As Rough As It May Seem,It's Still Steady As You Go...
Cultural heritage: Whose deep sea treasure is it really?
The United Nations 2001 convention on protecting underwater cultural
heritage was right to oppose the plundering of sunken archaeological
treasures for profit.
Unfortunately, only 15 countries have ratified the agreement, and the
plundering has begun.
In what may become the biggest underwater find ever, Odyssey Marine
Explorations, a commercial operation from Tampa, Florida, has
reportedly hauled 17 tons of gold and silver from a ship widely believed
to be the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes that was sunk
by a British warship off the coast of Portugal in October 1804.
British warships spotted the Spaniards in October 1804 andordered them to change course and sail for England.
Bustamente refused, a battle erupted, and Spain's 36-gun
Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes exploded and sank,
"breaking like an egg, dumping her yolk into the
deep," according to a Spanish account. The ship took with
it more than a million silver dollars freshly minted in
Spain's American colonies, documents of the time suggest.
The lost booty became the stuff of legend, one of the world's
great sunken treasures.
The company claims ownership of its find. And, of course, Spain is hiring
lawyers and preparing its legal claim to the trove, claiming a sovereign
nation's right over its cultural heritage.
It's clearly going to be a protracted legal battle, but we think it would
only be right to let another set of plaintiffs stake their claim to the
treasure, too: Spain's former colonies in Latin America, where the loot
was looted in the first place.
The hoard of gold and silver coins that sunk with the Mercedes was
probably minted in Peru - from where the galleon set sail for Cadiz,
via Montevideo, in March of 1804.
Though a potential Peruvian claim to the treasure would rest on
tenuous legal grounds - Peru wasn't even an independent country in
1804, but part of theSpanish empire - it certainly could make a sound
case based on moral considerations: The Inca didn't freely give gold
and silver to the Spanish invaders. Spain took it by force.
The moment seems ripe to reclaim long lost treasure. After stonewalling
Italian officials for years, the Getty, the Met and the Boston Museum of
Fine Arts have all agreed to return looted antiquities to Italy. Peru is
negotiating with Yale to recover thousands of pieces taken by Hiram
Bingham III from Machu Picchu in 1912 for a "loan" to the Peabody museum.
Two years ago, Italy returned to Ethiopia the 1,700-year-old Axum
obelisk, taken to Rome in 1937 on the orders of Benito Mussolini. And
it has promised to return a second -century Roman statue of Venus to
Libya, where Italian troops stole it in 1913.
Admittedly, these cases of theft are much more recent, not on the
appalling scale of the Spanish crown's conquest and plunder of Latin
American treasure hundreds of years ago.
But if Greece can insist on the ownership of the Elgin Marbles, which
Lord Elgin took from the Parthenon to ship to the British Museum in
1801 - when Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire - Peru surely has
a shot at the gold of Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes.
The fate of the recovered treasure is likely to be defined now in a federal
court in Tampa, where Odyssey quietly stashed the hoard before
announcing its find.
When the lawyers from Odyssey face off with those representing Spain,
perhaps Peru's lawyers should come, too.
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