Ocean Killings

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters, These see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep. For He commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof.

--"Psalms," 107

A Mile off the Coast of Santo Domingo, the winds are at 15 knots and the seas are running four to seven feet. The skies are the color of lead and the air presses down like a wet blanket on our faces. Even through the gray haze, the sun burns in a perfect circle of light. Eyes sting with the brightness and the salt spray. The sunlight dances across the chopp, breaking into a million diamond pin points, as the boat heads out to sea.

The sea was like this on the November day Burt Webber found beneath these waters a Spanish treasure galleon with a cargo worth an estimated $190,000,000. And off the Florida Keys, Mel Fisher maneuvered through such swells to find a treasure wreck worth $100,000,000. There is a need to be on these waters, even if you're a landlubber. There is a need to feel what the treasure hunter feels. To look out at the vastness of the water, to imagine what fantastic riches lie beneath the waves and to realize how enormously difficult it is to succeed where literally hundreds have failed.

A sleek-backed porpoise, silver and gray in the sunlight, breaks water off our port beam and runs with the boat. The sea teems with life: tarpon, turtle, porpoise. But, like the shark and the barracuda, the treasure hunter looks for death and the signs of death.

He looks for the reef that shattered the worm-eaten hulls of the galleons. He looks for the sand bar they foundered upon. He looks for the mistake, the unavoidable act of nature that spilled the gold coin and silver bar out of the bursting treasure holds and into the sea to rest on the flamingo-colored coral or to be buried in the soft sand.

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They took this route, the Spaniards, in heavy, slow galleons unable to sail more than a few degrees into the wind. They were loaded--overloaded--with the treasures of a brave and innocent New World. A New World being systematically raped by the technology of the Old. Armed with sailing ships, armor, gunpowder, cannon and the mounted horse, the Spaniards looted at will. At first, for scores of years, they had only to scoop up what the Indians had already fashioned. Later, the Indians would be made slaves in the mines to extract what remained.

Between the early 1500s and the early 1800s, the Spaniards extracted what today would be worth about 215 billion dollars from the New World. And because they traveled these Caribbean waters, waters laced with coral reef and sand bar, marauded by hurricane and pirate, not all made it from the New World to the Old.

You can take your pick of figures. Some say 20 percent of the treasure didn't make it. Some say ten. It doesn't matter who is correct. If you take the lowest figure, the amount is still over 20 billion dollars. That's billion, with a B.

More than 400 years later, little has changed. The coral still grows, encrusting doubloon and silver bar, covering goblet and chalice and bronze cannon. The men who sailed those vast lumbering treasure ships--pájaros puercos, or flying pigs, as the sailors of the day called them--are long gone to the fishes and salt water.

But although currents alter and sand bars shift and the sea life grows, men do not change. Today, on any given day, they sail these waters once again, using their technology to extract riches, but this time they use the technology of the New World to rape the Old.

It is a technology of cesium magnetometers, aluminum scuba tanks, twinscrewed motor yachts and hydrosuction hoses. And more. It is the technology of banking consortiums, stock offerings, big men who know how to attract big money. It is the technology of the press, how much a docudrama or TV special can be worth, not just in publicity but in the actual value of the treasure coins found.

"You can call it romantic if you want to," a treasure-hunting banker told me, while sipping coffee in the Nicolás de Ovando Hotel in Santo Domingo. "I call it good business. It makes sense. It makes profit. It's better than oil. The riskreward ratio is favorable."

The Spaniards knew about risk-reward ratios, even if they didn't call them that. Not until Germany a few centuries later would there ever be such bureaucrats. Every gold ducado, escudo and doubloon, every silver real, every pig and goat, every plate of china and bolt of silk, every block of indigo, every man and cannon ball was recorded in triplicate.

And at the House of Trade in Seville, every record was kept. Significantly, the vast trading house--whose records still exist--was set up in 1503, while Columbus was still careening around the Caribbean on his fourth voyage. The Spaniards set up their countinghouse even before the first gold coin had been minted. They had no worries. They knew the treasure was there.

"It's there, all right, it's still there," said Bleth McHaley, spokesperson for Mel Fisher's Treasure Salvors in Key West, Florida. "You have to keep in mind one thing. People who have made the kind of money to invest in treasure hunting have done it in dull and boring ways. They are no longer excited by money, but they are by the hunt for money. By the hunt for treasure. We sell the mystique as much as we sell the treasure."

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Spain kept her best ships to defend her coast line and the New World got the rest--consumed by the wood-eating teredo of the Caribbean; holds, passageways and decks piled too high and wide with treasure, cannons, livestock, trade goods, passengers, soldiers and slaves; the high sterncastles and forecastles lending to their instability. The miracle is not that so much treasure lies beneath these waters but that so much made it to Spain.

Not only did the ships carry the registered cargo, with 20 percent--the royal fifth--going to the king of Spain, but at least another fifth was illegally smuggled on board. Armed with compasses and simple navigational instruments, the two great Spanish treasure fleets would sail out of Havana to catch the darker blue waters of the Gulf Stream and whip around into the Atlantic on their voyage home. Not until the 17th Century did any man know how to figure longitude on a daily basis. They sailed by dead reckoning and by constant prayer. Every sailor who sailed in the Spanish fleet knew the 107th Psalm and the awesome power of God and His storms. He could, indeed, lift up the waves. And often did.

On September 13, 1641, the Flota Nueva España left Havana en route to Spain. This New Spain Fleet carried chiefly the treasures of Mexico and Peru and had harbored at Vera Cruz before making for Cuba and the return trip home. At Vera Cruz, it had also picked up porcelain, silks and spices from the Orient, which had been transported overland by burro from Acapulco.

There were 13 ships, and one of the biggest was the Nuestra Señora de La Limpia Y Pura Concepción. If that long name seems vaguely familiar, you probably read it a few months ago on the front page of The New York Times or saw it in Time along with the name Burt Webber, a barrel-chested former brickmaker and encyclopedia salesman who happens also to be the discoverer of what may be one of the richest treasure finds in modern times.

The Concepción was unusually rich because there had been no treasure shipment to Spain the year before. The 140-foot galleon carried 6,000,000 pesos (old value) of gold and silver, 321 chests of worked silver, 43 chests of pearls, 21 chests of emeralds from the Muzo mine in Colombia and 436 chests of trade goods from the Orient. There was almost certainly another 2,000,000 pesos smuggled aboard to escape the king's tax, plus an undetermined amount of indigo, cochineal, drugs and spices. The ship also carried some 530 human beings, 340 of whom would soon be dead.

It displaced 1000 tons, was heavily armed with bronze cannon and carried--as did all galleons--three masts, two of them square-rigged. Life on board was a stinking hell. Even though there were rules against it, the treasure-laden hold soon also would be filled with vomit, urine and garbage. The smell, even by 17th Century standards, in which no home was exactly a bouquet of roses, was overpowering. Vitamins were unknown, and the loathsome symptoms of scurvy were common. Lice were everywhere. Clothes could not be washed in salt water, because they would shrink. The sailors never undressed, even in the baking heat of the hold.

In the years from 1551 to 1650, the voyage from Havana to Spain averaged more than 67 days. Columbus had made it in 21 days in 1502, a record that has seldom been equaled in the history of sailing. But not only was Columbus an extraordinary sailor, he also was not sailing (continued on page 132)Ocean Killings(continued from page 122) in a criminally overloaded and badly leaking ship.

The crew of the Concepción prayed in the morning and evening, and the ship's boys chanted prayers every half hour. In the evening, all hands sang Salve Regina. Sometimes it didn't help.

A few days out of Havana, the Concepción began taking on so much water that her pumps couldn't keep up. The fleet returned for repairs and then sailed on September 28 into the teeth of a brawling hurricane in the Straits of Florida. The fleet was scattered, many ships literally splintering on the coral reefs that lurked sometimes only six inches beneath the waves. The Concepción, her sails shredded, drifted through the treacherous waters, her crew pumping around the clock.

With jury-rigged rudder and makeshift sails, she hoped to stay afloat long enough to reach Puerto Rico. Had she been able to make repairs at sea, she might have tried for Spain. Treasure for Spain wasn't a luxury. With a monetary system based on coin and not on paper, the loss of gold and silver had a calamitous effect on the Spanish economy. Without the treasure ships, which were virtually Spain's entire gross national product, the nation would fall into political, economic and social ruin.

But water had reached the Concepción's gunpowder stores, wetting all but 100 pounds. Without gunpowder, the ship was defenseless and easy prey for the marauders, especially the Dutch, who also sailed these waters. So for a month, the great ship drifted. The pilots, who, like everyone else on board, were licensed by Spain, began to disagree with the admiral over the position of the ship.

They insisted on heading south, where they assumed Puerto Rico lay. The admiral and other navigators on board felt that the ship was already dangerously close to the Abrojos, a deadly reef which translated to "Open Your Eyes." The admiral was sure that the pilots' course would take them onto the deadly coral. He was right. But Spain was strict in its bureaucratic laws and a pilot's decision was supreme.

At 8:30 P.M. on October 30, the Concepción struck bottom. The damage was then minor, and the crew desperately rigged extra anchors out of the huge bronze cannons to keep the ship from being dragged across the jagged reef. But the winds rose, the anchor lines parted and the hull strained, cracked and burst with a hideous rending sound. "I saw that any further efforts would be useless other than to save the silver, artillery and the people," Admiral Juan de Villavicencio wrote. "I sought to place what silver I could up on the decks, but this appeared to all as dangerous inconvenience for the risk of the enemy and that it would be more secure left in the bottom of the hold...." By three A.M. on November second, the ship had completely sunk except for the sterncastle, which was seated on the reef. "The night was wild and terrible with lashing waves and wind," the admiral wrote.

Following fierce fighting over who would leave with him, the admiral took 50 men in his boat and set out, correctly judging that he was north of the island of Hispaniola. Several other boatloads, misguided by the pilots, sailed to their death. A few dozen people stayed with the ship. There is disagreement in the records as to whether or not those who stayed piled the silver and gold onto the reef in order to make its rescue easier. Eventually, when no help came, those on the ship made a raft and sailed for Hispaniola. Only one survived.

Spain did not take the loss of such treasure sitting down. She had a well-organized salvage operation, using Indian and black slaves, who dove naked to depths of 150 feet, an achievement today duplicated only by the pearl divers of Japan. Careful records were kept and the wrecks were closely guarded during the salvage, which sometimes took years.

But the Concepción was never found by the Spanish salvors, even though rumors circulated of great pyramids of silver bars that survivors had allegedly piled atop the reef. The king of England financed a search for it in 1683 to no avail and it remained yet another mystery of the sea until a Massachusetts shipbuilder and merchant named William Phips made history four years later. Today, he would be on talk shows and the cover of National Geographic, and would be seen tossing a Frisbee to his dog in People. Back then, they made him a knight.

Phips, like his current counterpart, Webber, seemed an unlikely hero. One of 26 children, he left his father's farm to become a shipbuilder in Boston, where talk of Spanish treasure was as common then as it is in the Florida Keys today. In his 30s, the owner of a small merchantman, he went looking for the Concepción, which had sunk nearly a half century before. Even though it was nearly 300 years ago, Phips needed the same things that the current finders of the Concepción needed: legal backing and wealthy investors. Phips got his from King James II, the Duke of Albemarle and other rich Englishmen.

With two well-armed ships and a diving bell (which turned out to be useless), Phips headed for the same place that the current treasure seekers headed for as a base of operation, Puerto Plata, on the northern coast of Hispaniola, then Santo Domingo.

He found the wreck on February 20, 1687, and for the next two months, he and his Indian divers tried to recover the treasure from the badly overgrown wreck. Coral, which can grow up to three inches a year, will cover anything. It is rock-hard and has to be broken by hammer and chisel or explosives. Phips's divers freedived in over 60 feet of water and managed the extraordinary feat of recovering more than 37,500 pounds of coin, 27,500 pounds of silver bars, 347 pounds of silver plate, 25 pounds of gold ingots and bags of pearls and other gems. A fantastic treasure, it still amounted to only about 13 percent of what the Concepción carried. Phips immediately sailed to England, where he was made a knight of the realm.

In his honor, the Abrojos reef was renamed Silver Bank.

Phips returned to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he became the first governor, and then returned to the wreck site for more booty. After chasing off a number of other boats, he tried to break into the stern, where he believed the main treasure to be. But without effective underwater fuses for the gunpowder kegs, little was accomplished. After a few weeks, he gave up.

For the next few centuries, many others tried to again locate the Concepción, including Jacques Cousteau in 1968; he was more interested in a television special than in treasure. All failed, but the searches continued until Burt Webber finally lucked out.

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The new treasure hunters, with all their fancy equipment, still face the same old problems. You have to know where to look, you have to find the ship once you know where to look and you have to get somebody to pay for it all. That last item requires some work. Treasure hunters aren't usually the type of guys who have friends at the Chase Manhattan. Many are dashing, romantic types such as Mel Fisher, founder of Treasure Salvors, who became the most written-about hunter of all time when he found the $100,000,000 treasure ship Nuestra Señora de Atocha off the Florida Keys.

A freewheeling, balding, 56-year-old (continued on page 191)Ocean Killings(continued from page 132) former chicken farmer from Hobart, Indiana, Fisher would walk into a prospective investor's office, drop a seven-pound gold disk onto the desk, and then spill a bunch of gold coins from his pockets onto the desk, floor or whatever.

It was said to have had a great effect.

A slow-moving, drowsy talker, who wears a gold doubloon on his bare chest, Fisher has been out of money as much as in it. His fight with the state of Florida for the legal rights to the Atocha treasure--most of which has eluded him--has drained his resources. It is estimated that the search for and salvage of the Atocha has cost him about $5,000,000, as well as the deaths of a son and a daughter-in-law. The eventual value of what he has already found may reach $600,000,000--if he gets to keep it all.

Located on a Walt Disney-like recreation of a Spanish galleon harbored in Key West, Fisher charges the tourists to go aboard and gawk at the cannons and treasure he has pulled from the Atocha. It helps pay the bills.

"If a wreck is not going to be worth $10,000,000, we can't afford to salvage it," Treasure Salvors' Bleth McHaley said aboard "ship" as an overburdened air conditioner droned in the background. "Where do we get investors? I'd say three quarters are already millionaires looking for a thrill. It compares to investing in wildcat oil strikes, but it's more fun. Treasure hunters may be tall or short or quiet or voluble, but they have one thing in common: They're obsessed."

Key West, formerly a mecca for pirates, has now become the same for treasure hunters. Some would say there's little difference. It is a perfect location for the obsessed. It's hard to decide whether the prevailing mood of Key West is one of seedy gentility or of genteel seediness. Until a recent crackdown, it was the last hippie outpost in America with real hippies. Wearing shoulder-length hair and with their eyeballs focused on infinity, they roamed the streets and slept in other people's front yards under balmy skies and lime trees.

But along with the hippies is a nearly endless supply of kids, sometimes with a gold fishhook through one ear, who long to go out treasure hunting. They still are recruited by Treasure Salvors, which now checks for criminal records and encourages them to go to diving school. In the old days, Fisher would drive through town, recruiting people to stay aboard the engineless hulk that guarded his wreck site, promising intoxicants and female companionship to anyone with the guts to stay out there.

One of the Atocha's most beautiful treasures, an exquisitely carved silver whistle, was used by the shipboard kids to smoke marijuana until it was rescued. Dress aboard ship is so informal that it's sometimes dispensed with entirely. And when one member of the crew showed up in a real bathing suit, instead of torn-off blue jeans, he was greeted with the shout: "Who the hell do you think you are--Jacques Cousteau?"

But when Fisher got it into his head one day to call Castro to ask him if he could see certain ship records in Havana, even his people didn't have the guts to ring Fidel.

"Mel," they said, "it would be like an ordinary guy calling up Jimmy Carter."

"Naw," Fisher said, "it would be like a movie star calling up Jimmy Carter."

But along with Fisher's romanticism, he has a hard business sense. Having survived a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, he needs it. And along with hard business come the media. Fisher was the subject of literally thousands of newspaper and magazine articles when the Atocha was found. He has been the subject of two books, one television special and some investigative reporting.

"We sold National Geographic the television rights for $10,000," McHaley said. "ABC later offered us $100,000. We sold the magazine rights to National G. for $5000." National Geographic holds a hallowed place with treasure hunters, who figure angles like billiard players figuring a shot.

"Look, National G. bestows legitimacy on you," one treasure hunter told me. "It sits around in people's garages for five, ten years. You can be the biggest cowboy in the world, and if National G. writes you up, all of a sudden you are respectable."

The press descends on treasure finds like vultures on carrion. "They all came, network TV, everyone," McHaley said, remembering that awful day. "We had a guy from National Geographic on board, yelling and screaming to the other newsmen: 'Get away! You can't be here, get away!'

"I'll never forget when CBS rented a seaplane to land at the wreck site. When they landed, it was about a one-foot chop. When they took off, it was about four feet and they barely made it. I really thought they were going to buy the farm on that one."

But media, whatever problems they create, mean money for one very good reason. The value of a gold or silver coin is not just what you would get for the metal if you melted it down. At that rate, a peso would be worth about $6.53 today, and the worth of the remaining treasure on the Concepción, for instance, would be only about $28,000,000.

But the numismatic value is about $43 per peso, raising the Concepción to its $190,000,000 figure.

What makes the difference? Publicity, for one thing. The coins from a famous wreck such as the Atocha or the Concepción, which have been written about and seen on television, are going to be worth much more than coins that wash up on Miami Beach. And treasure-wreck coins and artifacts are auctioned by such prestigious houses as Sotheby Parke Bernet.

"Who do we sell the stuff to?" one treasure hunter said. "Coin collectors, museums, Arabs. Anyone who wants it. And, of course, there's the tax thing."

There is the tax thing, indeed. Treasure hunting can be tremendously lucrative as a tax dodge, just as oil drilling can be, especially if the treasure is found outside the United States. Using a trust set up in the Bahamas, for instance, an unscrupulous American investor can attempt to escape without paying any tax at all, even if he finds millions in treasure. As long as he doesn't bring the money into the United States--and who needs to?--he gets off scot-free. That is, if he isn't caught.

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If Mel Fisher and the Atocha people are the romantic cowboys of treasure hunting, Burt Webber and the Concepción people are the men in gray-flannel suits. The find, financed with a $450,000 venture put together by a successful Chicago investment banker, is controlled with a well-oiled, well-heeled smoothness that would impress IBM.

Under the name Seaquest International, Inc., located in Chicago, a 90-page well-documented, well-written prospectus was put out for investors. On page 72, an interesting line appears: "No person," the prospectus reads, "should consider investing in this project unless such loss can be borne without hardship." Once again, most of the investors were millionaires looking for adventure, fun and profits. The first operation, in 1977, named Phips L.P., after William Phips, the first discoverer, came up empty-handed. But in the meantime, a new $16,000 magnetometer was developed by a Canadian firm and modified to meet Webber's requirements.

The magnetometer is the single most useful tool to the underwater treasure hunter except for scuba gear. Simply, it (continued on page 266)Ocean Killings(continued from page 191) measures the magnetic field of the earth. When certain magnetic objects (iron cannons, ship's fittings, etc.) are found, that registers as an anomaly in the earth's magnetic field--an extra jolt. Webber used a hand-held cesium magnetometer the second time around that translated readings to vibrations that played on the diver's mastoids. Nobody just looks overboard anymore.

But the new technology alone was not enough to find the Concepción. The other half of any good treasure hunt is research. In this case, it seemed like a gift from heaven when researchers found Phips's long-lost journal giving bearings for the Concepción to within a one-eighth-square-mile area.

But even though the waters in Silver Bank have the clarity of a dry martini, Webber couldn't just sail out and find the ship. For one thing, the ship didn't exist anymore. All timbers had long since rotted. And the treasure was long overgrown with coral. The magnetometer was needed to find what once had been the Concepción. And on November 28, 1978, in four-foot seas under a bright sun, Webber found his treasure ship. Amazingly, it was the first real success he had had in 17 years of treasure hunting.

Webber, 36, is not the gold-doubloon-around-the-neck type. Given to drab clothing and quiet talking, he only occasionally gives way to a grin. And that is usually under water. He was born in the Amish country of Pennsylvania, the son of a Buick dealer. Asthmatic and a victim of 26 allergies, he dreamed of iron men in wooden ships and the treasure they found and fought for.

"The neighbors always said, 'That Webber kid does peculiar things,'" he told a reporter. "I learned to swim in the millstream when I was six. I dreamt about sunken ships and going down and doing salvage. The big thing in my life was that there was never enough excitement. I've always been a hyper person. I started diving when I was 16. When I was 17, I found five slot machines in the Millardsville [Pennsylvania] quarry--with money in the payoff tubes--but none inside."

That was his first treasure and he remained bitten by the treasure bug. He didn't go to college and was dissuaded from the Navy for fear that his asthma would keep him from being a frogman. Instead, he went to a diving school and finished second in a class of seven. He dived with the George Washington of treasure hunting, Art McKee, and found a number of wrecks, few of which contained enough treasure to pay expenses.

"It was sort of ridiculous I hung on as long as I did," he said. "But if I were to quit at my age, what could I do? I'd burned all my bridges. I'd worry about it, then I'd say, Look, you decided when you were a kid what kind of life you wanted ... but I have four kids now, we're renting half a house in Annville, Pennsylvania. I had to put up with the humiliation, with working in the brick factory."

He doesn't have to put up with humiliation anymore. He was on the Today show and, like Fisher, he will be the subject of countless news programs, TV specials, books and maybe even a movie. And when one newspaper published a photo of his home, he had to hire guards at $100 per day to protect the place. The Concepción is big business.

"I could see that salvagers were like pirates," Webber once said. "They ended up fighting. I knew it had to be done in a more businesslike way."

One of the most interesting business decisions Webber and Seaquest made was their deal with the government of the Dominican Republic, a nation whose method of choosing leaders sometimes resembles Let's Make a Deal. The Concepción is located 65 miles northeast of the Dominican Republic in waters considered the high seas by the United States, Great Britain and international law. They also happen to be waters claimed by the Dominican Republic, Haiti and the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British dependency.

By law, what Seaquest found was its to keep. But if the Dominican Republic which has a navy it knows how to use, suddenly showed up in a gunboat, who was going to be able to call a lawyer? Seaquest decided that discretion was the better part of valor. It worked out a deal with the Dominicans that gave the country 50 percent, straight down the middle. In return, the Dominicans would guard the site.

As the Seaquest prospectus puts it, the deal provides them with "the protection of the Dominican navy, which provided a 145-foot frigate manned with 42 men and credible firepower to dissuade intruders." One intruder from another treasure-salvage company was, in fact, dissuaded by the Dominicans. But what if someone doesn't get dissuaded? The wreck happens to be in international waters. What (text concluded on page 272; "Seven Tough Challenges" follows on page 268) Ocean Killings(continued from page 266) if, as part of their deal with Seaquest, the Dominicans kill or maim other treasure hunters? "Are you kidding?" a source close to Seaquest told me. "The Dominicans are very happy with Seaquest. Everything is being kept in the admiral's vault and they would do anything to keep Seaquest happy."

I asked what "anything" meant.

"You name it," the source said.

The contact man with the Dominicans is a colonel trained in the elite American Army Ranger and Navy Seal program, a hero of the 1965 revolution, who is personally credited with the killing of more than 100 men--all in the line of duty.

The Seaquest investors operate out of the Nicolás de Ovando, overlooking the Ozama River in Santo Domingo. Restored in 18th Century style, it is a place of dark wood beams and whitewashed walls, with red-plush antique chairs. The investors, wearing white sport shirts that bear the legend Operation Phips II, were lounging at poolside one day when one asked another how to get a flight back to the States on Sunday, a difficult task, since Pope John Paul Ii had just visited and the airport was still reeling.

"Call the colonel," he was told. Since the questioner found it strange to be calling an army colonel to arrange a flight, he asked what the colonel could possibly do.

"He'll kick somebody off Air Dominicana for you," was the reply.

Just how much treasure will be or has been found on the Concepción is a matter of speculation. Privately, investors will confide that the amount is truly stunning. Publicly, Webber told a reporter: "We bring up anywhere from one to five coins every single minute. It's just like Christmas Day every day."

So far, the only gold found on the scattered, coral-encrusted wreck site is a gold ornament, leading everyone to believe that the best is yet to come. Even so, the amount of silver coinage has grown so massive that a larger vault in Santo Domingo has been sought. Along with the silver are Ming Dynasty vases, plates, candlesticks and other artifacts that will bring a handsome return at auction time.

Seaquest doesn't intend to rest on its laurels. It means to begin searching for others of the more than 28,000 recorded shipwrecks in these waters. Other treasure hunters will be searching with them for one very excellent, very exciting, very profitable reason.

"One third of all the gold ever mined now lies beneath the sea," Fisher insists.

McHaley puts it more bluntly: "There's enough treasure still down there," she says, "to satisfy the greed of everyone."

"The winds rose, the anchor lines parted and the hull strained, cracked and burst with a hideous sound."

"It's hard to decide whether the mood of Key West is one of seedy gentility or of genteel seediness."

"Though the waters in Silver Bank have the clarity of a martini, he couldn't just sail out and find the ship."