Find Gold While Diving?

Perhaps the three most common questions asked of divers by non-divers are: 1) How deep do you go? 2) Have you ever seen a shark? And 3) Have you ever found any treasure?

Finding treasure while diving has ramifications. A story that has been in the making for 30 years is just now nearing a conclusion. French prosecutors have gathered enough evidence -- including a confession from wreck-looting diver Yves Gladu and gold bars in hand reportedly sold by American couple Gay and Philip Courter -- to formally request that these three and another defendant stand trial for trafficking stolen treasure. The gold, they say, is from an 18th-century shipwreck, the Le Prince de Conty, an East Indiaman sunk in a storm in 1746 off the French coast.

Gay Courter, an American best-selling author, said she was given the gold by French friends, Annette May Pesty, 78, and her now-deceased partner, Gérard. According to the Courters, telling them that his brother-in-law, Yves Gladu, an underwater photographer, had recovered them from a wreck.

Fifteen years later, in 1999, Pesty appeared on the BBC television program Antiques Roadshow with several gold bars. Pesty told the Roadshow appraiser that she discovered the gold while diving off the west African island of Cape Verde.

In 2010, the Courters began selling their bars on eBay, referencing Pesty's 1999 Antiques Roadshow appearance, and linking the sale to the plundered shipwreck. They netted more than $192,000. However, in 2018, a French underwater archaeologist, Michel L'Hour, spotted a listing for the five gold bars, made the connection, and told U.S. officials that they were stolen cultural property from the 1746 shipwreck, the Le Prince de Conty. U.S. authorities seized the gold, and in 2022, it was returned to France. The Courters were arrested in the UK in June 2022, while disembarking from a cruise ship, and eventually allowed to return home in Florida. A French judge is expected to decide soon whether to bring the case to trial.

"Finders, Keepers, Losers, Weepers" does not apply to underwater treasure with historical value.

Rules Vary from Country to Country

A rule of thumb is that if you find anything of historical value, someone else, such as the country of origin, even the state where you find it, and even insurers have a stake, as much 18th century cargo was insured (the concept was created in 1689 at Lloyds Coffee House in London, the predecessor of Lloyds of London). If a diver doesn't report a find and authorities discover the cache, they will seize it and prosecute the finder. Much gets turned over to museums.

That said, when Mel Fisher discovered the wreck of the Spanish galleon, the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, over a period of the 1970s, Florida wanted a cut, and he took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor in 1982, awarding his company exclusive rights to the treasure as its rightful salvors under admiralty law.

In the UK, finding gold or other treasures of unknown ownership is deemed "Treasure" and belongs to the Crown. Finding gold and not declaring it is basically stealing it.

This didn't stop two Brits who, while diving in the upper reaches of the river Thames, near Windsor, stumbled across a collection of glittering gold hairpins on the river bed and used their proceeds to fund a business start-up. They were cautious enough to salvage only a small number of pins at one time, kept their lips sealed, and sold the gold for scrap value.

What are these pins? In Tudor times, the 16th century, when the river was a main thoroughfare, wealthy nobles built their houses along its banks, and while palaces like Hampton Court were preserved, the timber-framed houses have long gone. Tudor noblemen often installed their lovers in these out-of-town houses and showered them with gifts such as gold pins to maintain hairstyles. These were probably all the unfortunate ladies had once they fell out of favor. Hence the expression "pin money." One can assume that the gold pins the diver later found ended up in the river after a boat accident or some petulant act.

Current Discoveries

Europe's Mediterranean and Atlantic Coasts have innumerable treasures, and of course, they are not for divers to keep.

In 2021, off the coast of Spain, two snorkelers spotted a few coins while picking up trash from the bottom. Knowing the law, they informed the authorities. Their reward? They were lauded, while the 53 late-Roman gold coins went to museums.

Off Sardinia, a beach diver in 2023 alerted authorities after seeing coins in shallow sand near Arzachena; the culture ministry's team soon lifted an estimated 30,000-50,000 coins from the water. In Italy, underwater antiquities are state cultural property.

A scuba diver in Israel, near Haifa in 2021, noticed a 900-year-old sword exposed by shifting sand and turned it over to the Israel Antiquities Authority, receiving a commendation. Under Israeli law, such antiquities belong to the state. But he did receive a commendation.

In the UK in 2007, Vincent Woolsgrove found five cannons on a 17th-century wreck off the Essex coast, retrieved and stored them, declaring only two. He sold the others to a U.S. collector for about $50,000. When questioned by authorities, he claimed to have found them in international waters, but after many years of investigation, authorities determined otherwise. In 2015, Woolsgrove was sentenced to two years in jail for the fraud and was fined more than US$40,000.

Some treasure finding can lead to a happier outcome. Reg Vallintine, a British recreational diving pioneer, once operated a dive center on the Italian island of Giglio, site of the sinking of the ocean liner, the Costa Concordia, in 2012. In the 1970s, Vallintine escorted his visiting divers to an old wreck 165 feet deep and the wreck proved rich pickings. One of his divers was a dentist in everyday life.

One day, Mensun Bound, an underwater archaeologist from Oxford University, was sitting in his dentist's waiting room when he noticed an ancient Etruscan vase sitting on a shelf. He asked his dentist where he got it. Vallintine's wreck turned out to be a 6th-century BC Etruscan merchant vessel.

Luckily, Vallintine had kept extensive diaries, including the names of all the divers he had taken to Giglio. Authorities were able to trace and recover the artifacts and souvenirs each had, save for a bronze Corinthian soldier's helmet a German diver had squirrelled away in a bank vault and refused to release. Today, the top floor of the national underwater museum at Porto Santo Stefano is dedicated to the finds from the Giglio shipwreck.

Today's Treasures

Two years ago, at Plymouth Hoe in England, a local diver poking around under an old pier found 300 20th-century coins. Because they were of no archaeological significance, she kept them. However, the best treasures ordinary American divers find are class rings and wedding bands. In August, Logan Barnard, a Dive Kauai instructor, spotted something gleaming on the bottom -- a Rolex watch.

It turns out in December 2023, a diver named Gregory Greer from Falls Church, Virginia, lost his 2002 Rolex Datejust on a Kauai dive. He and others searched to no avail, so he reported it and offered a $2,000 reward to whoever found it. When Barnard heard about the missing watch story, he contacted Greer and arranged to have it returned. Barnard refused the $2,000 reward -- he said returning it was reward enough: "If I can make his day by returning this watch, that's the priority."

So, when someone asks Barnard if he has ever found treasure while diving, he indeed has a story to tell.