Reproduced courtesy of the Melbourne Age newspaper

Source: The Age, Sunday March 3, 2002

History's rescuers draw up prize from the deep

It started with a bribe and ended in tragedy. Three centuries later the final chapter may be told, writes Paul Daley.

Intrigue, diplomatic duplicity and bribery, a war with France and a massive maritime tragedy marked the life and premature demise of the British warship the HMS Sussex, which sank in the Straits of Gibraltar in 1694.

Treasures: A cannon is raised from water twice as deep as the Empire State Building is tall.
Photo ODYSSEY
But as an American marine exploration company prepares to salvage the wrecked Sussex from its grave 800 metres below the wild seas off Gibraltar, Britain is eagerly eyeing the prize - rich archaeological treasures including gold and silver coins worth, according to some estimates, up to £3 billion ($A8 billion).

With that sort of money, Britain could dramatically improve its National Health Service, help fix its education system, make the trains run on time or retire public debt.

Indeed, if the treasure is raised and later sold to the right bidders, either as a collection or in tranches, Britain could find itself in a position of significant gain for little or no pain.

It is painless for Britain because so far the marine salvage company, Florida?based Odyssey Marine Exploration, has taken all the financial and physical risk in the parlous process of finding and trying to positively identify the Sussex. But in its unprecedented private-public partnership with Britain's Ministry of Defence on the Sussex project, Odyssey - and its investors - will also share the spoils with Britain.

While Odyssey (which has already spent $A6 million of its own money on the search) is reasonably confident, based on the research of its project archaeologist Neil Dobson, that the wreck it is investigating is that of the Sussex, it is not yet 100 per cent certain. Nonetheless it is confident enough to press ahead with its salvage plans, having recovered a series of distinctive artefacts from the wreck, including some of its 80 cannon.
Some of the artifacts on the seabed off Gibraltar, believed to have come from the Sussex, which sank in 1694 on route to the Duke of Savoy with £1 million on board
Photo ODYSSEY

While shipwreck hunting and salvaging conjures images of men Jacques Cousteau-style underwater gear braving the depths (and sharks) in search of treasure, these days the lot of salvage operators is a less romantic, far more hard-headed and high-tech pursuit. The outlays and the financial risks are huge, the diplomacy involved is often convoluted and the returns can be minimal. There is also a tendency for archaeologist purists to criticise the professional salvage operators as vandals and gold diggers.

"Let's not fool ourselves. This is not an archaeological expedition," a Spanish archaeologist, Carlos Leon, recently said of the Sussex project. "You cannot use divers at 900 metres and so you have to rely on robots and sonar. This is gold fever."

But as his company attempts what will be the world's deepest, most extensive archaeological excavation of a shipwreck by robotic intervention, one of Odyssey's cofounders, Greg Stemm, told The Sunday Age he rejected such claims.

"There are paths much easier to follow than shipwreck exploration if you want to make a lot of money," he said. "In order to have reasonable success of funding these expensive deep-ocean operations, you have to look for projects that have a potential return for investors, so that you can fund cutting-edge archaeology."

When Mr Stemm and his business partner John Morris started Odyssey, they did so with a simple business plan - locate the most valuable of the world's shipwrecks and find the potential claimants.
Anchor on the seabed off Gibraltar, believed to have come from the Sussex, which sank in 1694 on route to the Duke of Savoy with £1 million on board
Photo ODYSSEY

"We knew the technology existed to find and recover them but it would require bringing diplomatic, financial, marketing and archaeological disciplines together to make a business like this work. We also knew that it would require a lot of patience - "the financial staying power to go for years before income was generated from a major find," he said.

"The shipwreck business is not short-term play. It is a complicated, capital-intensive long-term endeavour. Like the biotechnology business, a company can expect to go years without income."

Steeped in mystery and carrying the legend that it had sunk with up to a million gold and silver coins on board, the HMS Sussex was a natural target for Odyssey.

Built in 1693 in Chatham, England, the 1200?tonne, 43-metre, two-deck Sussex was built with 19 other ships which, when eventually finished, would give Britain naval supremacy throughout Europe. The Sussex sailed at the request of King William in late 1693, as the flagship of a British fleet to contain the expansionist plans of France's King Louis XIV, also known as the "Sun King".

Britain was part of an alliance with Spain, Holland and the Roman Empire and Sweden to thwart the Sun King. But to do so they needed the support of the state of Savoy, a tiny but strategically critical state on the south-east border of France that held the key to successfully capturing Paris.

While Savoy's Duke was nominally on the side of the anti-French alliance, he was notoriously fickle and by late 1693 appeared to be wavering. Documents uncovered by archivists researching the Sussex for Odyssey make it clear that King William's plan to ensure Savoy's support played to the Duke's basest instinct - Britain would buy Savoy's support with £1 million.

According to a document dated 1693 recently discovered in the British archives: "A great summ of money is sending hence for Savoy." Odyssey also established that the royal proceedings of December 12, 1693, specify that William ordered the exchequer (Britain's treasury) to give the fleet "a million of money" (a million pounds sterling in coins, equal to 10 tonnes of gold or 100 tonnes of silver).

But early the next year and weighted down with 500 soldiers, its heavy guns and the heavy coins, HMS Sussex ran into a fierce storm while negotiating the Straits of Gibraltar. It sank to the bottom in minutes and all but two of the 500 aboard perished. The body of the ship's commander, Admiral Sir Francis Wheeler, later washed up on the shores of Gibraltar. He was dressed only in a nightshirt. Predictably, the Duke of Savoy changed his allegiance and the resulting stalemate between Britain, her allies and France continued well into the 18th century.

Buoyed by their research, Odyssey signed a cooperative agreement with Britain's Royal Naval Museum in 1998 and began scanning the floor of the Gibraltar Straits using robots and sonar. During the three years of searches over 540 square kilometres of the Mediterranean that followed, 418 "targets" were found. They included many ancient shipwreck sites and, most notably, one that contained a number of cannon. "For me, as an archaeologist, it was quite a moment," project archaeologist Neil Dobson recently said. "To look and fly over the site was amazing, because it had not been disturbed. We were the first people to see it since the vessel went down."

With the permission of Britain, which theoretically, at least until it is recovered, owns the wreck, several artefacts were brought to the surface. One was a 2.7 metre iron gun of the type used by the British Navy in the late 17th century. This year an elaborate search, once again using remotely operated vehicles and robots, will be made to recover the treasure.

If the Sussex's sunken treasure is worth billions, it will be one of the richest shipwrecks recovered in the world to date.