When Ohio shipwreck hunter Thomas “Tommy” Thompson found the wreck of the SS Central America on the bottom of the Atlantic in 1988 he struck gold, literally. He brought to the surface millions in gold bars and coins from the ship, which sank in a hurricane off the coast of South Carolina in 1857.
Over the years, excitement at the discovery of this watery treasure trove soured. Investors, who had helped raise $12.7m to fund the shipwreck hunt, accused Thompson of cheating them out of their share of the proceeds.
After a judge issued a warrant for his arrest in 2012, Thompson went on the run for more than two years, before being tracked down to a Florida hotel room. Still refusing to disclose the location of the coins, he is now about to mark his seventh year in jail for contempt, racking up a daily fine of $1,000.
Thompson’s case paints a complicated picture about shipwreck hunters – a profession both glamourised and reviled. His is a story of alleged crimes, lawsuits and police hunts. But he also uncovered a lost ship’s history; artefacts were displayed and he wrote a book about the process.
Sunken vessels, and the promise of vast treasures within them, have long lured those keen for riches and the glory of discovery. There are more than 3m undiscovered shipwrecks on the ocean floor, only a tiny fraction of which have been explored. But questions over who should ultimately have ownership of this watery heritage – and whether vessels are being explored or exploited – have caused deep divides in the shipwreck world.
“You have two sides of people looking at shipwrecks with different perspectives and motivations, almost at war with each other,” says David Mearns, a marine scientist and one of a handful of professional shipwreck hunters around the world.
On one end of the spectrum, shipwreck hunters like Thompson have helped forge the idea of a group of lawless scavengers, trampling over wrecks to profit from their riches. On the other, maritime archeologists, who explore wrecks as meticulously as crime scene investigators, see shipwrecks as a cultural heritage to protect. Better that a shipwreck stay hidden on the ocean floor than be found for plunder, says maritime archaeologist Chuck Meide. “If the site is discovered by treasure hunters, typically it is essentially destroyed for a short-term profit.”
Interest in shipwrecks has exploded since the discovery of the Titanic in 1985, says Mearns, whose own discoveries include HMS Hood, the British warship sunk in 1941 by the German battleship Bismarck, and the Esmeralda, a Portuguese ship lost in a storm off the coast of Oman in 1503. Advances in technology, including remote-operated vehicles and sonar, have made wreck hunting easier, while the costs of exploring the ocean – in shallower waters at least – have fallen.
The early days of shipwreck fever saw cooperation between hunters and maritime archaeologists, who worked together to find wrecks. But those days are long over, Mearns says. Now questions about who owns the ocean’s sunken vessels frequently spill over into hostility and lawsuits.
In 2013, Bobby Pritchett, the CEO of the Florida-based Global Marine Exploration, obtained permits to scour the seabed over about 260 sq km off Cape Canaveral. Three years later, he and his crew announced that they had found the remains of a 16th-century vessel.
Many believed it to be La Trinité, a French ship involved in a bitter battle with Spain that sank in the stormy waters off the Florida coast in 1565. Its loss, along with three other ships, proved to be a historic moment, allowing the Spanish to gain a vital foothold in North America.
Pritchett’s discovery kicked off a furious legal battle. Florida and France maintained that the ship belonged to France under a 2004 US law allowing countries rights over their military vessels in perpetuity. Pritchett argued that his find wasn’t La Trinité at all, but a Spanish vessel carrying looted French artefacts.
In 2018, a federal district court ruled in favour of France, leaving Pritchett with no rights to the ship – and the loss of millions in funding from investors who’d been hoping for a share in the ship’s riches. He has now launched an action against France and Florida alleging that they colluded to deprive his company of $12bn in future earnings and shareholder value.
La Trinité is just one example of many when it comes to shipwreck hunters finding themselves on the wrong side of the law. In 2012, the US courts ruled that Florida-based Odyssey Marine Exploration must return to Spain the coins it had found on a Spanish galleon at the bottom of the Atlantic and then flown to the US. In the UK in 2014, two Kent divers were ordered to pay £60,000 for raiding nine wrecks over a 13-year period and plundering “an Aladdin’s cave” of artefacts including an early 19th-century cannon and German first world war submarine propellers.
Criticism of shipwreck hunters’ methods is further inflamed by the fact that wrecks are often watery graveyards. A 2017 Guardian investigation found more than 40 second world war-era ships in south-east Asia’s waters had been damaged by salvage divers seeking valuable metals. Up to 4,500 crew members are estimated to have died when these boats sank. “You may as well just go into a war cemetery and dig it up. It’s no different,” James Hunter, from the Australian National Maritime Museum, told the Guardian at the time.
These sorts of cases help cement shipwreck hunters’ reputations among many maritime archeologists as opportunists at best and desecrators at worst. “A lot of these folks still are just out there to essentially plunder wrecks,” Meide says. “And I can’t find very much redeeming value in that.”
Meide traces his own drive to uncover the history of sunken wrecks to his childhood. Growing up in Atlantic Beach, Florida, his early years were steeped in tales of French and Spanish galleons lost to the seas in this part of the state. “I remember my dad telling me that those Spanish conquistadores could have marched right through our back yard,” he says.
For him shipwrecks are a puzzle to be unravelled by peeling back the layers like an onion, to measure, document and analyse everything, down to the tiniest insect remains or scrap of cloth.
“Most people associate [shipwrecks] with treasures and untold riches, but from the archaeologist’s point of view, it’s the stories,” Meide says. The chance to uncover these is a “one-time event”, he says. If you blast a hole in the ship to get to treasure, that history is destroyed.
But to some hunters, maritime archeologists can end up acting as gatekeepers, sitting on their research for years, even decades, without publishing. “What’s worse,” asks Mearns, “excavating a shipwreck, having all that data and never publishing? Or going out there and salvaging it, selling it on the black market and never telling anybody?”
Mearns believes most hunters are in it for the history and sense of discovery. “It’s a great feeling to find something that’s been lost for so many years – and the material that reveals that was a bunch of dusty papers found in an archive or a private library,” he says. “You’re bringing it to life so people can then see it, experience, relive it, relearn about it.”
It’s this sense of unearthing history that brothers Julian and Lincoln Barnwell say motivated them to conduct one of the most extraordinary shipwreck-finding missions. They spent four years and covered 5,000 nautical miles searching for the Royal Navy warship HMS Gloucester, which sank in 1682 while carrying the future king James Stuart – discovered it and then kept it secret for 15 years.
The Barnwells and their friend James Little found the wreck in 2007 – although it wasn’t until they found the ship’s bell in 2012 that they had proof it was the Gloucester. They told only a few government departments to give authorities time to formally identify the wreck and secure the site.
The Barnwells, who are both avid divers with day jobs running a printing shop in Norfolk, call themselves shipwreck enthusiasts, not hunters. “The term ‘shipwreck hunters’ alludes to treasure hunters and we certainly are not that,” says Julian. The brothers self-financed more than 200 dives to find the wreck. “It’s been like a hobby on steroids,” says Lincoln.
When they finally announced the find in June, experts said it could be the most significant historic shipwreck since the Mary Rose, the Tudor warship raised from the Solent between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight 40 years ago.
“A ship is a microcosm of a broader world,” says maritime historian Prof Claire Jowitt at the University of East Anglia, who was principal investigator on the Gloucester Project. Artefacts already rescued from the wreck – intact 17th-century wine bottles, a pot filled with ointment and even a urine specimen jar – will teach people more about life on and off the ship, she says.
Despite the deep divisions that persist in the shipwreck world, there is a common thread that runs between hunters like Mearns, enthusiasts like the Barnwells and archaeologists like Meide: a thirst to uncover the secrets at the bottom of the ocean – be that stories, treasures or both. “Shipwrecks are a bug that you catch,” Jowitt says.
