Inside the world of the shipwreck hunters (and the treasures yet to be found)

Telegraph

19-06-2025

' Shimmering gold lies in wait… ' promises the website of treasure hunter Martin Bayerle. It is now 44 years since he discovered the ' billion dollar wreck ' of the RMS Republic, the White Star Liner that sank in 1909, three years before its famous sister ship, Titanic.
The American adventurer, looking every inch the pirate in his eyepatch covering his left eye – which he lost the use of at 11 after an explosive accident – is still hoping to return to the wreck to recover an estimated 45 tons of gold that has lain 270ft beneath the Atlantic waves where vessel sank, about 50 miles south of Nantucket Island.
But, perhaps somewhat hopefully, he is now seeking strangers to back an online crowdfunder to bankroll a proposed £372,000 salvage operation this year. The fund's total is currently £109,000, but the appeal's website claims it, 'now has the resources to plunder the Republic's riches and reward the team and himself with the biggest pay day in the history of maritime treasure hunting'. Shipwrecks, and specifically the hunt for them, is just having a moment after the San José, laden with gold, was found off the coast of Colombia, sparking an international row over who owned the booty.
And the final resting place of Captain Cook's Endeavour was confirmed, off Newport Harbour, Rhode Island.
'It's possible that more investors will be tempted by this week's news reports of the gold coins seen aboard the wreck of the San José [the 300 year old Spanish galleon believed to be carrying more than £12 billion worth of gold] off the coast of Colombia,' says maritime historian Richard M Jones, referring to Bayerle's hopes. 'But for every treasure hunter who made a profit searching for treasure on the seabed, I could probably find you a thousand who lost everything.'
Jones, 44 – who has published over 20 books on shipwrecks – admits there's 'an obvious romance' to the lure of sunken treasure. He drifts into a reverie himself, describing the jewel encrusted copy of the edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám – still believed to be sealed into a safe on Titanic – with 1,050 specially cut rubies, topazes and emeralds set into its gold and leather binding. Like many armchair adventurers, he fantasises about being involved in the discovery of 'holy grail' wrecks, such as the Portuguese carrack, Flor de la Mar, which sank in 1511 with the loss of 400 souls while transporting an estimated £1.9 billion of spoils home from the conquest of Malacca. Or, the more mysterious Spanish galleon San Miguel, which sank off Santo Domingo in 1551 carrying an unknown quantity of stolen Inca and Aztec artefacts looted by the conquistadors.
Others are quickly skeptical of Bayerle's ambitions: '$500,000 wouldn't even begin to get that salvage operation started,' says Mensun Bound, the British maritime archaeologist, nicknamed the 'Indiana Jones of the Deep', who located Ernest Shackleton's ship, Endurance, beneath the ice of the Weddell Sea in 2022. 'It would cost millions to get that gold up, if it's even there.'
After a lifetime of undersea exploration, Bound knows first hand that discovering gold isn't all it's cracked up to be. In 2001, he and his team excavated the Portuguese ship Espadarte, which sunk in 1558. 'We were pulling up Ming porcelain but finding [50kg of] gold was absolutely terrifying. Oh god. Like the novelist Jack London says, 'gold changes you'. It does.
'From one day to the next we became very furtive, untrusting. If any of the boat handlers knew what we were bringing up in our wetsuits they would have slit our throats and disappeared with the loot. We dug up the tiles in my bedroom, put the gold under them and tarred them over. For eight to nine months I slept over all that gold, which was very scary.' How much was it worth? 'I don't know. It wasn't ours.' He explains they were working under licence for a government he'd rather I don't name.
Jones prefers to do his exploring from the safety of his local library in Flamborough Head on the Yorkshire coast. 'Although you need millions to find and salvage wrecks, you can do a lot of the detective work for the price of a few stamps, by combing your way through the national archives.' Obsessed with wrecks, since he watched the Titanic raised on TV aged 11 (and attending a Titanic convention to shake the hand of a survivor five years later), Jones began investigating shipwrecks in earnest in 2003, starting with the Great Gale of 1871. 'For a century people had said 70 people were killed on 30 boats. By studying the archives I found there were 28 boats and only 50 killed, including the lifeboatmen.' He was learning that, when it comes to the mysterious seas, 'People have a tendency to sensationalise, to let their imaginations take over because there is no evidence left to observe.'
Hitting the jackpot
Some treasure hunters hit the jackpot. Jones reminds me that in 1981, American treasure hunter Mel Fisher made worldwide headlines when he discovered the wreck of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha, declared the world's most valuable shipwreck by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2014. The Spanish galleon was sailing from the 'New World' to Spain, when it was hit by a hurricane and sank in 1622 with a cargo of 40 tons of gold and silver and around 70 pounds of Colombian emeralds.
'But Fisher paid a terrible price for his obsession with that treasure,' says Jones. 'In 1975 one of the boats involved in his quest sank. His son (Dirk, 21), daughter in law (Angel, 25) and a diver (Rick Gage, 21) all drowned.' Jones exhales. 'After that I guess he had to keep going or the loss would have been in vain. But how to do you celebrate the treasure after all that? Was it really worth it?'
After an eight-year legal battle with the state of Florida, Fisher was able to keep the loot (then estimated to be worth £335 million) and appeared on the Johnny Carson show wearing the salvaged 'money chain', a gold necklace worth £74,000 reaching to the waist. But he was also fined for damaging the ecosystem of the seabed, and by 1998, pleaded guilty to selling counterfeited gold Spanish escudo coins, which he had claimed came from the wreck. He was ordered to pay £50,000 to customers who bought the fakes.
Bound and Jones say the legal hassles alone make treasure hunting a poor investment choice. Jones points to the America Odyssey Marine Exploration team who went in search of the Royal Merchant in 2007. Nicknamed 'The El Dorado of the Seas' this English Merchant ship was lost off the Cornish coast in 1664 while carrying a rumoured £100,000 worth of gold (over $1.5 billion in today's money), 400 bars of Mexican silver (another $1 million) and nearly 500,000 pieces of eight.
'The operation was conducted in secret in the hope that the discovery would not be hijacked by other companies,' says Jones. 'Meantime, footage released of the treasure being flown to the United States showed boxes full of coins, but while the press were suggesting that this was the discovery of the Royal Merchant, the Spanish government realised that the team had actually located the warship Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, sunk in 1804 after a battle with the British.'
In 2013, the Odyssey team had to hand 14.5 tons of treasure over to the Spanish after a court order was issued.' Jones chuckles. 'Imagine going to all the effort and expense only to lose the lot! And we still haven't found the Royal Merchant!'
He goes on: 'One of the greatest treasures ship is the Blessing of Burntisland. It is believed to be an entire King's treasure loaded about the ferry in 1633. But it hit a squall, rolled over and sank. I first got interested in 1992 when I heard a news report that they were looking for it. The explorers were dressed up as King Charles I on the harbour mouth.
'In 1999 there were news reports that it had been found, there was a book and a website which has since been taken down. There is just no information. It leads me to believe they didn't find it – oops we got the wrong wreck. Nothing has been confirmed. Technically it is still out there for the taking.
'But because the Firth of Forth is a shipping channel, it has so many wrecks it would be very hard to figure out what's what. There is a liner that was converted to carry aircraft down there. There is so much and the Blessing is a wooden ship full of silver, it will be under the sea bed – the currents will have piled mud on mud.'
Tales of heroic failure
Jones stressed that the history of wreck hunting is littered with such tales of heroic failure. 'In 1986 Danish wreck hunter, Aage Jensen, found the wreck of the German submarine U-534, sunk by the RAF of the Danish island of Anholt in 1945.' Many believed she was carrying Nazi gold to South America.' But when they finally got her up, although there was a guide to South America, there was no Nazi gold. Instead they found 200 condoms!' He says that, 'U-534 is actually a wonderful historic find. It contained an enigma machine and an enigma decoded messages informing the crew that Hitler was dead.' The submarine became a museum in Birkenhead and a new visitor centre is planned for 2026.
Jones also notes that 'treasure hunters can also forget that many of these wrecks are war graves'. 'The HMS Edinburgh, sunk by a German U-boat in 1942, went down with a crew of 58 and 465 gold bars, intended as payment from Russia to America for war equipment,' he added. British diver and treasure hunter Keith Jessop found it in 1981 – with $36 (£26.8) million going to the Russians and the other $36 million split between him and his secret investors. But Jones points out the headlines were all about the money and not the deceased sailors.
'Although people focus on the treasure, there is often more money to be made from the history,' says Jones. He points out that the Tudor navy's Mary Rose, raised from the seabed in 1982 – with an estimated 60 million viewers watching TV coverage – now makes over £3 million per year as a tourist attraction. 'In the long term, history can pay more than chests full of treasure,' he says. 'The same goes for good, liveable wrecks. If you really wanted a return on your investment you wouldn't gamble on salvage operations. You'd buy an interesting old ship, sink it on a pretty reef and start a local dive centre!' As an example, he points to the wreck of the Swedish ferry Zenobia, which sank on its maiden voyage from Cyprus in 1980. Now rated one of the world's top ten wreck dives, Jones says it has 'totally regenerated the local tourist industry'.
Bound agrees that there might be some truth in that, but the man who has pulled a staggering array of 'wonders' from the deep – ranging from an Ancient Greek bronze helmet through to Ming vases and Tudor longbows – says there is nothing quite like the thrill of finding that your 'X' really does mark the spot. When he located Endurance, 100 years to the day after the polar explorer was buried in 1922, he 'felt the breath of Earnest Shackleton on the back of my neck'. He says there was 'crazy whooping and shouting on the bridge' of his search vessel. 'I had predicted the Endurance would be in very good condition, and she was. It was as if we had opened the freezer and there she was, just waiting for us.'