Saul's company faces losing sunken treasure

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14: A deep-sea exploration company co-founded by former Bermuda Premier David Saul has been ordered to return $500m worth of sunken treasure to Spain.

Dr Saul said his firm Odyssey Marine was considering continuing its legal battle to keep the stash, after the decision of a US Federal appeals court last month.

He said the firm had invested more than $1m to recover the cache and could now end up with nothing.

The bounty, including more than 500,000 silver coins, was recovered by treasure hunters using sophisticated technology to comb the ocean floor in 2007.

Gunfight

It is believed to have come from a ship called the Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes which was involved in a gunfight with British warships in 1804.

The coins are said to have been freshly minted in South America and were likely intended for the Emperor Napoleon as a bribe to prevent him from invading Spain, said Dr Saul.

The Associated Press reported that attorneys for Odyssey asked a three-judge panel in Tampa, Florida to overturn a lower court ruling and uphold the “finders keepers” rule that would give them the rights to coins, copper ingots, gold cufflinks and other artifacts found in the deep ocean off the coast of Portugal.

Treaty

Spain’s lawyers countered that U.S. courts are obligated by international treaty and maritime law to uphold Spain’s claim to the haul because it was a warship.

The judge sided with Spain and upheld an earlier ruling from a District Court judge that the booty should be returned.

Dr Saul said he felt the ruling was unjust and said the company was considering taking its appeal all the way to the Supreme Court.

The dispute centres on whether the galleon was a warship — and therefore Spanish property under a 1902 treaty of friendship between Spain and the US — or, as Odyssey maintains, a merchant vessel and fair game for treasure hunters.

Dr Saul said the ship was, according to historians, involved in a gunfight with the British Royal Navy, which was blockading Spain. It caught on fire, drifted 20 miles and the treasure it was carrying sunk in thousands of feet of ocean. The ship itself did not go down.

“Spain declared war on Britain saying they had attacked a merchant ship. Now they say it was a warship,” said Dr Saul.

He said the legal battle was likely to continue.

“We are searching the world’s oceans in international waters and we find something, we go to the expense of recovering it and someone says: ‘Not withstanding that you found it, you have raised it and conserved it, you are entitled to nothing’ it seems a bit inequitable.”