Will Finders Be Keepers of Salvaged Treasure?

Many archaeologists, citing the United Nations' 2001 convention on protecting underwater heritage, say that shipwreck sites should not be raided for profit. "In this case, you're looking at something which is a bottom-line business, and the guy is seeking to find things with pressure from investors and their own bottom line, so what protocols work for them certainly are not the same for us," said James Delgado, director of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University. "What's fascinating is seeing Greg Stemm trying to straddle the two worlds."

Given the value of the Black Swan site, Stemm said, "why in the world should we be disclosing where it is, when it's practically impossible to protect it?" Meanwhile, he said, Odyssey wants to return to the wreck to continue analyzing its identity, because for every ship it could be, "there is something that contradicts the evidence."

Spain's attorney in the case, James A. Goold of the Washington firm of Covington & Burling, called that "intentional ignorance."

"Everything points to Odyssey having known exactly what ship they were looking for and having then decided to claim it was unidentified," he said in a telephone interview.

"The law is quite clear that an owner of a ship remains the owner after it sinks, and a sovereign nation has a right to protect its cultural heritage," Goold said. "Spain has cultural heritage laws, and Spain has a program of underwater archaeology, and there are projects Spain undertakes by itself or with archaeological institutes for the public benefit, but not so someone can scoop up gold coins and sell them on eBay."

Odyssey's announcement in May that it had found a huge treasure stunned the Spanish government, which had just completed an agreement allowing the firm to begin work on another wreck found off Gibraltar, believed to be the 80-gun HMS Sussex. The Sussex sank in a severe storm in 1694 in waters that Britain and Gibraltar claim are international but that Spain claims as its own.

Spanish officials initially took the announcement to mean that Odyssey had excavated the Sussex in violation of the agreement, which they immediately canceled. Odyssey countered with a second announcement that the Black Swan was not the Sussex and that it lay in international waters.

"They say it's not the Sussex, but who knows?" said a spokesman for the Spanish Foreign Ministry who commented on condition of anonymity, citing ministry rules. "The information they have given regarding the so-called treasure is not complete, and it's very difficult to be certain where it comes from -- which oceans, what water, international or not, and from which ship," he said. People familiar with the case say that Spain has since concluded that the wreck is the Spanish galleon.

Spanish newspapers accused Gibraltar and Britain of complicity, saying they allowed the U.S. company to spirit away Spanish treasures through the tiny British territory at the entrance to the Mediterranean. Odyssey and the governments of Britain and Gibraltar denied that allegation, saying that Odyssey flew the haul out of the main airport in Gibraltar legally, complying with all customs requirements.

Within days, a Spanish judge launched an investigation and issued search and arrest warrants against Odyssey's two main ships, the recovery vessel Odyssey Explorer and the survey ship Ocean Alert.

On July 12, as the Ocean Alert tried to leave Gibraltar, it was stopped and forcibly boarded by Spanish maritime police just outside the three-mile limit of British-declared waters but inside the 12-mile zone that Spain declares as its territorial waters and that Britain asserts is international. Police took the boat into the nearby Spanish port of Algeciras, where it was searched and stripped of computer hard drives, maps and other items before being released a week later.

The British government sent Spain a strong note of protest, a spokeswoman at the British Embassy in Madrid said. But at the same time, she said, "we pushed Odyssey to be as transparent as possible, as quickly as possible."