindell will also bring along a subbottom profiler, a sonar-based system he has devised that bounces ultrasonic waves off the sediment on the seafloor to reveal what lies just beneath - artifacts, perhaps.

This is the instrument that Sarah Webster, an engineer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who will be going on the expedition, looks forward to using.

Ms. Webster, a mechanical engineer and former student of Dr. Mindell's, is working on a robot that will partly excavate several of the expedition sites. She is also designing the tools that will pick up and transport artifacts. "Before you dig a million-dollar hole," she said, "it's good to know as much as you can."

Dr. Lawrence Stager, a professor of archaeology at Harvard, will also be on board as archaeological director for the wrecks off Ashkelon. The two Iron Age ships submerged there, the oldest ever discovered in the deep sea, are thought to have been part of a convoy carrying 11 tons of wine in ceramic jars called amphorae, Dr. Stager said.

Many of these amphorae lie on the ocean floor, protected by the 1,300-foot depth from both scavenging divers and strong current.

The subbottom profiler, used in prototype form at the site on an earlier trip, suggested that more artifacts may lie beneath the sediment.

The sonar in the device penetrates the sediment with a powerful pulse of ultrasound twice a second; acoustic signals that bounce back are converted to images. The pulses can travel about six feet into the bottom, a useful distance for revealing small objects.

The ship, which was on its way to Marseilles from Naples, was reportedly laden with 170,000 coins worth about £12m, according to the Italian magazine Focus. Its passengers included a Russian countess and a Neapolitan duchess who were carrying diamonds and emeralds.

Several attempts to raise the ship, which is lying in more than 100 metres of water and is clogged with silt, have failed in the past.

Part of the ship's hoard was put up for auction in 2000 in London after four British divers recovered it from the seabed. But the sale was stopped after Scotland Yard intervened and returned more than 300 gold coins, 2,000 silver coins, diamonds and bracelets, worth about £70,000, to Italy.

"It blew my socks off," Mr. Kristof, an undersea explorer and photographer, said. "It was absolutely incredible, the mother of all treasure."

It is now also the subject of an emerging dispute between the entrepreneur who assembled the trove, working quietly in the Philippines while employing hundreds of locals to retrieve the old riches, and archaeologists who say he is plundering the world's artistic patrimony to line his own pockets.

The entrepreneur is Phil Greco, a former New Yorker who became interested in Asian culture while serving in the Vietnam War. He lived and worked in the Philippines for more than a decade salvaging old Chinese shipwrecks.

From his home in the Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, Mr. Greco is shipping his discoveries back East, where they are to be put up for auction.

Some 7,000 of the artifacts have so far reached a warehouse in South Kearny, N.J., across the Hudson River from New York City. Some 3,000 are en route. They will be sold in September by Guernsey's, an auction house on the East Side.

Art experts who have seen the collection call it impressive. "It was mind boggling," said Arlan Ettinger, president of Guernsey's, who visited Mr. Greco two months ago to assess the assembled pottery.

"If anybody has been witness to massive collections, it's probably me, because that's become our specialty over the decades," he said. "Nevertheless, you never cease to be amazed and overwhelmed when you're introduced to a fabulous collection like this."

But Donny L. Hamilton, president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University, a top preserver of old shipwrecks and their artifacts, said archaeologists worry when private salvors excavate potentially important undersea sites. They "recover just what has a market value," Dr. Hamilton said.

"The other material is ignored or left behind, so you only learn about the ceramic trade but nothing about the people on board, what they were eating, their armaments, the games they were playing," he added.

The ceramics are insured for $20 million, Mr. Greco said, though Mr. Ettinger said the appraisals had not been finished.

Mr. Ettinger said the pieces were 500 to 2,000 years old, many from the Ming and Song Dynasties. Many, he said, are in remarkable condition, from the smallest powder jars to the largest vases. He said the collection included blue and white Ming porcelain, and other pottery and porcelain in earthen tones, browns and burnt oranges and a spectrum of greens, from pale to intense. Photographs of some are posted on Guernsey's Web site, www.guernseys.com.

Victoria Johnson-Campbell, chief of Aurora Galleries International, in Bell Canyon, Calif., said she had seen the collection at Mr. Greco's home and found it extraordinary. "It's a stunning array," she said. "This collection by itself is going to expand our knowledge of Chinese porcelain. Some of the pieces are very, very seldom seen, and are in a form not viewed before."

Mrs. Johnson-Campbell noted that the collection included porcelains painted in reds. "Only a few are known," she said. But Dr. Hamilton, who viewed the collection on the Web site, said he was disturbed by the excavation. "Here we have only a small fraction of what we could have learned from the sites if they had been properly excavated and documented," Dr. Hamilton said.

"Along with all this porcelain, there's a lot of metal artifacts and organic articles," he said. "These have to be conserved and that takes a lot of time and expense."

Mr. Greco, a former marine who earned two purple hearts in Vietnam, bristled at such criticism. He said archaeologists did not have the money or skill to save such rich history from the ravages of the sea.

"They say it's outrageous that I'm pillaging all these national treasures," Mr. Greco said. "But if you're archaeologically correct you could never ever bring this kind of show to the world. It's impossible. It's too much. It's a bridge of 2,000 years of Chinese art and history."

Mr. Greco says his story is one of hard work and penny pinching entrepreneurism that succeeded because he developed close personal bonds with Filipino living in remote villages near the islands of Panay, Mindanao and Busuanga. "I stayed with the natives, the fishermen," he said. "And they led us to the sites."

The shipwrecks, he said, are embedded in reefs off Philippine islands in the South China Sea. "We have 16 sites we've been working in the last six or seven years," Mr. Greco said. Three sites have been highly productive, he added, including one his divers are still swimming down to and recovering artifacts from.

The shipwrecks lie at depths as great as 280 feet, Mr. Greco said, which is beyond the range of most sport divers. He said his team used no air tanks but rather weights and lines and hoses that bring air down to men working in the bottom gloom. Some of the divers swam with wooden paddles strapped to their feet, rather than fins. "Tanks are for tourists," Mr. Greco said.

Mr. Greco, whose company, Stallion Recoveries, is based in Hong Kong, said the lost ships were either going to Chinese trading posts in the Philippines or were on their way to Indonesia, to the south. Experts say the South China Sea abounds in wrecks lost to storms, piracy and ineptitude.

Mr. Greco said he always had his operation keep a low profile, even while getting the proper permits from the National Museum of the Philippines and other authorities. "We never told anybody what we were doing," he said.

He was apprehensive, he said, about making his finds public. "In the Philippines and Asia, depending on where you are, they think of them as pots and pans," he said of the treasures. "Once they see it has value, and somebody's interested, it's going to be a lot different working over there."

Mr. Kristof, a staff photographer for National Geographic (news - web sites) magazine for more than three decades, said publications like his were reluctant to feature projects like Mr. Greco's lest they appear to be endorsing treasure hunting over archaeology.

David G. Concannon, a board member of the Explorer's Club of New York City and a lawyer, said Mr. Greco had recently retained him to help protect his interests. "When you get a collection this significant, somebody usually pops up and wants part of it," he said.

The jewelry - worth at least $200,000 - was discovered under 6 inches of sand in about 12 feet of water three miles south of the Sebastian Inlet, said Jon Wilson, the diver who found the treasure.

He said he found the box with a metal detector as part of an ongoing search at the site, where a hurricane wrecked a Spanish treasure fleet in 1715. Florida's "Treasure Coast" takes it name from those and other Spanish wrecks.

The box contained a gold cross about 2 inches long studded with seven emeralds and attached to a thin 5-foot gold chain. It also held two emerald and gold rings.

"Everything is solid 22-carat gold, except the emeralds," Wilson said.

The reviews dealt with criticism from British experts who said they worried that the public-private recovery plan might not be up to scholarly standards, officials said.

The British government believes the excavation site contains the wreckage of H.M.S. Sussex, which went down in a storm in 1694 with gold coins on board. Today, experts said, the cargo could fetch perhaps as much as $4 billion.

The warship, with its 80 guns and 500 men, was leading a large British fleet into the Mediterranean to fight a war against France and its expansionist agenda under Louis XIV, the Sun King. The gold was to buy the loyalty of the Duke of Savoy, a shaky ally on France's southeastern flank who controlled important invasion routes to and from Paris.

The ship sank in waters a half mile deep. The finders of its putative resting place will publicly identify the site only as off Gibraltar.

Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc. of Tampa, Fla., found what the British authorities believe to be the wreckage of the Sussex during four expeditions from 1998 to 2001. It is a disintegrating mound rich in cannons, anchors and other artifacts. In September, the company signed an agreement with the British government to raise its remains from the bottom of the Mediterranean and split the proceeds. Under maritime law, a sunken warship remains the property of the owner state.

With its recovery plan approved on Thursday, Odyssey is now gearing up for an expedition this summer. A large vessel is to hover over the mound and send down a tethered robot to map the site and clear away debris. The robot, equipped with bright lights and arms, will move artifacts and ship parts to lifting baskets for transport to the surface.

"This will be the deepest archaeological excavation of a shipwreck ever undertaken," said Greg Stemm, Odyssey's director of operations. "We are excited to be working with the government of the United Kingdom on this historic project."

Last year in Britain, some archaeologists and politicians criticized the for-profit deal as potentially damaging to British interests, leading to a delay in carrying out the accord.

George Lambrick, director of the Council for British Archaeology, an educational group based in York, England, asked if the British authorities were really committed to protecting underwater heritage "or are just in it for the money." Some members of Parliament faulted the accord as "a treasure-hunting contract" and questioned whether it served the interests of history and archaeology.

Mr. Stemm said the critics had never seen the plan and were unable to judge its soundness. In any event, their objections proved insufficient to kill the deal.

This week, British and company officials said, the two parties are to announce the government's approval of a modified version of Odyssey's original recovery plan. The plan details the approved means of artifact recovery and archaeological investigation. Officials said the plan, 107 pages long, would be kept confidential, in part to protect the site.

The original accord, signed in September, called for the recovery plan to be completed in 100 days, or by early January.

"We've listened to them carefully," Geoff Reakes, a British Ministry of Defense official, said of the critics. "We've used their wise counsel and are building in an executive body to address their concerns."

Odyssey's plan, officials said, went through two drafts and five months of analysis and comment by the British government and its advisers. In the end, the parties agreed to two amendments relating to conservation of artifacts and remediation of the site after the excavation was completed.

The plan also features a new advisory body meant to oversee the recovery team and maintain high archaeological standards. The four-member body is named the Sussex Archaeological Executive. Odyssey and the British government will each appoint two members.

"The process we have followed gives our government greater comfort that this project will be accomplished professionally, and to best archaeological practice," M. W. Robinson, a Defense Ministry official who led the talks, said in a statement. "Since this partnering arrangement is a first for us, we are endeavoring to establish the right framework."

Odyssey, which has long experience in deep-water recoveries, said the Sussex work was to start as soon as financing was completed and the appropriate vessel, gear and personnel were mobilized. No problems are foreseen.

The partnership is to split the profits or appraised values of the recovered coins on a sliding scale that favors Odyssey at first and then the government. Odyssey is to get 80 percent of the proceeds up to $45 million, 50 percent from $45 million to $500 million and 40 percent above $500 million. The British government gets the rest.

The agreement calls for archaeological integrity — a difficult feat a half-mile down. Even if that turns out to be feasible, many archaeologists abhor the sale of recovered artifacts, saying it inhibits scholarly analysis and public display.

Responding to such criticism, the partnership agreement draws a distinction between classes of artifacts, saying cultural items like the ship's tools, cannons and navigational gear have a greater archaeological value than its cargo of coins. These, it says, can be sold to help defray the millions of dollars in costs that Odyssey will accrue from locating and recovering the remains of the Sussex.

Although other ships have been found in what was the sprawling Roman Empire, the flat-bottomed barge is one of the few found north of the Alps. It was built about 180 A.D., when Marcus Aurelius passed the throne to the emperor Commodus.

"What's really exciting is that the type is slightly different from others that have been found," said maritime archaeologist Andre van Holk, who oversaw the excavation. "It's longer and thinner."

The ship's 75-foot-long exterior is intact, as are a masthead and iron nails. The ship held no cargo when it sank, but the narrow construction and other remains — including a decorated chest complete with lock and key — suggest it may have been used by a paymaster sailing upriver with supplies for military camps and bases along the Rhine.

The ship, along with its wooden mooring, was found in De Meern, about three miles west of Utrecht, near what was once the site of a Roman military camp.

The Romans first arrived in the region at the time of Julius Caesar, about 53 B.C., and the Rhine later became one border of the Empire.

Several Roman watchtowers have been discovered along the river in the same area. One apparently was burned during an uprising by local tribes about 69 A.D.

After Roman times, the river changed course, and the entire complex around De Meern was buried under a deep layer of mud, clay and sand which kept the ship from rotting.

The ship "must have sunk in some kind of accident," Van Holk said. "It may have been natural causes, such as a heavy storm on the river, or it may have been capsized. The flat bottom construction makes it easy to tip."

The bow of the ship was open for loading supplies, or possibly men and livestock. Near the stern a roof covered a kitchen and a cabin furnished with a carved chest and a small cabinet, the keys to which have been recovered in near mint condition.

Remains of a bed or couch also were found, as were wooden stool legs made of walnut and carved with spiral grooves. The rest of the ship was built from massive oak planks. The wood was not native to the area where the barge was found and probably came from France or Germany.

The helmet is still being prised out of a block of earth by conservators at the British Museum in London. It is the only one found in Britain, and suggests a plot as glamorous as any Hollywood movie.

It clearly belonged to a centurion or other senior officer, but almost certainly was buried in the decades before the Roman invasion of the first century - suggesting that it belonged to a Briton who crossed the channel, joined the legions, prospered mightily, and returned to tell the tale and make a stupendous offering to the pagan gods.

The first coins were spotted in 2000 by a retired teacher, Ken Wallace, while walking across a ploughed field. He returned with a metal detector and found hundreds more.

A full excavation was blocked when the farmland was quarantined due to foot and mouth. It took almost a year before archaeologists from Leicester University, backed by English Heritage and the British Museum, could get onto the site.

From the first coin until yesterday's announcement, the find had to be a secret, for fear of antiquity looters who ravage many sites.

The hilltop field continues to astonish. Despite more than a year of digging, coins were still popping up days ago, and a discovery of masses of animal bones is evidence of ritual feasting, at a previously unknown major religious centre.

The discovery, by Kenzo Hayashida of the Kyushu Okinawa Society for Underwater Archaeology, follows years of patient searching of the sea bottom off the north coast of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands. The site, in Imari Bay, was initially found by fishermen, whose nets brought up artefacts including the personal seal of a Mongol commander, inscribed in both Chinese and the Phagspa script used to write the Mongolian language after the descendants of Genghis Khan conquered China and needed to administer their empire.

Sonar surveys and diving over the past 20 years have brought up iron swords, stone catapult balls, spearheads and stone anchor weights, James Delgado, of the Vancouver Maritime Museum, reports in the American journal Archaeology this month. The granite used for the anchor on the newly discovered shipwreck shows that the ship came from Fujian on the south China coast, one of the marshalling points for the fleet that attacked Japan in 1281.

More than 4,000 ships and thousands of troops were furnished by the defeated Sung Dynasty, according to Chinese records, and Kublai Khan’s Korean allies were ordered to build 900 more and to provide 10,000 soldiers. An earlier invasion attempt, in 1274, reportedly involved 23,000 men shipped across the Strait of Tsushima from Korea; they established a bridgehead and looted the port of Hakata (modern Fukuoka), but withdrew with the loss of numerous ships and more than half the army, according to some sources.

When Kublai invaded again in 1281, the Japanese were ready and had fortified the coast. The Korean section of the Mongol fleet attacked without waiting for the much larger Chinese force, and while they pondered how to attack the Japanese defensive walls, were in turn raided by small craft carrying samurai warriors, and by fireships.

After the main Chinese fleet arrived, a sudden storm, which the Japanese hailed as a heaven-sent kamikaze, mauled the anchored ships, drowning nearly all the 100,000 troops on board. At the entrance to Imari Bay "a person could walk across from one point of land to another on a mass of wreckage.”

It is one of these ships that the archaeologists have been investigating. Dr Delgado reports "bright red leather armour fragments, an intact Mongol helmet, a cluster of iron arrow tips, and a round ceramic object, a tetsuhau or bomb.” Such grenades were pottery spheres filled with gunpowder, and although their use is portrayed on scrolls depicting Kublai’s invasion, the historian Thomas Conlan has recently suggested in his book In Little Need of Divine Intervention that these were later interpolations.

"His suggestion that the exploding bomb is an anachronism has now been demolished by solid archaeological evidence,” Dr Delgado says. The six tetsuhau so far recovered "are the world’s earliest known exploding projectiles and the earliest direct archaeological evidence of seagoing ordnance.” X-rays of one bomb show that it was filled with pieces of iron shrapnel as well as gunpowder.

The scientists will be able to study the mysterious wreck and bring artifacts to the surface because of a Houston company’s remotely operated submarine that can dive to the site a half-mile below. It will be the deepest full archaeological exploration ever conducted in the Gulf.

The wreck, named Mica for the oil field in which it was found, is about 75 feet long and has a copper-lined hull that suggests a military, rather than commercial, purpose. Some of the wood resting on the silt sea floor appears charred.

Did the ship meet a fiery death? Researchers hope the remains can answer that question, identify the vessel and crew, and perhaps even shed light on a naval conflict almost two centuries ago.

Located about 30 miles off the mouth of the Mississippi River under 2,650 feet of water in an area known as the Mississippi Canyon, the wreck is beyond the reach of divers. It was found after Exxon Mobil accidentally laid an 8-inch pipeline through the site in early 2001.

The oil company reported the find to the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service and paid $250,000 to support an expedition that ended prematurely last year.

Scientists were working with the U.S. Navy in that mission but lost control of the Navy’s remotely operated vehicle. The ROV’s tether became entangled in the ship’s propeller, which destroyed the vehicle.

The archaeologists have brought up small pieces of copper plating from the shipwreck but hope to collect larger sections as well as other objects clearly visible on the seafloor. "A lot of the artifacts are now just waiting for us to pick them up," said oceanographer Brett Phaneuf of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University.

The copper plating, in two-foot strips, is important because several full sheets containing the same maker’s mark would allow scientists to pinpoint the ship’s origin. Because the plating appears to have been nailed to the hull by hand, researchers are confident the vessel was built before 1815, when ship-builders began using copper plates perforated by machine.

The ship’s age, date and military profile indicate that it may have played a role in the Battle of New Orleans, the final chapter in the War of 1812. The fighting between U.S. soldiers, led by Andrew Jackson, and British forces took place in December 1814 and January 1815.

"There’s a lot of interesting history at this time (in the Gulf) around New Orleans," Phaneuf said. He is headed back out to the Mica wreck today with the support of Deep Marine Technology, a Houston company that is donating equipment and expertise to the venture.

This is "far and away" the deepest Gulf of Mexico wreck studied in detail, said Jack Irion, a marine archaeologist with the Minerals Management Service and an authority on Gulf expeditions. Researchers say the entire Gulf is teeming with wrecks.

In Texas waters, which extend about 10 miles off the coast, the state has recorded about 1,700 wrecks, said State Marine Archaeologist Steven D. Hoyt. Among the most famous are La Belle, which dates to 1686 and was used by the French explorer La Salle, and three Spanish treasure ships that sank in 1554 near South Padre Island.

In deeper waters, one of the most notable wrecks was found two years ago. While scouting a deep Gulf pipeline route, BP and Shell Oil Co. found the wreckage of the World War II German submarine U-166, lost for nearly 60 years. It was lying in the silt under 5,000 feet of water about 45 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River.

Phaneuf said the Gulf of Mexico does not get enough respect from some archaeologists because it is not considered as old a travel route as other areas, such as the Mediterranean Sea, and has many oil rigs.

But he said that should not diminish the history in the Gulf’s waters, which he believes eventually may yield information on seafaring habits of the Aztecs, Mayans and other civilizations.

The federal Gulf database includes precise locations for more than 200 wrecks, with about a dozen discovered every year. Phaneuf said he would like to explore up to six a year.

Deep Marine Technology’s founder, Paul McKim, said his company will help when it can. In addition to the ROV, the company is trying to commercialize one-person, untethered submersibles that are far more maneuverable than an ROV. One such unit will be used this week when Phaneuf and McKim move from the Mica wreck to a site about 60 miles away.

More than 550 years after the first foundation stones were laid, modern technology is about to put the legend to the test. A group of Knights Templar, successors to the warrior monks who sought asylum from the Pope by fleeing to Scotland in the early 14th century and fought for Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn, are to make a "non-invasive" survey of the land around the chapel. They will use the latest ultrasound and thermal imaging technology in the hope of finding evidence of the existence of the vaults.

"The plan is to investigate the land around the chapel to a depth of at least 20 feet," said John Ritchie, Grand Herald and spokesman for the Knights Templar. "The machine we are using is the most sophisticated anywhere and is capable of taking readings from the ground up to a mile deep without disturbing any of the land. We know many of the Knights are buried in the grounds and there are many references to buried vaults, which we hope this project will finally uncover."

Rosslyn Chapel, or the Collegiate Chapel of St Matthew as it was to have been, was founded in 1446 by Sir William St Clair, third and last Prince of Orkney. Built as a celebration of Christ, it is also a monument to craftsmanship. Bristling with flying buttresses and gargoyles in the highest Gothic style on the outside, the interior is carved with scenes from the Bible, the fall of man, the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the birth of Christ, the crucifixion and the resurrection.

"Rosslyn is an amazing building. It is a book in stone but, because the symbolism which is written into the chapel is in a medieval language, we haven’t even cracked the introduction page yet," Mr Ritchie said. Pillars and arches are covered with hundreds of exquisitely carved leaves, fruit, animals and figures. Some curious carvings are said to depict cactus and sweetcorn, chiselled before Columbus set foot in America in 1492.

"There is a whole series of stuff on each section of the chapel, which relates to a different period of time," Mr Ritchie added. "We have to go back to the 15th century and read it with a medieval eye to understand what it all means. All these symbols relate to events in history. It is a book created in stone, which brings in all the apostolic religion, laid over by an astrological form which tracks the seasons, and the plants in the seasons." Both the Freemasons and the Knights Templar claim the ornate stonemasonry of the church is a secret code which, if broken, will reveal the whereabouts of treasures.

And that makes the legal document somewhat akin to a modern treasure map, one that holds the location via longitude and latitude of what is believed to be the remains of an 18th century merchant ship known as the Notre Dame de la Deliverance. The Deliverance could hold a fortune that would make Florida’s richest shipwreck look like a toddler’s piggy bank.

Sub Sea Research Inc., a Portland, Maine, salvaging outfit, believes it found the wreck of the 64-cannon French ship. Spain chartered the vessel to bring gold, silver and other riches from the New World to replenish coffers after its war efforts. But the Deliverance, with its 512 passengers, never made it to Spain, foundering in a 1755 hurricane.

What is known, according to an incomplete manifest dug up in Spain by Sub Sea, is the Deliverance left Havana on Halloween filled with 1,200 bars of gold bullion, 15,000 gold doubloons, six chests of gems, and a million silver pieces. That would be 10 times the booty found on the famed galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha, which sank in nearby waters and netted the late Mel Fisher legendary status when he hauled up $400 million in treasure -- the largest find ever. If the shipwreck turns out to be the 166-foot Deliverance, Sub Sea says it could contain between $2 billion and $3 billion in treasure.

Senior U.S. District Judge James C. Paine has allowed Sub Sea to make its claim under admiralty law, granting permission to "arrest" the still officially unidentified, wrecked and abandoned vessel off the Florida Keys. This will allow Sub Sea to protect its claim from other treasure seekers. As is done under admiralty law, the defendant is actually the wreck itself, identified only by its longitude and latitude. The legal wrangling has only just begun.

On Friday, Sub Sea’s attorney said the kingdom of Spain also has laid claim to the wreckage. Tallahassee lawyer Guy E. "Sandy" Burnette said Spain is asserting that the wreckage contains remains of Spanish soldiers and is sacrosanct. "It’s what we call a minor development," Burnette said wryly.

"They’ve cast a blanket over this thing before anybody really knows that it is the Deliverance. We think it is. We have good reason to believe it is, but honest to God how can we know until we see it?" Sub Sea will argue that the ship isn’t Spanish at all but French. The U.S. State Department, though, has told Sub Sea it needs Spanish permission to dive on the site.

Legal matters aside, getting to the salvaging effort itself will be a tricky maneuver because the wreck is strewn across the border of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, home to fragile coral reefs.

Greg Brooks, co-manager for Sub Sea Research, was back in Maine for the holidays, shoveling snow, dreaming about the Florida Keys and the Deliverance. "When I first started doing this I was like everybody else," Brooks said. "It’s like you are a kid and you’re walking down the beach hoping you trip over a treasure chest." But Brooks says it is about much more than the money for him now: "There were 512 people aboard that boat. What are their stories? That is the most fascinating part of digging up history."

Before they turned their attention to the Deliverance, Sub Sea focused on wrecks off the coast of Haiti. Brooks said they believe they’ve discovered the anchor and ballast stones of Christopher Columbus’ Santa Maria, which sank in 1492.

As for the Deliverance, there is plenty of skepticism in the sea of treasure hunters. Other salvagers, archaeologists and interested parties have flooded Internet bulletin boards on their favorite subject. They doubt Sub Sea has found the Deliverance, they doubt the Deliverance ever existed and even if it did, they believe there probably is not that much gold to be found within its strewn skeleton.

"They are saying this is typical publicity," said Bob "Frogfoot" Weller, a Lake Worth treasure hunter who’s written several books on the subject. "When you want somebody to invest in your wreck, you say there is billions of dollars on board." Weller noted the hoopla over the famed HMS DeBraak, which sunk off of the Delaware coast in 1798. Word was there was so much gold on the 80-foot ship that it sunk from the weight. When it was recovered, the only items of wealth found were a few gold bars and a ring, he said.

The Deliverance is about 10 miles from the Atocha site, but it is in deeper water about 40 miles southwest of Key West. Until recently, technology was not available for treasure hunters to explore the 200-foot depths where the Deliverance might have sunk, Brooks said. Brooks said satellite imagery has been particularly helpful, and so has research in Florida, Cuba and Spain.

"If you just headed out to sea and said, ’I’m going to go strike it rich,’ forget about it," Brooks said. "You have to do a ton of research, and you have to do a ton of surveying, and then you have to be extremely lucky."

Sub Sea learned that shrimpers in the 1980s pulled up some items with their nets at the suspected site. It took 20 hours to free one shrimper’s net, which entangled some wood, an urn and some big black metal ingots that were probably silver. During the years, others have fished out a crucifix, plate and some coins from the site.

Information on the ship has been scattered and scarce. The Deliverance was a French ship owned by the French East India Co. that Spain had hired to bring back wealth to fill its coffers in anticipation of what would become the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763).

What has Brooks and his company excited is that sonar has found a ballast -- the rocks that weighed down ships -- at the location, and it fits the size of the Deliverance. And if the wreck is indeed the Deliverance, there will be a review process to allow excavation within the sanctuary, which stretches 2,800 nautical square miles from the Dry Tortugas west of Key West into Biscayne Bay, throwing a protective cloak over the coral reefs. The wreck is thought to be spread over an 8-square-mile area, which includes the sanctuary but no Florida territorial waters.

Brooks has said much of the wreckage is free of coral and that a salvage effort would be environmentally friendly. The company uses a 102-foot converted U.S. Navy torpedo recovery ship. Sanctuary spokeswoman Cheva Heck says that Sub Sea has applied to survey the ship wreck site. "Our primary concern when we permit submerged cultural resources is the environment," Heck said. "If it is in a sensitive area, it is doubtful we would allow salvaging activities. "And if items are recovered, the sanctuary can lay claim to them if they have unique historical public interest, she said.

Treasure hunters who’ve examined the wreck say their research indicates that it’s the Notre Dame de la Deliverance — a 166-foot, armed merchant vessel of French origin that sailed under a Spanish flag. The research includes surveys of the site by state-of-the-art remote sensing devices and divers, a study of historical records, and the discovery that a few silver items — including a crucifix, plate and some coins — were brought up years ago by other salvagers.

"It was one of the richest ships ever lost,” says Greg Brooks, 51, the co-manager of Portland, Maine-based Sub Sea Research Inc., which is conducting the search and proposed salvage effort. He estimates the value of the Deliverance’s trove could be between $2 billion and $3 billion.

Sub Sea Research recently followed its findings with a quiet trip to federal court in West Palm Beach to stake a claim under admiralty law. In October, Sub Sea won an order from Senior U.S. District Judge James C. Paine allowing the company to "arrest” the shipwreck and protect itself from modern-day pirates. The wreck is located "substantially” inside the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary but outside Florida territorial waters, according to court records.

The law considers wreck sites "submerged cultural resources.” Those found in the sanctuary — a federal trusteeship co-administered by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the state of Florida — are strictly regulated. A permit is required to conduct a detailed survey and inventory of a wreck site. Additional permits are needed to recover and get title to the treasure.

Brooks says the law should now protect the company from other possible claimants if the wreck is indeed the Deliverance. The state has no claim, says Brooks, because the wreck is beyond the three-mile limit. Spain has asserted admiralty claims to lost warships in U.S. courts, but the Deliverance was privately owned.

The Notre Dame de la Deliverance, hired by Spain and owned by the French West Indies Co., which is long defunct, capsized and sank in a hurricane on Nov. 1, 1755, a day after departing Havana for Cadiz, Spain. On board were 512 passengers and crew.

The ship, named for an ancient French cathedral in the Normandy village of Lion-sur-Mer, was a top-heavy vessel equipped with 64 cannons, according to documentation cited by Sub Sea Research. It was hired by Spain because the kingdom was broke and could no longer build her own ships, and because the French and Indian War and the Seven Years War were diverting Spain’s naval resources.

"By 1750, [Spain’s system] that had for centuries shipped treasure back from the New World had virtually collapsed,” says R. Duncan Mathewson III, Mel Fisher’s former chief archaeologist who recently signed on as a consultant to Sub Sea Research. Mathewson, a member of the marine sanctuary’s advisory council, says Spain needed ships from other countries to transport treasure.

The Deliverance departed Havana on Halloween with a Spanish escort of seven or eight smaller, schooner-like vessels called zabras, according to Brooks’ research in Cuba and elsewhere. The ship soon met a fate that Brooks now believes was remarkably similar to what befell the Atocha and its hapless crew in surrounding waters 133 years earlier.

The hurricane struck the night after the ship left Havana, its eye passing over Havana to the southwest. The escorting zabras reportedly were able to survive the storm and scudded across the outer reefs to eventually anchor on the northwest side of the Marquesas Keys to ride out the storm the following morning, according to a research report prepared by Brooks and Sub Sea researcher Edward Michaud in July.

The Deliverance, blown off course, wasn’t so lucky. Sailors from the escorts who made it back to Havana reported the treasure ship foundered in roiling seas 12 nautical miles off the Marquesas Keys, rolled over and sank in waters too deep to allow salvage.

An incomplete manifest of Deliverance cargo that was owned by Spain’s King Charles III declares those riches to include 17 chests packed with nearly 1,200 pounds of gold bullion, 15,000 gold doubloons, six chests of gems, and more than a million silver pieces. That doesn’t count contraband or any valuable surviving belongings of passengers.

In contrast, the 112-foot Atocha’s approximate yield to date is 115 gold bars, 900 silver bars, 200 pounds of gold, 3,000 emeralds, 135,000 silver coins and less than 100 gold coins.

The largest treasure ever salvaged — worth more than $1 billion — was recovered in the 1990s from the 1857 wreck of the coal-burning sidewheeler S.S. Central America. That American ship went down off the coast of South Carolina carrying bullion and coins being brought back to the east coast by those who’d struck it rich during the California Gold Rush.

If the shipwreck found by Sub Sea Research is indeed the Deliverance, it capsized and sank in waters 180 to 200 feet deep, about 10 miles from where the Atocha was found in shallower waters in the 1970s by the late Mel Fisher.

Undersea search devices like side scan sonar and remotely operated vehicles have located an intact hull, two encrusted piles of ballast stones and what Brooks says appears to be cannons on the seabed. The wreck lies outside Florida’s territorial waters. "It looks like two wrecks,” says Brooks.

Mathewson is enthusiastic but cautious about the find. "It is important to emphasize we haven’t dated or identified any of the [sonar] anomalies yet, and we don’t know if it is the Deliverance,” says the marine archeologist, who has not yet visited the site or seen video shot by Sub Sea Research. "But I’m very excited.”

He says it’s promising that the wreck was a good-sized ship that appears to be pre-19th century. "We have side scan images of what looks like a well-articulated, intact lower hulled structure with full ballast,” he adds.

Mathewson says records indicate clear signs of a hurricane at that particular time. "The question is did the Deliverance go down in this part of the keys or go down in some other part,” he says. The ship was reported to have flooded and foundered in a very deep sea. "You would therefore expect the hull to be pretty much intact, and that’s what the images are suggesting. It’s not a vessel that’s scattered or broken up.”

The Deliverance has remained largely outside the shipwreck lore of the Keys. Even within the treasure hunting community, the Deliverance isn’t well known. Bob "Frogfoot” Weller, a longtime South Florida treasure hunter who’s written six books on the topic, says he’s never heard of the Deliverance.

"Just because they find a ballast pile, that absolutely doesn’t make it a treasure wreck,” says Weller, who lives in Lake Worth. "There are thousands of wrecks along the coast of Florida, but there aren’t that many that are real, serious treasure wrecks.”

Another dose of skepticism comes from Dr. John Broadwater. Broadwater is the manager of the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary off the coast of North Carolina, the site of the wreck of the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor. Its distinctive round turret was brought to the surface to great fanfare last summer.

"Treasure hunters are often wrong, and so are archeologists,” Broadwater says. "It’s so easy to go off and find something that has some of the characteristics of what you are looking for because you want so much to find it.” Still, more than one member of famed treasure hunter Mel Fisher’s team has found evidence about the Keys wreck site convincing enough to join Sub Sea Research’s team.

Lead attorney Guy E. "Sandy” Burnette Jr., a Tallahassee solo practitioner, says he’s brought aboard Fisher attorneys David Paul Horan of Key West and William VanDercreek, professor emeritus of Florida State University’s law school.

Burnette convinced Judge Paine that the find is genuine — and that an order protecting the wreck from rival treasure seekers was necessary — by showing him lead sheathing that once protected the hull from worms and was recovered outside the national marine sanctuary. The sheathing is the only item removed so far by Sub Sea Research, Brooks says.

The court order applies to an area that covers 18 square miles. About 90 percent of the wreck is located in the sanctuary, he says. Still, Burnette says, "we had to go to court to protect our rights outside the sanctuary.”

Sub Sea Research applied for an inventory permit in September. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration general counsel Martin Freeman, in Silver Spring, Md., confirmed the application is pending but declined further comment. An official at the marine sanctuary’s Key Largo office who is familiar with the application declined comment.

Still, Brooks and Burnette remain confident they’ve complied with the rules and will get the permit soon. "We’ve gotten very strong assurances that they won’t consider another permit for the area while ours is pending,” says Burnette. Brooks says that "once we get it in hand, and the weather clears, we’ll be back at the site.”

The marine sanctuary rules, which evolved from Mel Fisher’s protracted and ultimately successful legal battle with Florida over the right to the Atocha treasure, allow private salvagers to work wrecks on public property as long as the public’s interest in historic preservation is protected.

Generally, that means commercial salvagers like Sub Sea Research can obtain legal title to valuable items such as bullion, coins and gems deemed by archeologists to be of no special historical interest. The public would own any unique artifacts. But because the marine sanctuary’s rules of ownership are inexact, the potential remains for litigation over each item if and when treasures of disputed ownership are hauled from the wreck.

Before he hunted sunken treasure, Brooks built swimming pools for a living. About a decade ago, after 19 years in that business, he cashed out to find his fortune. Brooks’ principal partner and fellow investor is John Hardy, a former National Aeronautics and Space Administration engineer who currently runs a La-Z-Boy Furniture Gallery in South Portland.

Brooks says he’s personally spent a million dollars so far in the hunt for treasure that he believes has led him to the Deliverance. He’s helped make ends meet doing salvage work for insurance companies. Brooks, who is married and has a 15-year-old daughter, has plans to create a shipwreck museum and aquarium in Portland.

Until late June, when they first identified the wreck in the Straits of Florida as the Deliverance, Brooks and his associates spent much of their search time in wreck-infested waters off the north coast of Haiti. It’s there that Brooks and his partners think they’ve made another stunning discovery — the ballast stones and anchor of Christopher Columbus’ flagship, the Santa Maria. The Santa Maria struck a reef and sank off Cap Haitien in 1492.

Last summer, Brooks was preparing to return to Haiti when Michaud, a Sub Sea researcher in Framingham, Mass., began turning up information about the Deliverance. "The more we dug, the more we found that fit,” says Brooks. So Haiti was off, and Key West was on.

While Brooks and his company are the first to identify the Keys wreck as the Deliverance, they are not the first divers to have visited the site. In the mid 1990s, Thomas Yerian, a Key West resident, was issued a five-year search permit by the sanctuary, but it later expired. Yerian could not be located for comment.

"It’s been found before, but nobody recognized it,” says Brooks. Or, perhaps, nobody’s had the resources until now to mount an expensive and hazardous expedition, and overcome the bureaucracy, to locate and raise valuables from the wreck site. Brooks began attempting to check out the Keys wreck site in 1998. Recent technological advances in underwater imaging devices, however, are opening up the search, he says.

Sub Sea Research’s primary recovery vessel is the 102-foot M/V Diamond, a converted U.S. Navy torpedo retriever that’s currently docked on Stock Island near Key West. Today, says Brooks, about a dozen people are employed by Sub Sea Research to conduct the search of the Deliverance and document it with TV cameras; more will sign on when salvage activity at the site resumes. Everyone is a subcontractor, working mostly on speculation for an agreed-upon share of any booty.

All 512 crew and passengers on the Deliverance were presumed lost at sea. But Brooks and Michaud now hypothesize that as many as 400 survivors used small longboats and gigs to reach Matanca Key, a spit of sand nearby. The site now is submerged and is named Rebecca Shoal.

Historians previously have reported that 400 Frenchmen were butchered and cannibalized by Calusa Indians on Matanca Key, or Slaughter Key as it was also known, sometime before 1775. Brooks says he’s since learned that a year after the Deliverance sank, a French governor-general in the Caribbean dispatched two French frigates and 600 French and Spanish sailors to the Marquesas Keys to enact retribution on the Calusas for their alleged involvement in the massacre of French seamen who had survived a shipwreck.

The French found the bulk of the Calusa tribe on Key West and slaughtered more than 3,000. The bloodbath, Brooks says, marked the beginning of the end for the now-extinct tribe and may account for Key West’s Spanish name, Cayo Hueso, or Island of Bones. That hypothesis may never be proved. But 40 miles away, the answers to other questions are lying in the twilight 200 feet down.

Historical Recovery Specialists Inc. filed a federal complaint Wednesday, claiming it uncovered a centuries-old ship sitting on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The company wants exclusive rights to the ship, according to the complaint. And if the state is not willing to grant Historical Recovery rights to the ship, the company requests a "full and liberal salvage award."

"Historical Recovery is prepared to engage in an extensive, expensive and dangerous search, exploration, research, recovery and salvage," the complaint states, "in order to find and possess the unidentified sailing vessel and her tackle, armament, apparel and cargo."

The complaint identifies through latitude and longitude where the ship rests. The ship sits within 3,000 yards of latitude 27:34:19 north by longitude 80:18:56 west. The coordinates place the ship a few miles offshore of Indian River County just north of the St. Lucie County border.

Company operators must research the ship to make sure no government, company or person has tried to claim it. Historical Recovery Director John George said he could not comment on the find. He said he would have an announcement in a few weeks.

Florida’s East Coast is a popular spot for treasure hunting. A fleet of Spanish galleons sank along the coast during a hurricane in 1715. Historical Recovery’s complaint states the ship it found is from the same era.

This most recent uncovering of a sunken ship laden with precious jewels and coins might owe its discovery to lobster season. "I guess we could say it all started over lobster," said Ed Kuss, one of three directors of the Royal Palm Beach-based company. Kuss described himself as a jeweler and businessman from Prestonsberg, Ky. The company’s other two directors are John George of Royal Palm Beach and Terri Cooney of Fort Pierce.

A member of the recovery group was lobster hunting and found what Kuss would refer to only as an "unusual artifact."

Kuss said the shipwreck is thought to be a part of the Spanish Plate Fleet, a group of galleons that set sail from Havana in 1715 laden with jewels, gold and silver which ran into a hurricane and sank along the coast.

Last month, the company filed a federal complaint claiming its discovery and asking for exclusive rights to "search, recovery, and salvage" of the ship. Kuss said that sometime today, Historical Recovery Specialists would turn over the "articles of claim" that were recovered from the ship including "coins, emeralds and other artifacts." He said the total value of the ship’s treasures is unknown, but preliminary findings are promising: one emerald is estimated at 73 carats.

A federal marshal representing the federal court will record and safely store the items until the court’s final ruling on the ownership of the ship and its contents. However, the ownership of the 18th-century vessel could fall under federal or state jurisdiction, according to the Abandoned Shipwreck Act of 1987.

Officials from the state’s Bureau of Archeological Research said Wednesday that they were aware of the shipwreck’s discovery but could not comment about Historical Recovery’s claim of ownership because it has become a legal matter.

"The evidence indicates three unique shipwrecks, including an early Spanish wreck circa 1560, a 1715 Spanish treasure fleet shipwreck and the remains of a late 19th century vessel," said Robert Westrick, project archeologist.

He said he and other divers will continue their search this winter for more definitive proof of the 1715 wreck. So far, they have found a cannon, ballast stones, a 17-foot hunk of wood, a seven-foot encrusted anchor, two other sections of timber, a seven-foot rudder section and Ming dynasty porcelain.

In 1991, the company was awarded an exclusive contract with the state to explore a five-by-three mile area directly off Vero Beach, just north of the Riomar, a ship from the 1715 fleet. Westrick said known ships wrecked both north and south of their exploratory area.

"Basically, Vero Beach is directly in the middle of the area where the 1715 fleet came ashore. The area offers an ideal hiding spot," he said. He said the company just began searching the area in earnest this season. He said coins help date wrecks. "I think next year’s the year. We’ll start as soon as March," Westrick said.

He hopes his company will receive a salvage permit to begin bringing up more items and digging to find artifacts. The exploration permit the firm currently has allows it to recover only representative items to demonstrate the need for salvage.

State Archeologist Jim Miller is cautious, saying there is not yet proof of shipwrecks until a pattern is evident. "That’s premature. A cannon can be on the bottom of the ocean, or an anchor or a piece of wood, but they are clues," he said.

He said the site "has a way to go" before he could say there is a shipwreck and "a long way to go" before he could determine a ship was from the 1715 fleet. "We have many unexplained anomalies in magnetic fields, but we need to know what caused them," he said. Then, he said, "we need to search out what’s buried beneath the sand."

Mo Molinar of Fort Pierce, a man that experts say has probably recovered more sunken treasure than anyone alive over the last 35 years, is also excited about the prospect of finding another 1715 ship. "It’s going to pay off, big-time. This ship has never been worked, unlike the other ships that have been found. I hope this summer, we’ll go full force," he said.

Ernest Kling, director of HRD, hopes to find the main ballast pile, dated coins or items with the registry number from the manifest that would prove conclusively that their find is one of the 1715 ships. "We know the material is from at least two shipwrecks, and we think one is from 1715," he said.

A beachcomber from Delaware, he moved to Florida and formed HRD because he became interested in shipwreck salvage. This year, his firm is involved at three sites in the Keys as well as the Vero Beach site.

Robert F. Marx of Indialantic, an underwater archeologist writing his 53rd book on the subject, thinks "they’re going to find a ship from the fleet." He said it’s easier and quicker to excavate sites in deep water than in the shallow water off Vero Beach. "But these guys have put in a lot of work," he said.

The agreement is a legal breakthrough that could open the way to the recovery of perhaps up to $4 billion in gold coins that went down with H.M.S. Sussex in a violent storm in 1694, and of dozens of sunken vessels in seas around the world.

The company, Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc. of Tampa, Fla., found what British authorities believe to be the Sussex during four expeditions off Gibraltar from 1998 to 2001. The exploratory work was done with British approval, and the discovery tentatively announced last February. But until now there has been no legal precedent for a private company to join with a government to raise its treasure.

As new technologies open up the deep sea, the maritime superpowers of present and past — notably Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Russia and the United States — have begun to assert ownership over thousands of ships that were lost in distant waters.

But little has come of the claims because the governments often lack the money and skills to pull sunken treasure and cultural riches from the depths, and they have struck no major deals to let commercial partners share the risks and rewards.

The new agreement, which is being announced by Britain on Monday, changes that. The Ministry of Defense, the sunken ship’s official owner, calls it "an important step in development of a ’partnering’ approach to deep-sea archaeology."

Experts say it could end the days of freelance treasure hunting and start a time when nations oversee the recovery of their own lost fleets. They praised the agreement for requiring cultural artifacts to be handled according to contemporary archaeological standards.

The British say the Sussex, the flagship of a large flotilla, carried a fortune in treasure to buy the loyalty of a shaky ally in a war against France. In darkness half a mile down, the site where it is believed to lie consists of a large mound rich in cannons, anchors and other artifacts — the only such objects found anywhere near the area where the Sussex was reported lost.

"We’re fairly convinced it’s the Sussex," a senior British official said in an interview. "And we’re very excited to be working with Odyssey. We really want to see this succeed."

American experts, echoing the British assessment, say the accord is unique. "It’s the first time we’re seeing a profit-making group doing this kind of recovery," said Anne G. Giesecke, an marine adviser to the Society for Historical Archaeology, a professional group. Robert C. Blumberg, a senior policy adviser at the State Department, called the agreement "a public-private partnership where both sides stand to gain."

Months of detailed negotiations delayed the accord until Sept. 27, British and Odyssey officials said. The government said the agreement would "extend to recording and preservation of artifacts and their eventual conservation, publication, exhibition, marketing and all other facets relating to the management of our underwater cultural heritage."

Odyssey considers the agreement a coup and a model for a new era. "We see a whole industry emerging," said Greg Stemm, a founder of the company. "The private sector will routinely help governments in managing their marine heritage. It’s already a huge industry on land."

The company, which is publicly traded, is risking its own money in the venture: $4 million so far and up to $4 million for excavation work with an eventual total of tens of millions of dollars, much of it for marketing the treasure, Mr. Stemm said. Both sides agree that the ship carried coins, most likely gold, that were worth £1 million in 1694. In weight, that would be about nine tons. The $4 billion figure comes from the theoretical value of the coins if sold to collectors, which the company says it cannot predict.

The partnership is to split the profits or appraised values of the recovered coins on a sliding scale that favors Odyssey at first and then the government. Odyssey is to get 80 percent of the proceeds up to $45 million, 50 percent from $45 million to $500 million and 40 percent above $500 million. The British government gets the rest.

The agreement calls for archaeological integrity — a difficult technical feat at such depths and a goal that critics of for-profit archaeology are likely to dispute. Many archaeologists abhor the sale of recovered artifacts, saying it inhibits scholarly analysis and public display.

The partnership agreement draws a distinction between classes of artifacts, saying cultural items have a greater archaeological value than coins, which it allows to be sold to help pay for the project.

Mr. Blumberg of the State Department praised the approach as allowing the saving of wrecks that otherwise would deteriorate over time and be lost to history. Academic archaeologists, he said, had little money for the investigation of deep-sea artifacts. "If you have a thousand gold coins and they’re virtually identical in every respect that you can discern," he asked, "why shouldn’t you keep a representative sample for a museum and let the rest be sold?"

In recent years maritime countries have occasionally recovered shipwrecks from their shallow coastal waters. Sweden lifted the Vasa, a 17th-century warship, and Britain the Mary Rose, a 16th-century warship. This summer, the United States lifted the gun turret of the Monitor, a 19th-century ironclad.

In the case of distant waters, the governments often turned a blind eye to shallow-water treasure hunters. Spain took no action in 1985 when Mel Fisher found the Atocha, a galleon lost off Florida in 1622, and recovered about $400 million in treasure.

The stakes and costs have soared in recent years as robots, sonars and other advanced gear have opened every corner of the deep to exploration and recovery, bringing thousands of lost ships into play. So governments have begun to assert ownership over their vessels, especially warships.

In 2000, Spain won a legal battle over the issue when a federal appeals court in Virginia ruled that it owned the remains of two warships lost off the Virginia coast two centuries ago. The ruling snatched the ships away from a treasure hunter, who estimated that the wrecks bore more than half a billion dollars in coins and precious metals.

In a new disclosure about the Sussex, the British statement said the "considerable economic loss to the nation led to the foundation of the Bank of England," which bailed out the government with a loan.

In keeping with British practice, the 30-page agreement is being kept secret. But the British have released a summary memorandum. It specifies such things as the licensing fees Odyssey must pay, the profit breakdown and how a project plan must be completed in 100 days.

"The government," it says, "may appoint two representatives to monitor and record the exploration to determine whether the activities are being carried out in compliance with the project plan."

The agreement also says the British government will receive "10 percent of any net income derived from intellectual property rights associated with the project," as well as 3 percent of Odyssey’s "gross sales of merchandise that utilizes the name H.M.S. Sussex."

"It would be the first 1715 wreck to be excavated archaeologically," said Rob Westrick, company archaeologist. "Back in the ’60s and ’70s they didn’t know any better. They didn’t keep very good records. They’d just pile things in somebody’s garage. "Right now, it’s a mystery wreck," Westrick said.

Historical Research and Development works out of Orlando and Fort Pierce, where the motor vessel Deep Venture was docked Monday awaiting a lull in rough seas. Its crew discovered a cannon about 50 feet seaward of the public beach this summer and Westrick said the gun is unmistakably from an old Spanish ship. Company divers also have found old ship wood, including a 12-foot section of rudder. But it was the discovery of granite rocks that ships used for hull ballast that excited them.

"You find a cannon, that doesn’t mean you’ve found a shipwreck, because they’d throw cannons overboard to lighten a ship in trouble," Westrick said. "Wood floats away. And if you find a gold coin, some sailor might have gotten drunk and lost it overboard. "But when we found the rocks ... that meant we’d found the lower portion of a ship. That stuff doesn’t get there by itself." As company President Ernie Kling likes to say, "Ballast stones don’t float."

Kling, reknown treasure salvor Mo Molinar and others got a state exploration lease to look for shipwrecks off Vero Beach in 1991. Molinar and company researcher Robert Marx thought there might be a virgin 1715 wreck in those waters, Westrick said, but they were too busy diving known wreck sites to turn their full attentions to the area.

Last winter, a free-lance diver found 400 silver coins in the area and went to the state to get a lease. "He was told that (Historical Research and Development Inc.) already had the lease," said Westrick, who declined to name the diver in case the state decides to prosecute him for illegal salvage.

"He tried to sell (the company) information on where he found them and wanted 50 percent of what’s found," Westrick said. The company declined, but learned an important clue. "We kind of knew where he went in at, and he said they were near a cannon."

Deep Venture returned this summer. Clear water allowed its crew to tow Melbourne diver Bob Garritty on a line through the water to eyeball the ocean floor. "After 20 minutes we found a cannon," Westrick said. "The cannon was the first piece of the puzzle. We started the search and found some ballast stones."

Eleven armed Spanish galleons left Havana, Cuba, in July 1715, laden with New World wealth bound for Spain. Struck by a hurricane a few days out of port, the flotilla was splattered along the shore in current-day St. Lucie and Indian River counties.

The leader of the expedition, the Polish-Italian journalist and explorer Jacek Palkiewicz, told EFE Saturday he was very pleased with the expedition and felt "certain" he had found El Dorado. After two years of research and exploration, Palkiewicz said, the lost city had been found in an area adjoining the Manu national park, southeast of Lima.

The journey to El Dorado has allowed the researchers to confirm all the written accounts and myths surrounding the lost city, including reports that it was a 10-day walk from Cuzco, the ancient capital of the Inca empire. Palkiewicz said he was most surprised to learn that stories of the city being under a lake were completely accurate. The lake has been discovered in a four-square-kilometer (1.5-square-mile) plateau totally covered in vegetation. Russian specialists taking part in the expedition used terrestrial radar to confirm the existence of an underwater network of caverns and tunnels.

According to legend, the treasures of the last Inca rulers were buried under the lake. He added that a final extensive expedition would be carried out in October and would include scientists specializing in the study of caves. Palkiewicz said he had found traces of pre-Inca constructions, which indicate that the Incas had only begun to colonize the area shortly before arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. The man described by Britain’s Guardian newspaper as a "self-styled academic" did not rule out the existence of other Inca constructions, but said the dense jungle and the region’s torrential rains prevented the team from investigating further.

The expedition, which was made up of scientists from Argentina, Italy, Poland, Russia and Peru, used terrestrial radar and satellites to locate the lost city. The journey was planned after two previous visits to the area and was given a further boost by the discovery of a 16th-century manuscript ostensibly proving that El Dorado had been discovered by Jesuit missionaries. In the manuscript, which was found in the Vatican archives of the Society of Jesus, the pope authorizes the Jesuits to evangelize the Indians of Paititi.

Palkiewicz, a teacher of survival skills who has written some 20 books about his journeys to the most remote areas of the planet, has extensive experience in the Amazon jungles. In 1996, he led another expedition that succeeded in locating the true source of the Amazon River. His most recent expedition had a budget of more than $1 million and received the symbolic support of Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo, Poland’s Aleksander Kwasniewski and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

English firm Subsea Explorer Ltd. said it will use mini-submarines in its one million pound ($1,523,100) search for gold, jewels and coins lost off the eastern Scottish port of Dundee in September 1651.

"The hunt could become one of the biggest and most historically significant searches and salvage operations ever mounted in UK waters," the search team said in a statement.

The lost cargo’s value is the subject of fierce debate, with estimates ranging from 60,000 pounds to 2.5 billion pounds.

The treasure was looted from the defeated Scots on the orders of Oliver Cromwell, the 17th century English ruler who established parliamentary rule and fought royalist Scots after the English Civil War.

Scots noblemen had stored their property in Dundee because they thought it was the safest town in Scotland.

But it was plundered by Cromwell’s right-hand man, General George Monck, whose troops stormed the city and loaded the booty onto 60 ships.

The fleet put out to sea only to meet disaster less than a mile offshore when the ships are believed to have hit a sandbank and sunk beneath the Tay Estuary where they have lain undisturbed for centuries.

The mystery could finally be solved this summer with the help of technology used to explore the wreck of the Titanic, the British passenger liner which sank after hitting an iceberg in 1912.

Subsea, which gives submarine tours of the Titanic, believes the Tay treasure lies under a few feet of sand, about 40 ft (12.1 m) below the surface.

"We have the best technology and the best people behind us," Gary Allsopp, Subsea’s chief executive, said in a statement. "I am confident that if there are sizeable amounts of metal down there, we will find them."

The ship named San Jose sunk on June 17, 1631, in the archipelago of the Pearl Islands some 60 miles south of Panama City, according to the culture institute.

Historians had known the general location of the ship for a number of years, the institute said. But after the discovery of the Spanish galleon Vizcaina on Panama’s Caribbean coast in November, the institute launched a new effort earlier this year to document the exact position and the cargo of the San Jose.

No immediate plans have been made to salvage the shipwrecked San Jose and the Vizcaina.

"It is a very costly business and we need outside funding," a culture institute spokeswoman said.

Director Rafael Ruiloba recently told Reuters that Panama was in talks with various international donors to aid the salvages and the Vizcaina would likely be rescued next year.

Loaded with around 700 tons of treasure including silver and gold ingots bound for Spain, the ship left the port of Callao on Peru’s Pacific coast, making a stopover in Ecuador, before heading toward Panama City, the institute said.

The aging ship, which had been sailing for 20 years in tropical waters, sank after crashing into rocks off one of the Pearl Islands, institute research showed.

During the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, Panama served as the central point for gold and silver shipments between the mines of Peru and imperial Spain.

Galleons laden with treasure were offloaded in Panama City and transported across the isthmus by mule train to be set onto ships on the Caribbean coast headed for Spain.

In the early 15th century, China was the world’s greatest naval power and Zheng He (pronounced jung huh), a eunuch who was close to the emperor, was its admiral. He led a fleet of huge ships through the Indian Ocean, reaching the east coast of Africa. Scholars think the Chinese could easily have continued around the Cape of Good Hope to Europe and America, if they had stayed their course of exploration. This much is documented.

But Gavin Menzies, a retired Royal Navy submarine commander and navigation expert, has taken the story a global step forward. In a lecture before the Royal Geographical Society in London on Friday evening, he backed up his hypothesis with what he said were secret pre- Columbian maps showing results of the Zheng He voyage, ancient Chinese artifacts found far from home and remains of gigantic shipwrecks in Australia and the Caribbean.

Mr. Menzies also described how, on his home computer and with a commercial software package called Starry Night, he reconstructed the Chinese celestial navigation system and traced what he thinks is the epic round-the-world voyage of Zheng He from March 1421 to October 1423. The Chinese, he concluded, explored the coasts of Africa, South America and Australia and sailed into the Caribbean and the Sea of Cortez, off what is now Baja California.

The presumed circumnavigation, Mr. Menzies argued, was achieved by a fleet of more than 100 ships, several times larger than the European caravels of 1492, that passed through the Indian Ocean, rounded the capes of Africa and South America and then crossed the South Pacific. Some of the ships might even have reached the Antarctic coast.

Ferdinand Magellan embarked on Europe’s first circumnavigation in 1519, and the surviving ship struggled back to Seville in 1522.

From his 14 years of investigation, Mr. Menzies said he determined that the first European explorers of the New World, including Columbus and Magellan, carried maps derived from Chinese charts that somehow found their way to Venice in 1428 and then to Portugal. Authorities on the history of cartography said this might be the most controversial part of the new theory.

But the fact that Mr. Menzies was given a respectful hearing at the venerable geographical society indicated that his ideas were not being dismissed as those of a crank. The audience of diplomats, naval officers, geographers and other scholars raised no immediate objections to the evidence or reasoning. Publishers were also there, in anticipation of a planned auction of rights to a book Mr. Menzies is writing.

Mr. Menzies issued 17 pages of what he said was supporting evidence to back his findings. He said there was more evidence but it would not be disclosed until publication of the book.

In the meantime, some scholars reacted with polite skepticism.

"The burden of proof remains on Menzies’ shoulders," said Dr. John R. Hebert, chief of the map division of the Library of Congress, who has not studied the evidence on which the new theory is based. "I have no problem accepting the voyages if Menzies can provide a convincing, well- documented presentation, with sufficient contemporary documents to support the claim."

Dr. Gillian Hutchinson, curator of the history of cartography at the National Maritime Museum in England, is not persuaded that a link has been established between Chinese maps and those the Europeans used in their American voyages.

"It is possible," she told The Daily Telegraph of London last week, "that Chinese geographical knowledge had reached Europe before the Age of Discovery. But Mr. Menzies is absolutely certain of it, and that makes it difficult to separate evidence from wishful thinking."

In the lecture, Mr. Menzies said: "If people disagree with me they have got to come up with an alternative scenario. I say there is none."

Adm. Sir John Woodward, who served on submarines with Mr. Menzies in the 1960’s, said that he "is not some mad eccentric but a rational man, good at analysis — and he certainly knows all about charts."

In his lecture, Mr. Menzies said the primary evidence for his theory stemmed from his chance discovery that in 1428, the Portuguese had a chart of the world showing Africa, Australia, South America and various islands in remarkably accurate detail. For example, the chart clearly showed the Cape of Good Hope, which the Portuguese did not sail around until the end of the 15th century. He said the secret chart was the progenitor of several European maps in the later 15th century and in the early 16th century.

Mr. Menzies explained that the map was evidently based on documents that had been spirited out of China by the Venetian merchant and explorer Nicolo da Conti, who supposedly sailed with Admiral Zheng on part of one voyage. Da Conti is well known to historians as a source of knowledge about China in the 15th century.

Through research in Venice, Spain and Portugal, Mr. Menzies said that he found some of these early maps and also determined how the Chinese explorers were able to measure latitude and estimate longitude in the Southern Hemisphere, using Canopus as the guide star in place of Polaris, the North Star.

Mr. Menzies noted that the old maps "refer not to the world as it is today, but as it was five centuries ago, when sea levels and the apparent position of the stars were different."

Using the program Starry Night, he recreated the star positions of that time. Then, to try to "anchor" the stars to the old maps, he drew a perpendicular line from a star in the Southern Cross to Deception Island off the tip of South America. "The maps suddenly line up with current coastlines to an uncanny degree," he said, showing the Chinese must have gotten that far west and south.

Mr. Menzies also described nine wrecked Chinese ships that he said had been detected in the Caribbean Sea, which he said were further evidence of global voyaging by the Chinese fleet. He would not disclose their whereabouts. Scholars noted that the Caribbean has been thoroughly explored by undersea archaeologists and treasure hunters, and it seemed unlikely that such large wrecks would have been overlooked. The most current histories of cartography have no references to Zheng He voyages beyond the east coast of Africa.

But a violent storm hit the flotilla near the Strait of Gibraltar and the Sussex went down. All but two men died. The treasure — apparently gold and silver coins in theory worth up to $4 billion today — was never recovered.

Now, three centuries later, a team of entrepreneurs and archaeologists working with the British government says it has probably discovered the Sussex in the depths of the Mediterranean. A half mile down, the team’s robot has examined a large mound rich in cannons, anchors and solidified masses of artifacts, and its mechanical arm has gingerly lifted a few to the surface.

The identification of the tantalizing heap is not final, but the circumstantial evidence is strong. When asked about the wreck, the British Defense Ministry said in a statement that the recovered artifacts "lead us to believe that those items came from a British Sovereign vessel, most probably the wreck of H.M.S. Sussex.”

The discovery could rank as one of the most important from the sea. If plans proceed for an excavation of the site, archival and field research by the explorers suggests, the remains of the Sussex could yield the richest treasure wreck of modern times and illuminate a lost chapter in world history.

The loss of the Sussex’s payment, historians say, appears to have sent the Duke of Savoy into the French camp, altering the war’s outcome as well as a swath of European and American history. "We’re resurrecting history,” said Greg Stemm, operations director of Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc., a Tampa, Fla., company that leads the project.

Although divers have gone deeper to retrieve lost artifacts, miles in the case of the Titanic, those explorations were relatively easy and superficial compared with the difficulty of teasing out material and historical information from disheveled piles of decaying ship remains. At a half mile down, the excavation would be the deepest attempted in the annals of archaeology.

"We must not lose this knowledge,” said Anna Marguerite McCann, a marine archaeologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied Roman wrecks in the deep Mediterranean.

To search for the forgotten ship, Odyssey had to battle some archaeologists’ disdain of treasure hunters and win the blessing of the British and Spanish governments.

Odyssey is working with the Royal Naval Museum at Portsmouth, England, which advises the British Defense Ministry. The joint venture is unusual. The Sussex is a sovereign wreck — an extension of the state itself under maritime law. But Britain is letting private explorers bear some of the responsibility for its discovery and all of the financial risk.

While there is no question that the ship belongs to Britain, the private company has invested substantial effort, time and money in the project and can expect a fair return. The company is now negotiating with the British government for a contract to excavate the wreck and its potential riches. Typically, the finders receive most of the valuables.

Mr. Stemm, a founder of Odyssey, said the company’s hunt for the Sussex had so far cost $3 million over seven years.

Neil Cunningham Dobson, a British marine archaeologist working for Odyssey, told the Defense Ministry in a recent report that the company’s gamble had apparently paid off.

The submerged mound is the Sussex, he said, based on his analysis of "the survey data, the historical and documentary sources, the underwater investigations, the location, the size and shape of the site, and the cannon distribution and sizes.”

Technology is fast opening the deep, creating new opportunities as well as new conflicts among treasure hunters and archaeologists. Mr. Stemm and his business partner, John Morris, have gained reputations as peacemakers.

The Sussex caught their attention in 1995, Mr. Stemm said. A researcher showed the company a diplomatic letter written shortly after the sinking that said the ship carried a small fortune. The Sussex had no special renown in nautical history, unlike famous sunken galleons. So Odyssey hired researchers to comb archives in England, France, the Netherlands and the United States for clues to the ship’s cargo and resting place.

Evidence of where the Sussex foundered came from the logs of ships that witnessed the loss as well as the fleet secretary’s report. British court documents reinforced the idea of a rich cargo.

"A great summ of money is sending hence for Savoy,” said a document of November 1693. Just before the fleet sailed, the royal proceedings of Dec. 12, 1693, said the king had ordered the exchequer to give the flotilla "a million of money,” or one million pounds sterling in coins. That would equal about 10 tons of gold or more than 100 tons of silver.

Odyssey’s study hinted at the ship’s importance to history, which promises to make recovered artifacts more valuable. It was part of a grand alliance to counter France’s global ambitions under Louis XIV, the Sun King. The allies included England, Spain, Holland, Sweden and the Holy Roman Empire.

Savoy, a small state on France’s southeast flank that controlled key invasion routes to and from Paris, was a pivotal but wavering ally readily influenced by events, financial or otherwise.

"It doesn’t look good when you lose a brand-new ship in a storm in wartime,” said Chris Ware, a British maritime historian who helped Odyssey locate documents relating to the Sussex.

The loss of the large payment, and the defection of Savoy, helped create a stalemate that reverberated widely. The standoff in North America led to the French-English wars of the 18th century in which beleaguered colonists increasingly looked to their own defenses and institutions, a trend that culminated in the American Revolution.

As the research findings came in, Mr. Stemm and his company grew excited.

They talked with the British Defense Ministry and in March 1998 signed a cooperative agreement with the Royal Naval Museum. The hunt was code-named the Cambridge project. That June, they searched the bottom off Gibraltar with sonars and a tethered robot. Other expeditions took place in 1999, 2000 and 2001.

The cannon site was discovered early but the company kept looking wider to rule out other candidates, Mr. Stemm said.

Last year’s search, 75 days long, featured naval officers from Spain as well as Mr. Dobson.

"For me, as an archaeologist, it was quite a moment," he said in an interview of his first glimpse of the sunken cannons. "To look and fly over the site was amazing, because it had not been disturbed. We were the first people to see it since the vessel went down."

The team won permission from the British Defense Ministry to recover a few artifacts in an attempt to identify the vessel. Up came a three-pound stern cannon and cannonball — both covered in concretions but typical of small British weapons.

The recovered gun, made of iron, is typical of what the British Navy used in that day and is now undergoing conservation at Spain’s National Museum of Maritime Archaeology, in Cartagena.

In his report, which has not been made public, Mr. Dobson says the circumstantial evidence is strong enough to fix the wreck’s identity. These are among his arguments:

¶A survey of more than 315 square miles located 418 objects ranging from oil drums to ancient wrecks. But only one site held cannon.

¶The site is within one mile of where the British fleet secretary said the Sussex went down, and is consistent with how likely winds and currents would have carried the body of Sir Francis Wheeler, the fleet admiral, to where it was found, clad in a nightshirt, on Gibraltar’s shores.

¶The mound — 45 feet wide and 105 feet long — fits a decaying shipwreck of the Sussex’s dimensions.

¶The three sizes of visible cannon match the ship’s complement. A nine-foot one suggests the wreck is a large warship.

¶The lack of bronze cannon suggests the site is neither Spanish nor French, and the lack of olive jars reinforces the ship’s non-Spanish origins.

An expedition is planned for this spring. Mr. Stemm said any coins were most likely carried near the bottom of the ship and were probably now as much as 15 feet beneath the top of the debris pile.

"It is highly likely that this shipwreck will provide the greatest collection of artifacts ever assembled from the reign of England’s William and Mary," says a draft Odyssey plan. The company foresees books, a permanent museum and traveling exhibits.

In a private paper on cargo analysis, Odyssey lays out research that suggests the Sussex carried coins whose numismatic value could lie between several hundred million dollars to more than $4 billion.

"The reason for this wide range lies in the unknown details of the actual cargo shipped — the types of coins, whether they were gold or silver, and their condition," the paper says.

The Defense Ministry said it was discussing with Odyssey how any recovered riches and artifacts might be split. Mr. Stemm said the British government had the option to buy it all, cultural artifacts and trade goods alike. Odyssey, he added, anticipates rights to market much of the ship’s cargo.

Mr. Stemm said Odyssey would keep the collection intact until the project archaeologist approved its distribution. As for getting rich himself, he said he had given it little thought.

"We expect that this coin may become the most valuable coin in the world,” said David Pickens, associate director of the U.S. Mint.

Sotheby’s auction house and Stack’s, a numismatic firm, are planning a July 30 auction of the coin, believed to be one of only a handful of 1933 Double Eagles to have survived when all 445,000 struck that year were ordered melted down.

Double Eagles were first minted in 1850 with a face value of $20. The ones that were minted in 1933 were never put into circulation because President Franklin Roosevelt decided to take the nation off the gold standard.

As with all ingots from the era, the value is established by multiplying the number of ounces by the Fineness (expressed in decimal form) times the Mint value of $20.67 for pure gold.

Its Origin

John Kellogg arrived in San Francisco in October of 1849. It was early in the Gold Rush and Kellogg had to endure passage around Cape Horn at the tip of South America-resulting in his eight-month journey. He joined the coining firm of Moffat & Co. and remained in their employ during the firm’s service to the United States Assay Office.

In 1852 the bill authorizing the establishment of a United States Branch Mint in San Francisco was passed into law. The mint officially opened April 3, 1854; however, during its first two years in operation, shortages of materials resulted in the mint’s closure on a number of occasions. These disruptions required private assaying firms to fill the vacuum of coinage necessary for the commercial needs of California. During 1854 and into 1855, Kellogg became instrumental in providing private gold coins (at an urgent request of local bankers) until the U.S. Branch mint could sufficiently meet demand.

Augustus Humbert, a former New York City watchmaker, was employed at the U.S. Assay Office of Gold as the United States Assayer. Humbert arrived in California with the charge to oversee the government contract for the production of private gold coins. He arrived in San Francisco in January, 1851 with the dies necessary to strike coins in his possession and joined Kellogg in 1855. It was widely reported that, during 1855, Kellogg & Co. (Humbert’s name appeared on the ingots) was providing 50 percent more coins to the market than the U.S. Mint. This effort was credited by the local press as saving the San Francisco financial community from bankruptcy.

When Kellogg & Co. ceased striking private gold pieces in 1855, all efforts were turned to assaying bars. The partnership continued until 1860, when Humbert left the company. Kellogg remained in the assaying business until 1866. He died in April, 1886.

Excitement grew Thursday as small bronze cannons were hauled to the surface and more of the ship’s wooden structure was surveyed. But definitive evidence – a bell or anchor that might have carried the vessel’s name – remained elusive.

"Our first hypothesis is that this is Columbus’ ship, the Vizcaina,” said Rafael Ruiloba, director of the National Culture Institute, at the site near the port of Nombre de Dios, 75 miles east of Panama City.

"On the other hand, it could be one of the ships of (conquistador Francisco) Pizarro,” Ruiloba said as he oversaw work at the site, about 30 yards off the coast. "One thing is sure, and that is that we are looking at one of the earliest ships of the Conquest.”

Some evidence has surfaced that would support the idea that the 60 to 70 foot vessel is indeed the Vizcaina, one of the larger boats Columbus used on his fourth and final voyage to America. Historical records indicate Columbus’ crew scuttled the Vizcaina in 1503 after it sprung leaks near Portobelo, about 18 miles away from Nombre de Dios.

The wreck off Nombre de Dios was made with wooden pegs rather than iron nails – an indication that it is a very old vessel. Additionally, the ship’s bottom is not covered with sheets of lead, a practice the Spaniards began in 1508 to combat marine worms that ate wooden hulls.

The three five-foot cannons recovered so far, complete with stone projectiles the size of soccer balls, match the kind of "lombard” cannons the earliest explorers and conquerers would have used.

As divers worked in about 20 feet of water just off the shore, they spotted a half-decayed wooden chest containing what were apparently swords. After raising the chest, researchers quickly lowered it into the sea again, fearing that contact with the air might damage it.

The discoveries raised a question: If the ship was intentionally scuttled, why were valuable cannons and arms left aboard?

White suggests Columbus – as an explorer, not a conquerer – had little use for cannons. Instead, White said, there is evidence that a more vital item was removed: all the ship’s sails and rigging.

The wreckage lies on a route that also would have been used by Pizarro, who conquered Peru for the Spaniards in 1532-1533. But White remains steadfast in his belief that the ship was part of Columbus’ fleet.

"The fact that the captain apparently ordered the ship sunk, and there isn’t any lead on the bottom, and that it carries the same kind of weaponry, leads us to believe this is the Vizcaina,” he said.

Though White first brought the wreck to Panamanian authorities’ attention in 1998, excavations did not begin until this week. White, a Florida native, is helping with the project as a volunteer government consultant aboard a ship loaned to the project by a private firm.

November 2001 - AFGHANISTAN - The presidential palace in Kabul, Afghanistan, might be sitting on 20,000 pieces of gold, according to maps in the possession of to U.S. authorities, though experts fear it could have already been sold or melted down by the Taliban.

Dating from 100 B.C., the "Golden Hoard of Bactria” — 20,000 gold pieces in all — consists of intricate ornaments, coins, figurines showing dragon-like creatures and winged goddesses, pendants and necklaces dotted with precious stones, and even a crown covered in pearls and turquoise.

All of the pieces have varying artistic influences, since Afghanistan was an important stop on the Silk Road, the ancient trade route that led across Central Asia’s desert to Persia, Byzantium and Rome.

The treasure was discovered by Russian archaeologist Victor Sarianidi in 1978, a year before the Soviet Union invaded the country. It was the funerary outfit of elaborately dressed men and women, who were buried at a site in northern Afghanistan called Tillya Tepe, "The Golden Mound.”

The treasure remained in the Kabul Museum at least until 1991.

"Rumor has it that most of the Kabul Museum items have disappeared: stolen, destroyed or maybe even have found their way to other countries’ museums. I have heard a rumor that Tillya Tepe’s artifacts were moved to Russia,” said Ibrahim Stwodah, the General Director of Kabul University Libraries from 1970 to 1978.

To dispel those rumors, former Communist ruler President Najibullah showed the treasure to a delegation of diplomats and journalists in 1991. That was the last time it was seen. As in a fable, Najibullah sealed it in seven trunks and hid them in a vault carved out of rock underneath the presidential palace.

The vault was protected by a steel gate bolted shut by seven locks with keys held by seven people. At least three of the key holders, including Najibullah, have died.

In his last interview before he was killed by suicide bombers, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Taliban’s chief adversary, confirmed that the treasure was in the presidential palace basement in a safe with a steel gate, but he also said that the Taliban got control of it.

Rumor has it that bin Laden arranged for it to be smuggled across the mountains to Pakistan to be sold, or that the Taliban destroyed it as they did with the colossal figures of the Bamiyan Buddhas — their opposition to any art displaying human or animal forms would confirm the hypothesis.

But according to Unesco sources, there is a good chance that the trove is still intact.

"We think that the Bactrian Gold Treasure is still in the safe-room under the presidential palace in Kabul, but we are not certain,” Christian Manhart, a specialist in Asian art at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), told Discovery News.

If it is still there, it might be spared by U.S. bombers.

"Unesco has provided the American authorities with a list of cultural sites to protect, and through the Swiss Afghanistan Archives in Bubendorf with maps. The American reacted immediately in a very cooperative way and ensured us of their concern about the protection of cultural sites,” said Manhart.

July 2001 - NEW YORK - A 1909 shipwreck may hold $1 billion in gold - RMS REPUBLIC may have carried a fortune in gold when it sank in the Atlantic Ocean.

Salvors of the shipwrecked RMS Republic - a palatial passenger liner purported to contain gold valued at more than $1 billion - are pressing ahead to get the U.S. government to disclose exactly what was on the ship despite a setback in federal court June 29.

The gold that may be aboard the ship may include a United States Navy payroll and a secret military shipment sent to prop up the sagging regime of Russian Czar Nicholas II.

Timothy D. Barrow - a New Jersey attorney representing Martha’s Vineyard Scuba Headquarters Inc. and its president, Martin Bayerle, the man who discovered the shipwreck of the RMS Republic in 1981, 50 miles south of Nantucket Island - said he will continue efforts to force the government to produce either a manifest of the ship’s cargo of gold or a confidential bill of lading of the gold contained aboard when it sank in 270 feet of water on Jan. 23, 1909.

The government has filed an ownership claim to gold purported to be on the ship solely on Bayerle’s "good faith” research.

In United States District Court in Boston, U.S. Magistrate Gail Dein denied motions by Barrow objecting to the government’s response to Barrow’s claims for disclosure of the vessel’s gold cargo to which the government has laid claim. Dein advised the government’s attorneys that despite its assertion of conducting a reasonable search of the National Archives and Navy Historical Center and yielding nothing pertinent to the ship’s cargo, should such information subsequently surface, that it be disclosed to the court.

"The court’s ruling does not end our efforts to get the government to disclose their interest and provide documents of ownership,” Barrow said. "Either they have an interest or they don’t. It’s up to them to prove it.”

For the past two years, Barrow said negotiations have been conducted with the U.S. government to reach a salvage agreement before Martha’s Vineyard Scuba Headquarters Inc. extensively pursues salvage efforts. A salvage operation would expose salvors to undue risk in one of the most unforgiving regions of the Atlantic Ocean, according to Barrow. To date, divers have recovered a number of the ship’s artifacts, primarily from what is considered the first-class pantry. On-site salvage efforts are still being undertaken, and may move to include submersible robotic retrieval equipment, Barrow said. Bayerle and his team were awarded salvage rights by the federal court in Boston in 1987.

Last September, the U.S. government filed a claim for ownership of a portion of the gold reportedly on the ship, and based its claim on Bayerle’s extensive research. Much of that research can be accessed on the Internet at www.rms-republic.com.

The RMS Republic was part of the same White Star Line that featured the ill-fated RMS Titanic. It was known to be carrying supplies for the U.S. Atlantic battleship fleet then at Gibraltar as well as relief supplies for the survivors of earthquakes that had devastated the southern area of Italy a month earlier, according to Bayerle.

The Republic was rammed by the inbound passenger ship, SS Florida, in dense, pre-dawn fog on Jan. 23, 1909, as it headed for Nantucket light.

Fifteen hundred combined passengers and crew of both ships were rescued. The Republic was the largest and most luxurious ship in history to have been lost at sea until three years later when another White Star liner, the RMS Titanic, sank.

It may have also carried one of the world’s richest treasures, Bayerle said.

A rumor circulated soon after the collision that the Republic had carried a five-ton, $3 million 1909 face value shipment of newly minted American gold $10 eagle coins, but the rumor was officially denied amid statements that no gold was carried on board. Bayerle notes that documents regarding the Republic’s cargo and construction do not exist within the public archives of the United States, Great Britain, France and Russia.

And although legally required, an official investigation of the early 20th century maritime disaster was never conducted. The conclusion that no gold existed aboard the Republic was commonly accepted. That is, until Bayerle’s thorough financial study of the 1909 foreign exchange market and 1904 through 1914 domestic U.S. and foreign gold market isolated a transaction.

The research uncovered a Jan. 12, 1909, purchase of $3 million in newly minted U.S. gold coins - $2 million by identified French bankers from National City Bank (today’s Citibank) and $1 million by Goldman Sachs and Company. Once he identified the transaction, Bayerle said he was able to identify the principals and the motivation behind the acquisition.

"The French banks were purchasing gold in New York to assist in the settlement of the Jan. 22, 1909 Russian Bond, moneys the czar needed to remain in power,” Bayerle said. "The acknowledgment of the loss of this cargo would have jeopardized the very existence of the Imperial Russian Government - hence, the motivation for the cover-up.”

Through his company MVSHQ, Bayerle and his attorneys have had and remain in discussions with the former government owners of the gold and have also made inquiries to the involved banks, but his research has yet to be either confirmed or denied by any of them. Despite its September 2000 ownership claim, the U.S. government has failed to provide corroborating evidence for its assertions.

Bayerle estimates that the U.S. Navy lost approximately $265,000 in 1909, moneys worth today between $6 million to $8 million. There may be a chance, too, that the U.S. government may have been the real owner of the "Russian” gold as well, Bayerle believes. That gold shipment may exceed $1 billion on today’s market.

"I’m gratified to see that the U.S. government has finally acknowledged the quality of my research and has filed its claim,” Bayerle said. "The existence of the U.S. government’s gold would make more likely the existence of the Russian gold,” Bayerle said, "but we need proof.”

"We believe the U.S. government is being less than candid regarding the documents within their possession, and their knowledge concerning the loss of the Republic and her cargoes,” Bayerle continued. "The government has filed a claim against all the gold aboard, but they have provided no proof whatsoever that they own any gold aboard the wreck. We require proof to avoid risk to our investors and our divers.”

Bayerle said: "Although my research is compelling, we don’t believe the U.S. government would file a claim based solely on my work. They have more than they’re saying, and we require that information.”