Colapinto Odyssey Latest Vs

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sEcRETsOfTHEdEEPThe dispute over what may be the biggest sunken treasure ever ound.

BYJOHNcOLAPINTO

b r u c e

m c c

a l l

One morning last October, the Ex-plorer, a two-hundred-and-fifty-

one-foot ship owned by Odyssey Ma-rine Exploration, an American deep-seatreasure-hunting company, left thePort of Gibraltar and headed out to sea.On the horizon, three miles away, sat aSpanish warship. “They’re waiting forus,” Aladar Nesser, Odyssey’s directorof international business development,

told the Explorer’s passengers, amongthem twelve journalists who had beeninvited on board to witness what Od- yssey’s owners expected would bea tense confrontation with Spanishauthorities.

In May, Odyssey had announcedthat it had discovered, somewhere inthe Atlantic Ocean, a colonial-era shipwreck that had yielded seventeen tonsof silver coins and several hundred goldones—possibly the largest treasure ever

recovered from the sea. The company had transferred the booty to five hun-dred and fifty-one plastic buckets,loaded them onto a chartered jet, andflown them to the United States fromGibraltar, a British territory. Odyssey,claiming not to know the wreck’s iden-tity, and citing a need to protect it fromlooters, had given it the code nameBlack Swan and refused to divulge ei-ther its location—other than to say thatit is “beyond the territorial waters” of

any country—or details about the trea-sure. In July, however, the Spanishgovernment obtained copies of exportdocuments filed by Odyssey in Gibral-tar, which revealed that the recoveredcoins were Spanish. A Spanish court,investigating whether Odyssey hadplundered a national historical site, or-dered that the Explorer be seized whenit left Gibraltar waters.

As the Explorer’s captain, SterlingVorus, steered toward the warship, twosmaller vessels—patrol boats from theGuardia Civil—appeared, aiming forthe ship’s port side. Vorus made radio

contact with the captain of one of theboats, who ordered him to follow themto Algeciras, Spain, across the bay.

“Can you confirm that you areordering me, against my consent, un-der threat of deadly force?” Vorusasked.

His radio emitted a crackle of static.Marie Rogers, a lawyer for Odyssey, who was standing beside Vorus and lis-

tening closely to the exchange, nodded.Vorus said into the radio, “We willcoöperate with your orders.”

An hour later, the Explorer dockedin the port of Algeciras, at a pier whereseveral Guardia Civil officers stood waiting. Eventually, a group of officersboarded the ship and examined thepassengers’ passports. Vorus was charged with “severe disobedience” and jailedfor the night. The Explorer was takeninto Spanish custody for three days and

searched. Odyssey had long sincestripped the boat of documents andequipment that could provide clues tothe identity or location of the Black Swan. Even Zeus, the company’s eight-ton, two-million-dollar remote-con-trolled deep-sea robot, which is usedfor lifting treasure from the ocean floor,had been partly dismantled.

The next day, the “Today” show ranfootage shot from a storm-tossed din-ghy that had followed the Explorer into

the bay, and the Times of London re-ported that “a Spanish warship threat-ened to open fire on American treasurehunters yesterday as they tried to fleeGibraltar in the battle for a haul of goldand silver coins estimated to be worthhalf a billion dollars.” Odyssey’s dispute with Spain is likely to unfold not on thehigh seas, however, but in U.S. DistrictCourt in Tampa, Florida, where thecompany is based. In May, a lawyerrepresenting Spain—James Goold, aspecialist in maritime law at Covington& Burling, in Washington, D.C.—filed a claim with the court on the

Black Swan treasure. Two monthslater, Odyssey sued Spain for five mil-lion dollars in damages.

The United Nations estimates thatthere are more than three million

shipwrecks on the ocean floor. For years,much of the bounty salvaged by treasurehunters was recovered from wrecks inshallow water with the help of scuba div-

ers. This changed in the mid-eighties, with the advent of remotely operated ve-hicles, or R.O.V.s: robots equipped withlights, cameras, steering thrusters, andarms that can lift objects from depths asgreat as a mile.

As more submerged artifacts becomeaccessible, countries have begun to chal-lenge the “finders keepers” concept thathas traditionally governed salvage opera-tions. In 2001, the UNESCO GeneralConference adopted a Convention for the

Protection of Underwater Cultural Heri-tage, which seeks to thwart the activitiesof treasure hunters by prohibiting themfrom selling artifacts that are more than ahundred years old. The convention has

yet to take effect, but laws already existthat grant nations “sovereign immunity”over, or ownership of, their sunken war-ships in international waters. Lately,countries have successfully invoked theselaws in court. In 2000, Spain claimed therights to two warships, La Galga and the

Juno, which sank off the coast of Virginiain 1750 and 1802, respectively, and weresalvaged by Sea Hunt, an American trea-sure-hunting company. Sea Hunt wascompelled by court order to return thebounty—anchors, silver coins, and goldnuggets—to Spain and was denied a shareof its value. (Until then, it was standardfor the salvor to receive a substantial per-centage of a retrieved treasure’s value, pro-

vided that ownership of the ship was notin dispute.) If the Black Swan turns out tobe a Spanish warship, Odyssey could beobliged to surrender its haul to Spain.

The arrival of treasure hunters in the


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As more submerged artiacts become accessible, countries have begun to challenge the “fnders keepers” concept .



deepest parts of the ocean has also causedincreasing concern among nautical arche-ologists. Some of these specialists, whostudy shipwrecks and their cargo, have ac-cused treasure hunters of destroying wreck sites in search of valuables and criticizedthem for selling salvaged artifacts to thepublic—as Odyssey routinely does—through auction houses, Web sites, andhome-shopping channels. George Bass,the founder of the Institute of Nautical Ar-

chaeology, at Texas A. & M. University,has conducted ten shipwreck excavationsin the past forty years; he has spent decadessifting recovered debris for clues to thepast. “What treasure hunter is going tospend thirty years doing that if they have tosell the stuff off very quickly to pay off theirinvestors?” Bass asked me.

Odyssey, the country’s only publicly traded deep-sea treasure-hunting com-pany, which was founded in 1994 by GregStemm, an advertising executive, and

John Morris, a real-estate developer, hassought to distinguish itself from othersuch firms by working with archeologiststo excavate wrecks and by forming part-nerships with governments—few of

which seem willing to spend millions of dollars on R.O.V.s and other technology necessary for salvaging their cultural her-itage from the deep. Odyssey offers toshoulder the financial burden of excava-tions in return for a cut of the proceeds; in2002, it made a groundbreaking deal withBritain to excavate a British warship thatsank off the coast of Gibraltar in 1694

with a treasure aboard reported to be

worth as much as four billion dollars. AsStemm says, “The truth is that in the larg-est unexplored part of our earth Odyssey does things that no government in the

world can do.”

Stemm, who is fifty years old, tall andlanky, with a neatly trimmed gray

beard and a toothy smile, combines aboyish manner with a bristling air of in-tellectual superiority. A former member

of Mensa—“I scored in the highestlevel,” he says—he will reply to questions

whose answers he deems obvious withthe phrase “Yuh think?” or just “Duh!”But his enthusiasm is irrepressible.“There are these mysterious little timecapsules lying on the ocean bottom,” hetold me. “And that moment of discovery,

when an R.O.V. first comes upon a sitethat nobody has ever seen before—itgenerates a sense of awe as you comecloser and closer, and you see an artifact

here and an artifact there and you see apart of a hull. It’s a magical feeling thatstrikes some chord deep in our soul.”

Stemm says that Odyssey sells only themass-produced items it recovers, such ascoins. Moreover, he argues, by publicizingthe shipwrecks it finds—on TV specials,in books, and on its Web site—the com-pany does more to educate people aboutour seafaring past than academics do. “If I

were an archeologist today, I’d be saying,‘Why aren’t we out there working withGreg Stemm and these guys?’ ” he toldme. “What does the public really wanthere? What better curators are there on

earth than the entire public? Let’s involvethem all, instead of sticking everything instorerooms in the back of a museum.”

Even so, Odyssey, which has an aver-age monthly operating budget of abouttwo million dollars—much of it raisedfrom large financial firms, such as GLGPartners and Strata Capital—has con-

ducted its salvage operations with great se-crecy, and allowed few independent ex-perts to examine the wreck sites or theartifacts it has retrieved. Until January,

when Goold and a representative of theSpanish government were shown a few dozen coins and other artifacts, only Od-

yssey employees had been permitted to seethe Black Swan treasure, which the com-pany says is being held at an “undisclosedlocation” in the United States.

Secrecy pervades nearly every aspect of

Odyssey’s business. A bank of video cam-eras and a sign declaring “Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted” greet visitors to thefirm’s headquarters, a featureless two-story building in a corporate park near the

Tampa airport. Stemm’s office—in Janu-ary, he became Odyssey’s C.E.O. andchairman of the board, after Morris, whohas been battling cancer, resigned fromthe firm—can be entered only by punch-ing a security code into a keypad. Duringmy first meeting with Stemm, last Sep-

tember, Odyssey’s public-relations man-ager, Natja Igney, recorded our conversa-tion. (Igney also attended my meetings

with Odyssey’s staff members, a necessary precaution, she explained, to insure thatemployees did not inadvertently divulgeproprietary information.) On the walls of Stemm’s office were framed photographs,including one of the comedian Bob Hope,for whom Stemm once worked as an ad-

vance man, and another, inscribed “Tomy pal Greg,” of Lee Atwater, the late

Republican political strategist, playing anelectric guitar. (Stemm met Atwater inthe late eighties, when Stemm was a di-rector of the Young Entrepreneurs Orga-nization, a networking group that hestarted with two dozen other young busi-nessmen, including Michael Dell, thefounder of Dell Computers, and Ted Le-onsis, the former AOL executive.)

The son of an insurance agent and apet-shop owner, Stemm was born inFlorida but grew up in Michigan. As achild, he was an avid collector. “Coins,rocks, arrowheads—you name it,” he toldme. “I definitely have the collector gene,

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so we as a company relate to people withthe collector gene.” At the age of seven,during a visit to his grandparents’ home inLynn Haven, on Florida’s Panhandle, hesuffered what he calls his “shipwreck.” He

was on a shark-fishing expedition in theGulf of Mexico with his grandfather, anengineer, when their boat capsized.

Stemm’s grandfather drowned and wascarried off by the current. Stemm clung tothe overturned boat for hours, beforebeing rescued by fishermen. He has pre-sented the story, along with a love of his-tory and archeology, as an explanation forhis choice of profession.

Stemm studied marine biology at New College, in Sarasota, but he dropped outafter two years, when he was hired by BobHope. He left that job after a year and be-came a freelance marketing and events

consultant. “I said, ‘Man, I can do this,’ ”Stemm told me. “I understand promotion.I understand how to put things in writingthat people react to.” In 1984, at a bar inBradenton, Florida, he met Laurie De-Frain, a graphic artist, who was also fromMichigan. They began dating and eventu-ally started an advertising agency in Tampa.(The couple, who have two teen-age sons,married in 2005.)

DeFrain introduced Stemm to JohnMorris, a client who owned a local real-es-

tate-development firm. Together, they started a real-estate company. “John is oneof the smartest guys I’ve ever met,” Stemmsaid. “I can win a debate with most people,but I can never win a debate with John.” In1986, Stemm learned that the University of North Carolina at Wilmington wasauctioning off an eighty-five-foot researchship, the Seahawk, worth eight hundredthousand dollars. On a whim, he bid ahundred thousand dollars of company money and won the boat. Stemm and

Morris contemplated renting it out forparties, but before they got around to itthey were approached by a salesman fromDeep Ocean Engineering, a company thathad helped to pioneer the use of R.O.V.s.Until then, the robots had been used pri-marily by oil companies, for construction,drilling, and laying underwater pipelines.Deep Ocean Engineering wanted to dem-onstrate that the technology could helpidentify shipwrecks, and had a potentialclient who believed that he had located a

wreck in the Gulf of Mexico. Stemm andMorris agreed to provide the Seahawk forthe expedition. No wreck was found, but

afterward Stemm and Morris bought fivesmall R.O.V.s, for about fifty thousanddollars each. They rented the robots tothe Navy, which used them for practic-ing mine countermeasures, and began

working with insurance companies that were suspicious of claimants whose boatshad sunk in deep water. Stemm and

Morris, assisted by the R.O.V.s, photo-graphed the boats to determine whetherthey had been stripped of their electron-ics—possible evidence that they hadbeen scuttled for the insurance money.

The men called their new company, whose headquarters consisted of a few spare offices in Stemm’s ad agency, Sea-hawk Deep Ocean Technology.

In 1987, Stemm attended an archeology conference in Reno, where he met

Robert Marx, a veteran treasure hunterand the author of more than sixty popularbooks on shipwrecks and maritime his-tory. When Marx learned that Seahawk owned R.O.V.s, he told Stemm that in1965, in the Dry Tortugas—a group of seven islands near the Florida Keys—deep-sea shrimp fishermen had shownhim pots that they had caught in theirnets and which Marx recognized as sev-enteenth-century Spanish olive jars. Inthe early nineteen-seventies, Marx said,

he had searched the site with a dragnetand retrieved a huge anchor, which slippedoff his cable and plunged back into thedeep. The anchor, he told Stemm, wasevidence that below lay the wreck of aSpanish treasure galleon—probably onefrom a famous fleet of twenty-eight thathad been caught in a hurricane in 1622,shortly after setting sail from Havana. In1985, Mel Fisher, a treasure hunter basedin Key West, had found one of the ships,the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, along with

four hundred and fifty million dollars’ worth of gold and silver, thirty-five mileseast of the Dry Tortugas site. Marx pro-posed to sell the site’s location to Seahawk for ten thousand dollars in cash and a ten-

per-cent cut of any profits. Stemm ac-cepted the offer. “I’d read a lot of Marx’sbooks by then,” he told me. “He seemedto be a guy who knew what he was talk-ing about.”

In October, 1988, Stemm, Morris,DeFrain, and Stemm’s younger brother,Scott, left Tampa on the Seahawk carry-

ing a map of the Dry Tortugas on whichMarx had drawn an “X.” Scott, a fireman,had been enlisted to operate the boat’smain search tool, a side-scan sonar: athree-foot-long torpedo-shaped sensorthat is dragged behind a boat, close to theocean floor, and uses sound waves to de-tect “anomalies” on the bottom. Withintwenty minutes, the side scan picked upan anomaly, but the group was too inex-perienced to recognize it as a shipwreck.Over the course of three months, the Se-

ahawk combed the ocean floor, tackingback and forth across an area ten milessquare—a process known as “mowing thelawn.” In January, with James Whitaker,an experienced side-scan technician, onboard, the group returned to the site of the original anomaly. Whitaker’s mea-surements indicated that the wreck wasabout sixty feet long, too short to be atreasure galleon. Whitaker also thoughtthat the wreck’s “boxy” shape, as he latertestified, “looked more like a barge.”

Stemm, however, argued that a substan-tial portion of the ship could be hiddenunder the sand, and he and Morris re-solved to return to the site with an R.O.V.

This would be costly, since the wreck lay at fifteen hundred feet—deeper than theheight of the Empire State Building. Toexamine it would require a larger, far moreexpensive R.O.V. than the ones Stemmand Morris owned. The operation wouldcost ten thousand dollars a day.

Up to this point, Stemm and Morris

had funded the hunt with small invest-ments from friends and relatives, who

were promised a percentage of any profits. They now decided that the best way toraise a large amount of money quickly wasto take Seahawk public. Morris met withbrokers at Kober Financial Corporation,in Tampa, a firm that had access to a“blind pool” company. (Contributors to ablind pool allow brokers to decide how toinvest their money.) Morris told the bro-kers that he and Stemm conceived of trea-sure hunting as a sustainable businessrather than as a get-rich-quick scheme;they would not only excavate shipwrecks



and sell some of their finds to the publicbut also auction off film rights to the

wrecks, sell tickets to shipwreck-themed“attractions,” and publish books and mag-azine articles. “It was in the business planfrom the beginning, the way this all fit to-gether,” Stemm told me. Kober agreed tonegotiate a merger between Seahawk and

the blind-pool company, which had half a million dollars in its pool. After themerger, Seahawk became the country’sfirst publicly financed treasure-huntingcompany, and its stock began trading forhalf a penny a share. Stemm and Morrisacquired sixty million shares each.

In mid-April, 1989, the men returnedto the Dry Tortugas site with a new R.O.V., which beamed grainy black-and-

white images from the sea bottom onto amonitor aboard the Seahawk. Morris and

Stemm saw some broken timbers, andthen a pile of round clay objects—olive jars of the kind that Marx had described. The R.O.V. also transmitted images of aheavily corroded bell, which Stemmthought resembled one retrieved from theAtocha, and several rectangular objectsthat he later said he thought were “possi-ble silver bars.” Seahawk subsequently re-trieved three astrolabes, sophisticatednavigational devices that Stemm’s re-search suggested would be found only on

a treasure galleon.Stemm had read accounts of the 1622

disaster, all of which mentioned only threetreasure galleons that had been lost in thestorm: the Atocha, the Rosario, and theSanta Margarita. All three had since beenfound, in shallow water, but Stemm be-lieved that a fourth galleon might also havegone down. He cited a book called “The

Treasure Galleons: Clues to Millions inSunken Gold and Silver,” published in1971 by a wreck diver named Dave Horner,

who had spent years researching Spain’streasure fleets in the marine archives inSeville. In a chapter on the 1622 disaster,Horner asserted that four million pesoshad been lost on the ships that disappearedduring the hurricane. Stemm knew that1.9 million pesos had been on the Atocha,the Santa Margarita, and the Rosario. “So

what that tells you,” he later testified, “isthere’s still 2.1 million pesos in treasurelost.” If another ship in the fleet had sunk,he said, “then you would assume or deducethat that ship must have had 2.1 millionpesos in treasure on it.”

Stemm had a name for the ship that he

believed may have been carrying the trea-sure: the Nuestra Señora de la Merced,

which, according to Horner’s book, hadset off from Havana in 1622 carrying sixty per cent more gold and silver than theAtocha. Horner offered no details about

what had happened to the ship, butStemm, who could find no record of the

Merced’s having reached Spain or havingreturned to Havana after the hurricane (asother ships in the fleet had done), specu-lated that it may have sunk in deep water.Perhaps, Stemm later testified, the fate of the ship had not been recorded in any con-temporaneous documents because therehad been no eyewitnesses to the sinking.

On April 25th, after returning fromthe wreck site in the Dry Tortugas,Stemm appeared with Morris on a Tampatelevision station, to discuss their find: a

Spanish ship, possibly carrying, in today’scurrency, as a reporter at the station put it,“up to eight hundred million dollars”—atreasure without precedent. According toinvestigators from the Securities and Ex-change Commission, which later chargedSeahawk with fraud, on the day of thebroadcast someone at the company phoned Kober and told the brokers aboutthe discovery. After watching the eveningnews, the brokers began phoning custom-ers, and Kober became, as one employee

later told S.E.C. lawyers, a “madhouse.” The brokers sold Seahawk stock until1 A.M., driving up the stock price sixfold,from three cents to nineteen cents ashare.

Soon, reporters began calling Sea-hawk, and Stemm and Morris hired Dan-iel Bagley, an associate professor of masscommunications at the University of South Florida, to manage the press.Bagley arranged for stories to appear innational and foreign news outlets, includ-

ing USA Today and the London DailyTelegraph, and on the “Today” show. TheTimes reported that “records show” thatthe Dry Tortugas ship could have beencarrying “a multimillion-dollar treasure.”A follow-up article added, “Some arche-ologists said the wreck might be the mostimportant undersea archeological find inthe Western Hemisphere.”

P

reparations to excavate the wreck took more than a year. In January, 1990,

Stemm and Morris hired David Moore, athirty-four-year-old nautical archeologist,to oversee scientific aspects of the salvage

operation. Moore had earned a master’sdegree in maritime history and nauticalarcheology from East Carolina University in 1989, and for six years had worked withMel Fisher, on the Atocha excavation andother Spanish colonial wrecks. “I waslooking for experience,” Moore told me,explaining why he had agreed to assist a

treasure hunter. “And to get an up-close-and-personal view of what all the contro- versy was about—this treasure-hunting- versus-archeology crap. I said, ‘Ratherthan sit here in this ivory tower, let’s getout there and get my hands dirty and seeif they are the devils incarnate that peopleclaim them to be.’ ”

In May, Moore and two dozen Sea-hawk employees arrived at the Dry Tortu-gas site in a recovery ship that Stemm andMorris had bought and equipped with a

two-million-dollar R.O.V., which they nicknamed Merlin. The team spent weekspassing Merlin over the site, and took thousands of pictures that would later beused to create a record of the location of every visible artifact. Then the team beganusing specialized dredges to suck sandaway from the wreck. According to Moore,the technicians operating the R.O.V. wereeager to position it over areas where they believed gold lay. “I kept reminding them,‘You do not want to set this two-ton

R.O.V. down on the sand, in an area where we don’t know what’s down there,’ ”Moore told me. (Moore says that he de-termined that the R.O.V. had already crushed a dozen ancient olive jars, valuedat twelve thousand dollars each.) In early

June, the team saw something unusual onthe seabed. “It was the edge of a gold barthat was just barely visible coming out of the sand,” Moore recalled. “We sucked abit of sand away and picked it up andbrought it to the surface.” It was a six-inch-

long gold ingot, known as a finger bar,stamped with several circular markings.

Seahawk immediately issued a pressrelease. Citing Robert Marx as an author-ity, the company declared that the stampsindicated that the bar was “documentedgold of the Spanish crown.” The next day,the Times reported that the ingot was the“strongest evidence yet that the ship is atreasure-laden Spanish galleon from a fa-bled, ill-fortuned fleet that set sail fromHavana in 1622.” Seahawk’s stock rose toan all-time high of just under eighty-fivecents a share.

Moore, however, was worried. He be-



lieved that the markings on the gold bar were routine tax stamps, suggesting thatits owner had paid taxes on the gold tothe Spanish king. The bar was probably privately owned and could have been car-ried by a crew member or a passenger ona variety of vessels. Moore doubted thatthe wreck was the Merced, a ship sup-

posedly larger than the Atocha. “TheAtocha’ s frames were nine, nine and ahalf inches wide,” Moore told me. “I said,‘The frames on this thing are about sixand a half to seven inches; there’s no way this ship can be bigger than Atocha.’ ”Moreover, apart from Horner’s book, which listed the Merced as one of eighttreasure galleons in the 1622 fleet, Moorecould find no record that the ship hadever existed.

In mid-July, Moore stated these con-

cerns to Stemm and Morris in a “prelim-inary site analysis,” and entreated his em-ployers to consider that a loss of gold andsilver in the amount that Horner claimed

was aboard the Merced “would have cre-ated quite a ripple in official correspon-dence.” Speculating that Horner had mis-understood the use of the word merced (“gift”), which appears twice in Spanishdocuments about the 1622 fleet, Moorenoted that “ Merced doesn’t even appear tohave been a popular ship’s name”; it oc-

curred just once in a database that he hadcompiled of a thousand Spanish ships of the period.

Stemm later testified that he readMoore’s report, but, believing its findingsto be incorrect, decided not to share it

with investors, brokers, or journalists.Nevertheless, the prospectus that Sea-hawk provided to potential investors in-cluded a disclaimer about the wreck (“Some writers have speculated that itmight be the Merced, with incredible

amounts of wealth. That’s a possibility,but we are not counting on it”), andStemm hired researchers to search theSeville archives for references to the ship.(They found none.) Robert Marx, who

was working as a consultant on the proj-ect, was dispatched to Spain, and in lateOctober he sent a fax to Stemm in whichhe wrote that he was “certain” that the

wreck was not a treasure galleon but,rather, one of two merchant ships thathad gone down with the fleet.

That winter, Seahawk moved into aseventeen-thousand-square-foot facility in Tampa, which included corporate

offices, conservation labs, and galleries fordisplaying artifacts that the company re-trieved from the Dry Tortugas site. (Theseeventually included nearly three dozengold bars and fragments, more than athousand silver coins, pearls, olive jars, ce-ramics, and musket balls.) Seahawk alsoleased a ten-thousand-square-foot build-

ing in St. Petersburg and hired architectsto turn it into a museum devoted to shipwrecks and underwater treasure. Not until July, 1991, when reports appeared in the Tampa papers that the S.E.C. had begunan investigation of Seahawk, did the com-pany issue a press release stating that theDry Tortugas wreck was probably a “mod-erate-size merchant vessel” and that theMerced “may not have existed.” The an-nouncement triggered a sell-off of Sea-hawk shares. The stock price tumbled to

six cents and, eventually, to a penny. InDecember, an analysis commissioned by the S.E.C. concluded that the artifacts re-covered from the Dry Tortugas had amarket value of a little more than a mil-lion dollars—less than what Seahawk hadspent to salvage them. (An appraisal by Seahawk at around this time valued theartifacts at five million dollars.)

The S.E.C. was particularly interestedin Stemm’s and Morris’s trading of

Seahawk stock. A day after the Times story appeared trumpeting the news of thegold bar retrieved from the Dry Tortugas

wreck, Stemm sold four hundred thou-sand shares, worth two hundred andtwenty-seven thousand dollars. Morrisand Bagley, Seahawk’s director of public

relations, also sold stock and, according tothe S.E.C., all three men realized returnsof, “in some cases, over 3,000 percent.” Inlate 1994, the S.E.C. charged Seahawk

with fraud and inflating, in S.E.C. filings,the value of artifacts recovered from the

wreck. In addition, Stemm, Morris, andBagley were charged with a total of

twenty-two counts of fraud and insidertrading. The S.E.C. offered Seahawk a deal: it

would drop the charges against the com-pany if Stemm, Morris, and Bagley re-signed, and Seahawk agreed never againto employ them or to use company money to pay their legal fees. Stemm, Morris,and Bagley decided to fight the chargesagainst them in court. (Seahawk has sinceceased operations.)

The men’s trial, which began in No-

vember, 1997, in U.S. District Court in Tampa, lasted three weeks. Morris andBagley testified, as did experts on Spanishcoins and artifacts, marine archeology, se-curities trading, and the interpretation of side-scan sonar readings. Stemm was thestar witness. He told me that the S.E.C.investigation and the trial were “amongthe worst ordeals” he has endured, butcourt records suggest that his perfor-mance on the stand was extraordinary.For three days, in testimony that spans

more than four hundred and fifty pages inthe court transcript, he parried questionsand repeatedly thwarted the S.E.C.’s leadprosecutor, Peter Bresnan. At one point,Bresnan grilled Stemm about his an-nouncement on Tampa television thatSeahawk had found “silver bars” at the



wreck site. The bars turned out to be worthless firebricks.

Bresnan: and you nvr inford h pub-lic of h fc h wh you hd prvioulyhough wr ilvr br wr cully brick,did you?

stemm: th’ kind of rick quion. Of cour w inford h, bcu vry iw found ohing w nnouncd wh wfound. so if you followd h li of wh w

found, nd w nvr found firbrick, hn youwould hv bn old h w didn’ findfirbrick. W didn’ k i prcic o n-nounc wh w didn’ find. W nnouncdwh w did find.

Bresnan: You nvr—stemm: Do h k n?Bresnan: I y.

Bresnan had no better luck question-ing Stemm about his failure to make pub-lic Moore’s preliminary site analysis. “Inever informed anybody of informationthat I thought was wrong,” Stemm said.

“I think it’s pretty simple. When I thoughtthat logic was flawed or historical data wasflawed, I simply wouldn’t pass it out. Ithought that was being pretty responsi-ble.” Bresnan tried to get Stemm to ex-plain why he had sold all but sixty thou-sand of his more than sixty-one millionshares of company stock just before Sea-hawk revealed to the public that the wreck

was probably a small merchant vessel.Stemm diverted the exchange into a long,complicated argument about the meaning

of “beneficial stock.” The jury found the defendants not

guilty on all counts. “What doesn’t kill youmakes you stronger,” Stemm told me. In1994, after resigning from Seahawk, heand Morris founded another treasure-hunting company, Odyssey Marine Ex-ploration, which they took public in Au-gust, 1997. “A number of the primary initial investors in Seahawk, as soon as we

won the S.E.C., came right back into Od- yssey,” Stemm recalled. The company

pursued leads on several shipwrecks, in-cluding H.M.S. Sussex, an eighty-cannonBritish warship that had led a fleet of al-lied ships from Gibraltar in February,1694. The fleet, which included shipsfrom Spain and Holland, was preparingfor battle against France, but it was caughtin a storm and sank. The Sussex lost all buttwo of its five hundred crew members.

Stemm has said that Odyssey learnedabout the Sussex in 1995, when a re-searcher showed him and Morris a copy of a three-hundred-year-old letter to anofficial in the court of Louis XIV from theFrench consul in Livorno, Italy. The let-


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ter described the loss of the allied fleet andmentioned that a large sum of money—amillion pounds sterling—had been on theSussex when it sank. “That one simpleletter set us down the path,” Stemm latertold the Sunday Telegraph. Odyssey hiredresearchers to examine archives in En-gland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and

the United States, and concluded that themoney was a bribe from England in-tended for the Duke of Savoy, a waveringally who controlled a region of southernFrance that provided an important inva-sion route.

In 1998, Odyssey, with the consent of the British government, began to searchfor the Sussex. (The Sussex, being a war-ship, was British property.) But it wasn’tuntil four years later that the two partiesagreed on a salvage deal: Odyssey would

pay for the salvage in return for eighty percent of the first forty-five million dollarsrecovered, fifty per cent of the next fourhundred and fifty-five million, and forty per cent of anything above that amount.Odyssey also obtained permission fromSpain authorizing the company to searchnear Gibraltar, in what it considered to beSpanish waters, on the condition that theMinistry of Culture be notified of any findsother than the Sussex.

In September, 2001, Odyssey’s side-

scan sonar detected an anomaly east of Gibraltar. Five months later, the Times, ina front-page story by William Broad, re-ported that “a team of entrepreneurs andarchaeologists working with the Britishgovernment says it has probably discov-ered the Sussex,” a ship possibly carryingsome “10 tons of gold or more than 100tons of silver,” perhaps “worth up to $4billion today.” The evidence suggestingthat there was treasure aboard the Sussex,Broad wrote, included a document from

1693, which stated, “A great summ of money is sending hence for Savoy,” andan entry in “the royal proceedings of Dec.12, 1693,” in which England’s King Wil-liam III “ordered the exchequer to give theflotilla ‘a million of money,’ or one millionpounds sterling in coins.” The next day,Odyssey’s stock more than doubled, fromninety cents to $1.93. Broad wrote aboutthe company again in May, 2003, report-ing in the Times that “no problems areforeseen” with the salvage of the vessel.

That fall, Odyssey purchased the Ex-plorer and the custom-designed R.O.V.,Zeus, and began excavating a wreck off

the coast of Georgia: the SS Republic, asteamship that had sunk in a hurricane in1865, while transporting money and pas-sengers from New York to New Orleansafter the Civil War. Press reports esti-mated the value of the Republic treasureat a hundred and eighty million dollars,though Odyssey later revised this figure to

seventy-five million. By 2005, the compa-ny’s investors included several financialfirms, among them Fortress InvestmentGroup and Galleon Group.

B y this time, however, doubts aboutthe company’s claim to have found

the Sussex had begun to circulate. Oneskeptic was Jim McManus, a sixty-three-

year-old ship’s captain, commercial diver,and marine-archeology buff. In July,2006, McManus and two friends—John

Bartram, a former television producer andamateur historian in Britain, and VincentBurrows, an archeologist—launched a

Web site called Historyhuntersinterna-tional.org. The History Hunters had readnews reports about Odyssey’s deal withthe British government, and they decidedto conduct their own research on the Sus-sex. Photographs of the wreck site thatOdyssey had released in 2001 showed apile of debris that McManus believed wasnot big enough to be the Sussex. “It’s

barely wide enough to be the Sussex be-fore she collapsed,” he told me. “Shipssometimes spread out to the sides whenthey sink. So the signature of the wreck isusually much, much larger than the ship

was in real life.” McManus also studied aphotograph taken by Odyssey of an an-chor at the site and concluded that it wastoo small to belong to the Sussex and the

wrong shape for a British anchor of theperiod. Moreover, he thought that there

weren’t enough cannons scattered around

the site—nineteen were visible in the sitemaps that Odyssey released—given thatSussex had been an eighty-gun warship.

McManus and Bartram searched thearchives of the Exchequer and of Parlia-

ment in the British Library but found norecord of a million pounds sterling beingaboard the Sussex. “You have to under-stand that in those days the entire operat-ing budget for the Navy amounted to only a few million pounds,” McManus told me.“Now, to lose a million pounds in goldcoin on a ship? That’s a pretty significant

punch in the treasury.” Bartram believedthat Odyssey had made an error interpret-ing the historical documents. The com-pany had relied in part on diaries compiledby scribes in the court of William III,

which, as quoted by William Broad in theTimes, indicated that the King had or-dered the Exchequer to “give the flotilla ‘amillion of money.’ ” However, a subse-quent article in the Sunday Telegraph in-cluded the rest of the sentence that Broadhad cited: “Days before the Sussex left

Portsmouth, the royal proceedings of De-cember 12, 1693 recorded that King Wil-liam had ordered the exchequer to issue ‘amillion pounds in money for the use of theFleet.’ ” The phrase “for the use of thefleet” is routine language used in parlia-mentary proceedings to refer to appropri-ations for the British Navy (“the fleet”).

Thus, Bartram concluded, “They read apayment to the King for the Navy as apayment by the King to Savoy.”

In August, 2006, McManus and Bar-

tram began to post their opinions aboutthe Sussex on the History Hunters’ Website. Four months later, the site crashed.

The History Hunters determined that so-phisticated hackers were attacking thesite, repeatedly shutting it down. “One of the clever things they’d done, which my security people hadn’t seen before, was to

join as a member of History Hunters,then post messages to each other withinthe internal messaging system,” Bartramtold me. “But, instead of sending mes-

sages, they were sending code.” Bartramsaid that the attacks ceased two months tothe day after they began, evidence, he be-lieves, that the hackers had been hired ona contract. “And who would pay to hack a little Web site like History Hunters?”Bartram said. “No one—unless they’vegot a commercial motive.” (Stemm de-nied that Odyssey had hired the hackers.“We would never engage in, nor endorsein any way, creating any problem for any-one’s Web site, no matter how criticalthey might be of Odyssey,” he wrote in ane-mail.)

Stemm repeatedly assured me that



Odyssey had proof of the Sussex’s treasurecargo that had not been reported by themedia, and he promised to show it to me.In December, he and his wife came toNew York to attend the première of theDisney film “National Treasure: Book of Secrets.” (Odyssey had negotiated withDisney to sponsor an online contest tied

to the movie, and artifacts from the SSRepublic were being sold as part of a “Real‘National Treasure’ Collectors’ Set,” fornineteen hundred and ninety-five dollars,on the company’s Web site.) I met Stemmin the restaurant of his hotel, where hehanded me a book that had Odyssey’slogo and the word “Confidential” stampedon its cover. “There’s stuff that the Britishtreasury department has on Sussex thatthey won’t even show to me,” he said. “So,I mean, what you’re going to see in this

book isn’t the only evidence we weregoing on.” Stemm left me alone to look atthe book, saying that he would return inan hour.

The book included photocopied pagesfrom the “Calendar of State Papers, Do-mestic Series” and the “Calendar of StatePapers, Treasury Books,” diaries by Wil-liam III’s scribes. On one page, an arrow pointed at a passage containing these

words: “Yesterday a warrant passed theprivy seal for paying a million of money

out of the Exchequer for the use of thefleet.” The excerpt made no mention of the Sussex or of Savoy. There was also acopy of a page from a book called “A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs fromSeptember, 1678 to April, 1714,” by Nar-cissus Luttrell, who, like Samuel Pepys,kept a record of the daily events in Parlia-ment. Luttrell’s entry for November 18,1693, read, “A great summ of money issending hence for Savoy.” There was noreference to the Sussex.

Toward the back of the book was acopy of the Livorno letter—the originalinspiration for Odyssey’s interest in theSussex—along with an English transla-tion. The letter, which was addressed to aMonseigneur Pontchartrain, an official inLouis XIV’s court, was a newsy account of recent developments in the war with En-gland, and a passage at the end describedthe storm that had struck the enemy fleetthe previous month:

Bu h or wornd nd h dirlwrhip of h englih fl w lo, longwih i 90 cnnon nd 500 crw, of whichonly wo moor urvivd. In ddiion, hi v-

l crrid illion pir, of which 800,000wr for h Duk of svoy nd h r for hmrqui d Lgnz nd ohr individul.

This passage, Stemm had told me, wasamong the best evidence that the Sussexcarried a million pounds sterling in itshold when it sank. But the passage couldbe proof that there was considerably less

treasure on board. The term “piastres”—used throughout Europe at the time todenote pieces of eight, a basic unit of Spanish currency—varied in value fromcountry to country. The Livorno letter

was written in French to the French courtby a French-speaking official, and, as Od-

yssey admitted in the book, “In that pe-riod, the French, Spanish and Italiancoins were valued at just under one-fourthof an English pound sterling.”

W hether there is a four-billion-dol-lar treasure aboard the wreck thatOdyssey has discovered—and whetherthe wreck is the Sussex—will be resolvedonly when the company salvages the ship.But, more than four years after the Times asserted that the excavation was expectedto proceed, only a few artifacts have beenretrieved. Andalusia, an autonomous re-gion of southern Spain, disputed theSpanish government’s deal with Odyssey,asserting that its authorization was neces-

sary for the company to work in waters off southern Spain. The project remainedtangled in diplomatic red tape until a yearago, when Odyssey announced that An-dalusia would appoint Spanish archeolo-gists to observe the salvage operationaboard the Explorer, at which point theexcavation would go forward.

Yet, two months later, on May 18,2007, Odyssey announced the recovery of seventeen tons of coins not from the Sus-sex but from the ship code-named the

Black Swan. At the time of the find,Stemm was reading the financier NassimNicholas Taleb’s book, “The Black Swan”—Taleb borrows the term fromKarl Popper to describe improbable events

of great impact. “I knew when I wasthinking about the code name that it wasgoing to be world famous,” Stemm toldme. “And the treasure is a perfect ‘black swan’—one of those things that no onethought was possible. Everybody was fo-cussed on the Sussex. They were all talk-ing about that and then—boom! We

dropped seventeen tons of silver on thetable!”On May 19th, the Times heralded

“what may be the richest undersea treasurerecovery to date,” and Odyssey’s stock climbed briefly to an unprecedented highof $9.45 a share. In Spain, the reaction wasless enthusiastic. The Ministry of Cultureissued a press release stating that the trea-sure could be Spanish or have been re-moved from Spanish waters. Rumors cir-culated in the Spanish press that Odyssey

had broken its agreement to allow Span-ish archeologists to oversee the excavationof the Sussex and, using a code name, hadspirited the Sussex treasure to America.Several articles suggested that the treasurecame from the Merchant Royal, an En-glish ship that had been lost off Land’sEnd, near Cornwall, in September, 1641,reportedly carrying, among other treasure,a large payment intended for Spanishtroops serving in Belgium. (Under theterms of the Foreign Sovereign Immuni-

ties Act, of 1976—which holds that prop-erty of a foreign nation is immune fromclaims in the United States, unless it is inthe country as part of a commerical oper-ation—Spain could pursue a claim to thetreasure.)

The day after Odyssey announced thefind, Spain’s American lawyer, JamesGoold, sent a letter to a lawyer for Odys-sey, requesting information about theidentity of the Black Swan. He receivedno reply. (Odyssey denied receiving such

a letter.) In late May, Goold filed an own-ership claim on the Black Swan treasure inSpain’s name at the admiralty court in

Tampa. He also requested detailed infor-mation about the artifacts recovered fromthe site. Odyssey demanded that Spainfirst agree to abide by a “protectiveorder”—a confidentiality agreement that

would forbid the Spanish governmentfrom sharing the information with any-one. Spain refused “for a whole bunch of reasons,” Goold told me. He said that theorder did not state what information Od-

yssey would agree to disclose and that itcarried provisos that Spain considered



draconian. “All information would beprovided to only one particular authority in Spain,” Goold said. “I couldn’t show itto experts; if I showed it to the Ministry of Culture, then the Navy couldn’t see it, andso on.”

In July, Spain successfully petitionedBritain to release copies of the export doc-

uments that Odyssey had filed when itflew the Black Swan treasure from Gi-braltar to America. These stated that theship’s cargo—including hundreds of buckets of Spanish coins—had been re-covered from the Atlantic Ocean, twohundred miles west of Gibraltar. SeveralSpanish historians quickly surmised thatthe wreck was not the Sussex or the Mer-chant Royal but, rather, the Nuestra Se-ñora de las Mercedes, a Spanish Navy ship that had been sunk by British war-

ships in 1804 as it was returning to Sevillefrom South America with more than amillion silver and gold coins in its hold.Odyssey said that it could neither confirmnor deny this theory, and, by last fall, afterthe Guardia Civil briefly arrested Odys-sey’s ship, the Explorer, with twelve jour-nalists, including me, aboard, a protractedcourt battle between Spain and Odyssey over the Black Swan seemed inevitable.(The excavation of the supposed Sussex

was suspended indefinitely.)

After the History Hunters’ Web sitecrashed, in late 2006, Jim McManus

started posting his findings about Odys-sey on a Yahoo! Finance message board,

where Odyssey investors regularly congre-gate to discuss the company, often in op-timistic terms. “I now have no clue how high this could go,” one Odyssey watcher

wrote the day after the company an-nounced the Black Swan find and itsstock climbed above nine dollars. “$30

might actually be a reasonable prospect,but $50 if you factor in future earnings,the lack of any competition and the factthat there’s literally thousands of billionsof dollars (Is that trillions!) worth of lostcargo now looking very exposed on the seabed.” McManus, writing under the aliasDoc, gleefully recounted the details of thebattle between Odyssey and Spain overthe Black Swan and ridiculed the claimthat the treasure was worth five hundredmillion dollars. Photographs that Odys-sey released of Stemm with the Black Swan hoard suggested to McManus thatthe coins were not rare hand-stamped

seventeenth-century “cob coins”—whatthe Merchant Royal would have carried—but machine-made pieces, probably fromthe early eighteen-hundreds, and thus of far less value to collectors.

McManus also revealed details of lucra-tive sales of Odyssey stock by the compa-ny’s directors. S.E.C. filings, available on-line, showed that in the days after the stock

reached $9.45 John Morris had sold $1.36million in shares; his brother David, thecompany’s secretary and treasurer, sold$708,500, and George Becker, Jr., who

was then Odyssey’s executive vice-presi-dent, sold $402,750. “Why would anyoneholding this ‘Extremely Valuable Stock’ selleven one share when it will go to $20?????”McManus asked in one post. “You cer-tainly wouldn’t believe an Insider whoknows the real story would sell now would

you? LOL Doc.” He ended his posts with

the recommendation “Strong Sell.”Last September, Odyssey filed a libel

and defamation suit against McManus,accusing him of making “false, disparag-ing and damaging comments regardingOdyssey, its business, management per-sonnel, and recovery efforts.” Stemm toldme that McManus was “making stuff up.As a responsible move for our sharehold-ers, we had no choice but to sue him.”(McManus denied that he knowingly published false information. “I referencedeverything,” he told me.) In early Novem-ber, the Timesof London published an ar-ticle about several Odyssey executives’

stock sales, which added a new detail: onthe export documents filed in Gibraltar,the company had estimated the coins’

worth at far less than five hundred milliondollars. The company assigned them a

value of just under four million. TheTimesheadline was provocative: “SUNKEN

TREASURE ‘OVERVALUED TO LIFT

SHARES OF SALVAGE FIRM.’ ”

Three days after the story appeared, Imet with Stemm; his wife, Laurie; and hissons at a restaurant in Tampa. Stemm wasdressed in a blue Hawaiian-style shirt,

jeans, and Top-Siders, his silvering hairneatly blow-dried. “If we hadn’t beenthrough the S.E.C. thing, then I’d think this was really tough, what we’re goingthrough with Spain,” he said. “One man’snightmare is another man’s adventure; itcomes with the territory.” He dismissedSpain’s efforts to claim the Black Swan

treasure. “They are just bumbling around,”he said. “Just embarrassing themselves.First they said the Black Swan was theSussex, then they said it was the Mer-chant Royal, and now they’re saying wefound it in Spanish waters—or it’s theMercedes.” He insisted that Odyssey hadnot yet been able to identify the ship withcertainty and that it meant nothing thatthere were Spanish coins on board. “Dur-ing the colonial period, reals and escudos

were as ubiquitous as present-day Amer-ican dollars,” he said. “They could havecome from any ship of the time.”

Stemm had repeatedly told me that

“They’re willing to throw in their kidneys.”

• •

THENEWYORKER,APRIL7,2008 53



every search Odyssey undertakes is pre-ceded by detailed research into a partic-ular ship’s history, cargo, and likely wreck site. Yet he implied that the Black Swan find was unexpected, a notionthat was echoed, at dinner, by Laurie, who alluded to the “randomness” of thediscovery.

“Well, no,” Stemm interrupted. “Wehad a research area staked out.”“So you knew what you were looking

for,” I said.Stemm waved his hand dismissively.

“There were several potential shipwrecksin the area that we were looking for,” hesaid.

Even if the Black Swan turned out tobe a Spanish ship, Odyssey would still geta salvage award from the court, he wenton. “And those are generally up to ninety

per cent of the recovered treasure.” (Ac-cording to Goold, salvage awards thislarge are extremely rare.)

Stemm insisted that there was nothingunusual about the disparity between thehalf-billion-dollar valuation of the Black Swan treasure initially posted on Odys-sey’s Web site and the four million dollarsthat the company had cited on the exportforms. The latter figure, he explained,reflected the cost of recovering the coinsfrom the sea: “We’re required by the gov-

ernment to put a value that accounts forthe amount of money we spent findingand bringing the coins up. That figure hasnothing to do with what we’ll actually sellthem for, after marketing and advertisingthem. I mean, it’d be like someone gettingangry that an oil painting costs five thou-

sand dollars when the paint itself cost only a hundred and twenty-five!”

Nor, Stemm said, was there anythingsuspicious about the timing of Morris’sstock sales. “That was all done perfectly legally,” he said. “He sold nine per cent of his position. He made about a millionbucks. I mean, after twenty years with the

company. You know?” He went on, “Imean, I just sold some shares last week.About a hundred and sixty-five thou-sand—about nine per cent of my posi-tion.” (In 2006, Stemm’s salary was threehundred and forty-seven thousand dol-lars, and last year he received a bonus of two hundred and sixty thousand dollarsin cash and eighty-seven thousand sharesin Odyssey stock. In the ten years sincethe company went public, it has beenprofitable in only two, 2003 and 2004,

when it sold valuable coins from the Re-public; it operates at a loss of, on average,nearly twenty million dollars a year.)

Stemm says that a love of science, nota desire for profit, compelled him to foundOdyssey. “Archeology is my passion,” hetold me several times, and he argued thatthe company’s scientific work is of higherquality than that of some of the most re-spected archeological institutions. Heurged me to visit the company’s conserva-tion lab, where two staffers were cleaning

artifacts from the Republic; they wereleaching saline from pottery in baths of

water and removing encrustations from acannon using electrolysis. Some scholarsargue that Odyssey’s methods betray afundamental misunderstanding of marinearcheology. “Finding, raising, and con-

serving artifacts is no more archeology than my aunt’s careful collecting of Indianarrowheads on her South Carolina farm,”George Bass, of Texas A. & M., told me.In the late nineteen-seventies, Bass and ateam of specialists excavated an eleventh-century wreck off the southern coast of

Turkey. They spent years reassembling

the hull from a thousand fragments of wood, and the resulting structure has provided insights into a period of shipbuild-ing about which little was previously known. Over three decades, conservatorspieced together nearly a million fragmentsof glass retrieved from the wreck. These

yielded beakers, cups, bowls, and bottles,and, for the first time, information aboutmedieval Islamic glassware.

Last spring, in an essay published inthe online nautical-archeology journal

Shipwreck Central , James Delgado, the ex-ecutive director of the Institute of Nauti-cal Archaeology, at Texas A. & M., chal-lenged Stemm to prove that Odyssey ismore scientifically responsible than othertreasure-hunting companies. “The issue isone where the flash of gold and silver ob-scure or overwhelm the type of careful

work that yields treasures of a differentsort,” Delgado wrote. “We base our oppo-sition to treasure hunting on the track rec-ord of those years of lost opportunities

and lost history, and the challenge weissue to Odyssey is to show how they aredifferent.” In response, Stemm invitedDelgado to visit Odyssey’s offices and tourthe company’s conservation labs. But Del-gado told me that he has not yet done sobecause Stemm suggested that he wantedan endorsement after the visit. (Stemmdenied that he made such a request.) Del-gado also said that he was dismayed by Odyssey’s policy of selling the mass-pro-duced artifacts—chiefly coins—that it re-

trieves. “Numismatists are now studyingthe dispersal of coin based on each indi-

vidual coin and where they find it,” Del-gado told me. With respect to the fivehundred thousand coins found on theBlack Swan, he said, scholars will wonder,Are they all the same? What do they rep-resent? He added, “A detailed analysis of that entire collection might yield some re-ally fascinating insights into what’s goingon in minting processes, even down to thegrade of silver.”

Several archeologists I spoke with,pointing out that Odyssey, like Seahawk before it, has never published any of its“Take. Your. Time!”



findings in a peer-reviewed scientific jour-nal, said that they were skeptical of thecompany’s claim that it regards science asa priority. “It’s going to be twenty yearssince they salvaged the first so-called trea-sure,” Filipe de Castro, an assistant pro-fessor of nautical archeology at Texas A.& M., told me, referring to Seahawk’s ex-

cavation in the Dry Tortugas in the late-eighties. “They have not produced oneline—one line—of information that isrelevant for the history of seafaring or thehistory of technology, or whatever wouldbe expected.” (Stemm told me thatscientific journals have rejected paperssubmitted by archeologists on Odyssey’sstaff, on the ground that the company is atreasure-hunting firm.)

An archeologist who briefly workedfor Odyssey on a shipwreck, and agreed

to speak to me on the condition that henot be identified, said that he decided totake the job despite reservations. “They were saying, ‘Everything will be done ar-cheologically correctly; nothing will besold; we have unlimited funding’—anideal dream of how archeology should bedone with treasure involved,” the arche-ologist told me. He said that he wasshown Odyssey’s plan for excavating the wreck. “Their proposal was to uncoverthe top deck and then basically sink a

shaft straight through the decks down to where they perceived the bullion is,” hesaid. “In the process of sinking a shaft, you’re destroying the timbers, you’re de-stroying the frame of the ship, you’re de-stroying the artifacts, and basically you’remaking a mess.” The archeologist saidthat he resigned after it “became very clear that they only wanted the gold.”Stemm denied this account. “There are alot of people that have claimed to have worked with us in one way or another

over the years,” he wrote in an e-mail.“But the ridiculousness of claiming that we would ‘sink a shaft’ into a wreck sitesuggests that he might be confusing us with someone else.”

The first hearing on the Black Swantreasure was held one morning last

November in the U.S. District Courtin downtown Tampa. Spain had filed amotion requesting that the court com-pel Odyssey to disclose the identity of the Black Swan and allow Spain to in-spect the treasure, or, failing that, to voidthe company’s claim to the wreck. The

judge was Mark Pizzo, who ten years ear-lier had presided over the S.E.C. trial of Stemm, Morris, and Bagley. Stemm,dressed like a ship’s captain, in a double-breasted blue blazer with brass buttons,arrived at the second-floor courtroom,

where his wife and sons, along with sev-eral Odyssey executives and directors,

had already gathered. “I couldn’t decide whether to wear my Buccaneer tie,” he joked—but his eyes darted nervously to James Goold, the lawyer for Spain, agray-haired man in a rumpled blue suit,

who was arranging documents on anearby table.

During the hearing, Goold and Od- yssey’s general counsel, Melinda Mac-Connel, often spoke over each other inraised voices. Goold argued that it wasimplausible that Odyssey did not know

the identity of the Black Swan. “Odyssey has made it clear they’ve done vastamounts of research,” he told Judge Pizzo.“They don’t search the Atlantic at ran-dom. They don’t search the EnglishChannel at random. They know whatthese ships are. They tout that in their

Web site.” MacConnel insisted that Od- yssey did not know the ship’s identity andthat it could not reveal the location of thesite, for fear of looters. She also arguedthat details about the recovered artifacts

must remain secret to prevent speculationin the press about the ship’s identity,

which “could affect the value of ourstock.”

The hearing lasted two hours. JudgePizzo ordered the parties to work out aprotective order that would prevent de-tails about the shipwreck from fallinginto the wrong hands. When the hear-ing was over, Stemm approached Gooldat his table and in a hushed voice accusedhim of repeating lies about Odyssey

published in the Spanish press. (Stemmlater told me that he had said to Goold,“That stuff you said about Odyssey plun-dering the coastlines of Europe: if youbelieve that, you’re ignorant. And if youdon’t you’re dishonest.”) A lawyer forOdyssey hurried over and pulled Stemmaway. (In January, on the court’s order,Odyssey revealed to Spain the wreck’slocation and shared information aboutthe artifacts. In early March, the courtdismissed Odyssey’s claim for damagesagainst Spain.)

That afternoon, I drove with AladarNesser, Odyssey’s director of interna-

tional business development, to Stemm’slake house, twenty-five miles north of Tampa, a handsome shingled estate witha live-in groundskeeper and a boathousesheltering a pontoon boat, a waterskiingboat, a bass-fishing boat, a catamaran,and some kayaks and canoes. Stemm, who was waiting for us when we arrived,

also owns a town house in Tampa and, with members of his extended family, abeach house in Madeira Beach. In thekitchen, he opened a bottle of red wine—“A Spanish rioja would, I think, be ap-propriate,” he said. Then he and Nesser,glasses in hand, walked to a screened-inporch overlooking the lake. They weresoon joined by Mark Gordon, Odyssey’spresident and chief operating officer. The men reviewed the events of themorning. Stemm gleefully repeated a

comment that Goold had made when healluded to the most common exceptionto the United States’ sovereign-immu-nity rule entitling governments to claima lost ship: if the vessel is not a warshipbut a commercial ship. (Although theBlack Swan was not found in U.S. wa-ters, Spain claims that because Odyssey has transported treasure from the ship toFlorida the rule applies.) The SpanishNavy ship the Mercedes had been usedin several wars. Stemm argues, however,

that when it sank it was on a nonmilitary mission, transporting freshly mintedmoney from the New World, as well asother commercial cargo. As he put it,“The Mercedes was the FedEx of itsday!” It was the closest he had come toadmitting that the ship that Odyssey hadfound was the Mercedes.

Stemm noticed that Gordon was wearing a cap and a T-shirt emblazoned with logos from the Disney movie “Pi-rates of the Caribbean.” Last spring, Od-

yssey had used the Explorer and Zeus tosink, somewhere in the Mediterranean, atreasure chest containing fifty thousanddollars in gold coins and a key to a new Volvo—part of a treasure hunt that Dis-ney and Volvo had arranged to promote“At World’s End,” the third installmentin the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series.“In the past, we were always concernedabout a squeaky-clean corporate image,”Stemm said. “But people are really drawnto pirates now—look at Johnny Depp.So I mean, from a marketing standpoint,there are worse things to be associated

with than pirates!”

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