Canadian divers agree to share their undersea finds with Cuba
By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff, 3/9/2001.
Boston Globe
MONTREAL - As frustrated US researchers look on, Canadian treasure hunters,
with special blessings from Fidel Castro, are leading a bullion rush into the
waters off Cuba, graveyard for hundreds of Spanish galleons that fell victim to
jagged reefs, pirate attacks, and fearsome storms over more than three
centuries.
The Western Hemisphere's lone outpost of Communism, desperate for cash, is
forging unusual alliances with capitalist sea dogs, granting them salvage rights
to vast swaths of sea in exchange for a cut of the potential bounty.
The payoff could be fabulous. Billions of dollars in lost bullion and gems,
as well as a trove of archeological remnants, lie among the razor-edged coral
formations and the treacherous shoals off western Cuba and the Isle of Youth,
according to treasure hunters and maritime historians.
''Cuban waters are full of untouched wrecks,'' said Paul Frustaglio,
president of Visa Gold Explorations, a Toronto company that wants to map the
sites of sunken galleons by combining high-technology underwater search gear
with painstaking research in dusty shipping archives in the old Spanish seaports
of Seville and Cadiz.
''These are probably the richest unexplored waters in the world,''
Frustaglio said. ''There are fortunes to be found, and we're going to find
them.''
That prospect makes some marine archeologists blanch, especially given the
technology that allows treasure seekers to find and pluck glittering bounty from
depths that were beyond reach a decade or so ago.
''The entrepreneurs have their history right; those waters are surely rich
in wrecks,'' said Samuel P. Turner, an archeologist and historian with the
Institute of Maritime History in Biddeford, Maine. ''But that doesn't mean they
should be looted.
''Treasure hunters are strip miners of shipwrecks, hauling out the bullion
and blowing off the history,'' Turner said.
The two rival Canadian teams working in Cuban waters adamantly dispute that
view.
Frustaglio insists that his diving teams have taken extreme care in removing
7,000 artifacts from the company's first big find, the remains of a 19th-century
Spanish brigantine, the Palemon, located last year. The artifacts include
diamond-encrusted jewelry, yes, but also horse saddles, perfume bottles, crystal
ware, and cutlery, all of more historic interest perhaps than cash value.
''Many artifacts we bring to the surface will stay in Cuba, becoming part of
the national patrimony,'' said Frustaglio, who operates from Havana's Hemingway
marina.
The other Canadian company probing the Cuban deep is Advanced Digital
Communications, a British Columbia salvage firm that grabbed world headlines
last October when it located the USS Maine.
The sinking of the Maine in Havana harbor, after an explosion on Feb. 15,
1898, killed 260 US sailors and ignited the Spanish-American War.
The ship was raised by the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1912, towed to sea,
and scuttled in deep waters with full military honors. Its exact resting place
had been unknown.
Finding the Maine at 3,700 feet was more or less an accident. It was located
as Advanced Digital's deep-sea research vessel, the 250-foot MV Ulises,
electronically scoured the seabed about 4 miles outside Havana Harbor for a test
run of its equipment.
''Finding the Maine was exciting, but for us the real significance is that
it showed we can do what we need to do: locate wrecks with precision, ascertain
what ship they are, and what cargo they might have carried,'' said Ernesto
Tapanes, who runs Advanced Digital with his marine-engineer mother, Paulina
Zelitsky. ''We're after treasure galleons that went down en route to Havana.''
For three centuries, beginning in 1519, Havana served as an assembly port
for huge flotillas that twice a year carried the riches of the New World to the
coffers of imperial Spain, under the protection of heavily armed men-of-war.
The voyages started in Cartagena, Porto Bello, Veracruz, and other harbor
settlements on the Spanish Main, where transport galleons were loaded with gold
from Peru, Colombian emeralds, Venezuelan pearls, and Mexican silver.
Harried by pirates, navigating only by com, sextant, and hand-drawn
charts, the heavy-bellied ships from Colombia and Panama followed a course
through the narrows of the Yucatan Channel before beating a sweeping loop across
the Gulf of Mexico, then tracking south to Havana.
There they were ed by the silver fleet from Vera Cruz, deep-laden with
ingots.
''On the way to Havana, they were smashed by storms, foundered on reefs or
shoals, and were preyed upon by pirates,'' Tapanes said. ''Many hundreds were
lost over the decades. Off Cabo San Antonio and off the Isle of Youth, we are
convinced there will be a high concentration of wrecks.''
Fidel Castro, a keen skin diver, is known to be fascinated by treasure lying
tantalizingly beyond the reach of his country, which lacks the technological and
financial wherewithal to mount serious searches. So over the past two years, a
handful of foreign companies have been granted exploration rights, parceled out
like oil concessions, with the Castro government guaranteed a 50 percent split
of any spoils.
Teams from South Africa, Italy, and have also secured search rights,
but the Canadians are leading the pack. They have scored the only successful
finds so far, and they boast the most advanced gear: side-scan sonar, metal
sensors that can detect a cannon or large anchor 8 feet beneath the sand,
submersible robots, and minisubmarines.
''Until very recently, only major nations and big oil companies had the
resources to operate our kind of vessel and equipment,'' said Tapanes. ''We're
doing cutting-edge work with extreme deep-water equipment.''
Visa Gold Explorations, which has no connection to the credit card firm, is
working shallower waters. Besides the Palemon, the company has located three
other promising sites, wrecks whose identity and worth have yet to be
determined.
The wreckage of the Palemon is already under salvage. The vessel is Spanish,
but of the wrong vintage and carrying no fortune; the 164-ton brigantine, en
route to Havana from , struck a reef just off Cuba on April 15, 1839,
going down with a cargo of fabrics, woodware, perfumes, cosmetics, and
miscellaneous ware, from horse stirrups to billiard balls. Some jewelry has also
been retrieved.
''It's still the richest haul in Cuban waters so far,'' said Frustaglio, who
says the company will turn a profit on the Palemon by selling artifacts through
international auction houses.
The opening of Cuba's seabed to treasure seekers has raised varying degrees
of envy and outrage among onlookers in the United States.
American scientists, marine historians, and salvage outfits are mostly
banned from Cuban waters because of decades of bad blood between Castro and
Washington, dating from the 1961 CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion, which
failed to topple the Communist government.
By contrast, Canada has good ties with Castro and has become Cuba's most
important economic partner.
''In Cuba, everyone is beating us to the punch,'' said Frank Muller-Karger,
professor of marine science at the University of Southern Florida, who says he
envies the Canadians conducting oceanographic research in Cuban waters.
Marine archeologists raise different concerns.
''Shipwrecks deserve protection, like any important historic sites,'' said
Stefan H. Claesson, president of the Institute of Maritime History. ''Cuba risks
the pillaging of 500 years of seagoing history for a quick dollar.''
A few Caribbean countries have banned treasure hunting altogether, convinced
that wrecks are best left to the sea.
Modern treasure hunters defend their work, saying that they bring an
environmental and historic sensibility to salvage efforts.
''We're running a business, yes. We expect to profit, and profit well,''
Frustaglio said. ''But we are also preserving history. Part of what we salvage
will go to Cuban museums, pieces of the past recovered for people of our times
to ponder.''
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 3/9/2001.
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