Mrs Hannaby, 57, from Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, heard her metal detector's tell-tale beep while out on one of her regular six-hour Sunday detecting walks with her son, woodcarver Michael, 33.

For 500 years, the treasure had lain buried four inches below the ground, despite repeated ploughing. The discovery is all the more astonishing as this was not the first time the Hannabys had scoured the arable field between Ashridge and Great Gaddesden.

"You get a buzz every time you get a signal, but chances are it won't be anything," said Mrs Hannaby. "This time, it popped up all of a sudden," said her son. "You can literally miss things by inches. We couldn't believe it. We always dreamed of finding treasure." And the pair struck gold again when the landowner refused Mrs Hannaby's offer to split the money equally and said he wanted only 30 per cent, saying he would never have known about the treasure if not for her.

Under the Treasure Act of 1996, finders must report potential treasure such as gold and silver objects more than 300 years old. Finders are offered the market value for their discoveries which museums have first option to buy.

At 2.8cm by 2.3cm, the treasure is barely larger than a postage stamp, but its importance is exciting experts. Roger Bland, head of treasure at the British Museum, describes it as an 'important find', and regrets that the museum does not currently have the funds to buy it.

Odyssey Marine Exploration hasn't found any gold this time, but it's looking for an even bigger jackpot. The company's research indicates the HMS Victory was carrying 4 tons of gold coins that could be worth considerably more than the treasure that Odyssey raised from a sunken Spanish galleon in 2007, co-founder Greg Stemm said ahead of a news conference set for Monday in London.

So far, Odyssey has recovered two brass cannons from the wreck of the Victory and continues to examine and map the debris field, which lies about 330 feet beneath the surface, Stemm said. The company said it is negotiating with the British government over collaborating on the project.

"This is a big one, just because of the history," Stemm said. "Very rarely do you solve an age-old mystery like this." Odyssey said the 31 bronze cannons and other evidence on the wreck allowed definitive identification of the HMS Victory, 175-foot sailing ship that was separated from its fleet during a storm and sank in the English Channel on Oct. 4, 1744, with at least 900 men aboard. The ship was the largest and, with 110 bronze cannons, the most heavily armed vessel of its day. It was the inspiration for the HMS Victory famously commanded by Adm. Horatio Nelson decades later.

Odyssey was searching for other valuable shipwrecks in the English Channel when it came across the Victory. Stemm wouldn't say exactly where the ship was found for fear of attracting plunderers, though he said it wasn't close to where it was expected to be. "We found this more than 50 miles from where anybody would have thought it went down," Stemm said. Federal court records filed by Odyssey in Tampa seeking the exclusive salvage rights said the site is 25 to 40 miles from the English coast, outside of its territorial waters.

A Ministry of Defense spokesman said Sunday the government was aware of Odyssey's claim to have found the Victory. "Assuming the wreck is indeed that of a British warship, her remains are sovereign immune," he said on condition of anonymity in keeping with government policy. "This means that no intrusive action may be taken without the express consent of the United Kingdom." He would not say whether the government had begun talks with Odyssey over the future of the find.

Newspapers of the day and other historical records analyzed by the company indicated that the Victory sank off the Channel Island of Alderney near Cherbourg, France. A 1991 British postage stamp depicts the Victory crashing on the rocks there. Pieces of the ship had washed up in various places, but its final resting place had remained a mystery. The belief that the Victory had crashed onto the rocks had marred an otherwise exemplary service record of the ship's commander, Sir John Balchin, and a lighthouse keeper on Alderney was prosecuted for failing to keep the light on. Odyssey believes the discovery exonerates both men.

"As far as the family is concerned, it is an astonishing revelation," said Robert Balchin, a 66-year-old British university administrator and direct descendant of the commander. "It's as if he's sort of come alive again. "When I went to see this extraordinary find of the cannon with the coat of arms of the king on the side, it was really a wonderful feeling to know that Sir John Balchin saw that every day, and it brought a very special communion with the past."

The HMS Victory was returning from Lisbon, Portugal, and was probably transporting 100,000 gold Portuguese coins for merchants, according to Odyssey's research. The ship had sailed there to help rescue a Mediterranean convoy blockaded by the French in the River Tagus at Lisbon.

The wreck site is roughly 70 feet by 200 feet and littered with other debris, Odyssey said. Its research ship, Odyssey Explorer, is equipped with a remote underwater robot capable of carefully removing the smallest of items from the bottom and shooting high-resolution photos and video.

Odyssey, a publicly traded corporation, announced in May 2007 that it had raised 17 tons of silver coins from an Atlantic Ocean shipwreck. The company later said it believed the wreck to be the Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes y las Animas, which sank off Portugal in 1804.

Shortly afterward, the Spanish government sued Odyssey in federal court in Tampa to claim the treasure, arguing that the shipwreck was never abandoned by Spain. The case is pending. Some in the Spanish government have called the company 21st-century pirates, and twice in the months after the 2007 announcement, ships from Spain's Civil Guard seized Odyssey ships off the Spanish coast. Both ships and their crews were released within a week.

The company's relationship with the British government has been more cordial. Odyssey had already negotiated an agreement with British officials regarding the search for the HMS Sussex, which sank in the western Mediterranean in 1694 with gold coins aboard.

Jude Plouviez, of the Suffolk County Council Archaeological Service, said the coins dated from 40BC to AD15. They are thought to have been minted by predecessors of Iceni Queen Boudicca. Ms Plouviez said their value when in circulation had been estimated at a modern equivalent of between £500,000 and £1m, but they were likely to be worth less than that now.

"It's a good, exciting find. It gives us a lot of new information about the late Iron Age, and particularly East Anglia in the late Iron Age. The discovery is important because it highlights the probable political, economic and religious importance of an area. It certainly suggests there was a significant settlement nearby. As far as we understand, it was occupied by wealthy tribes or subtribes," she said.

Ms Plouviez said the find was the largest collection of Iron Age gold coins found in Britain since 1849, when a farm worker unearthed between 800 and 2,000 gold staters in a field near Milton Keynes. She said secret excavations had been carried out on the latest find in Suffolk after a man reported it to the council's archaeological service in October.

The staters, which each weigh about 5g, will now be valued ahead of a treasure trove inquest. "We don't know how much they will be worth but it will be less than they were at the time," said Ms Plouviez.

"After the treasure trove inquest, they will be offered to museums at their current value." She said the exact location of the find would not be made public but added "thorough" searches of the area had not uncovered any further artefacts.

Researchers discovered the coins at the beginning of the eight-day Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, which started at sunset on Sunday. One of the customs of the holiday is to give "gelt," or coins, to children, and the archaeologists are referring to the find as "Hanukkah money."

The 1,400-year-old coins were found in the Giv'ati car park in the City of David in the walls around Jerusalem National Park, a site that has yielded other finds, including a well-preserved gold earring with pearls and precious stones.

They were in a collapsed building that dates back to the 7th century, the end of the Byzantine period. The coins bear a likeness of Heraclius, who was the Byzantine emperor from 610 to 641. In that style, the emperor is clad with military garb and is holding a cross in his right hand. One the other side, there is the sign of the cross.

Authorities said the excavation of the building where the hoard was discovered is in its early stages. They are attempting to learn about the building and its owner and the circumstances of its destruction. "Since no pottery vessel was discovered adjacent to the hoard, we can assume that it was concealed inside a hidden niche in one of the walls of the building. It seems that with its collapse, the coins piled up there among the building debris," Ben-Ami and Tchekhanovets said.

Maurice Richardson, who unearthed the 2,200-year-old gold collar near Newark will not get to keep it but has received an undisclosed reward and his lucky find has been acquired by his local museum. "I was only in the field because a customer kept me late," Richardson, a tree surgeon, told the Guardian newspaper. "Normally I'd never want to go into this field because a plane crashed there in the last war, and the whole place is littered with bits of metal."

Richardson's first discovery in the field was a piece of World War Two scrap metal but as he bent down to throw it away, his metal detector emitted a louder beep. It was then that he discovered the collar, which was hailed by a leading expert as one of the most important finds of its kind in years.

"It's a fabulous thing, the best Iron Age find in 50 years," J.D. Hill, head of the British Museum in London's Iron Age department, told the paper. "When I first saw a picture of it, I thought somebody was pulling my leg because it is so like the Sedgeford torc in our collection that it must have been made by the same hand.

"What is fascinating about it is that it turned up where no torc should be -- to put it mildly, the Newark region is not known for major high-status Iron Age finds." The BBC reported that the necklace was the most expensive single piece of treasure found by a member of the public in over a decade.

Archaeologists say the trove of 39 gold and 70 silver coins was minted in the middle of the first century B.C. as the future Roman ruler Julius Caesar led a campaign against Celtic tribes in the area.

Curfs said he was walking with his detector this spring and was about to go home when he suddenly got a strong signal on his earphones and uncovered the first coin. "It was golden and had a little horse on it - I had no idea what I had found," he said.

After posting a photo of the coin on a Web forum, he was told it was a rare find. The following day he went back and found another coin. "It looked totally different - silver, and saucer-shaped," he said. Curfs notified the city of his find, and he and several other hobbyists helped in locating the rest of the coins, in cooperation with archaeologists.

Nico Roymans, the archaeologist who led the academic investigation of the find, believes the gold coins in the cache were minted by a tribe called the Eburones that Caesar claimed to have wiped out in 53 B.C. after they conspired with other groups in an attack that killed 6,000 Roman soldiers. The Eburones "put up strong resistance to Caesar's journeys of conquest," Roymans said.

The silver coins were made by tribes further to the north - possible evidence of cooperation against Caesar, he said. Both coin types have triple spirals on the front, a common Celtic symbol. The two other known caches of Eburones coins have been found in neighboring Belgium and Germany.

Maastricht city spokeswoman Carla Wetzels said the value of the coins is not known - their worth is primarily historical. The Belgian cache of similar size was estimated at around 175,000 euros ($220,000).

The farmer who owned the land agreed to sell his interest to the city for an undisclosed sum. Curfs, a teacher at a nearby junior college, continues to own the 11 coins he found, but has lent them to the City of Maastricht on a long-term basis. The coins will go on display at the Centre Ceramique museum in Maastricht this weekend.

Ten years ago, at a spot known locally as "Black Rock", two men diving for sea cucumbers came across a large pile of sand and coral. Digging a hole, they reached in and pulled out a barnacle-encrusted bowl. Then another. And another. They had stumbled on the oldest, most important, marine archaeological discovery ever made in South East Asia, an Arab dhow - or ship - built of teak, coconut wood and hibiscus fibre, packed with a treasure that Indiana Jones could only dream of.

There were 63,000 pieces of gold, silver and ceramics from the fabled Tang dynasty, which flourished between the seventh and 10th centuries. Among the artefacts was the largest Tang gold cup ever discovered and some of the finest Yue ware - a porcelain that the ancient Chinese likened to snow because of its delicacy.

The exceptional quality of the goods has led some scholars to suggest that these were gifts from the Tang Emperor himself. The bulk of the cargo was more homely, including 40,000 Changsha bowls, named after the Changsha kilns in Hunan Province, where they were produced. Found packed inside tall, earthenware jars, some experts believe bean sprouts were placed between the bowls as a sort of organic bubble-wrap. These brightly painted tea bowls were the Tang equivalent of plastic food containers.

"It looks like they were approaching Tanjung Pandang, the main town on Belitung Island, when they hit the reef," explains Walterfang, the stocky German treasure hunter who salvaged the wreck. The Belitung wreck is a time capsule that has revolutionised our understanding of two ancient civilisations that fill the airwaves today, China and the Middle East

"They may have come here for water or other supplies. Perhaps there was an emergency. Or even an attack by pirates. "But we cannot know. It was nearly 1,200 years ago." Magically, everything was perfectly preserved by a layer of silt. Raised from the seabed more than a millennium later, the gold cups and bronze mirrors, silver boxes and ewers look as fresh as the day they were created.

In 2005, the Singapore government paid more than £20m to acquire the treasure as the centrepiece for a new maritime museum. But it is not just about bling. The Belitung wreck is a time capsule that has revolutionised our understanding of two ancient civilisations that fill the airwaves today - China and the Middle East.

The serial nature of the cargo - 1,000 miniature funeral urns and 800 identical inkpots - shows that China was mass-producing goods for export several centuries earlier than previously thought. The Arab dhow, the first of its kind ever found, proves something equally startling - that mariners from the Persian Gulf were trading on a scale, and over distances, unmatched by human beings until Vasco da Gama set sail for India at the end of the 15th Century. Sinbad the Sailor was for real.

One of the Changsha bowls bore a date stamp, "the 16th Day of the seventh Month of the second Year of the Baoli reign", or AD 826. Carbon-14 analysis of some star anise found in the wreck confirmed this as the probable date of the dhow's departure from China.

Most scholars believe it set sail from Canton, or Guangzhou, as it is today, the largest of the five ports servicing the Maritime Silk Route. No-one knows exactly where the dhow was heading when it struck the coral reef. Its most likely destination was a place familiar to us for other reasons, the Iraqi port of Samara, or Basra as it is called today. In the 9th Century, Basra was one of the wealthiest cities in the world, with a prosperous merchant class hungry for Chinese luxury goods.

Among the most sensational artefacts found in the wreck are three dishes decorated with cobalt from Iran which represent the oldest blue and white ware ever found, setting back by several hundred years the invention of what would become known all over the world simply as "china."

Mr Stevens, a businessman from Hinckley, has been metal detecting for 30 years, and this find in his home county of Leicestershire is his most valuable yet. After discovering it he contacted antiquities specialist Brett Hammond from Time Line Originals. Hammond said: "I arranged for him to take it to the finds liaison officer in his area under the portable antiquities scheme. It was clearly an important item of treasure. It is a gold ring possibly containing a rare black diamond. It is a beautiful early medieval inscribed finger ring that would have been owned by a very wealthy person, in the Church or possible even royalty. Common people in that era were not even allowed to own gold, so it must have been owned by a powerful person. The ring has gone to the coroner pending an inquest and if tests show what we think it is a museum will almost certainly be interesting in acquiring it."

Stevens said he was with friends in a ploughed field when he came across the ring about five inches down. He said: "We have a really good relationship with the local farmer who more or less gives us a free reign on any fields that have no crops growing. We had noticed a few days earlier that he was busy ploughing up the field in question, so it at once became our target for the day. I stuck at it for a couple of hours and had only a few interesting artefacts for my efforts. Then I found an Edward halfpenny and hope returned only to fade again as the day yielded rather less than we had hoped for. Some of my friends had switched off their detectors and were walking back to their cars.I was about to join them when I got a really good signal. The others grouped round me as I dropped to my knees and dug to a depth of about five inches, then pulled out a clod of damp soil. From the side of it I could see gold. One of my friends thought it was a bottle top but as my fingers closed on it I knew it had never wrapped around the top of a bottle. It is boldly inscribed with lettering that certainly looks very early medieval to my untrained eye. I don't know yet what the letters spell out, but if they indicate a royal owner it might be worth tens of thousand of pounds."

A treasure hunter found an Anglo-Saxon cross in a field in Nottinghamshire. It is made with gold probably melted down from Merovingian French coins. Two of the red cabochon gemstones are missing as is the relic that would have been kept in its centre. The red stones are among the world's most ancient gems and were used by ancient Greeks who called them granatum, the same word they used for pomegranate seeds.

The anonymous finder discovered the 1,400-year-old cross just 12 inches beneath the sod on a farm in Nottinghamshire. He had already unearthed a Saxon penny and beaten copper plate before probing deeper. "Instinctively I put down the digger and scraped gently at the soil with my gloved hand," he said. "Then I made contact with a piece of metal that made me want to remove my glove. It seemed warm, almost alive, to my touch. My fingers closed on it and when I opened them I was gazing down, literally with my jaw dropped in astonishment, at the most wonderful find I've ever recovered."

He handed the find to a coroner who declared it as treasure trove at an inquest. This means the finder will get half the proceeds of a sale. He is likely to split his earnings with the farmer. The specific location of the find is being kept secret for fear that so-called 'nighthawks' will descend on it in case there is anything else to be found.

"Oh, my God," diver Michael DeMar said, describing his discovery of the chalice on the site where the Spanish galleon Santa Margarita is believed to have gone down during a vicious storm.

Dented on a few sides and encrusted with marine growth, the chalice weighs more than a pound is etched with scrollwork and boasts decorative handles.

The wreck was from a Spanish fleet that sank during a Sept. 6, 1622, hurricane. Over the past quarter century, it has yielded the biggest treasure find in U.S. history.

The late Key West treasure hunter Mel Fisher began the search for artifacts from the Santa Margarita, which sank in 1622, more than a quarter-century ago.

The chalice is slated to arrive at a Key West laboratory Wednesday morning. Experts hope cleaning it will reveal more details of a crest etched inside the bottom of the piece. Salvors estimated the value of the chalice at at one million dollars or more.

The divers, who are searching the shipwreck trail of the Spanish galleon Santa Margarita that sank in a 1622 hurricane, also recovered ceramic pieces, spikes, ships' fittings, rigging elements and two skeleton keys. "We were on the trail on the Margarita site following the artifact scatter pattern to the north," said Blue Water head archaeologist Dr. R. Duncan Mathewson. "This is the furthest point on that trail where gold has ever been found before, so it confirms that we're on the right trail."

The search for Santa Margarita artifacts began more than a quarter-century ago by the late Key West treasure hunter Mel Fisher. Today, the Blue Water team is leading that search under a joint-venture partnership with the Fisher family owned company, Motivation Inc.

Almost a year ago, Blue Water divers located gold bars, gold chains and a lead box containing thousands of pearls that were carried by the Margarita. The value of that find was estimated at more than $2 million.

The Chilean National Monuments Council insists the ship and its treasures are state property under terms spelled out in Chile’s national monuments law N. 17.2888. Even so, the Council has agreed to grant the company 25 percent of the loot. “Because the ship was embedded in the sand rather than deep under the ocean 'Our Lady of the Good Council and San Leopoldo' is property of the private business that found it,” the Republic's Comptroller's Office told the Santiago Times.

Most archaeologists expected to find the remains of the ship deep on the ocean floor. But fragments of the 41-meter x 11-meter ship have been discovered embedded in the sand under fairly shallow waters near where the Huenchullami River flows into the ocean. The once ornate vessel was built by the French in the mid 1700s and, loaded with 56 canons, was used by their military until the ship fell into Spanish hands. The Spaniards revamped the ship into a merchant vessel and set it sailing to “New Spain.”

After several trips to the new world, the ship sank after five months at sea when it was nearing the end of a journey from Puerto de Cadiz, Spain, to El Callao, Peru. The ship was carrying precious glassware from the Spanish royal family to be sold to Peru’s Spanish royalty. The glassware, along with garments decorated with gold, gold money, fancy furniture and over 50 canons, today have an estimated value of US$30 million.

The company Web site gives a graphic explanation of how the ship went down: the crew was so malnourished and sick that they could not even raise all of the ship’s sails. They were caught in a terrible storm and could not be rescued, condemning the galleon and its crew to Davy Jones’ locker. Twelve bodies and pieces of the ship washed ashore the day after the storm, but no treasure.

Oriflama S.A. was formed in 2001, bringing together a scientific team from Cuba with the sponsorship of several Chilean universities. Later, several local museums joined the effort. The goal was to find the galleon and recover the treasure. “Despite frequent contact with the company, until today no one had asked or been given permission to start excavation work on the ship,” said Oscar Acuna, the executive secretary of Chile’s National Monuments Society, in a press release. “Since the property is protected under the law, it is the state’s property. The state is willing to grant the company 25 percent of the treasure for its work, but the rest will be state property.”

But before the actual worth of the ship’s treasure can be determined, the ship’s remains must be recovered from under the sand. So far, the project has cost the company US$1 million, and another US$15 million in expenses may yet be incurred before the project is completed.

“We are hoping that the National Historical Council will invest in our project so we may complete it,” Oriflama CEO Hernan Couyoudijan told the Santiago Times. “It will cost an estimated US$15 million. The National Historical Council does not have rights to the ship and it seems it would be in their best interest to work together with us on the project. We want to make a museum out of it. This would not only preserve some of history, but potentially boost tourism in Curepto.” Cuepto’s city government met last week to decide if they will side with the company or with the National Historical Council in the dispute. No decision had been announced by press time.

The Oriflama S.A’s scientific team found the ship through the use of magnetomentry, a methodology using a machine that detects materials with magnetic properties, like iron. The company continues excavation work, but needs more sponsorships to complete the project.

"Some of these are in uncirculated or mint condition," Bowers said, predicting the best could bring $50,000 to $100,000 each at auction. Of particular interest to coin experts - numismatists - are gold pieces known as quarter eagles and half eagles, which carried face values of $2.50 and $5, respectively, in the days before the United States printed paper currency.

Those coins were struck at mints in New Orleans; Charlotte, N.C.; and Dahlonega, Ga. The Charlotte and Dahlonega mints operated from 1838, when the first significant U.S. gold deposits were found in those areas, until the start of the Civil War in 1861, said Douglas Mudd, curator of the American Numismatic Association's Money Museum in Denver. Neither mint ever reopened.

The Dahlonega mint produced 1.38 million gold coins, while another 1.2 million were minted in Charlotte. That was only of the fraction of the tens of millions of gold coins minted in the United States before the federal government confiscated gold coins held by individuals, banks and the U.S. Treasury in 1933 and melted them into gold bars as the country abandoned the gold standard.

The treasure also includes $10 gold pieces, known as eagles, that were minted in Philadelphia and New Orleans, Mudd said. "Relatively speaking, they are rare," Mudd said of the Charlotte- and Dahlonega-minted coins. "The mints were set up to take advantage of the resources there."

The New York was a 165-foot sidewheel steamer built in its namesake city in 1837. By 1846, it was making regular commercial runs between Galveston, Texas and New Orleans. A storm took the ship to the bottom, killing 17 of the 53 people aboard. The other 36 were rescued.

A group of four hobbyists, who enjoyed looking for sunken vessels in the Gulf, discovered what was left of the SS New York around 1990. After several trips in the ensuing years and bringing up a handful of coins at a time from the mud that virtually covered the ship, the four invested in a full-scale salvage operation in 2007.

"What we've found is varied, a little of everything," said one of the four, Craig DeRouen, who is on a leave from his normal job as a mechanical engineer in the oil industry. "There are different denominations from different years, silver and gold."

DeRouen, along with fellow New Iberia residents Avery Munson and Gary and Renee Hebert, have ownership of the coins after obtaining title to the wreck from a federal court. Mudd said that although the coins are worth much more now because of current gold prices around $900 an ounce, that's only a fraction of their value. "The collector value may be three, five, eight thousand dollars more, depending upon their condition," Mudd said. "It depends upon the individual piece and its individual rarity."

John Albanese, a rare coin dealer in Far Hills, N.J. since 1978, appraised about 200 of the gold coins. "This is the most impressive Southern-minted gold I've seen in my lifetime," he said. Mudd said $100,000 for one coin likely would involve an exceptional piece, but a range of $8,000 to $16,000 wouldn't be unusual for a coin in high-grade condition. "Historically, they are interesting. These are the first coins produced by gold from the United States," he said. "The California gold rush didn't occur until about 1850."

Gold resists saltwater corrosion, and mud that had collected on the coins was removed with a chemical compound that does not affect the metal, Bowers said. Meanwhile, the silver coins are etched by the sea water, giving them a "shipwreck effect" that is popular with collectors, Bowers said.

This will be the first hunt of the year for the Fisher organization, which runs Mel Fisher's Treasures museum in Sebastian. Fisher Abt said the site about two miles south of the St. Lucie Nuclear Plant is the southern most tip of the fleet's wreckage field. "I think it's one of the 1715 fleet," she said. "We have some evidence of the early record of 1715 fleet material being found in that area." But there may also be wrecks in the vicinity from the 1600s and the 1800s.

Pope, the president of his company Amelia Research and Recovery, dug off shore at Stuart's Tiger Shores Beach last year with another treasure hunter who believes the 1715 wreckage reaches further south. David Jordan plans to return this year, working again with Pope, with hopes of finding a wreck by the cannons he thought he saw 29 years ago while surfing just north of Stuart Beach.

Fisher Abt, meanwhile, said her crews typically find some shards of pottery and musket balls, cannons and anchors, at any given shipwreck. And, "hopefully, some gold coins, gold chains gold jewelry," she said. "You never know."

Already, there has been promise of the Treasure Coast. "Our very first hole we dug . . .," Pope said, "we picked up a piece of copper sheeting from a ship." Copper was typically used for dinnerware and cooking pots, but was also used on the ship itself. The new find was only 3 inches by 6 inches and had not been positively identified. "We live everyday with anticipation of finding lots of treasure," Pope said. "Who knows? The next hole could be the big one."

"If the experts assessments are correct, the shipwreck could date back to the late 1400s or early 1500s, making it a discovery of global significance," Namdeb Diamond Corp., a joint venture between De Beers and the Namibian government, said in an e-mailed statement from the capital, Windhoek, today.

The site yielded a wealth of objects, including several tons of copper, more than 50 elephant tusks, pewter tableware, navigational instruments, weapons and the gold coins, which were minted in the late 1400s and early 1500s, according to the statement. The Namibian government will claim ownership of the treasure found, Halifa Mbako, group corporate affairs manager at Namdeb, said in a telephone interview from Windhoek today.

"By Namibian law, discoveries of this nature belong to the state," he said. "The discovery was found in our mining area, but the treasure belongs to the state." The Namibian government is in consultations with the governments of Spain and Portugal to try and identify the ship, which was most likely a trading vessel, given the goods on board, said.

On April 1, Bob Burrell, the head of Namdeb's Mineral Resource Department, found some rounded copper ingots and the remains of three bronze cannons in the sand. "All mining operations were halted, the site secured and Dr. Dieter Noli, an archaeologist and expert in the Sperrgebiet, was brought into the project and identified the cannons as Spanish breach-loaders of a type popular in the early 1500s," Namdeb said.

The find may be the oldest sub-Saharan shipwreck ever discovered, Namdeb said. "If this proves to be a contemporary of the ships sailed by the likes of Diaz, Da Gama and Columbus, it would be of immense national and international interest and Namibia's most important archaeological find of the century," according to the statement.

Diamonds have been mined along the south-western coast of Namibia and in its coastal waters for the last 100 years. De Beers, the world's largest diamond company, is 45 percent owned by Anglo American Plc, 40 percent held by the Oppenheimer family and 15 percent owned by the government of Botswana.

"We went out on the field looking for cannonballs," Alexander Granhof told the online edition of the Sydsvenskan newspaper. "I found a piece of metal and thought at first it was shrapnel from a shotgun. I shouted to grandfather and then we discovered more and more coins," he added.

In all, the pair found more than 4,600 coins on the field. Archaeologists, using metal detectors, boosted the tally to 7,000 but did not rule out that even more coins were hidden in the soil. "This is incredible," Bernd Gerlach of the Lund University Historical Museum told reporters.

Both Alexander and his grandfather Jens Granhof are interested in archaeology and went treasure hunting after reading about a treasure buried somewhere in the province of Scania. No reward sum has yet been determined but the silver in the treasure alone was estimated to be worth 1.5 million kronor (250,000 dollars).

During the 13th century when the coins were hidden, the sum could have fetched some 15 serfs, museum head Per Karsten said. The coins had been placed in two urns that were wrapped in cloth. The treasure was likely buried during troubled times, and one theory was that the coins were church taxes collected from nearby farms. The find included thousands of English coins with a high silver content and some other markers that likely were used locally.

They believe it to be either gold or silver, based on the scan with a sophisticated metal detector. A drilling company began boring pilot holes at one-yard intervals trying to find the entrance of the cavern, about 100 yards from the Czech border in the eastern German state of Saxony. Once it is found, the searchers are to snake a camera down into the enclosure to determine exactly what they have found.

"It can't be iron," Haustein said as work progressed at the site. "The computer readout clearly indicates gold." By late afternoon, however, the most excitement for a crowd of onlookers from the tiny settlement was a short-lived geyser of water that shot up as one of the holes was drilled.

Haustein — an amateur treasure hunter who is also a member of Germany's parliament for the opposition Free Democratic Party — said the process could take several days. Haustein has been working with Christian Hanisch, who found the notebook in the belongings of his father, a former Luftwaffe radio operator who died last year.

Haustein said last week that he was convinced they had found the storied Amber Room treasure but later acknowledged that, while there could be "cultural treasures" in the cavern, such as paintings or amber paneling, they are not things that show up with a metal detector.

The Amber Room — named for magnificent wall panels of golden-brown amber — was stolen by the Nazis from a palace outside St. Petersburg during World War II and has never been recovered in its entirety. The ornate Amber Room, made from amber panels decorated with gold leaf, was originally a gift from the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm I to the Russian Tsar Peter the Great. During the Second World War it was dismantled by the Nazis and later disappeared, and since then archaeologists have searched for the room in over 100 places.

Experts have been skeptical of Haustein's claim, pointing out that stories of the Amber Room surface regularly, only to be proved wrong, and that the Amber Room had no significant amounts of gold or silver in it.

The story begins in 1989 in the area around Caborca, near the Gran Desierto de Altar in the Mexican state of Sonora. The nearest surface water is the Sea of Cortez; some 60 miles to the west. Arizona is 70 miles to the north. Ranching is the chief occupation, but there are a number of mines in the area along with placer gold deposits in some of the canyons. It is within these dry canyons that a local Mexican man began his quest to find hidden treasure in the form of placer nuggets. Some finds of nuggets had been made in the past, and fired with optimistic enthusiasm; our gold-seeker grew determined to find his share. At this point, our latter-day prospector did something very much at odds with tradition: visiting a Radio Shack store - he purchased a metal detector. Practicing on buried coins and other metal objects, he learned how to operate it, and then he set out for an area that was reported to have produced nuggets. Once there, he started to walk; slowly and carefully across the desert, all the while following a grid pattern that would ensure that no areas would be unchecked. Hundreds of boring hours slowly ebbed away with an occasional 'beep' from his ear-phones to signal a potential find. Most were due to scrap iron or old lead bullets. Then one day; the 'beep' sounded a little different. Digging down; he caught that first gleam from his own personal El Dorado. Hardly believing his eyes he kept digging, the gleaming surface kept going - and going. By the time he had completely uncovered this incredible nugget, it was obvious that it was huge. Just hauling it back to his home was a chore since it weighed over twelve kilograms. There; a gentle washing removed the last traces of dust left on the surface from its subterranean resting place. Now the enormity of his find engulfed him: What to do with this massive nugget, shaped like the boot of a conquistador of old? Who could help him with advice regarding the ways of selling such a thing? Ah, but of course - the Patron. He would know. And he did.

Since that fateful day in the Desierto, the "Boot of Cortez" has passed through a number of hands and has been marveled at by hundreds of thousands of museum-goers. It was one of the star exhibits at the Tucson Gem & Mineral Show in 2004, the theme of which was simply: "Gold". Based on its enthusiastic response by the public, the owner of the "Boot" was solicited to place it on loan for the traveling "Gold" exhibition assembled by the Houston Museum of Natural Science where it was exhibited in 2005, along with other notable specimens from: the Smithsonian, Harvard and other major collections. The exhibition then moved to the American Museum of Natural History in 2006 where it opened to rave reviews by collectors and casual visitors alike. After almost a year in New York City, the exhibition recently closed in August 2007.

Its pristine condition and unique shape have earned it the sobriquet "the most unusual and attractive large nugget in the World" and at 389.4 ounces Troy (32.4 Troy pounds) it is the largest surviving placer nugget from the Western Hemisphere. The 2nd largest nugget is Alaskan and is almost 100 ounces smaller. It has a bright, rich golden-yellow color which indicates a high purity (approximately 94% + pure). There have been larger masses of gold but these have consisted primarily of intermixtures of gold and worthless rock. The "Boot of Cortez" measures a stunning 10 3/4 inches in height and 7 1/4 inches in width.

"It's the biggest ship of its kind to be found," said professor Liu Wensuo, and archaeologist from Sun Yat-sen University. "It lay in about 25m (82ft) of water and was covered in mud - perfect conditions for preservation. Both the ship and its contents are in exceptionally good condition."

The salvage team began building a massive steel cage around the 30m (98ft)-long vessel in May in order to raise it and the surrounding silt. The cage was made up of 36 steel beams, each weighing around 5 tons. Together with its contents, the cage weighed more than 3,000 tons. The heavy lifting began a day earlier than expected at 0900 on Friday due to favourable weather conditions. It was completed two hours later and placed on a waiting barge.

As many as 6,000 artefacts have already been retrieved from the 13th Century vessel, mostly bluish white porcelain, as well as personal items from crew members, including gold belt buckles and silver rings. A further 70,000 artefacts are believed to be still on board, many still in their original packing cases.

In the mid-1980s a number of ships, containing enormous hoards of Chinese porcelain, gold and silver, were found by foreign treasure hunters. This really is only the beginning, there are so many shipwrecks in this area... sometimes they even wash ashore Their valuable cargoes were sold at auction houses in the West. At the time, China was too poor to bid for the artefacts. The loss of such an important part of its history spurred the government into action.

Nanhai 1 will be the first major project to be undertaken by Chinese underwater archaeologists. Professor Liu is confident that the salvage will be a success. "This really is only the beginning, there are so many shipwrecks in this area, fishermen often snag artefacts in their nets, sometimes they even wash ashore," he said.

It will also give historians much-needed information on a time when China was trading with the world. During the Song dynasty, most of the country's trade was with India and the Middle East. Later that trade would shift westwards. "People often think of ancient China as being a closed society, but in the Tang and Song dynasties, China traded with the world - much like today," Professor Liu added.

The Nanhai 1 will eventually be moved to a new purpose built museum near Yangjiang in Guangdong province. The dramatic building - still far from completion - is being built on the beach. The ship will be stored underwater in a massive tank, in which the water temperature, pressure and other conditions will be identical to where it lay on the seabed, allowing visitors to watch as archaeologists uncover its secrets. China has invested about $40m in this project, in the hope of reclaiming a part of the country's history, and this time ensuring it stays in Chinese hands.

The 545 coins, each worth thousands of euros to collectors but priceless to historians and archaeologists, could overturn much of the received wisdom about the complexity, and wealth, of pre-Roman Celtic society in France. Why was such enormous wealth, a king's ransom at the time, buried in the grounds of a large Gaulish farm 40 miles south of Saint-Brieuc in the first century BC? Why was the hoard never recovered?

"Treasure on this scale would only have been used for transactions between aristocratic families," said Yves Menez, an archaeologist specialising in iron-age Brittany. It has always been assumed that the Celtic nobility lived in fortified towns, not in the wild and dangerous countryside. "The reality must have been more complex," Mr Menez said. Like all Gaulish coins, the 58 "stateres" and 487 quarter "stateres" found near to the village of Laniscat are copies of early Greek money.

Gauls served as mercenaries in the armies of Alexander the Great. The money that they brought home served as the model for home-minted coins. Some of the new treasure trove, rescued from the site of a proposed dual-carriageway, have the familiar Celtic monetary pattern of a horse on one side and a man's head on the reverse. Other coins have hitherto unknown designs, such as horses with human heads.

There are also images of riders and wild boars. Smaller caches of Gaulish coins have turned up in the past but rarely of such quality and never in such numbers. Most transactions for goods in Gaulish times were conducted through barter. Coins were for the super-rich. "This is an exceptional discovery," said Mr Menez. "It represents a colossal fortune for the period. Each of these coins was like a 500 euro note today."

The hoard of coins was discovered by the French government agency, the Institut National de Recherches Archéologiques Préventives (INRAP), which has the right to explore any potentially significant site before a road or new building covers it forever. The coins are believed to have been minted in around 75 to 5BC. They were probably buried just before, or during, the first Roman invasions of what is now northern and western France.

A dig led by INRAP archaeologist Eddie Roy discovered the coins scattered over 200 square metres of a site soon to be occupied by a new by-pass. It is believed that they were all buried together but disturbed over the centuries by agricultural ploughing. "We found a single coin about 30cms down and then we started a systematic search," Mr Roy said. "We found 50 more in a single day and then, with the help of metal detectors, we located all the others."

The dig unearthed the remains of a large manor house or farm, which is thought to have belonged to the "Osisme" people – a Celtic tribe living in the far west of the Breton peninsula. The coins were probably buried in the farm's boundary embankment. Why? To hide the wealth from the Romans? Possibly. The farm was occupied for several centuries after the treasure was buried but the coins were never recovered: one small part of Gaul which resisted the Roman invasion.

Known as an Angel Coin because of the depiction of an angel on one side of it, experts say the coin would have belonged to someone of great wealth and social standing, possibly a merchant trader, in medieval times.

Thought to have been minted in the 1500s, the rare discovery has excited historians and archaeologists in the region who have been desperate to catch a glimpse of the coin first-hand. However, few have clapped eyes on the artifact which is due to be auctioned off in London in the coming weeks.

It is expected to fetch thousands, but there has been widespread disappointment that the unknown seller has decided not to report the coin to the finds liaison officer at the Museum of Antiquities for the North East. Rob Collins, finds liaison officer at Newcastle University's Museum of Antiquities, said the discovery was very exciting, not only for Northumberland but the region as a whole.

He told the News Post Leader: "Gold coins don't turn up very often, they are fairly rare finds. "They are normally found in very good condition as gold doesn't corrode so they appear quite lusty in that sense. "Gold coins like this represent a considerable amount of wealth to the person at the time, so in that way, it's very rare for gold coins to be lost or dropped. "This particular coin would have belonged to someone like a merchant or possibly some type of nobility."

Although Mr Collins has only seen photographs of the coin, he says he would like to have seen it in the flesh in order to verify its identity. "It's important for me to see such artifacts and verify them. "It's disappointing not to be able to see the coin and speak to the finder as well," he said.

Local historian, John Dawson, of Cambois, said the coin was discovered somewhere near the Choppington Pit, between Choppington and Guide Post and claims it could be worth up to £20,000. He said: "One coin is a find but if another was to be found in the same area then it becomes a treasure trove. "The coin would have been made sometime between 1505 and 1529 and it is thought that only another nine have been found in this country."

Most of the coins are German, English and Arabic currency from the late 900s and early 1000s. But archaeologists are most excited about the presence of six very rare Swedish coins, from the reign of Olof Skötkonug, king of Sweden from 994-1022. One of the Swedish coins has never been found in Sweden before, although an example has been found in Poland. One of the other coins is only the second of its kind to have been found.

The find contains rare early Viking money and foreign currency from present-day England, Germany, Ireland, Iraq, and Uzbekistan. Along with a similar cache recently discovered in England, the new find paints a picture of Vikings trading and looting their way across Europe and beyond. The Anglo-Saxon coins were likely either plunder or protection money known as danegeld, which was paid by regional rulers to keep Vikings from attacking, experts said. The Asian coins are products of the Vikings' extensive trade, which the Norse conducted by sailing south along Russia's long rivers to reach the Middle East.

Archaeologist Dan Carlsson told Svenska Dagbladet that the coins were "very well preserved, and come from a period about which we know little in terms of coin history." Gotland is one of the richest sources anywhere of buried Viking treasure. Discoveries of coins and other treasure are made on a regular basis.

The artifacts are encased in a "concretion," essentially a chunk in which the cannons and other objects have been fused together due to the reaction between saltwater and iron over time. The concretion, which is about the size of a small car, is the largest ever recovered from the wreck and was too heavy to be lifted by crane, Clifford said by cell phone from his boat, the 75-foot Vast Explorer. Instead, a custom-built net was attached to the mass, which was lifted from the ocean floor by four flotation bags, Clifford said.

The concretion was discovered last summer in the same spot as a smaller mass of three cannons that was retrieved from the ocean floor last month, Clifford said. The newly found cannons, believed to be among the approximately 30 cannons that the Whydah had stolen from other ships and was storing in her hold, were found about 10 feet beneath the ocean floor at the spot where the first artifacts from the wreck were discovered in 1984.

The concretion will be tied to a pier in Provincetown tonight and left underwater until it can be transported to a laboratory in Brewster for examination later this week, Clifford said. "All we know is that there are some cannons and other artifacts sticking out of it, but until we get it in the lab and X-ray it, we won't know exactly what's in there," Clifford said. "It's pretty suspenseful."

The Whydah, laden with loot from at least 54 other ships and manned by a crew of about 140 pirates, sank in a northeaster off Wellfleet on April 26, 1717. Clifford has removed about 200,000 artifacts from the wreck since 1984, some 200 of which are on display in Cincinnati as part of a traveling museum exhibit.

The pair kept their find intact and it was transferred to the British Museum to be examined by experts, who said the discovery was "phenomenal". It was declared as a treasure at a court hearing in Harrogate on Thursday. North Yorkshire coroner Geoff Fell said: "Treasure cases are always interesting, but this is one of the most exciting cases that I have ever had to rule on. "I'm delighted that such an important Viking hoard has been discovered in North Yorkshire. We are extremely proud of our Viking heritage in this area."

Metal detectorists David and Andrew Whelan, who uncovered the treasures, said the find was a "thing of dreams". The pair, from Leeds, said the hoard was worth about £750,000 as a conservative estimate. They told the BBC News website: "We've been metal detecting for about five years; we do it on Saturdays as a hobby. "We ended up in this particular field, we got a really strong signal from the detector... Eventually we found this cup containing the coins and told the antiquity authority. "We were astonished when we finally discovered what it contained."

The ancient objects come from as far afield as Afghanistan in the East and Ireland in the West, as well as Russia, Scandinavia and continental Europe. The hoard contains 617 silver coins and 65 other objects, including a gold arm-ring and a gilt silver vessel. Dr Jonathan Williams, keeper of prehistory in Europe at the British Museum, said: "[The cup] is beautifully decorated and was made in France or Germany at around AD900. "It is fantastically rare - there are only a handful of others known around the world. It will be stunning when it is fully conserved."

Most of the smaller objects were extremely well preserved as they had been hidden inside the vessel, which was protected by a lead container. The British Museum said the coins included several new or rare types, which provide valuable new information about the history of England in the early 10th Century, as well as Yorkshire's wider cultural contacts in the period.

It was probably buried for safety by a wealthy Viking leader during the unrest following the conquest of the Viking kingdom of Northumbria in AD927. A spokeswoman for the museum said: "The size and quality of the hoard is remarkable, making it the most important find of its type in Britain for over 150 years."

The find will now be valued for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport by the Independent Treasure Valuation Committee. Dr Williams said that the British Museum and the York Museums Trust would be looking to raise the funds to purchase the collection so it could eventually go on public display. The proceeds would be split between the finders and landowners.

A gold bar, eight gold chains including two that measure more than 4 feet long, 11 ornate gold pieces and hundreds of other artifacts were recovered earlier this week by divers from Blue Water Ventures of Key West. Among the most intriguing discoveries was an 8-inch-long closed lead box. A small gap in its seal allowed salvagers to glimpse contents thought to be pearls (several thousand).

Found in approximately 18 feet of water, about 40 miles west of Key West, the items are believed to come from the Spanish galleon Santa Margarita. The Margarita sank off the Florida Keys in a 1622 hurricane.

An initial cache of treasure and artifacts from the Santa Margarita was discovered in 1980 by the late shipwreck salvor Mel Fisher. Fisher is best known for his 1985 discovery of the treasure of the Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha, which sank in the same hurricane that claimed the Margarita.

Dr. R. Duncan Mathewson III, partner and director of archaeology for Blue Water Ventures, said Blue Water's team has been searching for the remainder of the Margarita wrecksite for two years under a joint venture agreement with the Fisher group, now headed by Mel Fisher's son, Kim Fisher. The elder Fisher began a quest to find the 1622 galleons in 1970.

The latest finds, Mathewson said, occurred in an area known as the Quicksands. The artifacts and treasure will be taken to the Fisher group's Key West headquarters for cataloging and conservation. Experts plan to attempt opening the sealed metal box Friday afternoon after its initial conservation and examination. Mathewson estimates more than $100 million worth of artifacts and treasure from the Santa Margarita remains to be recovered.

Anxiously awaiting the decision is Jack Harbeston, managing director of the Cayman Islands-registered commercial salvage company Sea Search Armada, who has taken on seven Colombian administrations over two decades in a legal fight to claim half the sunken hulk's riches. "If I had known it was going to take this long, I wouldn't have gotten involved in the first place," said Harbeston, 75, who lives in Bellevue, Wash.

In 1982, Sea Search announced to the world it had found the San Jose's resting place 700 feet below the water's surface, a few miles from the historic Caribbean port of Cartagena. Under well-established maritime law, whoever locates a shipwreck gets the rights to recover it in a kind of finders-keepers arrangement meant to offset the huge costs of speculative exploration.

Harbeston claims he and a group of 100 U.S. investors - among them the late actor Michael Landon and convicted Nixon White House adviser John Ehrlichman - have invested more than $12 million since a deal was signed with Colombia in 1979 giving Sea Search exclusive rights to search for the San Jose and 50 percent of whatever they find. But all that changed in 1984, when then-Colombian President Belisario Betancur signed a decree reducing Sea Search's share from 50 percent to a 5 percent "finder's fee."

Current President Alvaro Uribe's office declined to discuss the impending court decision, which is expected by Wednesday. But over the years successive governments have argued that Colombia's maritime agency never had the authority to award exploration contracts to Sea Search because the wreck is part of the country's cultural patrimony. The government may also be motivated by dollar signs. Harbeston believes that if sold skillfully to collectors and museums, the San Jose's treasure could fetch as much $10 billion - more than a third of Colombia's foreign debt.

The real value is impossible to calculate because the ship's manifests have disappeared. But the San Jose is known to have been part of Spain's only royal convoy to try to bring colonial bullion home to King Philip V during the War of Spanish Succession with England from 1701-1714. "Without a doubt the San Jose is the Holy Grail of treasure shipwrecks," said Robert Cembrola, director of the Naval War College Museum in Newport, R.I.

In 1994, Colombia hired treasure hunter Tommy Thompson to verify Sea Search's coordinates. Thompson, an American who has since disappeared allegedly with millions in investors' loot from a previous deep-sea find, turned up nothing. Another oceanographer, Mike Costin, who worked on a commercial submarine brought in by Sea Search for one of the company's early, booze-filled expeditions, also has his doubts.

"We found something, but I don't think it was the San Jose," he said. An underwater video taken of the alleged wreck in 1982 shows what looks like a corral reef-covered woodpile. "But drink a glass of wine and it can look like almost anything," said Tony Dyakowski, a Canadian treasure hunter based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Dyakowski claims to have uncovered sea logs that put the San Jose miles closer to the mainland. Harbeston shrugs off his detractors, saying, "If everyone's so sure it's not down there, then why don't they let us finish what we've started?"

Wherever the hulk lies, marine archaeologists say advances in diving, sonar and metal-detection make it possible to find almost any underwater wreck today. The problem is fending off rivals for whom the glint of gold is too powerful to resist. "It's like when you light a lantern in the forest and you discover all these insects you didn't know were there before are now descending on you," said Peter Hess, a Delaware lawyer who represents salvage companies.

Besides Sea Search, rival salvage companies and the Colombian government, Spain has also actively defended its sovereign rights over sunken ships that flew its flag. Last week, Spain filed claims in a U.S. federal court seeking up to $500 million in colonial treasure a Florida firm estimates it found recently in a shipwreck in the Atlantic Ocean.

Archeologists also have voiced concern, pointing to a 2001 UNESCO convention - backed by Spain but not signed by Colombia or the United States - that outlaws commercial exploitation of sunken cultural heritage. "People forget the San Jose is an underwater grave of 600 men," said Carla Rahn Phillips, a University of Minnesota historian and author of the new book "The Treasure of the San Jose." "The wreck deserves to be treated with respect, and most salvors I know only pay lip service to its historical importance."

The Colombian court ruling will also affect other commercial salvage companies eager to dive for more than 1,000 galleons and merchant ships believed to have sunk along Colombia's corral reefs during more than three centuries of colonial rule. Almost none have been recovered due to the legal limbo in the San Jose case. Daniel de Narvaez, a scuba-diving businessman hoping to salvage a wreck near the Caribbean island of San Andres, said that given the long, tortuous battle, he expects the decision could go either way. "After such a laughable and tragic ordeal, nothing surprises me anymore," he said.

A chartered cargo jet recently landed in the United States to unload hundreds of plastic containers packed with the 500,000 coins, which are expected to fetch an average of $1,000 each from collectors and investors.

"For this colonial era, I think (the find) is unprecedented," said rare coin expert Nick Bruyer, who was contracted by Tampa-based Odyssey Marine Exploration to examine a batch of coins from the wreck. "I don't know of anything equal or comparable to it." Citing security concerns, the company declined to release any details about the ship or the wreck site.

Company co-founder Greg Stemm said a formal announcement will come later, but court records indicate the coins might have come from the wreck of a 17th century merchant ship found off southwestern England. Because the shipwreck was found in an area where many colonial-era vessels went down, the company is still uncertain about its nationality, size and age, Stemm said, although evidence points to a specific known shipwreck.

The site is beyond the territorial waters or legal jurisdiction of any country, he said. "Rather than a shout of glee, it's more being able to exhale for the first time in a long time," Stemm said of the haul, by far the biggest in Odyssey's 13-year history. He would not say if the loot was taken from the same wreck site near the English Channel that Odyssey recently petitioned a federal court for permission to salvage.

"In seeking exclusive rights to that site, an Odyssey attorney told a federal judge last fall that the company likely had found the remains of a 17th-century merchant vessel that sank with valuable cargo aboard, about 40 miles off the southwestern tip of England. A judge granted those rights Wednesday.

In keeping with the secretive nature of the project dubbed "Black Swan," Odyssey also is not discussing details of the coins, such as their type, denomination or country of origin. Bruyer said he observed a wide variety of coins that probably were never circulated. He said the currency was in much better condition than artifacts yielded by most shipwrecks of a similar age. The coins - mostly silver pieces - could fetch several hundred to several thousand dollars each, with some possibly commanding much more, he said.

Value is determined by rarity, condition and the story behind them. Other experts said the condition and value of the coins could vary so much that the price estimate was little more than an educated guess. "It's absolutely impossible to accurately determine the value without knowing the contents and the condition of the retrieved coins. It's like trying to appraise a house or a car over the phone," said Donn Pearlman, a rare coin expert and spokesman for the Professional Numismatists Guild. Experts said that controlled release of the coins into the market along with aggressive marketing should keep prices at a premium.

The richest-ever shipwreck haul was yielded by the Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha, which sank in a hurricane off the Florida Keys in 1622. Treasure-hunting pioneer Mel Fisher found it in 1985, retrieving a reported $400 million in coins and other loot.

Odyssey likely will return to the same spot for more coins and artifacts. "We have treated this site with kid gloves and the archaeological work done by our team out there is unsurpassed," Odyssey CEO John Morris said. "We are thoroughly documenting and recording the site, which we believe will have immense historical significance."

The company salvaged more than 50,000 coins and other artifacts from the wreck of the SS Republic off Savannah, Ga., in 2003, making millions. But Odyssey posted losses in 2005 and 2006 while using its state-of-the-art ships and deep-water robotic equipment to hunt for the next mother lode. "The outside world now understands that what we do is a real business and is repeatable and not just a lucky one-shot deal," Stemm said.

In January, Odyssey won permission from the Spanish government to resume a suspended search for the wreck of the HMS Sussex, which was leading a British fleet into the Mediterranean Sea for a war against France in 1694 when it sank in a storm off Gibraltar. Historians believe the 157-foot warship was carrying nine tons of gold coins to buy the loyalty of the Duke of Savoy, a potential ally in southeastern France. Odyssey believes those coins could also fetch more than $500 million. But under the terms of an agreement, Odyssey will have to share any finds with the British government. The company will get 80 percent of the first $45 million and about 50 percent of the proceeds thereafter.

Odyssey also is seeking exclusive rights to what is believed to be an Italian-registered passenger vessel that sank during World War I in the Mediterranean Sea east of Sardinia, and to another discovered in the Mediterranean about 100 miles west of Gibraltar.

Although the Spanish government had given its approval, authorities in the regional government of Andalucia had been blocking progress towards recovering the 10 tonnes of gold and silver believed to have gone down with the vessel. On Friday, however, they gave the go-ahead for the Odyssey Explorer to go after the wreck, El País newspaper reported yesterday.

The American ship, belonging to the Florida-based Odyssey Marine exploration company, has been scanning the sea bed off Gibraltar for almost a decade. The 400 square miles of Mediterranean sea bed have turned up what appear to be dozens of ancient and modern wrecks, including some believed to date back 2,000 years to Phoenician and Roman times. But one wreck in particular, lying some 2,500 ft (760 metres) down and with the cannons still clearly visible to robot cameras despatched by the company, is thought most likely to be the HMS Sussex. The 80-gun warship, supposedly laden with gold and silver, had been on a secret mission to ensure the support of the Duke of Savoy in the war of the League of Augsburg against Louis XIV of France.

Admiral Sir Francis Wheeler, with HMS Sussex as his flagship, had led a fleet of some 80 vessels to the mouth of the Mediterranean at Gibraltar. "Historical records suggest a million pounds sterling was destined for Savoy," Odyssey Marine says. "Other court records show that just as Wheeler's fleet was assembling to sail for the Mediterranean, a million pounds was being collected at the exchequer ... and that an order was sent to the exchequer to issue 'a million pounds in money for the use of the fleet'."

In mid-February 1694, after a stop-off in Gibraltar, the Sussex found itself caught in a terrible storm. Admiral Wheeler eventually agreed to cut down the main mast to increase its stability. But, according to the two Muslim sailors who were the only survivors from the crew, the mast smashed to pieces while the vessel drifted, took on water and, eventually, plunged to the bottom of the ocean. Some 560 Sussex crew members were among the 1,253 sailors to die that night. Admiral Wheeler's body, dressed in his night-shirt, was discovered later by Spanish fishermen.

The HMS Sussex has long been a treasure hunter's dream. Odyssey Marine, which recovered more than $75m (£38m) of gold and silver coins from the wreck of the SS Republic off Georgia in 2003, began its hunt for the Sussex in 1997. In what was hailed as a ground-breaking agreement between a government and a treasure-hunting company, the UK has signed a deal with Odyssey Marine Exploration to allow it to seek out the Sussex.

Under the terms of the deal, any treasure discovered will be divided between the government and the company. The Spanish government initially tried to block the search, but Spain now agrees that - if it can be proved that this is the Sussex - the cargo belongs to Britain.

The search begins four years after officials with the Amelia Island-based Amelia Research and Recovery team first surveyed the shallow waters off Hutchinson Island for a stack of cannons that a local surfer discovered almost 30 years ago.

"I'm excited and ready to go," said Dave Jordan, a former Palm City resident and surfer who kept his discovery a secret for 25 years until his wife triggered the memory. "I want to see what's there." So does Doug Pope, the president of Amelia Research and Recovery, who on Monday captained the four-story-high boat down the Intracoastal Waterway in Fort Pierce. Pope and Jordan worked with the state to secure necessary permits to "dig and identify" the 42 targets they found during a 2005 survey about 200 yards from the beach.

Starting as early as today, professional divers will use metal detectors to rule out which of the targets are "modern junk" — bridge parts or other metal debris — picked up in the initial survey, Pope said. Then they'll use a 6-inch vacuum dredge to determine what the remaining targets are. If they uncover an artifact of potential historical significance, the treasure hunters must first receive a permit to "salvage" the material.

"When the treasure gods start smiling, then we'll say we found something," Pope said. "They don't smile that often." If Jordan's 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 archeological preserve around the wreck. Other ships from that fleet have been discovered in Indian River County.

While it is unlikely any gold will be uncovered in the search, officials with the Historical Society of Martin County are hoping historical treasures will be discovered and eventually displayed in the new Elliott Museum planned just yards from the possible shipwreck site.

Jordan, who has family in Martin County and is in the process of moving from North Carolina to Gainesville, said he will likely stay on the Polly-L for a few days as the work begins. The project is expected to take about a month. "It's important for me to find the cannons, but it's not about me," he said. "I'm excited Martin County is getting a chance. There's tons of history here. It's unbelievable."

Drawn by a Brazilian math teacher's Web site descriptions of miners scooping up thousands of dollars in gold, between 3,000 and 10,000 people have poured in since December, cutting down huge trees, diverting streams and digging ever-deeper wildcat mines, in an area that only months ago was pristine rain forest.

Hundreds of mud-covered men with picks and shovels hack at the earth, marking their tiny plots with tree branches and string. Others feed dirt into wooden troughs and the residue into pans. A lucky few will end up with tiny nuggets and flakes of gold to sell for $530 an ounce in the town of Apui, about 50 miles north. Even the cooks, cleaners and porters serving the new industry are making about six times the minimum wage.

It's reminiscent of Serra Pelada, a mountain that became a gargantuan hole in the jungle floor after a gold rush in the early 1980s, immortalized in Sebastiao Salgado's photos of what looked like a hellish human anthill. "This is even better than Serra Pelada. I've been mining all around the Amazon since 1978 and this is the best I've ever seen," said Joao Leandro de Azedo, 70, overlooking his stake from a hammock. Azedo said he has panned some 70 ounces of gold worth a total of $19,000 since arriving 17 days ago, including 17 ounces in a single day. Half the proceeds went to the man who staked out his plot, and 8 percent more to Jose Ferreira da Silva Filho, who claims to own the entire "garimpo," or wildcat mine.

Already, too many people are chasing too little gold and there isn't enough space for all the miners at the eight main digging sites. Price-gouging (chain saws costing around $400 in gold) is rampant and malaria is spreading in the makeshift city, nicknamed Eldorado do Juma after the Amazon's mythical Eldorado, or city of gold. It already has bars, restaurants, barbershops, bakeries, equipment shops and jewelry stores, most of them constructed out of tree branches and tarps. A 16-room brothel is under construction.

Federal police armed with automatic weapons arrived last month, imposing a nightly curfew and cracking down on shootings but making it harder to get rich quick. "Luckily, we caught it right at the beginning. It is a concern for everyone that this doesn't become another Serra Pelada," said Walter Arcoverde of the National Department of Mineral Production.

Local people had been mining this area of the jungle state of Amazonas in relative peace until Ivani Valentin da Silva, a math teacher in Apui, posted their pictures and stories on the Internet, said Antonio Roque Longo, the mayor of Apui. "Perhaps he didn't have any idea of the impact it would have," said Longo. "People see this on the Internet and they think they're going to do the same thing. But the truth is, for every one person who strikes it rich there are 30 who go home penniless."

Da Silva said he clearly wrote that the gold would soon run out. "Unfortunately, no one read the article," he said, denying any responsibility for the environmental damage being done by the thousands of fortune-seekers. His Internet posting forced federal police to pay attention, he said, and without that, "the area would be totally devastated."

Government geologists are trying to measure the deposits, while environmental regulators struggle to prevent miners from using heavy equipment or mercury, which joins gold particles together but can ruin the rivers. The fear is that like Serra Pelada, Eldorado do Juma will end up a scarred wasteland.

Already, small rivers of mud gush from streambeds at night, suggesting that heavy-duty water jets are being used illegally, despite promises to wait for permits. "Most of the gold that can be mined manually has already been found, but if they start using heavy machinery this place is going to explode all over again," said Luiz Gonzaga da Conceicao, 51, a miner from Brazil's far west.

The land reform agency says the land actually belongs to the federal government, but now that the miners are here, there's talk of compromise _ authorities say they will permit pressure hoses, rock crushers and other machinery if miners police themselves and stick to an environmental protection plan. But da Silva, the man who claims to own the whole area, says he's working on exactly that. "This place has a great future. There are other minerals here besides gold. We have to get organized to exploit it," he said.

The authority plans to display the find along with an exhibition on its history in Newark in about 12 months. Sarah Midgley, the council's head of leisure and cultural services, said the authority felt compelled to buy the torc to preserve the area's heritage and prevent it from going overseas.

"The torc is one of the most significant pieces of Celtic artwork found in northern Europe and it proves that there was a significant community in the Newark area," she said. It is thought the relic, which would have been worn as a civic ornament, was buried as part of a religious offering.

An inquest declared the artefact to be "treasure" in May 2005. That meant Mr Richardson and Trinity College, Cambridge, who own the land where the torc was found, will share the £350,000. The authority is now looking at potential sites in the town to display the find, which is currently being looked after by the British Museum.

Sonja Marzinzik, curator of prehistory and Europe at the museum, described it as "an outstanding find of very high-quality workmanship." She said that it was a stunning example of early English heritage that reflected the skill of the makers and the importance of Anglo-Saxon England in the wider, early medieval world.

The discovery raises questions about the mobility of people and goods in the early Middle Ages. The gold is studded with large garnets, which would have come from Asia. Dr Marzinzik said: "The large garnet settings are extraordinary, as substantial garnets of this kind are scarce, particularly in the 7th century when supplies from the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka dried up. Their analysis can shed light on the economic background of gemstone provenance and trading networks. Suddenly we’re part of a much bigger picture. Before, we were not in the picture."

The finder, who wishes to remain anonymous, reported his discovery to Kevin Leahy, principal keeper of archaeology at Scunthorpe Museum, who is also finds adviser for the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which records archaeological objects found by the public.

Dr Leahy said: "He had got a signal and found the first fittings from the gold sword hilt. He realised its importance and brought an excavating machine to take off the turf and pick up the rest. They were about 15 inches down. He brought them to me to declare them as possible treasure.

"He came in with a box, with the objects wrapped up in kitchen-roll paper. He went through each one, as if pulling large rabbits out of a hat. These were clearly very important 7th-century sword fittings with filigree gold, a really top-quality object."

The only other object to emerge from the site was a 1920s lightbulb. Dr Leahy said: "That confirmed my feeling that the sword was originally in the river. There is a history in Lincolnshire of finding weapons in rivers, starting in the Bronze Age. One can only guess why, but there were a lot of early medieval battles and fights on river crossings. This could have been dropped."

The sword’s quality suggests that it was commissioned by someone of high rank. Society was stratified at that time and the owner might have been a member of an important family or a noted warrior. The blade has not survived, although traces of iron are preserved on some of the gold fittings, which include the pommel, the upper hilt guard, the upper hilt collar, the lower hilt collar and the lower hilt guard.

After the find was valued by an independent treasure valuation committee at £125,000, the British Museum had to raise the money. The purchase was made possible with a £70,000 grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund. The rest came from the British Museum Friends and museum funds.

Experts from Oxford Archaeology North were brought in and with the help of English Heritage began further excavations. Below the broaches they found the grave of a Viking woman. The two copper alloy broaches that started the whole thing. Courtesy Portable Antiquities Scheme. Then, 10 metres away, they found more burials, full of grave goods. Altogether, Peter’s "find of a lifetime" led to the discovery of two female and four male burials.

"This was a haunting find," explained Faye Simpson. "When I first saw the excavated graves, complete with artefacts but the bodies of those buried long decomposed, it seemed as though the people buried there had indeed followed in the footsteps of their ancestors and gone to Valhalla – the Viking afterlife."

The sandy soil of the area means that while the bodies have decomposed, the goods they were buried with remained exactly where it was interred over a thousand years ago. Archaeologists were therefore given the unique opportunity to excavate a Viking Age cemetery under 21st century conditions.

In the male burials they found weaponry and fire-making materials in two of them, while one was buried with spurs, a possible bridle and what is thought to be the remains of a drinking horn. One of the females was buried wearing a magnificent jet bracelet on her left wrist and with a copper alloy belt fitting. The other had been buried with a wooden chest at her feet, which x-rays may determine holds weaving equipment.

"We could not have expected more from the excavation of the site," said Rachel Newman of Oxford Archaeology North. "We knew the broaches found by Mr. Adams came from a burial of a Viking Age woman, which was exciting and of great importance in itself, but we did not expect to find five other graves complete with such a splendid array of artefacts. It truly has been an amazing few months excavating this extremely important Viking Age site."

The site is made even more remarkable by its rarity. Only one other Viking cemetery has been found and excavated in England to date - a cremation cemetery at Ingleby in Derbyshire, which was excavated in the 1940s. Ashes were found buried in earthenware pots and very few artefacts survive. The only other group of bodies to be found buried together was a battlefield cemetery at Repton, Derbyshire.

According to Sir Neil Cossons, Chairman of English Heritage, it is the fact that the burials are of a domestic type that makes them so important: "This incredible find provides rare archaeological evidence of the Vikings as settlers who integrated themselves into English life," he said. It reveals, he added, "the presence of the Vikings as a community group including women and challenges the war-lords stereotype as depicted by Hollywood."

"I just stumbled by chance across an Arab silver coin that was around 1,100 years old," Edvin Svanborg told news agency TT. Svanborg says he is studying history, and recognized the coin as one that is commonly found on Gotland. He said he had seen pictures of similar coins in the past.

The brothers started looking for more coins, and quickly realised that they had found something very valuable. In quite a small space they found around 1,100 coins and a few bracelets. Most of the treasure was in good condition, although rabbits had left their mark on some of the coins.

This was the first time that the Svanborg brothers had found treasure, although Edvin said he hoped to find more in the future. "I'm planning to study to become an archaeologist," he said. The brothers are now likely to get a reward, after handing over the treasure to the authorities. It is so far unclear how much they will receive. "But that's not the most important thing. The point is finding a treasure trove," Edvin said.

Majvor Östergren at Gotland county administrative board praised the brothers for handing in the treasure. "They acted in an examplary fashion."

Gotland is an archaeologist's paradise, where there have been discoveries of a large number of Viking treasures. Farmer Björn Engström found the world's largest ever haul of Viking treasure on the north-eastern part of the island a few years ago. The loot included coins, necklaces and other jewelry, which altogether contained 65 kilos of silver and 20 kilos of bronze. He was given 2.1 million kronor as a reward.

Palm Beach resident Peter Knollenberg will watch the Today segment with great interest, as he is chairman of Sovereign Exploration Associates International, a company with a license to the shipwreck site — code named Fantome Cove — off the rocky coast of Cape Prospect near Halifax, Nova Scotia.

In those shoals on Nov. 24, 1814, HMS Fantome foundered in rough seas, laden with U.S. coins and silverware snatched three months earlier from the dinner table of first lady Dolley Madison during the sacking of Washington.

Today producers are interested in the efforts of Philadelphia-based Sovereign Exploration Associates "because governments are fighting. It was a British ship, and they want to get hold of it. But they had looted the White House," said Pieternel Knollenberg, the chairman's wife.

The company bought the rights to the Fantome site three years ago and completed its first dive in 2005. Nova Scotia has first dibs on any finds under Canada's Maritimes' Treasure Trove Act. The provincial government is entitled to 10 percent of the artifacts or treasure for its museums, said Robert Baca, president of Sovereign.

"They want us to bring it up," he said. "It's big for their tourism, to invite people to come see 'the White House' there." But Britain has asked Canada to intervene and withhold further exploration permits, citing the "sovereign immunity as Royal Navy warships," a right which the Fantome retains after sinking, said Steve Atkins, a British Embassy spokesman in Washington, D.C.

"It is not a matter of rehashing arguments of war that took place many years ago between two nations that have subsequently become the closest of allies. It is also not a question of what this ship may or may not hold as cargo. Royal Navy warships and their cargos remain the property of the British government," Atkins said.

Another wrinkle is the HMS Tilbury, wrecked nearby on a voyage from Halifax during a hurricane in 1758. About 280 people died, and the payship's cargo included wages for a British admiral's forces. Although Fantome wrecked more than a half- century after Tilbury — and did not involve loss of life — British objections apply to both ships.

Regarding the Tilbury, authorities want to protect the site as a burial ground, Atkins said. But based on the court martial of the captain, it was known that "no one died in (the Fantome) wreck," Baca said. "The Brits can't say the loot is theirs, because it was stolen from us. So it's a ploy about disturbing sailors' remains."

"We're focused on how these wrecks can help with history, especially of the War of 1812, when we were really on our own," Knollenberg said. "Kids' interest in the adventure side of these discoveries will help them learn the history side as well."

He's also concerned about rescuing history before these ancient ships deteriorate, from natural elements and advanced drag-net fishing gear. In many instances, "People don't have the financial wherewithal to explore these wrecks. We do. We can get (artifacts) out of the water and conserved."

In keeping with the treasure hunter’s tradition of guarding its finds, Odyssey’s court filings provided no details on the ship’s likely name, country of origin or wreck date. The company merely identified a point on the globe, said the wreck site was within a 5-mile radius of it, and handed the U.S. Marshals Office as evidence of the find a bottle it recovered from the site. Co-founder Greg Stemm declined to comment Friday when asked about the ship. "When we’re ready," he said, "we’ll be announcing a bunch more information."

It’s a welcome turn of events for Odyssey shareholders, particularly those who withstood years of failure before its 2003 discovery of the SS Republic, a sidewheel steamer that sank 100 miles off the coast of Georgia in 1865. Odyssey eventually sold the gold and silver coins it found on board for tens of millions of dollars, thus replenishing its coffers, credibility and stock price.

Since then, however, the company has had another round of setbacks. Though lucrative, the Republic ultimately yielded just one-quarter of the coins the company’s research suggested would be found. Last year, Odyssey’s inaugural shipwreck museum closed just 90 minutes after its grand opening in New Orleans because of Hurricane Katrina. Co-founder, chairman and CEO John Morris took temporary leave from his executive posts after being diagnosed with cancer. And Odyssey’s imminent plans to excavate a ship believed to be the HMS Sussex -- which sank in 1694, the company says, with millions or possibly billions of dollars in coins aboard -- was postponed after years of complex international negotiations when a Spanish regional authority jumped in with a last-minute claim.

Such is life at what may be the country’s only publicly traded company of its kind. Odyssey’s hope of achieving a consistent cash flow by having several projects in the pipeline at once has not yet materialized. Still, the company has made the best of its situation, such as performing sonar scans of the ocean floor in high-traffic areas when weather or legal conflicts interrupt. Odyssey wrote the Securities and Exchanges Commission in 2005 that it hoped to locate and salvage five separate wrecks it identified in the English Channel.

James Delgado, executive director of the Institute for Nautical Technology at Texas A&M University, said a large number of ships wreck in the busy corridor north of the Bay of Biscay. "You are at a crossroads of maritime trade that has been so for centuries," he said. "These are not easy waters."

Odyssey’s request for exclusive access to and control of the wreck site will be discussed at a court hearing Tuesday. Under international maritime law, salvors typically request such permission from their own court system or that of the jurisdiction nearest the wreckage.

Even if the federal court approves, it could be months or even years before the company is permitted to send remote-operated vehicles down to begin sifting the wreckage. Odyssey could face legal claims or challenges from parties such as the ship’s country of origin, the descendants of its insurers or owners and archaeologists who consider for-profit salvage an abomination. And though Odyssey says the ship lies 100 meters beyond any country’s territorial boundaries, and thus, presumably, in international waters, history suggests the nearest government will make a claim anyway.

"The workmen saw all these coins come pouring out of the digger bucket," said Maidstone Museum's Laura McLean. They will be transferred to the British Museum for cleaning and recording. It is then hoped the hoard of coins can be put on display in Kent. The county council's Andrew Richardson said: "In four years of dealing with all the treasure in Kent I have never dealt with anything on this scale.

"The remarkable thing is that someone has gathered these coins together and stashed them because they were no longer legal tender." Dr Richardson said the coins featured the head of Roman Emperor Constantine and other powerful figures from the time.

Huffsmith, a member of HRD's board of directors, filed an application for a water-quality waiver in early September with the state Department of Environmental Protection in Tallahassee. Divers would use their boats' underwater blowers, which channel water from the propellers, to remove sand from any wreck site, but Huffsmith wrote he doesn't expect that to hurt the nearby reefs built by Sabellariid worms, a protected species.

"The bottom (of the exploration site) consists primarily of coarse shell material deposited in the heavy surf zone," Huffsmith wrote. This material, he added, tends to drop out of the water, back to the bottom, within 5 to 10 minutes of being kicked up, rather than being suspended for great lengths of time and coating the worm reefs. If sand kicked up by the treasure hunt does approach any worm rock colonies, however, he said, HRD will stop work and contact state officials.

DEP spokeswoman Sarah Williams said Friday her agency is looking over HRD's application to see if it is complete. If so, she said, DEP could grant a waiver after a 60-day period for public comments. If not, the state will ask the company for more information. Huffsmith's application includes a 2005 research plan by project archeologist Robert Westrick, who pointed to new artifacts found in recent years in HRD's exploration area.

"Spanish Colonial coins and related artifacts have been found on the beach and beyond the dune line in the immediate vicinity," Westrick wrote. And since 1992, he added, his company has found the same such material scattered in the area off Indian River Shores it leases from the state.

Now HRD leaders want to find the ship they believe may have held the coins in its hold back in the 18th century. If they do, he indicated, it could be a new find among the other six wrecks already identified, documented and salvaged along the Treasure Coast. The company wants to identify several "magnetic anomalies" its divers detected in 1996 and 2001, Westrick wrote. These could indicate metal parts of a sailing ship, such as cannon or ballast, and thus point to an undiscovered wreck, he added.

All this is entirely possible, said Taffi Fisher-Abt, daughter of the late treasure salvor Mel Fisher and director of Sabastian's Mel Fisher Museum. "This is a large ocean," Fisher-Abt said Friday. "Dad once told me there's a shipwreck every 100 yards from Havana, Cuba, to North Carolina. Some are not valuable, some are, some are historical." She said HRD's site lies between two sites the Fisher organization has been exploring and salvaging for years off the Riomar and Wabasso Beach areas. The Fishers have leases to 10 wrecks of the 1715 fleet, from Cape Canaveral south to the St. Lucie Nuclear Power Plant. The Fishers and HRD, in fact, are two of nine separate companies seeking to salvage treasure from the Treasure Coast.

Huffsmith said HRD won't even be exploring until early next summer, when the waters offer better visibility, so there is time to work for the state waiver. For much of the year, in fact, offshore visibility is too poor for the casual diver or snorkeler to spot Spanish treasure. So some arm themselves with metal detectors and "poach" on leased sites, Westrick wrote. "HRD's presence, while conducting legal activity on the site, should deter at least some of this 'illegal' diving," he added.

But the discovery, the strongest sign yet that Philadelphia-based Sovereign Exploration Associates may have discovered the remains of the legendary British frigate HMS Fantome or other ships from its fleet, sets the stage for a possible international legal showdown involving the salvage company, the British government and heritage officials in Canada and the U.S. over the future of the wreck site.

CanWest News Service has learned the British government has asked Canada to halt exploration at the possible Fantome site and insisted that nothing should be taken from the area without permission from London.

Wendy Barnable, a spokesperson with the Nova Scotia government's Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Heritage, said Wednesday the province has received a letter, via federal officials in Ottawa, in which Britain argues that the Fantome -- along with a sunken 18th-century British treasure ship, HMS Tilbury, also being sought by Sovereign off the Cape Breton coast -- "remain the property of the British government and can't be disturbed without their consent."

Describing the British intervention as unprecedented, Barnable said provincial heritage officials are studying the "very complex" issue and have, in the meantime, advised the U.S. salvager to seek British approval to continue its explorations.

In a statement announcing its latest finds, Sovereign said: "Our divers observed flatware, artifacts, ship fittings and thousands of coins. While our science team has not positively identified the vessels on the site, the new data combined with last year's recoveries clearly establish the site as one of significant historical importance."

The search for the Fantome has been controversial and jurisdictionally complex because the British wreck lies in Canadian waters but is believed to hold gold and other treasures looted during a famous 1814 raid on the White House, treasury headquarters and other buildings in the U.S. capital. The same naval operation also inspired the "bombs bursting in air" imagery of The Star-Spangled Banner, the U.S. national anthem.

"The Malacca Strait is full of rocks, reefs and small islands. Nobody knows exactly how many shipwrecks are there, but we would find out," the 49-year-old former engineer told Reuters in a recent interview. He is working with investors on a $50 million plan to salvage wrecks in Indonesia and Vietnam under national licenses akin to production-sharing contacts for oil. The plan also calls for the construction of museums and archeological conservation centers in Vietnam and Bali. The potential of more discoveries in the Strait of Malacca has lured many treasure hunters. Walterfang is one of them, and perhaps the most successful, so far.

His latest find, in 1998, was a blockbuster. It was the wreck of an Arab ship laden with more than 60,000 ceramic pieces and gold and silver artifacts from China's Tang dynasty (618-907), possibly bound for a grand wedding in Arabia. Besides Walterfang's finds, other notable discoveries include a Dutch warship that sank off Malaysia over 400 years ago and salvaged in 1995. Experts recovered a bronze cannon from the Nassau, which sank after a battle with Portuguese warships.

The British merchant ship Diana, which sank off Malacca in 1817, was discovered in 1993, yielding Chinese plates, bowls, candlesticks and other artifacts that fetched 2.2 million pounds ($4.1 million) at an Amsterdam auction two years later. John Miksic, Southeast Asian history expert at the National University of Singapore, said there could be more breathtaking finds ahead after the Tang Treasure.

A ship of Admiral Zheng He's "Treasure" fleet in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) would make a sensational find. Zheng led seven armadas through Southeast Asia and beyond to spread Chinese influence from 1405 to 1433. Red-and-white porcelains from the period would be extremely precious, Miksic said. A red-and-white jar from the early Ming era was recently sold at auction for $10 million, Miksic added.

Walterfang said Indonesian fishermen had been a key source of information and would continue to be. He says he keeps good relations with them through an Indonesian in-law. He was bitten by the treasure bug after fishermen showed him samples from shipwrecks on one of his diving trips in the 1990s, spurring him to quit his job at a German cement company.

Fishermen in parts of Indonesia, such as East Sulawesi, dive in shallow waters without oxygen tanks in search of seafood and occasionally stumble on the odd treasure, he said. Their ceramic samples led to his finds in 1997 of a 10th-century vessel, known as the Intan Wreck, in the Java Sea and a 15th-century ship, the Maranei/Bakau Wreck, near Belitung island, off southeastern Sumatra, the next year. Soon after, he found the Tang treasure near Buton island off southeast Sulawesi. Intan yielded thousands of Chinese ceramics, Indonesian gold jewelry, bronze artifacts and Arabian glassware, while Maranei/Bakau held a mixed cargo from the Ming dynasty.

"All the ships found in Indonesian waters were representing actually the time capsules of those periods," said Walterfang, who is married with five children in New Zealand. Walterfang's slides of the Tang Treasure showed glittering gold cups and plates, a Chinese-inscripted bronze mirror, white glazed stoneware and a tall green vase with a dragon lid.

Some initially questioned the value of the finds as many were corroded and covered by limestone or coral, he said. "The scientific and academic community just didn't know how to handle it because it was just too good to be true that there was such a cargo from the Tang dynasty."

Walterfang shrugged off advice that the artifacts be auctioned immediately, choosing to ship all the cargo to New Zealand for conservation, in a costly, six-year process. "I decided to go to New Zealand, far away from the media, far away from the world and tourists, to conserve it first." Specialists restored artifacts with chemicals injected millimeter-by-millimeter under microscopes, he said. They spent four years and $350,000 to conserve one silver flask alone.

The Maranei/Bakau Wreck is still under conservation in New Zealand and will end up in a future Bali maritime museum, he said. The Intan Wreck has been handed back to Indonesia as part of compensation for the Tang Treasure, which will be exhibited soon at the Hua Song Museum in Singapore. Walterfang said he also gave Jakarta $2.5 million plus a deal to help conserve some of the existing finds and cover the costs of sending four Indonesians for conservation training abroad.

Underwater archaeologists found an object, perhaps 100 feet long, buried under sand in water near South Island, off Georgetown County. The discovery was announced by Jim Spirek, of the S.C. Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology. It was reported in today's editions of the Myrtle Beach Sun-News.

According to the Sun-News, the object was discovered about noon Wednesday. Divers plan to return to the site in September, to look for additional items. Spirek told the Sun-News that the object could be part of the wreckage from the Chorruca, a Spanish galleon that sank in 1526 in Winyah Bay. The Chorruca was a lead vessel in the expedition headed by Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon, a conquistador born in 1475 in Toledo, Spain.

De Ayllon had settled on the island of Hispaniola (the island where today's Dominican Republic and Haiti are located) and was a successful business owner there. In 1523, he was asked by King Charles I of Spain to look for a route from the Atlantic Ocean through the newly discovered American continent to the Pacific Ocean.

De Ayllon tried to find such a passage along the Carolinas coast and is thought to have landed in the Cape Fear area. He also is credited as being the first European to discover Chesapeake Bay. In 1526, he headed an expedition of 600 colonists hoping to begin life on the South Carolina coast.

During that expedition, the Chorruca sank. The colony did not last long. There was a fight over leadership, during which African slaves reportedly escaped and joined nearby Native American tribes. A fever epidemic broke out, killing de Ayllon and many others. About 150 survivors gave up the effort in late 1526 and returned to Hispaniola.

Abt is the daughter of the late and renowned treasure hunter Mel Fisher, and the director of Sebastian's Mel Fisher Treasure Museum, where the gold bar went on display Friday. "We're very excited," Abt said about the recent discovery. "It's got beautiful markings on it. I would say it's worth at least $25,000." Roman numeral markings on the bar indicate it is 19 1/4 karats, she said.

Abt said Milne's crew found the bar in less than 20 feet of water near John's Island, south of the Sebastian Inlet. At the same site, the crew also found a copper "maravidi," a coin used by Spaniards in the 1700s, and a bronze cross.

The site is part of the ocean bottom that contains remains of ships from a 1715 Spanish fleet that sank during a hurricane while sailing back to Europe, loaded with treasure from Central and South America. The Mel Fisher Center holds state salvage contracts on the shipwrecks and has recovered treasure from them for the past 40 years, Abt said.

She said Milne's crew will continue to work the trail that revealed the recently-found gold bar in hopes of finding more treasure before stormier fall weather sets in. "We've been working that site (near John's Island) pretty diligently this summer," she said. "It's one of the top three sites as far as production of treasure."

The site is one Mel Fisher began exploring in the early 1960s before he began looking for the wreck of the Atocha, a 1622 galleon laden with 40 tons of silver, gold and copper off the coast of Key West. He found the Atocha in 1985 after a 16-year search, Abt said.

The place where the gold bar was found Aug. 11 is named the Corrigan site, after a local ranching family who once owned one of only two cabins on the beach between Sebastian and Vero Beach, Abt said. She said the other cabin belonged to the late treasure hunter Kip Wagner. In 1961, Wagner discovered a ship believed to be the Nuestra Senora de la Regla — the lead vessel in the Spanish flotilla — and helped salvage about $1.6 million in silver coins.

Salvagers haven't identified the ship where the recently-discovered gold bar came from, but it might be the Regla, Abt said. Under state law, The Mel Fisher Center gives 20 percent of the value of artifacts it finds to the state at the end of each year.

"The discovery of a Columbus shipwreck, let alone the finding of the flagship Mariagalante, would be a tremendous contribution to maritime archaeology," said Charles Beeker, director of Academic Diving and Underwater Science Programs in IU Bloomington's School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation. "Perhaps more important would be the cargo. Were the ships laden with native Taino Indian artifacts heading to Spain? Such a find would shed new light on the nature of the contact period between the Old and the New Worlds."

Earlier this summer, Beeker and Geoffrey Conrad, director of IUB's Mathers Museum of World Cultures, took a team of faculty and graduate students to the Dominican Republic to explore intriguing magnetometer anomalies the IU researchers had discovered 10 years ago. The readings suggest large objects buried under silt and mud, and within coral colonies. The readings indicate also that the objects are scattered -- similar to how a shipwreck, or several for that matter, would appear -- in a 75-square-meter area.

In the years since the anomalies were discovered and mapped, Beeker, Conrad and their graduate students have returned yearly to the Dominican Republic to complete a variety of projects related to tourism, conservation and the archaeological exploration of village sites and ceremonial wells related to the Taino Indians.

La Isabela Bay was the site of the first permanent Spanish settlement established by Columbus, and the Taino were the first indigenous people to interact with Europeans. Beeker said much of the history of this period is based on speculation, something he and Conrad are trying to change.

Their research teams are multinational and multidisciplinary, tapping such resources as the Anglo~Danish Maritime Archaeological Team (ADMAT) -- a nonprofit educational organization -- and the Genetic Anthropology Laboratory in IUB's Department of Anthropology. The latest research team included ADMAT as well as four professors and 10 graduate students from HPER, the School of Public and Environmental Affairs and the IU departments of anthropology, biology and mathematics.

Among their latest efforts, they retrieved a 300-pound kedge anchor that could be from the Columbus era. The anchor, which is being conserved at the laboratory of the Oficina Nacional De Patrimonio Cultural Subacuàtico (ONPCS), was encrusted with dead as well as live coral within the area of interesting magnetometer anomalies. The live coral was removed from the anchor and cemented onto nearby coral colonies. "We're strong advocates that you need to respect the biology when you excavate," Beeker said.

Beeker and Conrad's team used a water dredge to dig down to the most prominent magnetometer anomaly pinpointed. The pump, which acted like a vacuum cleaner, was able to dig an 8-foot hole through the silt and mud, with the magnetometer reading getting stronger as they went deeper. The team ran out of time, however, and had to postpone the search until later this summer. They are optimistic. When they return, they plan to determine which shipwreck they found, not whether one actually is buried in the bay.

Beeker said that several ships sank in La Isabela Bay during a hurricane in 1495. Researchers estimate that eight or nine vessels were lost in the bay, including smaller caravels and one or two larger store ships, or naos. One of the lost naos is believed to be the Mariagalante, Columbus' flagship on his second voyage to the New World. Documents indicate some of the ships carried cargo when they left for Spain, but Beeker said the contents are unknown.

Conrad and Beeker described the La Isabela Bay research project as a long-term investment by IU, which has funded much of the research. They also believe it is a project for which the land excavations and exploration of Taino village sites are as important as the underwater explorations.

"Everyone knows the name 'Columbus,'" Beeker said. "We want people to know Taino, too."

Bidders crowded the room to see history made in the auction world as the estimate was doubled then tripled and continued to climb in price. Towards the end two bidders were left in the fight for the coin, one in the room and one on the phone. At £390,000 a new bidder appeared and the coin received open applause from the room when he purchased the Double Leopard for a hammer price of £400,000.

"We knew that there would be huge interest," said Jeremy Cheek of Spink Auctions, "but this surpassed all our expectations." Spink is the leading auction house for record prices of coins. It is in the privileged situation to have sold seven of the top ten coins auctioned over the years, including the top two.

This coin is the third known specimen of its kind. The two other examples, found in the bed of the river Tyne in 1857, are now both in the British Museum. No other specimens were known until this coin was discovered and dug up earlier this year by a metal detectorist in the south of England. This is therefore the only example in private hands. It is a slightly different variety to either of those in the British Museum.

The finder was working with the permission of the landowner who has a joint interest in the coin - the proceeds of the sale will be divided between them. In order to protect the site the find spot is not being disclosed.

The Gold Double Florin, authorized on 14 December 1343, was to circulate at a value of six-shillings. The first coins were struck in early 1344, but the coinage was not a success. The Double Florin was replaced by the Gold Noble, authorised on 9 July 1344, and therefore this magnificent coin was only legal tender for a brief seven months.

The obverse shows a full length portrait of Edward III enthroned beneath a Gothic portico. The King is crowned and holds an orb and sceptre. Two crowned Leopards sit at either side, and the surrounding fields are decorated with fleur de lis. The reverse is filled by a floriate cross with crowns at the four points, within a quadrilobe with four Leopards in the angles.

The Double Florin was the first large gold coin of England. It was intended primarily for foreign trade. The denomination was based on the gold Florin of Florence, and the design was derived from a French gold coin ("masse d'or") of Philip IV of France (1285-1314).

Edward's issue of large gold coins was emblematic of the might of England during his reign (1327-77). Edward ruled not only England but also much of France which he claimed through his mother Isabella, daughter of Philip IV. It was Edward's brilliant son, the Black Prince, who secured English interests on the continent with his stunning victories at Poitiers and Crecy.

The ring, which is beautifully worked, engraved with mysterious lettering and surmounted by a diamond that had almost certainly travelled along the Silk Route from India to Europe, was found on a rainy morning in 2002 by John Wood, a retired tool engineer from Manchester. Armed with his metal detector, he had been given permission to explore ploughed fields at Manley Old Hall on the edge of the Delamere Forest in Cheshire.

A farm worker had told Mr. Wood that he wasn't likely to find anything as the fields had been scoured by treasure hunters on numerous occasions. But within two minutes his detector gave a signal and Mr. Wood dug up what a friend described as "looking like one of those gifts from a fairground."

On cleaning the ring Mr. Wood found the inscription loyaute sans fin (loyalty without end), the letter E engraved three times, each time followed by three stars, and, either side of the diamond, the two initials V and A. The engravings suggested at first that the ring was a love token but puzzled experts that Mr. Wood showed it to.

He was also disappointed that when he registered it for treasure trove, the Government's treasure valuation committee, which concluded that the ring was 14th century, valued it at just £3,000. He appealed and the valuation went up to £60,000. But it was research by Helen Molesworth, a specialist in Christie's jewellery department, that cracked the engraved code.

Delamere Forest was one of the favourite hunting grounds of Edward III, then pursuing England's claim on vast swathes of France in the Hundred Years War. One of Edward's closest allies on the Continent was a wealthy Flemish textile manufacturer, Jacob Van Artevelde. Jacob, a strong supporter of English claims in France, and the English king were close. They were each a godfather to one of the other's children.

The three Es, Miss Molesworth concluded, signified Edward and the V and A his Flemish friend. The ring was probably a gift by the king thanking his loyal friend. Miss Molesworth said yesterday: "It is only a theory but it is a very viable possibility." She went on: "I can't tell you how rare this ring is. It is the most exciting piece I have handled in my career. Diamonds were very rare for the time. The goldwork is exquisite and, historically, we are potentially dealing with a royal ring." Setting a diamond, a great rarity in 14th century Britain, in the ring, indicated that the piece could only have been made for someone from "the very upper echelons of society then," said Miss Molesworth.

Under the terms of Mr. Wood's registration of his find under the Treasure Act, it is believed that he has agreed to share the proceeds of the sale 50-50 with the landowner. The ring was sold to an anonymous British collector and fetched double its estimate.

Mr. Wood took up metal-detecting six years ago "as something to do while fishing." He thought that he might search the land beside the river banks while waiting for bites on his line. The ring was the find of his short career. On previous trips he has found a George III half-guinea which he sold for £55 and a Henry VIII coin worth £145. He estimates that he has found at least 2,000 modern pound coins that have been dropped. "We always make sure the farmer gets half the proceeds of anything we find, and a bottle of Scotch."

The vessel could date to the mid-1500s, when the first Spanish settlement in what is now the United States was founded here, the archaeologists said. But the exposed portion looks more like ships from a later period because of its iron bolts, said Elizabeth Benchley, director of the Archaeology Institute at the University of West Florida.

"There are Spanish shipwrecks in Pensacola Bay," Benchley said. "We have worked on two — one from 1559 and another from 1705. But no one has found one buried on land. This was quite a surprise to everybody."

Construction crews came upon the ship this month while rebuilding the base's swim rescue school, destroyed during Hurricane Ivan in 2004. The exposed keel of the ship juts upward from the sandy bottom of the pit and gives some guess of the vessel's form. Archaeologists estimated the rest of the ship is buried by about 75 feet of sand.

During initial work to determine the ship's origin, archaeologists found ceramic tiles, ropes and pieces of olive jars. The settlement was founded in 1559; its exact location is a mystery. The Spanish did not return until more than a century later in 1698 at Presidio Santa Maria de Galve, now the naval station. The French captured and burned the settlement in 1719 but handed Pensacola back to Spain three years later. Hurricanes forced the Spanish to repeatedly rebuild.

The Navy plans to enclose the uncovered portion of the ship, mark the site and move construction over to accommodate archaeological work, officials said. "We don't have plans to excavate the entire ship," Benchley said. "It's going to be very expensive because it's so deeply buried and we would have to have grant money," she said.

John Newman, from Suffolk County Council's Archaeological Service, said the treasure, which would originally have been adorned with a silver wash, was of the usurper emperors Carausius (287-293 AD) and Allectus (293-296 AD).

"This appears to be the largest hoard of legitimately minted coins of the two usurpers from Britain to date," he said. "The coins are made up of 258 of Carausius, and 347 of Allectus, minted at London and possibly Southhampton or Colchester, which was the first time official mints were set up in Roman Britain."

During a treasure trove inquest in Bury St Edmunds yesterday, coroner for Greater Suffolk Peter Dean heard how metal detectorist Paul Flack contacted Suffolk County Council after discovering 30 of the coins, which he correctly identified as being of Roman origin.

"We were able to mobilise a small team of archaeologists - funded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme - who excavated the area and found the remaining coins," said Mr. Newman. "We ascertained the coins had originally been placed in a pottery jar and then buried on the edge of a Roman period ditch, close to an area of known settlement - probably a moderate farm - but had been scattered by the plough lines running through the field. "A pile of flints was also discovered which may have been used to mark the spot where the coins were."

The coins, which are currently being kept at the British Museum where they will be cleaned and conserved ready for valuation by the Treasure Valuation Committee, were probably worth around four or five months wages for a labourer at the time they were buried.

Dr Dean commended Mr. Flack for helping to save the "great historical value" of the coins by reporting his find to the council immediately. "This is a find that should be considered treasure under the Treasure Act," he said. Local museums have now expressed interest in buying the coins. Peter Merrick, chairman of Friends of Mildenhall Museum, said he would be making enquiries to determine exactly where the coins were discovered.

Experts described the coin as "the find of the last 100 years." But the museum is angry at the size of its outlay, claiming that it should have been able to acquire it for two thirds of the price, and has called for reforms to art export laws.

Made from more than 85 per cent gold, weighing 4.33g and showing almost no sign of wear, the coin was struck in 805-810 during the reign of Coenwulf, the King of Mercia, East Anglia and Kent, the most powerful ruler in Britain at the time and a significant figure in the gradual unification of England.

The coin carries his name, title and an image of him and, on the reverse, the intriguing inscription DE VICO LVNDONIAE (From the trading place of London). Besides being in almost perfect condition, it's significance, says the museum, is that it is the earliest gold coin in the name of an English ruler intended as part of a circulating currency.

Many dozen Anglo-Saxon silver pennies have been unearthed but the Coenwulf mancus is only the eighth British gold coin - the museum now owns seven of them - cast between 670 and 1257 to be found. Earlier gold examples, including one from the reign of Offa, Coenwulf's predecessor as ruler of Mercia, were ceremonial coins.

Little is known about Anglo-Saxon coinage - and less still about Coenwulf who ruled Mercia from 796 to 821. But despite the enormous value of the coin, Gareth Williams, the museum's Anglo-Saxon coin curator, said yesterday that he was convinced that it was used as currency because of the unexpected inscription.

Coenwulf was, like rulers before and after him, in thrall to the language and culture of the Romans who had left Britain three centuries earlier. His decision to use the word vicus, meaning a trading centre, on the coin rather than civitas, the city seat of authority, is a strong indication that the coin was for trading.

The mancus was found several inches below a footpath on the bank of the Ivel near Biggleswade in 2001 by a metal detector enthusiast out walking with his dog. But how the coin came to be there is anybody's guess. "It would have been a grievous loss," said Mr. Williams. A recent dig near the river - not yet written up by archaeologists - has unearthed the remains of an Anglo-Saxon market place which may have been the destination of whoever lost the coin.

The image of Coenwulf, a bloodthirsty figure who stole the throne from Offa's son and then invaded East Anglia and Kent to create an empire stretching from the South Coast to the Welsh borders and the Humber, is not likely to be a good likeness, said Mr. Williams. "The rulers of the time chose to make themselves look like Roman emperors."

He went on: "It may be very expensive but it is an absolutely top discovery. It is beautifully preserved. It has no wear or tear and must have been freshly struck when it was lost. It's condition is so exceptional that we were suspicious at first. We had to test it quite thoroughly before we were convinced."

The mancus first came to public attention when the anonymous finder and the owner of the river bank, put it into auction at Spink in London in October 2004 with an estimate of £150,000. The British Museum bid but dropped out below £200,000 and it sold to an American dealer, Allan Davisson, for £230,000.

Mr. Davisson applied to take it to America but the Government issued a temporary export stop. This gave the museum six months to match the selling price. If it failed to do so, the export could go ahead. But in the meantime, Mr. Davisson disclosed that he had had an offer of £357,000 from a private collector in the United States and this was the price he wanted "matching."

The museum said yesterday: "This jump in price was very unfortunate and we think that this is a loophole that should be closed. We have always understood that the 'matching price' was the initial sale. We have started talks with Government because we feel this needs to be addressed in future."

Fred Leighton's gems make him giddy and they should, they're a far cry from the Mexican crafts he sold in the village in the 60s. Now he sells a far fancier selection on Madison Avenue.

Fred Leighton: "I bought what I liked. I learned through trial and error what value is." Fred designs some pieces, like the bracelet and earrings worn by Mariah Carey, but most are vintage, like the antique bracelet worn as a headband by Natalie Portman.

But Fred has a recent acquisition that he thinks were made for a queen, literally: a set of emeralds, two rings, a pendant, a necklace and earrings, which are thought to be from a shipwreck off the coast of Florida.

Legend has it they had been en route to the queen of Spain in 1715 when the fleet of ships sank in a storm. A diver found them in the 1970s and they only recently made it to Fred's store, and the earrings are his favorite.

Fred Leighton: "I've seen a lot of 18th and 19th century Spanish jewelry and I've never seen anything of the quality of these earrings."

The entire set has 309 emeralds, totaling a tad more than 232 carats. He estimates the value of this set at somewhere in the ball park of $2 million. But for Fred, selling this treasure will be such sweet sorrow.

Fred Leighton: "When you get something really beautiful, it's hard to give it up."

Part of the reason the emeralds are in such good condition is because they were found inside a silver box. The box was corroded, but the gems were unscathed.

The explorers will work with Dave Jordan, the Palm City native who spotted the cannons. Popin said the state Department of Environmental Protection has approved a permit needed to investigate 48 possible targets on the ocean floor. Those targets were identified with work completed in 2004 using technology called side-scan sonar and a magnetometer, which find buried objects and those on the sand surface.

This spring, Popin said they planned to be back in the area to check out the targets using a small boat with divers and a water dredge, which will allow the explorers to sift through the sand in search of small pottery bits, wood from a ship hull or possibly a pistol or, even better, gold.

"We can sift through it and see if there's anything of importance," Popin said. "We're not supposed to bring anything up except for identification. If we uncover something, we're supposed to put it back on the bottom."

If they do find interesting artifacts, the archaeologists will apply for a salvage permit to bring their 70-foot lift boat named the Polly L to excavate. Popin said the work this spring should take up to two weeks, depending on the weather. "Visibility is a big part of it," he said. "The pistol is exactly the kind of thing we'll be looking for."

The finders will now be rewarded for handing over the items at 'market value', which has yet to be decided. The Viking cast gold ingot, found in Wembury, was said to be particularly rare. The artefacts are certain to be sent to museums across the South West, including possibly Plymouth City Museum. All were found by metal detector enthusiasts, including three members of the South Hams Metal Detecting Club.

Plymouth coroner Nigel Meadows held a formal hearing to rule that the items were treasure trove and hand them over to the State. He read statements from the four finders, the landowners and experts from the British Museum in London who gave an expert opinion on their worth.

Mr. Meadows said after the hearings: "They're nice objects. They're not worth thousands and thousands, but they tell us a lot about our history." In each case a special committee will decide on the market value of the items and the cash will be split 50-50 between the finders and the owners.

The items are: A cast gold Viking ingot found with a metal detector by Michael Holland four inches under the surface of a ploughed field in Wembury on March 27. The bar would have been stored and used to make another object, such as a piece of jewellery.

A medieval gold finger-ring set with a sapphire and dating to the 13th century, found about five inches beneath the surface of a field near a church in Dunterton, between Tavistock and Launceston. It was found on April 17 by Clive A'Lee, a member of the South Hams club.

A post-medieval silver huntsman's whistle found in a field at West Charleton, near Kingsbridge, by Michael Long, also from the club, in 2003. It was reported only this year.

A silver gilt dress hook, part of a fastening for clothing, found on a farm near Ugborough on December 28, 2004, by Graham Fisher, again from the club. The report from the British Museum said the item was difficult to date.

All the items were handed over to Danielle Wootton, who is the finds officer for Devon and works in Exeter for the British Museum. Under the law, anyone who does not hand over an item they suspect to be valuable within 14 days can be prosecuted and be fined or even jailed.

Mr. A'Lee, a 43-year-old gardener from St Budeaux, has been metal-detecting for 15 years, and the ring is his most valuable find. He said: "The ring was very clean. It looked like it was put in the ground yesterday. I was gobsmacked. I was shaking when I dug it up." Mr. A'Lee was awarded two trophies by the club for the most important find of the year and has a framed photograph of the ring on his wall.

Despite the disappearance of the ship, the Rooswijk, the lost vessel and its treasure remained the property of the Dutch East India Co. When the company was taken over by the Dutch government in 1798, the Netherlands became the legal owners of the vanished bullion.

Last year a British sports diver, Cambridgeshire carpenter Ken Welling, found the wreckage. The Dutch Government was contacted, and the discovery was kept secret until this week, when Holland's Finance Minister, Joop Wijn, took possession of original wooden chests full of bullion. The silver was handed over at a ceremony in Plymouth Harbour aboard a frigate of the Royal Dutch Navy, the De Ruyter.

The loss of the Rooswijk in December 1739 was a financial disaster for the Dutch East India Co. and for Holland as a whole, as well as being a catastrophe in human terms. There were no survivors, and the world learned of the disaster because English fishermen, looking for potentially valuable storm debris found a wooden chest full of letters that identified the ship as the Rooswijk. It had sank just a day after sailing from the Dutch coastal island of Texel.

Underwater excavations have recovered all the silver bullion, and more than a thousand artefacts. Other cargo seem to have included substantial quantities of sheet copper, sabre blades and masonry, presumably for some construction project in the Dutch East Indies. Evidence of life on board was found in layers that reflected the vessel's social and architectural stratification.

When some time after the disaster the floor timbers had collapsed, the contents of each deck had simply fallen on top of one another.All the silver had been stored near the officer's dining area. The archaeologists knew how much they were looking for because the Dutch Government still has precise records of what was lost.

The silver, mainly in 1.9-kilogram bars, had all been mined in Spanish-ruled Mexico. Originally it had been carried by Spanish vessels from Mexico to Cadiz. It had then been sold to the Dutch and shipped to Holland, where it had been melted down and converted into silver bars bearing the imprint of the Amsterdam Chamber of the Dutch East India Co. The "re-branded" treasure was then loaded onto the Rooswijk, bound for Batavia, modern Jakarta.

There, some of it would have been converted into Javanese currency, while much would have been shipped to Siam (modern Thailand) or Bengal to be converted into local coinage. Before yesterday's handover to the Dutch, a full archaeological study has been carried out into the hundreds of bars recovered. Most were still in their original wooden chests. The discovery of so many silver bars complete with "packaging" is unique, and is helping archaeologists understand the scale and nature of the 18th-century international bullion trade, which financially underpinned most of the European colonial ventures of that time.

"This discovery is unique," said marine archaeologist Alex Hildredas. "It has provided a near complete assemblage of silver ingots cast for a single voyage, and would have been melted down to produce coinage if the vessel had not sunk."

In the colorful age of pirates, Blackbeard was flashiest of all. In a stroke of 16th-century marketing genius, the buccaneer wore bands of pistols, daggers and a cutlass during battle and tucked burning ropes under his hat to surround himself with smoke. "He created an image that is still remembered 300 years later -- beard, ribbons aglow, a face that looked almost like Satan itself," said Ben Cherry, who has studied Blackbeard and interprets the pirate at schools and festivals around the world. "He made everyone think he was a nasty guy, which is (his) success."

History records Blackbeard's flagship, the 40-gun Queen Anne's Revenge, ran aground near Beaufort Inlet in 1718. Archaeologists believe a treasure of information about the notorious pirate lies in a jumble of cannon and timber on the ocean floor there. But the sea still holds the secret of whether the wreckage was really the Queen Anne's Revenge and the site might be destroyed before the truth is known.

"We've only done 5 percent of the wreck, which means the rest is sitting out there in potentially great hazard from storms," said Phil Masters, the underwater salvage expert who found the wreckage nine years ago.

The ship sank in about 24 feet of water and was buried under 15 feet of sand for almost 300 years, archaeologists said. But through the years, the ship also sank in the sand and now sits on bedrock, and storm after storm has gradually stripped away the protective sands. Only 3 feet of sand now cover the wreckage, and the next violent storm to hit Bogue Banks could destroy the site, archaeologists said.

"We're seeing material we haven't seen before because now it's uncovered," said David Moore, of the North Carolina Maritime Museum. "But we also must ask, ‘What are we missing? What has the storm taken away that we didn't even know was there?'"

Hundreds of artifacts recovered so far point to Blackbeard, such as a 2,500-pound cannon that was recovered in May. Archaeologists at East Carolina University found valuable clues through X-rays. "All of her guns were loaded and ready to fire. One even had a wad, some cannon shot, another wad and three bolts in the bore," said Wendy Walsh, a lab manager at ECU. Gold Dust, a ship's bell and a pewter plate also date to when Blackbeard terrorized the Caribbean. But the definitive answer as to whether the wreck is the Queen Anne' Revenge is still missing, and the answer might be lost forever if not recovered soon.

"The treasure is in the history. That's what is important to realize is that there is so much history under the sand out there," Masters said. "It is so frustrating to see it sitting out there and we can't get at it because of a lack of funding." A major expedition to recover and preserve the wreck would cost at least $6 million over 20 years. Archaeologists are scrambling to find it, and state historians have asked the Army Corps of Engineers for money to help fund a salvage operation.

"You have to accept the fact that (pirates are) glamorized, and it's our job to bring a little bit of truth and life to that story to see who these people were and why they were doing what they were doing," said Mark Wilde Ramsing, an underwater archaeologist with the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources and project director for the wreckage recovery effort.

County museums officer Dr Mike Bishop said his budget was empty and unless new funding was found, the service could not afford the many thousands of pounds at which the haul would inevitably be valued by the British Museum.

The coins were originally buried in a primitive clay pot and then scattered over the site by successive years of ploughing. Frank Basford, IW Council finds liaison officer, said 940 pieces made of a silver and copper alloy had been unearthed.

"It is an important, significant find. Iron Age coins themselves are common but it is very unusual to find them in this quantity," he said. "This is certainly the largest hoard of its kind ever found on the IW. It is impossible to say how the coins came to be buried. They could have been some sort of community savings and Iron Age people would sometimes bury their wealth in times of stress or trouble."

IW Metal Detecting Club founder and chairman Dave Clark said the first of the coins was discovered by Shanklin member Albert Snell. More were subsequently uncovered by other members in what became a team effort. A quarter of the coins were found scattered over a large area of agricultural land away from the main hoard, he said. It was recovered over the course of a week by 16 of our members. They were all given an opportunity to dig.

"It was such a wonderful occasion seeing these coins popping up everywhere," said Mr. Clark. He said he did not want to speculate on the value of the find. "We are not in this for the money. Our club motto is 'pleasure not profit'. We just get a thrill from playing our part in helping discover the IW heritage." He said the location of the find was being kept a closely guarded secret to respect the wishes of the landowner, who did not want unauthorised or unscrupulous treasure hunters on his land.

Funk and his partners hope the wreck is from the famed 1715 Spanish Silver Plate Fleet. The fleet of 11 galleons set sail from Havana in 1715 laden with jewels, gold and silver, but ran into a hurricane along Florida's east coast. "Ten of the 11 ships were destroyed," said Funk, an archaeologist who teaches history at Satellite High School, in Satellite Beach. "Seven have more or less been found."

The shipwreck sites include spots near Fort Pierce and Sebastian, and the ships' high-value cargo gave the Treasure Coast its name. For the past decade, Funk and his partners have been surveying, exploring and researching what might be another of the treasure ships, in 43 feet of water off Melbourne Beach.

While exploring the wreck in late August, they found several artifacts that boosted their hopes. "Our artifact collection is pretty interesting," Funk said. "We have enough artifacts, I think, to show what period they belong to." There's the intact, silver-handled pistol and what appears to be a boarding sword, which has a curved blade and was known to be used by fighting mariners. The collection also includes some cannon balls, pewter plates and a stack of silver platters, which Funk said are beautifully embossed. "They look like a big turkey platter," he said. "We're sending (the collection) to a conservation lab for more study."

In the meantime, Funk and his partners will work on renewing the salvaging permits they need from various state agencies, such as the state Division of Historical Resources. Permitted salvagers can end up owning items they find, but 20 percent of the value of found treasure goes to the state.

The dive site worked by Funk's team stretches diagonally for perhaps a mile. The team includes members of Heartland Treasure Quest, from Georgia and Florida; Amelia Research Co., of Amelia Island; and Florida Research and Recovery, a group of investors primarily from Georgia.

A principle of Heartland Treasure Quest is Sebastian resident Rex Stocker, who was a member of the Real Eight Co. The Real Eight Co. worked with the famed Mel Fisher's Treasure Salvors Inc. in the 1960s to recover millions of dollars worth of treasure from the 1715 Fleet shipwrecks.

Taffi Fisher Abt, Fisher's daughter and the director of Mel Fisher's Treasure Museum in Sebastian, said she's interested to hear more about the items found by Funk and his partners. "It's quite possible this wreck is one of the 1715 Fleet," she said. "I have not seen any of these artifacts, and I haven't seen their log sheets, so I don't know for sure."

On a small mould is written the word "Allah" in beautiful Arabic script, on top of a lid sits a delicately chiseled doe. Tiny perfume flasks accompany jars made of baked clay, while slender-necked vases fill the shelves of the hangar along with brightly colored glassware from the Fatimides dynasty that once ruled ancient Egypt.

A team of divers, among them three Australians, two Britons, three French, three Belgians and two Germans, excavated the vessel laden with rare ceramics which sank more than 1,000 years ago some 130 nautical miles from Jakarta. Their finds, including artefacts from China's Five Dynasties period from 907 to 960 AD and ancient Egypt, are already causing a stir among archaeologists who say the cargo sheds new light on how ancient merchant routes were forged.

"It is a completely exceptional cargo," says Heymans, the Belgian chief of the excavation team. "There is very little information about the Five Dynasties era and very few things in the museums. This wreck fills a hole," he tells AFP. Close to 14,000 pearls and a profusion of precious stones were found in the wreck, including some 4,000 rubies, 400 dark red sapphires, and more than 2,200 garnets.

"On the second last day of diving, I spotted some broken ceramics. Under 30 centimeters of vase, I uncovered the handle of a golden sabre," says Daniel Visnikar, the leading French diver. It took more than 24,000 dives to recover all the treasure from the boat which rests 54 metres below the surface. Material recovered from the site has whetted the appetite of overseas experts.

"A 10th century wreck is very rare, there are only a few," says Jean-Paul Desroches, a curator at the Guimet Museum in Paris, after seeing photographs of the early hauls. He says the wreck and its cargo offers clues to how traders using the Silk Road linking China to Europe and the Middle East, used alternative sea routes as China's merchants moved south because of invasions from the north.

The variety of loot pulled from the depths is hard to imagine: dishes adorned with dragons, parakeets and other birds; porcelain with finely-carved edges; teapots decorated with lotus flowers; and celadon plates with their glaze intact. "These porcelains come from a very special kiln, an imperial kiln, perhaps from the province of Hebei in the north of China," suggests Peter Schwarz, a German ceramics specialist.

Heymans insisted the treasure -- the subject of controversy when the divers were chased from their barge in the open-sea by the Indonesian navy last November -- was stored in a comprehensive and transparent manner. "Every piece is indexed and we know which part of the boat it comes from. Every week we sent (the Indonesian authorities) a DVD with digital photographs of all the pieces," he says.

As well being chased by the Indonesian navy, an incident that began a long dispute over the booty, Heymans says another group of treasure hunters also tried to move in on the swag. Cosmix, Heymans' Dubai-based corporation, was the force behind the five-million-euro operation, which was funded by unnamed private investors in Europe.

The divers say the treasures might be bought by a foreign museum or are expected to be shown between 2006 and 2007 in an auction, as the cargo is valued at several million dollars. Indonesia will receive 50 percent of proceeds from the sale of the treasures.

So far, 422,000 artefacts have been recovered from the wreckage 54 metres below the surface in what could be the largest cargo of ceramics ever found. Christie's, which is expected to auction the items in 2006 and 2007, says it's worth millions of dollars.

Most of the goods are fine white or green wares from northern and southern China dating to the early 10th century. But the vessel also contains Egyptian artefacts and Lebanese glassware, and experts say the rarity and variety of the items could shed new light on inter-Asian trade.

Agung, who started the PT Paradigma Putra Sejahtera salvage company four years ago, explored 30 already looted wrecks before receiving word that fisherman had found pieces of ceramics while trawling for snails about 220 km northwest of Jakarta.

"It was unbelievable, amazing," said the 37-year-old Agung, among the first divers to take a look at the wreckage in mid-2003. "There was no coral at all, just a mound of ceramics" 100 metres long, 45 metres wide and 30 metres high.

Thirty per cent of the pieces were in pristine condition, many of them green ceramic dishes from China's Five Dynasties period (907-960 A.D.). Among the most prized possessions are a white vase with a long slender neck and sloping shoulders believed to be from the Liao dynasty (907-1125 AD) and a flask made of a brilliant emerald green translucent glass tentatively attributed to 10th century Egypt. There are also thousands of rubies, bronze coins, silver mirrors, ceremonial tools and shipping equipment.

"Discoveries like this show how important the sea floor is," said Thijs Maarleveld, a founding member of the International Committee on the Underwater Cultural Heritage and a lecturer on maritime archaeology at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Inside are hands-on, museum-style exhibits of the high-tech equipment that shipwreck salvage companies use to meticulously pluck treasures from the sea bottom. One-of-a-kind computer games outline the science behind archaeology, and how artifacts are used to reassemble history. The story is set against the backdrop of real treasures from the deep told in incredibly sharp high-definition video of the recovery of the SS Republic, which sank 140 years ago.

Odyssey Marine Expeditions Inc., which finds and salvages historic treasure-laden ships, sees the experience as a vehicle to turn most of the artifacts, effects and rare coins it exhumes from the ocean bottom into cash.

The company is negotiating deals to open a second of its Odyssey's Shipwreck and Treasure Adventures within a year. Its hometown Tampa Bay area is high on the list of the 10 markets in the running. If the initial $3.7-million development cost in New Orleans provides the return, company officials envision up to 50 of them in major markets around the world.

"This has been part of our plan since the beginning," said Greg Stemm, a director and co-founder of Odyssey. "The attraction answers all the questions people ask us about how we do this work and gives them a taste of what it's like to be on one of our expeditions. We are using it to build a community of shipwreck artifact fans around the Odyssey brand."

In a shopping complex shared by Ripley's Believe It Or Not, Virgin Megastore and Hooters, the museum comes equipped with gift shops front and rear. Patrons can buy effects as pricey as Civil War-period gold coins for $1,100 and up or resin replicas of delicate ceramics they've just seen exhumed from the ocean floor for as little as $12. Of course, there is a full load of themed T-shirts featuring a beaming cartoon logo of Zeus, Odyssey's 8-ton underwater robot that's the workhorse of the company's deep-sea recovery effort.

If it all sounds like theme park tactics, the resemblance is intentional. Odyssey's entertainment wing is steered by a cadre of former Sea World, Busch Entertainment Corp. and Walt Disney World executives. The exhibits are modular, so they can be moved to other locations easily. The computerized videos and flat screen displays can be reprogrammed within days to tell the story of other vessels Odyssey recovers in the future.

"We've packaged the story to educate and energize people of all ages," said George Becker, chief operating officer of Odyssey and a former general manager of Sea Worlds in San Diego and San Antonio. "We designed it for the whole family. This is all about bringing history to life. New Orleans is all about history."

As a Confederate and Union ship, the Republic's home port was New Orleans. It went down in a hurricane off the coast of Georgia, loaded down with cash and other goods intended to resupply the Louisiana city at the beginning of post-Civil War Reconstruction. The location in the French Quarter provides the historical atmosphere while the city, which drew about 10-million tourists in 2004, provides the traffic.

The exhibit got a warm welcome from city tourist industry leaders who have begun marketing New Orleans as a family destination rather than one known mostly for its adult diversions and overindulgences. In recent years, the city has dramatically bolstered its collection of art and children's museums and sees the success of the 5-year-old D-Day Museum as a catalyst for more.

The common perception of shipwreck salvagers is one of entrepreneurs living out an adventure that's somewhere between Jacques Cousteau, Steve Zissou and grave robbers. It's an image Odyssey hopes to redefine with a focused marketing push that explains the company's role in researching archaeology, charting history and unraveling the mysteries of the sea. It also is taking some of the sting out of the idea of selling artifacts to pay for the high-tech research tools that make the work possible, but offends many purists in the academic world.

The attraction is hardly a first. Key West treasure hunter Mel Fischer for years has sold shipwreck artifacts from a museum. But he found the format doesn't travel well after closing a venture in Orlando. In Charleston, S.C., a new museum displays the wreck of a recovered Confederate submarine. Attractions marketers, however, have been reinvigorated by the popularity of several exhibitions from the wreckage of the Titanic.

Odyssey's marketing effort goes far beyond a state-of-the-art Shipwreck Adventure. Odyssey self-published a book about the Republic and the recovery that debuts Sept. 6. That follows a National Geographic spread last fall, an MSNBC/National Geographic documentary and a guest tour of the network talk show circuit.

Odyssey, which sold about $25-million in artifacts in 2004 mostly through wholesalers, has recovered about a quarter of the artifacts from the Republic that one hired expert estimates could fetch $75-million if sold at retail prices. In addition to being a revenue generator, the exhibition is supposed to be part of Odyssey's answer to generating more sales.

The company recently sold Republic coins on the NBC Shop at Home channel and is filming infomercials. Each Shipwreck Adventure patron is offered a free DVD of the retrieval work (the company has 3,500 hours of raw high-definition film). If they are interested in direct sales offers online, in the mail or from the company, a sales force of two dozen people at its call center in Tampa will spring into action.

The finder, Keith Stuart, 62, was taking part in the club event in a field on the Isle of Wight and is now waiting to be told the whistle's value after having it declared treasure by a coroner's court.

Archaeologists have dated it to the 16th Century and have told Mr. Stuart that it will fetch many thousands of pounds. The whistle, 2½" long, is engraved with roses and pomegranates, the latter being the emblem of Catherine of Aragon, Henry is believed to have hunted on the Isle of Wight and the whistle may have been dropped during a visit.

Mr. Stuart, a former milkman, said the whistle was only a few inches below the soil at Shalfleet. He thought it resembled a toy gun or cannon and may even have been from a Christmas cracker, and he thought it of no significance. However, he later showed it to Frank Bashford, the coroner's officer, who identified the metal as silver and indicated that it was a huntsman's whistle of some antiquity.

When Mr. Stuart researched the emblem the link with Henry VIII was suggested. Records indicate that the king visited the island in 1540, at which time he was married to Anne of Cleves. However, it is unlikely that anyone else would have dared use a whistle bearing the former queen's insignia.

Once the whistle has been valued, museums will be offered the chance to buy it at a price set by experts. If there is no buyer, it will be returned to Mr. Stuart who may offer it for sale privately. He must share the proceeds with the owner of the field where it was found.

The golden ornaments, estimated to be between 4,100 and 4,200 years old, have been unearthed gradually during the past year from an ancient tomb near the central village of Dabene, about 75 miles east of the capital, Sofia, said Vasil Nikolov, an academic consultant on the excavations.

"This treasure is a bit older than Schliemann's finds in Troy, and contains much more golden ornaments," Nikolov said. Heinrich Schliemann, an amateur German archaeologist, discovered the site of ancient Troy in 1868 and directed ambitious excavations that proved he was right.

The treasure consists of miniature golden rings, some so finely crafted that the point where the ring is welded is invisible with an ordinary microscope. "We don't know who these people were, but we call them proto-Thracians," Nikolov said.

They likely were ancestors of the Thracians, who lived in what is now Bulgaria and parts of modern Greece, Romania, Macedonia and Turkey until the 8th century A.D., when they were assimilated by invading Slavs. "The buried man was cremated, and then an earth mound was piled over his ashes and his riches, suggesting that he was part of these people's social elite," Nikolov said.

Bozhidar Dimitrov, director of the National History Museum of Bulgaria, said the site consisted of a settlement and three mounds, and excavations would continue. "This is the oldest golden treasure ever found in Bulgaria after the Varna necropolis," Dimitrov said.

The golden artifacts from a vast burial complex discovered in the 1970s near the Black Sea port of Varna date back to the end of the fifth millennium B.C. and are internationally renowned as the world's oldest golden treasure.

Greg Brooks and John Hardy of the Sub Sea Research states "It was one of the richest ships ever lost," they estimate the value of the Deliverance’s trove could be between $2 billion and $3 billion. The Deliverance departed Havana on Halloween with an armed escort of seven or eight smaller, schooner-like vessels 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 ships reportedly were able to survive the storm and sailed across the outer reefs to eventually anchor on the northwest side of the Marquesas Keys to ride out the storm until the following morning, according to a research report prepared by Brooks and Sub Sea researcher Edward Michaud.

An incomplete manifest of the Deliverance cargo that was on board at the time of sinking 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 belongings of passengers.

Before he hunted sunken treasure, Brooks built swimming pools for a living. Over 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 an 18-year-old daughter, has plans to create a shipwreck museum and aquarium in Portland.

Sub Sea Research’s primary recovery vessel is the 105-foot M/V Diamond, a converted U.S. Navy torpedo retriever that’s currently docked on Stock Island near Key West.

The day was great for beach hunting, windless with a calm ocean. He always liked to get an early start in the morning, and that day he had a feeling it was "his" day. On recent visits to this beach he had begun to recover a few silver coins and silver plate parts, mixed in with an assortment of iron spikes. His wife Jennifer had said that morning, "Put your metal detector in the car, and I’ll sit on the beach with the kids while you detect." It was a family decision that had a good omen. Gary was using a Minelab "Excalibur" metal detector and got his "hit" in a pile of shells several yards up from the water’s edge. It was a different kind of hit, louder and with a different tone. He dug down about 18 inches, and when he first saw the artifact he believed it to be a champagne bottle top twist. As he picked it up and turned it over, his knees became weak. The gold was as bright and shiny as the day it was made, and the emeralds were unbelievably deep green. He was thunderstruck. He walked down to the water’s edge, then back up to the dune line. He was seized by the urgency to show the ring to his wife, and running in sand took his breath away.

And so it went, a family outing that produced a treasure fit for a king. The Drayton family will be spending many more trips to the beach, and if luck will have it there will be more jumping up and down as treasure is recovered.

The Lincs coroner has now declared the find treasure trove. The British Museum is expected to keep pieces and pay Mr. Baker up to £100,000 in compensation. The six pieces will be valued by the British Museum, which is expected to decide to keep them and pay compensation to Mr. Baker.

Unemployed, Mr. Baker, 36, who has been metal-detecting since he was aged 10, will split the proceeds with Kevin Walker, the owner of the land. Mr. Baker, of Queen Mary Road, Ermine West, Lincoln, who made the find in October 2002, first took the pieces to Scunthorpe Museum. They were passed on to the British Museum, which identified them and indicated it would be interested in purchasing them after a treasure trove inquest.

Angela Care-Evans, a curator at the British Museum, described some aspects of the find as "unique" in the context of Anglo-Saxon discoveries. The parts of the hilt are up to 86% gold and decorated with garnet gemstones, indicating the sword was made for someone of high status. Experts think it may have belonged to a warrior from the Kingdom of Lindsey.

The British Museum has yet to put a final valuation on the find, but experts have suggested it could be worth anything up to six figures. The exact location of the find is being kept secret to protect the site, which was recently featured on the BBC programme Hidden Treasures.

The Spanish region's government, despite prior central government approval of the project, last month sent its Guardia Civil patrols to board Odyssey's research vessel and now demands a say-so in one of the most anticipated – and controversial – deep-water excavations ever planned.

Odyssey, eager to stay on good terms with anyone claiming maritime interests in the shipwreck-rich Mediterranean, announced last week that it would concentrate on five other "high-value targets" until things are ironed out with Andalusia's department of culture. "We'd all like to see the Sussex project move ahead, but we have other projects that could prove as valuable," says Odyssey co-founder Greg Stemm. He says the company plans to return to the Sussex later in the year.

The ease with which the firm has shifted operations to other sites is a testimonial to how many potentially lucrative shipwrecks litter the floor of the Mediterranean, and how successful the firm's advanced deep-water search technology has been in locating them. The sudden snag in the Sussex project, after years of preparation, also provides a glimpse of the political and emotional gulf that divides those who seek treasure in the deep ocean floor and those who see it as a repository of maritime history.

Odyssey, which last year recovered 51,000 gold and silver coins and thousands of other artifacts from the Civil War-era wreck of the SS Republic off the Georgia coast, claims that it serves both goals: raising saleable artifacts that it says have little value to archaeology and items of unique cultural importance for preservation and exhibit. The total value of the Republic operation has yet to be determined, but with two ships in its fleet and a third under lease, Odyssey has set out to become the leading for-profit shipwreck exploration company in the world.

Archaeologists fear such ambitions are no idle boast. Although there are an estimated 3 million undiscovered shipwrecks worldwide, archaeologists say advanced deep-water technology such as Odyssey's side-scan sonar and deep-diving robots will expose these cultural "time capsules" to commercial exploitation. "The problem is that salvage operations are driven by time and money, not by what can be learned from the wreck" says Robert Neyland, the chief archaeologist for the U.S. Navy, who headed recovery of the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley. "Commercial salvage and archaeology are not compatible."

Although the "finders keepers" principle applies to most shipwrecks in international waters, archaeologists have taken some consolation in the fact that the rights to "sovereign" vessels like the Sussex are retained by the country under whose flag they sailed, wherever they sank. But to the horror of British archaeologists, Odyssey has struck a first-of-a-kind deal with the British defense ministry that provides a sliding scale for the division of treasure, the conservation of artifacts, and the sale of media rights.

Because the Sussex, the flagship of a 13-ship fleet, sank while it was carrying a vast sum of money and six tons of gold intended to assure the loyalty of the Duke of Savoy to England in the war with France, both parties to the agreement could wind up with billions. George Lambrick, director of the Council for British Archaeology, calls the deal "a blatant piece of heritage asset stripping" that will "legitimize commercial treasure hunting for financial rewards on a grand scale."

The British government would get 60 percent of any take over $500 million. "This deal would not have been struck if millions – perhaps billions – of dollars were not at stake," Limbrick says. "With its eye firmly on booty not culture, it looks as if the government is reneging on the basic principles of archaeological management that it has championed elsewhere," he says.

At least on the surface, the deal is at odds with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage, a 2001 international agreement that has yet to be ratified. It states that "underwater cultural heritage shall not be commercially exploited." Lambrick says he's concerned that the Sussex agreement will set "a dangerous precedent for the exploitation of wrecks in other waters" from 2,000-year-old Roman galleys in the Mediterranean to treasure-laden Spanish galleons in the Gulf of Mexico.

When it comes to sunken treasure, the glimmer of gold — like the will of a rich uncle — has a way of bringing potential heirs out of the woodwork. Odyssey, for instance, last year paid $1.6 million to Atlantic Mutual Insurance Co. , which had insured a portion of the SS Republic's cargo a century and a half ago – to resolve its claim to the wreck.

With a formal agreement from Great Britain in hand and the approval of the project by the Spanish government, the only remaining obstacles to the Sussex project appeared to be technical ones. Then the mouse roared. Andalusian authorities contend that it's possible a British flagship sailing through the straits of Gibraltar on its way to France in 1694 just might have had something that belonged to Spain on board.

Or perhaps because of the wreck's proximity to Spain, it's not the Sussex at all, but a Spanish vessel. And even though the wreck lies outside territorial waters in what Spain has designated "an adjacent area," Andalusia insists that it, too, must approve the project – perhaps in return for a small share of the take.

But the trail stopped when the depth of the water and the sand outpaced the mechanics of sand dispersement, leaving the two business partners in Jupiter Wreck, Dominic Addario and Peter Leo, to wonder where the main hull of this ship — possibly the San Miguel de Archangel — and its potential mother lode of treasure might be.

This month, Addario and his wife Yvonne, who own Jupiter Coins, hope they find out. If the weather holds, during the third week of May, he and his team will take his $2 million, 62-foot double-hulled catamaran – the Motor Research Vessel Enterprise – a few hundred yards from the Jupiter Inlet and pump more than 40 feet of sand out of the area to try and reach the hull of the San Miguel.

"We've dug more than 20,000 holes and mapped the shipwreck," said Dominic Addario. "We think the ship hit a sand bar off Jupiter Island, and the upper deck flipped over at her cannon ports, which is why we've found several cannons and the lighter items, such as the coins. The rest of the ship sank. That's the part of the ship we're going after. "If we find this wreck," he added, "it could have as much impact on this area as Mel Fisher's discovery of the Atocha off the Florida Keys."

The lure of a possible fortune in silver and gold is spurred on by several finds already, particularly a 77-pound silver ingot that bears the Roman numerals DCCXX, or number 820 indicating it is the 820th bar cast in 1652 in Lima, Peru. "We're hoping to find the other 819 ingots in the hull," said Addario, who said the treasure in the sunken ship could be worth several million dollars.

Addario and Leo didn't get to keep this original ingot. In a decision by a federal judge in 1990, Jupiter Wreck has the right to salvage the items, but the State of Florida gets the unique pieces, and the first of multiples. Jupiter Wreck gets the rest.

"The state has the finest selection of every type of coin we found and the one-of-a-kind artifacts," said Leo, who originally found the cannons and anchor in 1987 and joined with Addario to bring up the treasure, but is no longer actively involved in the search. "Jupiter Wreck has the title to the shipwreck." Two of the original cannons and an anchor were donated, and are now part of Lighthouse Park.

One of the things they have not salvaged is the ship's bell or any items that definitively identify the ship as the San Miguel. Mike Daniel is the director of the Burt Reynolds & Friends Museum who also heads a major archeological expedition in North Carolina to excavate Blackbeard's ship. He said it's possible the ship near the Jupiter Inlet isn't the San Miguel, but a salvage ship sent from the Bahamas where it was salvaging the Nuestra Senora de la Maravilla.

"They've only found a piece of the ship," said Daniels, "and nothing that specifically points to the San Miguel except records that indicate it could be that ship that foundered at Jupiter Inlet. The only dating they have right now is from the coins they've found that are from the mid-1650s."

But the search for the San Miguel is only part of the "treasure" that Addario may find. He says his ship is capable of moving hundreds of cubic yards of sand from the area under the water, and by using a barge with a hundred feet of pipe, he will be able to take this sand and renourish the beaches south of the inlet, using the natural wave action.

"If we can do this successfully," Addario said, "then the sand becomes the treasure, since the beaches are in dire need of sand, and we can create a 'borrow pit' of sand that we can disperse periodically. Our boat becomes a portable way to move sand to the beaches that need it."

Addario estimates that the cost of the search will be about $50,000 a month. Originally, he had planned the expedition for September, but the hurricanes changed that schedule, and also ran his boat aground near the Indiantown Road Bridge and the Riverwalk seawall. With the help of the town, he was to able extricate the boat and move it north along the Intracoastal to where he could continue to outfit the interior and fine tune the equipment.

"I joke that I've gone broke trying to find treasure," he said. "I want to end the equation and answer the question of where is the rest of this ship. Then I can move on."

The vessel in question was HMS Sussex, the 80-gun pride of the Royal Navy which had set sail from Portsmouth on 27 December 1693, for the Mediterranean with a huge political bribe on board. Locked in a series of iron-clad chests stowed in the cavernous hold was £1m in gold coins, worth at least £600m in today's terms, destined for the ruler of Savoy in north-western Italy.

Its purpose was to persuade the duke to attack the French monarch on his poorly defended southern border at the height of the Nine Years War, which was being pursued by an English-led coalition desperate to end Louis's expansionist ambitions. But in the early hours of 19 February 1694, the warship, completed only eight months earlier, foundered during a fierce storm off Gibraltar and sank in 3,000ft of water - taking its precious cargo to the ocean floor.

The ship's captain, Admiral Sir Francis Wheeler, whose body was washed up on Gibraltar, reputedly in his nightshirt, had been given secret orders by King William III detailing how the bribe was to be paid.

The loss of the bullion persuaded the English monarch to sue for peace and imperilled the nation's finances to such an extent that the Bank of England was founded to prevent a repeat of the debacle. Now, as the 311th anniversary of the sinking approaches, King William's bribe is once more provoking political rancour and division over its on-board treasure and the fate of its lost souls.

The case of HMS Sussex has far-reaching implications for every one of the estimated three million wrecks in the world's oceans and the opposing forces of poorly funded marine archaeologists and rich commercial salvagers. It is also a debate about a treasure hunt which, if it succeeds, will net the Treasury anything up to £360m.

When news of Sussex's loss reached the Italian port of Livorno in 1694, the unnamed French spy hurried his message to his paymasters in Versailles. After the initial jubilation, the parchment was filed and forgotten for the next three centuries. Then in 1994 it was rediscovered by an Italian researcher, sparking one of the most fevered treasure hunts in history.

Within the next six months, a state-of-the-art salvage vessel owned by a private American corporation, Odyssey Marine Exploration, will arrive at the site off Gibraltar. Armed with the most advanced robotic submarine on the planet, the salvagers will begin the process of examining the 17th-century wreck that they believe is HMS Sussex and attempting to bring its golden piastres and any other artefacts to the surface after three centuries on the seabed. It will be the deepest salvage operation ever undertaken for a ship of that age.

The project, which will cost an estimated £24m, has been made possible by a ground-breaking agreement with the Ministry of Defence in London to share the proceeds. But while the scheme could prove massively lucrative - up to £1bn according to some estimates - it is causing concern among British archaeologists. They fear it could signal the start of the looting the world's underwater heritage. While plans for the dive are being finalised, The Independent has learnt that a coalition of eminent academics has challenged the obscure MoD agency co-ordinating the salvage, claiming that the project amounts to sub-aquatic asset stripping.

In a letter sent by the Council for British Archaeology (CBA) to the Disposal Services Agency, concern is expressed that insufficient guidelines have been laid down for such areas as recording the items found, the funding of future conservation work and preserving the dignity of the wreck as a grave. Mike Heyworth, director of the CBA, said: "To be honest, we would prefer that this wreck had never been found. But now it has, it is our role to try to ensure the archaeological integrity of the site is preserved. This must be an archaeological operation, rather than some sort of smash and grab with a robotic bucket on the sea floor. For example, we don't know what they plan to do if and when human remains are found or how exactly everything will be catalogued."

From such artefacts, archaeologists hope to piece together a picture of life on board HMS Sussex, a ship from a period where virtually no first-hand documentary evidence survives on the life of an ordinary seaman. As Admiral Wheeler struggled to steady his vessel in the Mediterranean storm, he would have been helped by a crew of sailors who, far from the image of press-ganged amateurs, would have been seasoned professionals. Brian Lavery, curator of the National Maritime Museum, said: "Sailors in this era of the navy were not military men - there was no uniform for seamen or their officers. Instead, they prided themselves on their professionalism and their fearlessness. You only survived on board by gaining the respect of your peers."

In the letter, sent with the support of five archaeological bodies, including the UK arm of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, the CBA calls for the "project plan" - the hitherto undisclosed blueprint for the dive - to be made public before work starts on site.

The letter expresses particular concern that commercial pressures to realise a profit by selling the bullion will leave insufficient time to study all objects from the warship, the once proud flagship of a 200-strong fleet, before they are dispersed. It adds: "We would argue that all artefacts, including coins, should be treated in the same way and any disposal would not be appropriate until the full assemblage has been studied." Both Odyssey and the MoD reject the archaeologists' concerns and insisted this week that the Sussex salvage would be carried out to the "highest archaeological standards," pointing out that two independent monitors would be present and a respected firm of British marine archaeologists was overseeing the operation.

A MoD spokesman said: "We are certainly aware that there have been concerns and we are working very closely with Odyssey to resolve them. The priority is to minimise disturbance to what is considered as a very valuable heritage site."

Sceptics point out, however, that were it not for the iron crates holding the gold in an undisclosed part of the 1,200-ton vessel, neither Odyssey nor the Government would have shown any interest in the pile of muddy wreckage at the bottom of the Mediterranean. Indeed, the potential rewards for both parties are massive. The value by weight of the nine tons of coins from the reign of William III is relatively small at about £80m. The true value of any treasure haul is in its attraction to collectors, increasing the so-called melt value by up to thirtyfold.

A leading London antiquarian dealer said: "There is an extra cachet to an object that has been lost to humanity in the depths of the sea. Just look at the stuff from the Titanic. This applies particularly to gold coinage. It is redolent of a swashbuckling age where monarchs bought favours and armies to pique their rivals. You are buying into the glamour and myth of that age."

Under the deal between the MoD and Odyssey, the British Government will receive an increasing share of the proceeds of the exploration according to the value of what is found - 20 per cent of the first $45m (£25m), half of what is found between $45m and £500m (£278m) and 60 per cent of anything above $500m.

Odyssey, based in Tampa, Florida, announced last month that it made $9.6m (£5.3m) from the sale of bullion recovered from the SS Republic - an American vessel carrying gold during the civil war - in just six months and expects to make up to $15m by the end of the year.

But while archaeologists recognise Odyssey and the MoD are making significant efforts meet their concerns, there is anxiety that the Sussex dive could open the door to more unscrupulous treasure-seekers. There are some 250,000 wrecks in British waters and, according to the United Nations, up to three million worldwide. These include eight ships lost during the explorations of Christopher Columbus, and the San Jose - a Spanish galleon which sank off Colombia in 1708 and is perhaps the most valuable wreck of all, with two tons of platinum in its hold.

The CBA points out that the exploration of a wreck to produce artefacts for sale contradicts international attempts to bring in a law which forbids the trade in such antiquities. Despite lauding the aims of the Unesco convention on underwater heritage, the British Government has so far failed to ratify the conservation agreement laid out six years ago.

Critics say that is perhaps unsurprising when rule 2 of the treaty is considered: "The commercial exploitation of underwater cultural heritage for trade ... or its irretrievable dispersal is fundamentally incompatible with the protection and proper management of underwater cultural heritage. Underwater cultural heritage shall not be traded, sold, bought or bartered as commercial goods."

Archaeologists believe that with the wider use of the ultra-sophisticated sonar used by Odyssey to discover the potential site of HMS Sussex, time is running out for governments to conclude an agreement to protect rather than exploit their underwater heritage.

Dr Heyworth of the CBA said: "If someone came along and asked to dig up a historic site on land in Britain for profit, the authorities would be horrified. So why is it any different under the sea? Better technology is improving detection of sites that until now have been protected by their inaccessibility. Now these sites are rapidly becoming accessible and something needs to be done before their treasures are grabbed by looters."

Pinpointing a resting place of sunken bullion is still far from an exact science, however. Original documents relating to the sinking of the Merchant Royal, a trading vessel carrying £65m in bullion, state that witnesses on board an accompanying vessel calculated the sinking took place "ten leagues from Land's End." The reality is that the witnesses were too far out to sea to have seen the Cornish coast, and the Merchant Royal could be anywhere within an area of 600 square miles.

According to one wreck expert, there is no guarantee that the 17th-century ship lying off Gibraltar is HMS Sussex. He said: "There is a potentially delicious irony here. Matching a specific site with old documents is a real hunt for a needle in a haystack. After all this money and effort, the closest Odyssey and the MoD might come to a pile of gold is some rusty cannon balls and a bit of 17th-century anchor chain."

A vintage $20 gold piece is among items plucked from the 1865 wreck of the SS Republic off the Georgia coast. Even old bottles are valued artifacts. Coin World has reported that a collection of two dozen Coronet "double eagle" $20 gold pieces from the wreck fetched "in excess of $2.5 million" from a West Coast coin broker.

Not all the gold and silver coins salvaged from the steamer are expected to command such lofty prices. But in an effort to capitalize on public interest spurred by a recent National Geographic Society television special on the SS Republic, Odyssey has launched an online marketing effort to sell some of the wreck's more mundane items:

Empty Lea & Perrin's Worcestershire sauce bottles (complete with glass and cork stopper) for $600 apiece.

Flasks that once held Henry T. Hembold's Buchu Extract (used to treat "Loss of Power, Fatuity, and Epileptic Fits, Insanity and Consumption") for $900 each.

Or, for the economy-minded, there's an elegantly framed lump of coal from the ship's well-stocked coal bins for a mere $99.

At least for the coal, there's probably no need to hurry. "There's a lot of coal down there," says Odyssey spokeswoman Laura Barton. "The Republic was known for using a lot of coal, and it was only halfway through its run when it sank, so there's as much as you want." The market in coal from famous shipwrecks is hard to gauge. Lumps of coal from the HMS Titanic, which sank in 1912, have sold for as little as $25, but Barton says the Republic's coal is after all, older — and more attractively packaged in a polished wood shadow box.

Novelty of another kind, however, has already resulted in some lofty prices for some of the Civil War-era coins. Officials of Monaco Financial LLC of Newport Beach, Calif. — acting on behalf of undisclosed private collectors — snapped up a handful of the rarest $20 gold pieces, minted between 1849 and 1865.

Company Vice President Adam Crum says the coins are "among the finest specimens known." He says the value to coin collectors is due to the their excellent, mint-like condition and the fact that they come with a "pedigree" from a known shipwreck.

In addition to 51,000 gold and silver coins, Odyssey officials say they have retrieved nearly 13,000 artifacts from the ship's watery grave, which lies in 1,700 feet of water more than 100 miles off the Georgia coast. So far, the company has reported the sale of $10 million worth of coins, but it also has more than 200 different kinds of bottles and other artifacts.

The company says it will retain some of the more distinctive items from the Republic — including the ship's bell — for use in traveling and permanent exhibits, which it plans to announce in 2005.

The bulk of the Republic's cargo, however, still lies somewhere on the ocean bottom. The ship was reportedly carrying $400,000 in gold and silver coins from New York to New Orleans to aid in postwar reconstruction. "Based on our research, we believe we've only recovered about 25 percent of what's down there," says Odyssey co-founder Greg Stemm. "Since we have not found the purser's safe, or any safe for that matter, it leads us to theorize that it may have fallen off when the main deck cabins were detached from the main deck," he says.

Sometime early this the year, the company's research and recovery vessel, the Odyssey Explorer, now being re-outfitted in Tampa, will return to the wreck site in an effort to locate the rest of the cargo. Stemm says if the top deck of the steamer broke away as it was sinking and left a trail of debris across the ocean floor, the trail should lead to the rest of the cargo "like a trail of bread crumbs."

The research ship may not be on station off the Georgia coast for long, however. It is scheduled to be moved soon to the western Mediterranean, where the firm has its eyes fixed on an even bigger prize. Odyssey and the British government have signed an agreement that permits the company to salvage what is believed to be the HMS Sussex, a large 80-gun English warship that sank in a storm near Gibraltar in 1694.

The Sussex was carrying a large quantity of gold and silver to the Duke of Savoy, an ally of Britain against France in the War of the Grand Alliance. The payment reportedly included millions in cash and six tons of gold — a cargo that Odyssey claims could range in value from "several hundred million to a billion dollars or more."

Spink auction house had expected the 0.15-ounce gold coin to fetch between $214,000 and $267,000.

American collector Allan Davisson purchased the coin, which was found by an amateur searcher using a metal detector near the River Ivel in Bedfordshire, north of London, in 2001.

The coin weighs just 4.33 grams and was discovered on a public footpath beside the River Ivel in Bedfordshire, England. It is the first new Anglo-Saxon gold penny to come to light in nearly a century and the only known gold coin with the name of Coenwulf -- a king who ruled over the central English region of Mercia.

Experts at Spinks had been fascinated by its reference to the "wic" of London, an Anglo-Saxon settlement outside the city walls.

The previous auction record for a British coin was a gold piece bearing an image of George III's crown, which sold for $303,000 in 1999, Spink said.

But it could just as easily have buried the loot even deeper. Either way, treasure hunters both professional and amateur are keen to see what storm-tossed riches await along a stretch appropriately dubbed the Treasure Coast.

"We're anxious," said Taffi Fisher-Abt, daughter of renowned treasure hunter Mel Fisher and overseer of 25 professional salvagers. "I think there will be a few that just won't be able to be held back."

The object of their decades-long search is booty lost after a 1715 hurricane destroyed a Spanish fleet just offshore between Fort Pierce and Sebastian. All but one of the fleet's 11 vessels sank, depositing New World riches over miles of beaches and sea bottom.

"There is quite a bit of jewelry that was going back to the crown in Spain that still needs to be recovered," said Pat Clyne, spokesman for the Fisher organization. "Something like this always raises a flag and treasure hunters say, `Hey, now's the time. Let's go.'"

Through battering waves, powerful winds and dune-leveling storm surges, hurricanes change the topography of beach and sea floor. That can be good or bad for the treasure hunter. "It could have uncovered a huge pile of treasure, or it could have added 20 feet of sand on top of it," Fisher-Abt said from the treasure museum she operates in Sebastian.

"You can't tell until you get out there," said part-time treasure hunter Kim Glaner of Orlando. But it may not be until spring that the salvagers actually get to sea. The storms have churned the waters, rainfall runoff has reduced visibility and many of the hunters suffered damage to their boats or the marinas that serve them.

"All the treasure divers I've spoken to have pretty much hung it up for the season," Glaner said. But while ocean-borne treasure seekers are high and dry for now, metal-detector-wielding beachcombers may experience a real windfall. When hurricanes carve away several feet of beach, riches can be found -- coin by precious coin.

"They're picking gold and silver coins up right now," said Bob "Frogfoot" Weller, 79, a mostly retired treasure hunter and author of eight books on the subject. The Lake Worth man tells how after a nor'easter roared through on Thanksgiving 1984, beachcombers harvested approximately 3,000 gold coins from treasure ships left exposed on a shore north of Vero Beach.

"It was probably the most famous beach treasure hunt of all time," said Weller, who gained his nickname as a frogman during the Korean War, when he received a letter addressed to "Frogfoot."

Objects taken from a beach are free and clear for the finder. But to hunt for sunken treasure offshore, a salvager must have a contract with the state for exploration and, should a site be discovered, a second contract to salvage. If treasure is found, 20 percent goes to the state, which displays those pieces it wants at facilities across Florida.

James Levy, a historian with the state Bureau of Archaeological Research, said besides coins, beachcombers have retrieved such artifacts as a gold snuffbox, gold whistle and silver sword hilt. Those finds can pay off; a gold coin can go for $9,000, said Weller, who over four decades has brought to the surface about 2,000 silver coins, an 11-foot golden chain and a six-foot golden rosary -- not to mention jewelry.

While it will most likely be next year before treasure hunters see whether Frances and Jeanne have uncovered similar booty, "they're always optimistic, they're perennially optimistic," Levy said. "That's what keeps them going."

Walterfang's Batu Hitam wreck, with a US$40 million price tag, was part of an 8th-century porcelain cargo that China's Tang Dynasty traders had shipped aboard an Arab dhow for export to what is now Malaysia, India and that part of Arabia now comprising the United Arab Emirates.

The seven-year-old find, which is still making news, was the first indicator, experts said, of China being a maritime trading nation 200 years before European colonial powers emerged. Walterfang's historically significant finding serves as a rare success among a struggling breed of maritime exploration companies, shipwreck salvors and treasure hunters in Asia.

"The business is tending to get less viable," Dr Michael Flecker, managing director of the Singapore-based Maritime Explorations, told Asia Times Online. "There is more competition, often from illegal looting."

Maritime Explorations, working in Southeast Asia and the South China Sea, struck its most recent discovery off Vietnam, surveying two 15th-century Thai shipwrecks off Phu Quoc Island. Both, according to Maritime Explorations, were heavily looted of their Thai Sukhothai and Sawankhalok ceramics cargo.

Flecker, who holds a doctorate from the National University of Singapore on the excavation of a 10th-century shipwreck off Indonesia, said historical cargoes in Asia usually consist of ceramics, an indicator of the demand for Asian ceramics driving medieval trade routes to the West.

Searching for sunken treasures involve other problems, such as governments demanding tall up-front license fees and high percentages of findings. Some agreements, though, have been successful. Maritime Explorations, for instance, excavated the Binh Thuan shipwreck off the coast of southern Vietnam working with the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture. The unearthed artifacts were sold at Christie's in Melbourne for $1.39 million this March.

On August 14, the Terengganu state government in Malaysia offered to help any exploration effort to retrieve ancient sunken treasures, a move earning applause from many professionals. "The policy of the Malaysian government is a very good one - pragmatic and archeologically responsible," said Flecker. "Malaysia insists on far more archeological work than many other government in the region."

More than 3 million shipwrecks rest beneath the world's waters, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). But not everyone is impressed with that figure. A maritime explorer estimated that annually, about six shipwrecks are found in deep waters. Hard to determine too is the financial health of maritime companies, with those that Asia Times Online contacted coy about revealing their annual turnover.

Flecker said the costs of salvaging shipwrecks are depth- and weather-dependent. He estimates that these costs vary from a few thousand dollars a day up to $25,000, "bearing in mind that the higher day rates often result in much shorter project times." Added bills come with the follow-up costs of transport, conservation, warehousing, cataloguing, analyzing, research and marketing. "They can sometimes cost as much as the offshore work," Flecker said.

Greg Stemm, co-founder and director of the Florida-based Odyssey Marine Exploration, estimates the money spent in two days of excavating a 500-meter-deep shipwreck can pay a maritime archeologist for a year. Stemm, credited to have discovered hundreds of shipwrecks, dislikes the word "treasure" and prefers "intrinsically valuable trade goods." In the summer of 2003, he located and recovered gold worth $140 million from the SS Republic, an American Civil War steamer lost in 1865.

Such finds are few and far between, as when Singapore-based Hallstrom Holdings salvaged the 17th-century Vung Tau cargo of Chinese porcelain that was auctioned in 1992 at Christie's in Amsterdam for $7.3 million. Many valuable wrecks are still waiting to be salvaged in Asia, including the Manila Galleons - the approximately 40 16th-century Spanish trading ships lost when heading back to Mexico from the Philippines with some of the richest cargoes ever.

In trying to raise funds to salvage them, investor-seeking companies flaunt high-technology remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), robotics, cameras and specialized computer hardware and software. "If a company has a good track record and is known to be archeologically responsible, it's not too difficult to find investors," said Flecker. "However, unscrupulous salvors have frightened many potential investors away."

They frighten some maritime archeologists too, a breed that salvaging companies now enlist to reassure investors and governments. The Professional Shipwreck Explorers Association, for instance, has an 11-point code of ethics that includes asking members to have a qualified project archeologist on important explorations. Denise Lakey, an American scholar specializing in medieval Spanish maritime commerce, told Asia Times Online that salvors and treasure hunters have occasionally approached her. "My experience with them was, without exception, that they had big plans and promised a lot of things that never came through," she said.

Lakey said she would not have worked with any of them because, "as a professional archeologist, I see salvage and treasure hunting as extremely harmful to the archeological record." But not all maritime explorers deserve that view, as Forbes magazine, in a report, mentioned how Seabed Exploration, Tilman Walterfang's company, paid "meticulous attention to historical, archeological and conservation procedures throughout its operations." The Intan find, an 11th-century shipwreck with Song Dynasty artifacts, was said to have had "not a single object ruined or a site irresponsibly excavated."

Besides, maritime archeologists might have no other choice apart from forgetting shipwrecks. As Stemm wrote in "Key to Davy Jones's Locker," a January 1996 article, "Deep ocean work is very expensive, and there are no financial shortcuts. You can't use volunteers to operate delicate multimillion-dollar deep-ocean equipment." He said the only way archeologists will have access to the sunken knowledge is by working with the ventures that fund these projects.

Maritime explorers themselves have a tough battle staying afloat. "Far more is spent on survey and salvage than is ever earned, when viewed overall," said Flecker. His primary motivation in the business, he explained, lies in the excitement of discovering a new wreck, finding new and unexpected artifacts - the long-lost messages from the past that the ocean whispers. "Running successful projects with large numbers of local divers and crew is also immensely satisfying."

The only problem, Flecker said, is that "in a good year I may spend only two or three months diving and the rest of the time chasing paper." The oceans can drown mighty ships, it seems, but not red tape.

Heimdal knows of one of those ships, the Clarius. It sank in 1594 in the early era of galleons, the ships that carried the riches conquistadors took from the Incas they conquered and the mines those people left along 1,000 miles of South America's west coast.

Anyone who's mowed a lawn has followed the pattern Heimdal and his team of hunters will use to seek the Clarius, and, according to a document from that vessel's time, "many other ships of great value." "At first it will be day-in, day-out drudgery," a slow process back and forth on a 32-foot boat over about 100 square miles of seabed, Heimdal said. That will take about two months.

Along the way, Heimdal said, some of the six partners in his company, RSOperations LLC. (RSOPS) and the local laborers they hire will make use of computerized mapping systems and three other tools. Side-scan sonar will "take a nice picture" of everything sticking out from the murky bottom, Heimdal said. That will start the process of identifying possible wrecks. A mangetometer will detect iron and steel, even that buried well into the sand, and give the searchers a good idea of what's old and relatively new beneath the waves. A water blower, powered by the wash from the boat's propellers, then will push away the sands while sending clearer surface water down to aid the scuba divers.

While the blower is a standard tool in underwater salvage, the rest is "highly specialized equipment" that the Ecuadorian navy doesn't have but which RSOPS will lease from private suppliers, Heimdal said. That's one reason, he said, why the nation, with a capital city of 12 million people yet still with a third-world economy, has never explored the wreck sites off its own beaches, including those in RSOPS' contracted search field.

"They're still virgin" to searchers other than occasional thrill-seeking divers, Heimdal said. He learned that and more about the Ecuadorian wreck fields through years of contacts with professional shipwreck hunters and marine archeologists, including noted author Robert Marx.

Only over the past few years has Ecuador granted "concession" search rights to companies like RSOPS, Heimdal said. RSOPS has one of six such contracts, granting it sole rights to an area that two other companies, in France and Canada, applied "barely after us" to secure, Heimdal said. He figures he knows why: They also have copies of the Hack Atlas.

It was dubbed the "great book" after English privateer - or pirate, to the Spanish - Bartholomew Sharpe found it on one of five galleons he captured off the west coast of Panama in 1680. For centuries afterward, only several copies of it existed.

In detailed maps and notes, the atlas chronicled decades of Spanish sea pilots' experiences along the coasts of the "South Sea." Galleons plied that route from Peru to Panama, where treasure was unloaded and sent by mule trains across Panama's isthmus to be reloaded on ships bound for Spain. Two decades ago, Heimdal obtained a rare microfilm copy of the atlas's translated English version from a California library. In it was this passage:

"About the middle of the bay lyes another finale river that you cannot see til you come near it, from the mouth of which comes shoals about 2 leagues into the sea, which are very dangerous, on which was cast away Phillipo Casto, a great pilot of this sea in the ship Clarius in whome was aboundance of coined money & Plate in the year 1594 & many other ships of great value have been lost since upon these shoals." That, said Heimdal, is where RSOPS will search.

Some of those ships - though probably not the Clarius, which sank about 12 miles from shore - may have since been salvaged by the Spanish and others, he said. But if even a 10th of their treasures remain, the historic and financial gains from their discovery will be huge, he said. The Hack Atlas has been credited with three recent galleon discoveries off Ecuador, producing millions of dollars worth of precious ore, coins and artifacts, Heimdal said.

RSOPS is seeking about $500,000 through private investors for the venture, enough funds to support it for about two years, Heimdal said. The company has issued a strong caution of high risk to potential investors.