Divers Gird for Battle on Shipwreck Ownership

Dropping 25 feet to the bottom, Steve Lawson began weaving his way lazily through the kelp toward the Palos Verdes shore.

The sand below him was strewn with rusted debris--the wreck of the Dominator, a World War II liberty ship that went aground in 1962. The vessel is a favorite stop for the California Wreck Divers club, of which Lawson is a member. Pounded for 25 years by surf, the wreckage now is a heap of rubble spread thinly over several hundred yards.

But one man’s rubble is another man’s treasure. Lawson, 22, drew a small hammer from a bag and swam into the mess, tapping and scratching here and there. A decaying round wheel caught his eye for a moment, but a tap of the hammer revealed it to be iron, so he let it be.

Later he found something worth keeping: a crusty old cage lamp with a brass insulator. “I have another one at home,” he explained after the dive. “I want to compare the two.”

Legislation Feared

Lawson’s hobby is collecting brass artifacts from shipwrecks. His fear is that pending federal legislation may seriously hamper that pursuit.

The proposed law would affirm state ownership of shipwrecks deemed historic. While it probably would not apply to relatively recent wrecks such as the Dominator, divers say, it would overturn hundreds of years of admiralty law and end forever the carefree climate in which organizations such as California Wreck Divers thrive.

“Our reason for being would cease,” said Jack Ferguson, a wreck diver for 17 years and dive master of the 500-member club. “It would turn us into outlaws.”

Said Rep. Charles E. Bennett (D-FLa.), whose bill has created the ruckus: “There are hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of century-old artifacts being (lost). What (people are) doing is . . . chipping away at Plymouth Rock.”

At the center of the controversy are the estimated 50,000 to 100,000 shipwrecks lying in waters regulated by the state and federal governments. For at least 200 years, they have been governed by federal admiralty law, which asserts that whoever finds a wreck has the right to salvage it and retain at least a portion of the take.

While some states have enacted their own shipwreck legislation, the courts have been inconsistent in declaring whether state laws take precedence over admiralty law. In California, for instance, would-be treasure hunters must obtain permits from the State Lands Commission, which requires them to share half their take with the state if the salvage is worth more than $25,000, or a quarter of it if the value is less.

But until recently, federal officials say, many states have been insensitive to the historic value of shipwrecks. Commercial salvors have often challenged state laws, and sports divers have routinely ignored them.

Bill Gleason, editor and publisher of the 220,000-circulation Skin Diver magazine, estimates that of the 1.2 million sport divers in the United States, about 400,000--including an estimated 56,000 in California--regularly dive on shipwrecks. In addition, he said, perhaps 100 full-time commercial salvors rely on wrecks to earn their livings from salvage.

The current controversy began in 1971, when Mel Fisher, a California chicken farmer turned treasure hunter, made a spectacular discovery off the Florida coast. He found the wreck of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha, a Spanish galleon that sank in a hurricane in 1622 bearing a vast treasure in gold and silver.

A long series of court battles ensued, pitting Fisher against the state of Florida and the federal government on the issue of who owned the spoils, now estimated to be worth more than $400 million.

So far, Fisher, who owns a commercial salvage company in Key West, has overcome most of the challenges. The courts have upheld admiralty law by denying government claims to the treasure. But in 1979, Rep. Bennett, who comes from Jacksonville, introduced a bill declaring old shipwrecks to be state-owned.

The proposal foundered that year, as have similar bills Bennett has introduced in every session of Congress since. This year, however, supporters of such legislation are more optimistic because key opponents have lost their seats and the recent discovery of the sunken liner Titanic has sparked public interest in the salvage issue. Divers throughout the country are taking Bennett’s efforts seriously.

Federal Ownership

His bill would essentially assign ownership of historically significant shipwrecks--defined as any wreck included in or “determined eligible” for the National Register--to the federal government, which would then transfer title to the states in which the wrecks were found.

Each state would be required to develop guidelines to protect its shipwrecks. Although the bill would require states to guarantee sport divers the continued opportunity for “recreational exploration of shipwreck sites,” it would also give states the power to prohibit divers from removing artifacts.

According to Jim Delgado, acting maritime historian for the National Park Service, which maintains the National Register, a site is eligible for inclusion only if the wreck is associated with events or people important to American history, is a good or only example of a specific type, or has the potential of yielding information important to the study of history.

The National Register now includes about 150 shipwrecks, only four of them off California, Delgado said. Another 12 off the California coast have been nominated for inclusion, pending approval by the secretary of the Interior.

“There’s a double standard in the country right now concerning shipwrecks,” Delgado said. “Shipwrecks are important national resources, yet (unlike some less significant sites on land), we’ve dealt with them as if they are renewable resources to exploit.”

Early in this century, he said, the systematic plundering of archeological sites on land, such as Indian cliff dwellings in the Southwest, led to National Park Service protection.

“It’s just as inappropriate now as it was then,” Delgado said. “I’d rather go to a museum and see a whole thing together with the story that it tells, than see a little shard of pottery on one person’s mantel and a spike on another’s.”

His concerns are echoed by many professional archeologists. The 1,900-member Society for Historical Archeology has hired a Washington lobbyist to push for passage of Bennett’s bill.

‘Damage Can Be Done’

“What often isn’t understood is the damage that can be done in removing objects without providing some sort of map,” said Don Hardesty, a University of Nevada anthropologist and president of the society. “Our information depends on the context of those objects.”

But divers say such arguments miss the point.

More than 90% of the known wrecks, they say, were discovered by sport divers. While some sell or trade what they find, most--motivated by the thrill of the hunt--simply polish artifacts for display in their homes or museums.

California Wreck Divers sponsors 20 to 30 programs a year for schools, churches and service clubs, where members exhibit and explain their findings. Rather than pillage history, the divers say, they preserve it.

The divers add that although the legislation would initially apply only to the 5% to 10% of wrecks estimated to be of historic interest, it would open the door to future legislation that could give the government control over all wrecks.

“It comes down to wanting all the power,” said Charles McKinney, executive director of the Washington-based Atlantic Alliance for Maritime Heritage and Conservation, a group formed four years ago to oppose shipwreck legislation.

“Already you have a lot of wrecks that just aren’t being given the attention they should be,” McKinney said. “The academics say, ‘Fine, we’ll wait until we have the resources,’ but the reality is that this material isn’t going to be around all that long.”

As evidence of the unenforceability of shipwreck legislation, many California divers point to the case of the Winfield Scott, one of only four Gold Rush-era steamships that operated along the West Coast in the mid-19th Century.

The ship sank off Anacapa Island on Dec. 2, 1853. Substantial portions of the wooden hull remained intact, as well as iron machinery and a large number of artifacts from shipboard stores, passengers’ baggage and provisions.

Today the ship is one of the California wrecks awaiting inclusion in the National Register. By a quirk of fate, however, the federal government has had the power to shield it from sport divers since 1935, when Anacapa Island was made a national monument--it is now part of Channel Islands National Park--and its waters were removed from the purview of admiralty law.

Protective Effort

The protective effort has been especially vigorous during the last five years, when National Park Service archeologists have tried to map and document the ship’s remains.

Yet, by most accounts, the effort has failed. Until recently, Delgado said, only seven divers had been cited for illegally removing artifacts from the Winfield Scott. Of those, five were successfully prosecuted. At the same time, he said, dozens of other divers have virtually pillaged the ship unimpeded.

“Of course you can’t really protect a wreck,” Delgado conceded. “We’re not in the business of being cultural cops.”

Supporters of Bennett’s bill point to states where they say local shipwreck laws have proven effective. A favorite example is Texas, where the discovery of a shipwreck nearly 20 years ago led to the adoption of protective measures considered stringent by national standards.

The wreck was that of the Espiritu Santo, a Spanish treasure ship lost off Padre Island in the Gulf of Mexico in 1554. Discovered by commercial salvors in 1968, the vessel was the object of an 18-year legal tug-of-war between its finders and the state over who should retain title. The state eventually won, although the courts gave a significant salvage award to the finders. But in the process, Texas officials say, scores of priceless artifacts were removed in ways that destroyed their archeological value.

To keep this from happening again, Texas in 1969 enacted legislation to protect any ship that sank in state waters before 1900. The law prohibits commercial salvors from exploiting such wrecks and allows sport divers to remove artifacts only in pursuit of state-approved archeological projects in which all finds remain in the public domain. Of the 1,700 known shipwrecks in Texas, said Barto Arnold, the state’s marine archeologist, the law applies to about 550.

The law has “worked very well” and has never been legally challenged, Arnold said, and shipwreck studies in Texas have increased dramatically since 1969.

He admitted, however, that the Texas law is far easier to enforce when applied to commercial salvors--who use large pieces of equipment for long periods of time--than to sport divers, who, though greater in number, tend to work in less visible ways.

Such concerns have prompted supporters of Bennett’s bill, such as Delgado, to hold out a hand of friendship to opponents in the sport diving community.

“No one I know really views sport divers as the enemy,” Delgado said. “I’d like to see archeologists and sport divers work together.”