14 DAY TRIAL // An American judge is soon expected to decide on the faith of what some term the largest treasure to have ever been recovered from the ocean depths. Last year, the Odyssey Marine Exploration company found something off the coast of Portugal that made the Spanish government tremble with excitement – a long-forgotten pile of coins and other valuable items, now worth well over 500 million dollars.
All the goods were being carried from Peru to Spain by the Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes vessel, when the ship was engaged and sunken by an English fleet. More than 250 men lost their lives in the incident, and just under 40 survived the attacks.
For all the subsequent years, the loot remained buried in the sands off the coast of Portugal, until an OME expedition discovered it last year. Now, all the artifacts are stored in one of the company's warehouses, and their fate will soon be decided.
“The ship is the history and national patrimony of Spain, not a site that may be covertly stripped of valuables to sell to collectors. Odyssey was well aware that it is off limits,” James Goold, who is Spain's attorney in the American court, argued.
“We suggested, ‘You know what? Let’s do a split here. You should have all the cultural artifacts.’ We said, if this is a Spanish shipwreck, we think that the cultural artifacts should go to Spain. We just think we should be properly rewarded for spending the money, doing great archeology,” Greg Stemm, the CEO of Odyssey Marine Exploration, said on Tuesday on TODAY. “It cost millions and millions of dollars to do this work,” he added about the excavation, although he failed to mention the exact sum.
“The Mercedes, if it was the Mercedes, was carrying a merchant cargo. While governments can take a sovereign immune warship and say that nobody can salvage it, they can’t say that you can’t salvage goods on behalf of merchants. In fact, we have the descendants of a lot of the merchants that had goods aboard the Mercedes that have come into court and said, 'We think Odyssey should salvage these goods for us,'” Stemm stressed, saying that there was no way of knowing that the coins came from the Mercedes.
Still, the ship was hit in its powder magazine during the battle, so no evidence remained on the ocean floor. Still, the fact that the OME collected the coins from a very large area, spanning the length of several football fields, seems to point that, indeed, the loot came from the Spanish vessel.