¶ ¶
BROADCASTER: With up to a billion bucks
of treasure on the line,
this is going to be a fight all the way to the finish.
BROADCASTER: So, who does it belong to?
"We found it, it's ours,"
says Florida salvage company Odyssey Marine.
The Spanish government says, "We don't think so."
BROADCASTER: Lawyer James Goold is representing Spain
in its legal battle with Odyssey Marine.
JAMES GOOLD: Sunken ships are like time capsules.
I've specialized in protecting them
from treasure hunting companies.
Spain's history has been taken, and we've got to get it back.
But that doesn't mean that a US judge has to agree with me.
I've got to prove it.
NEIL CUNNINGHAM-DOBSON: As far as I'm concerned,
it didn't belong to Spain.
We were conducting salvage operations
in international waters.
(boom)
NARRATOR: At stake, not just half a billion dollars,
but a crucial question:
Who owns history?
The answer lies in a wreck over half a mile under the waves.
INTERVIEWER: What, for you, is the difference
between treasure hunting and marine archaeology?
CUNNINGHAM-DOBSON: Well, there's the thing.
(laughs)
How long have we got?
¶ ¶
TOM DETTWEILER: We went out in the Atlantic Ocean.
The North Atlantic has a tendency
to be on the bad side,
storms come across the ocean
on a regular basis.
It was a difficult area to work in.
But I have to say, we'd gotten quite good at that.
We had made modifications to the ship over the years
to help it operate better under those conditions.
And so we just went out and started "mowing the lawn,"
is what we call it,
covering it with sonar, looking for more wrecks.
All of these searches
are hours and hours and hours of very tedious monitoring.
But you can't let your concentration stray.
And we came across quite a number of shipwrecks
in that area.
You know, a lot of these shipwrecks were unidentified.
So, we just kept doing that, mowing the lawn,
finding more wrecks.
And then all of a sudden, with the sonar,
we came across little hard dots, which represents a debris field.
CUNNINGHAM-DOBSON: It didn't look like a shipwreck.
Unless you knew what you were looking for,
you wouldn't give it a second glance.
So, we're gonna put an ROV in the water,
and we're gonna go down and have a look at this.
SEAN KINGSLEY: We're talking 1,100 meters to the seabed.
That's twice the height of the Empire State Building.
After 150, 200 meters,
the daylight disappears,
it's complete darkness.
DETTWEILER: We drove towards the area with the ROV
so that we tried to get a big picture of what it looked like.
KINGSLEY: Then suddenly Zeus turns on its lights, and boom,
there are these rocks on the seabed,
and the ROV crawls in.
CUNNINGHAM-DOBSON: When you looked out the gloom
and you saw down, these molehills.
DETTWEILER: The ROV operator, he screamed, "That's coins."
(laughs)
And the room just exploded
because everybody else had been kind of afraid to say it.
MAN 1: Look at that lot.
MAN 2: Yes. MAN 3: Wow.
MAN 4: Yay!
MAN 1: Thousands.
DETTWEILER: Uh, yeah, there were just coins everywhere.
It was unbelievable.
Greg and I had known each other for quite a number of years.
He would come out on the ship with us quite often
whenever he could get away from the office
for any period of time.
He loves the adventure.
GREG STEMM: Archaeologists actually run our operations.
But we're also in a commercial business.
We sell the duplicate coins.
We'll make those available to the public so they can own them.
KINGSLEY: If you've got 50,000 coins which are all the same,
put some in a museum, and sell the rest to pay for the science
and perhaps create a bit of a profit.
DETTWEILER: I think we had investigated
six targets that day.
And so when you suddenly had success, it's great joy.
This was the last shipwreck of the day.
KINGSLEY: The site's a monster.
It's 282 meters long, 100 meters wide.
DETTWEILER: It represented the size of a football pitch.
It was unbelievable.
And we just kept finding bundle after bundle after bundle
of coins.
CUNNINGHAM-DOBSON: And at this time we know we're clicking,
wow, this is a lot of money here,
this is hundreds of millions.
But where's the rest of the wreck?
Where is it?
Why have we got all these mounds of coins and not any structure?
KINGSLEY: The shipwreck is something that has a keel,
it has hull, you can make out different clusters of material
or pottery or cannon.
But this was just scattered as far as the eye could see.
There is no part of the structure of a ship.
It's gone.
And it's confusing, right?
CUNNINGHAM-DOBSON: So, then that's when
the underwater detectives bit comes in
and read the map and sees what it is.
KINGSLEY: And Zeus started to fly across the seabed,
not touch anything, just take photographs.
(click)
CUNNINGHAM-DOBSON: Click, click, click, click, click, click,
click, taking pictures.
DETTWEILER: It would oftentime take two days, three days
till we collected enough images to stitch them together.
CUNNINGHAM-DOBSON: I think, was it
13, 14,000 images in this photo mosaic.
I thought wow.
What have we got here?
I've got this perfect map.
It was unbelievable to see these mounds.
KINGSLEY: This is a massive concentration of clumps of coins
with copper ingots, bars of tin,
and then some small finds.
It's a strange mess.
A random collection of artifacts,
as if you've thrown something out of a hundred-story window.
¶ ¶
DETTWEILER: You know, initially,
we can't even say it's from one ship
because it was scattered so far and wide.
KINGSLEY: And nobody has seen anything like this before.
How does a ship break up in such a way
to form in this manner,
and what happened to the rest of it?
¶ ¶
STEMM: Until we get more artifacts up and identify it,
all we know right now
is that we found a shipwreck with a bunch of coins on it.
And that's not a bad thing, no matter where they came from.
(laughs)
(telephone ringing)
DELGADO: I got this call out of the blue.
Hello, Jim Delgado.
It was Greg.
Oh, hi, Greg. How are you?
I don't know why Greg called.
It surprised me.
I met Greg Stemm at a conference in the UK
talking about shipwrecks on the high seas
and a new type of business model
with selling the goods of the past.
But I didn't know the man and I'd never worked with him,
so I didn't have much of a sense of Greg.
He said he was at a site, and the most amazing thing
was that there was no shipwreck, he said.
It was as if somebody had just discarded
and thrown over chests of coins.
Had I ever seen a site like that?
I said, "No, I never had."
It seemed rather strange.
I said, "Are they pattered or positioned in a way
that suggests that maybe a ship fell over and capsized,
or is there more of a wreck buried?"
He said, "No, it's just this money."
I said, "Well, that's interesting.
I've never seen anything like that."
And when I hung up, I wondered, what was that all about?
And that's the last I thought of it for a while.
CUNNINGHAM-DOBSON: Right away we knew
that there's a lot of value in these coins.
So we decided on a methodology for an excavation of the site.
DETTWEILER: We designed special tools
to be able to protect these very fragile clumps of coins
or artifacts that we had anticipated recovering.
STEMM: Oh, wow!
(laughing)
DETTWEILER: There are just tons of coins coming up
coated in mud,
and the archaeologists would have to spend time
sorting them out of the mud.
CUNNINGHAM-DOBSON: This stuff's really worse
than baby poo on a blanket.
DETTWEILER: And then recording all the details of each coin
and giving it an artifact number and logging it.
You know, then it would go into a bucket
where we put a preserving fluid to try to protect the coins
as much as we could till we could 'em ashore.
And Greg was out there every time the vehicle came up,
and, you know, looking at what we had brought up.
STEMM: It's a lot of coins down there.
CUNNINGHAM-DOBSON: What was very interesting
about the coin collection
is the damage on these coins is obviously done
through some traumatic force, such as a huge explosion.
So, I was trying to separate the bent coins
so that I could take them to an expert on explosions
and work out how did this coin get bent like that.
DETTWEILER: We didn't know at the time,
but ultimately we recovered 17 tons of silver coins.
And we did it in roughly three weeks.
It's an unbelievable recovery.
¶ ¶
NARRATOR: Odyssey decide to fly the coins and artifacts
to the United States
and file a claim on the treasure.
DETTWEILER: We quickly filled up the cargo spaces of the plane,
and we still had buckets, and so they went into seats
and got individually strapped into the seats.
STEMM: This is so surreal.
¶ ¶
DETTWEILER: We had not seen anything to identify the wreck.
And so we kept referring to it as the Black Swan,
the code name that we gave to it.
KINGSLEY: At the time, Greg was reading
Nassim Taleb's book on the black swan.
A black swan event is something that is completely unexpected
and utterly transforms the world we live in.
So, everything sort of clicked into place.
BROADCASTER: But deep-sea explorers out of Tampa
have struck gold for real.
Divers for a company called Odyssey Marine Explorations
found a ship that sank in the Atlantic.
BROADCASTER: 17 tons of silver and gold coins.
Up to $500 million.
ÁLVARO DE CÓZAR: I think it was in 2007
that I read an article in the newspaper
that mentioned those words "treasure hunters."
And that immediately meant something to me.
I mean, I was very attracted to mysteries.
I'm a journalist.
I used to be a reporter in El País,
the biggest newspaper in Spain.
I published a story about the Black Swan.
I called it "Pieces of Eight" in honor to the Treasure Island,
one of my favorite books.
And, in fact, it was true.
There were almost 500,000 pieces of eight.
Three hours later, we received a call
from the Ministry of Culture because they are really angry.
They told us, "We know that Odyssey
has been looking for a treasure
in an area very close to Spanish waters,
and we're just trying to prove
if that treasure belongs to Spain."
ELISA DE CABO: It's very difficult to express what we felt
because we are against treasure hunters companies
because they just work for private benefit.
IVÁN NEGUERUELA: I've been fighting against
all the treasure hunters companies every day of my life.
And it's completely forbidden to sell any object.
That's what the Spanish law says.
DE CABO: There was no time to be angry.
I mean, we have to work,
to show everyone that the treasure belongs to Spain.
And, so, yes, the first reaction was to go to court.
So, we call our ambassador in Washington,
and the embassy helped us to contact James Goold.
¶ ¶
GOOLD: I got a call from the Spanish Embassy
within an hour of the newspapers having shown up.
And so the first thing I did was get out the magnifying glass
and look at every copy of this photo that I could
to see what the coins were.
I noticed that they had been changed
to obscure the image of whatever king it was.
And so I couldn't tell whether they were Spanish,
British, French, or whatever.
But it turned out that Odyssey
had filed a lawsuit a month before,
an advert at the back of a newspaper,
saying that they had discovered an unidentified vessel.
That started a clock running
under which if no one came into court
and disputed that Odyssey was entitled
to all of that material,
then they could go to court and say, "We're the owners."
So, we couldn't sit on our hands.
We had to move fast.
¶ ¶
KINGSLEY: I got a call, Greg was in town,
"Would you like meet up?"
And I thought, this is going to be a painful meeting.
You know, I'd read the headlines.
They were being trashed in the national newspapers.
So I met up with Greg.
He was in very high spirits.
He was delighted with the publicity
and obviously thought they had a very strong position legally
that they'd be able to retain ownership of this material.
DE CÓZAR: Spanish laws say that you cannot earn money
selling the cultural heritage.
But Greg was someone that believes everything is possible
if you fight for that.
MAN: We know it's a ship.
STEMM: We know it's-- well, maybe.
MAN: As opposed to?
STEMM: Well, we've got a lot of coins that we found
in the bottom of the ocean.
You know, it's amazing.
Sometimes people just dump things off of ships
to prevent the ships from sinking.
It's happened.
MAN: They're lightening it, if you will.
STEMM: Exactly.
DE CÓZAR: And Greg knew very well
that if he wins this battle,
if he could prove there was no shipwreck,
that the treasure had just been discarded,
then Spain would not have a claim
and it would all go to Odyssey.
¶ ¶
NARRATOR: As the deadline approaches,
James Goold contests Odyssey's claim on the treasure
in the Florida courts.
DELGADO: Now what Spain has to do is not only intervene,
it has to prove there's a shipwreck
and that that shipwreck belongs to them.
And that the coins were the king's money
and part of the sovereign property of Spain.
GOOLD: By the end of that day,
I dashed off a letter to Odyssey's lawyer saying,
"On behalf of Spain, please inform us of what it is."
And next Monday evening I was on a plane to Madrid.
¶ ¶
DE CABO: We knew we have to be very quick
to identify the shipwreck.
There was no time to be angry or...
or to cry.
(laughs)
We have to defend the heritage.
¶ ¶
GOOLD: I've got to prove it was a Spanish shipwreck.
So, the first question is,
what had happened in history at that spot?
But Odyssey wouldn't reveal the exactly location
where they had been working.
So, on that first trip to Madrid,
I sat down with the Spanish navy to ask what they could find
about the movements of Odyssey's ships,
because there are ways.
There are GPS signal tracking devices
that every ship is required to have.
And, so, sure enough, there was a record for Odyssey's ship.
But once they got 20 or 30 miles from Gibraltar,
their signal went dark.
So, then I thought, well, something's going on here.
But there were a few blips that had still shown up,
five or six of them,
and there was a cluster of them south of Portugal.
So then I thought, okay,
something had to happen around here.
So, then we started looking in the history books.
And in a very short time
I found that there had been an absolutely pivotal event
in Spanish and world history in October 5, 1804,
what was called the Battle of Saint Mary.
DELGADO: At the time, Spain is still a global, powerful empire,
but its influence is waning.
Spain had made a deal that if they paid Napoleon
a vast amount of money each month,
he wouldn't invade Spain.
He'd focus on invading Great Britain.
So, it was a form of protection money.
And that's what sets up this entire tale,
because the king of Spain needs more money.
Where does he get that money?
He gets it from his Latin American colonies,
and specifically orders his warships
to load silver from the mints down in South America.
And so they cross the Atlantic.
But what they haven't counted on
is that fact that there are spies.
And in the United Kingdom,
the decision is made to stop those ships.
¶ ¶
A small British force of ships intercepts the Spanish vessels,
in what basically amounted to high seas hijacking.
A British ship called Amphion
cuts across the line of the Spanish ships,
behind a Spanish vessel called Mercedes.
And the British navy opens fire.
(cannons firing)
The single shot from Amphion...
(boom) (crash)
...goes right through the hull of Mercedes
and lodges in the magazine,
where all the gunpowder is stored.
In that moment, that powder goes off in a massive explosion
that tears the ship apart.
Mercedes cracks open like an egg
and spills her contents into the sea...
and rains debris all over the ocean
as well as onto the nearby ships.
Stunning doesn't even really begin
to convey the horror of that moment.
It is a war grave with 250 dead,
including Spanish sailors, marines,
and the wives and the children of Spanish officers.
That loss of that ship not only saw 250 lives taken,
it saw Britain and it saw Spain
return to a state of war,
leading to a period of tremendous civil unrest,
the weakening of the Spanish Empire.
In just a year, the great naval battle of Trafalgar
is going to see the French and Spanish fleets
literally destroyed by Nelson.
All of this hinges on what happens on that spot of water
back on October 5, 1804.
GOOLD: Navy records gave us the positions,
which tells us that's where the Mercedes sank.
Then I turned and compared it
to what we had learned from those blips,
and sure enough, bull's eye--
the exact location where they had been taking the coins.
Well, it had to be the Mercedes, but that's not gonna be enough
to prove in court what actually was there.
I needed to see what was on the bottom at the site,
what Odyssey's own records revealed.
DELGADO: Only Odyssey's own data--
its photography and the location of the site--
could confirm for sure that there's a shipwreck down there
and if it's a naval vessel.
The trouble was, they weren't rushing to hand it over,
and their ships were in a port that Spain couldn't get to.
DE CÓZAR: Gibraltar is a place in dispute.
It's a rock that is in the land of Spain,
but it belongs to the United Kingdom.
So, the Guardia Civil couldn't go into Gibraltar
to check the Odyssey Explorer.
They had to wait till they get out of the port.
DETTWEILER: The Spanish made it very clear
that should we leave that harbor,
they would capture us.
BROADCASTER: In 6-foot swells, a Spanish government gunboat
intercepts the salvage vessel the Odyssey Explorer.
DE CÓZAR: The Odyssey Explorer had been in Gibraltar,
I don't know, for months.
And each day was costing them a fortune
in running costs for the ship.
So, they had to eventually leave port
even though they knew they'd be captured.
DETTWEILER: Sure enough, both ships were seized,
took 'em into Spanish ports,
took a lot of things off of the ship.
We had, of course, already stripped the ship
of anything from the Black Swan.
We did not have any of the data drives
or anything that had the data in it on the ship.
But they still took all the data drives
out of every computer and things like that.
So they were not very nice about it.
(laughs)
DELGADO: Without Odyssey's data and photography,
it would be virtually impossible for us to prove
that this was definitely the Mercedes.
So, now the legal team had to up the game
to discover exactly where Odyssey had been looking.
The one thing I had learned from my brief interactions with Greg
was that he didn't do anything without a lot of research.
He didn't go unless he knew what he was looking for
and where he might likely find it.
¶ ¶
VICTORIA STAPELLS: Not everybody can read 16th century Spanish.
Not everybody knows where to look for those documents.
Over a period of more than 35 years,
I have worked for many different institutions as a researcher.
In 2005, I was contacted by someone from Odyssey.
And they were interested in knowing
where a number of ships were approaching the Bay of Cadiz.
And at one point, we had altogether 50 different ships
for their database for that one area.
And then they became interested in one particular ship,
and all the most detailed information
that one could possible find was of interest to them.
When this story broke, I felt absolutely horrified
because my first job is I'm a historian.
I am not interested in the treasure.
I immediately contacted the people in Odyssey by email.
And they got back and they said, oh, just relax, no problem,
we have everything under control.
So I said, "Well, it's not under control here."
And every time you turn the radio on,
every time you turn Spanish news on at night,
every time you buy a newspaper,
it was just on and on and on and on and on and on.
I mean, I was accused of being a spy.
And they said, "Oh, we can't tell you anything.
We're not about to say what the ship is that we found
or where exactly we are.
But if you want, we'll give you a hint."
And they said it's something to do with the make of a car.
Well, of course, I knew that they had found the Mercedes.
GOOLD: Victoria Stappels' statement was very useful
because it confirmed that Odyssey had set about this
with a deliberate intention of locating the Mercedes.
Meanwhile, Greg Stemm is issuing sworn statements under oath
that they have no evidence that would confirm what ship it was.
DE CABO: It was very hard to believe
that they were all the time denying it was la Mercedes.
It was really strange for us, something incredible to believe.
GOOLD: So, I went back and asked the court
to consider doing something about this.
(chime)
And sure enough, an order comes from the judge
that Odyssey has been
"disingenuous and utterly without merit."
And Odyssey, after fighting it and fighting it and fighting it,
had to turn over the photo mosaic
and give me access to their DVDs of the seabed
and their photographs.
And so there was a very nice moment
when finally we could see the site.
So, now we needed to show
that right there on the seabed was a shipwreck,
something Odyssey had denied all along.
¶ ¶
DELGADO: We were in Houston at a meeting.
And when the meeting was done, Jim, in his quiet way said,
"Got a second? I want to ask you a question."
GOOLD: I had these images, some of which I couldn't understand
and he could look at.
And instantly starts pointing out
everything that I had been puzzled by.
¶ ¶
DELGADO: This was a very competently done job,
which appeared to me to be nothing more than a map
for recovering the coins,
and I'm not seeing a wooden hull,
but I wouldn't after a few hundred years.
You could see this was a chunk of a section of hull,
in one case with a cannon tangled in it,
meaning that was where a gunport had been.
A section of hardware
from the rudder that steered the ship.
A chest of belongings including candlesticks,
silver platters, things of that sort.
GOOLD: So then we start taking little Post-it markers
and pasting them all over the photo mosaic
to keep track of them.
¶ ¶
DELGADO: And so, as I looked at it,
I said, "This is a shipwreck site.
It's clearly a shipwreck site.
Look, look at this.
There's a donut of debris, thinner in the middle
and very compact around the sides."
I said, "That's when something explodes."
¶ ¶
GOOLD: We could see that that was a shipwreck.
But was it the Mercedes?
DELGADO: It was in the right place,
from approximately that time period,
based on the type of ship,
the type of fittings and the guns.
It felt good.
It felt like the right answer.
But, then again, shipwreck stories
almost always surprise you.
GOOLD: I got used to going through
hundreds of hours of these DVDs
of the running footage of their ROV
as it went back and forth over the seabed.
Hundreds of hours of waiting for something to come into sight
and then doing a screen grab.
(click)
And all of a sudden, there comes into view
a long, elegant fluted cannon, and it's got very ornate handles
that look like dolphins or some kind of fancy dragon.
And I go, oh, what?
Those are medieval cannons
two centuries out of sync with everything else we're seeing.
What's going on here?
DELGADO: Were we wrong about it being Mercedes?
It felt like we were back to square one.
It was incredibly frustrating.
GOOLD: Obviously it was problematic.
What was I gonna do?
So I go back to Madrid
to start going through
the Spanish museums of medieval cannon
with Elisa, looking for matches of this.
We're coming close, but not quite.
And then... (snap)
Wait a minute.
On the Mercedes manifest
there's a specific record
that the ship was carrying two "cañones bronce inútiles,"
useless, obsolete bronze cannons.
It's a smoking gun that this is the Mercedes.
How could it be anything other than that?
DE CABO: We organized a press conference
at the Ministry of Culture.
We were all very excited, I must admit.
We were all very excited.
We had very great news to give.
GOOLD: It was the kind of thing I'd never been through before,
where you've got press photographers
rolling around on the floor in front of you and so on.
Well, the mystery is over.
The coins and other artifacts that Odyssey took from the site
are documented to have been on the Mercedes.
We went public,
and the world headlines were "The mystery is over."
We came flat out and said it's the Mercedes.
(indistinct conversations)
¶ ¶
CUNNINGHAM-DOBSON: Whilst we were on the ship, for me,
all the clues started to point
towards this is pretty much the Mercedes.
INTERVIEWER: Right from the start?
CUNNINGHAM-DOBSON: Yeah, for me anyways
and the archaeologists looking at it, yeah, yeah.
It was fairly obvious that they were Spanish cannon.
Obviously, there's coins saying "1804."
And the coins were bent 'cause it blew up.
That's pointing towards it's the Mercedes.
What else could it be?
¶ ¶
NARRATOR: Eventually, even Odyssey begin to acknowledge
that it might be the Mercedes.
But their lawyers are not finished yet.
DE CÓZAR: One day they said to me that they were looking
for the descendants of the merchants
that put all the gold in the cargo of la Mercedes.
¶ ¶
KINGSLEY: There are 811,000 coins on the Mercedes,
of which around 74%, three quarters,
belong to private individuals.
If you find a merchant vessel,
whatever is on it and you claim it,
if you can't find the owner, everything belongs to you.
BROADCASTER: After all this, it might just come down
to finders keepers, losers weepers.
¶ ¶
DELGADO: At times, what it felt like is you'd win some ground,
but at every step of the way a constant pushback.
GOOLD: Takes a lot of work to come in and prove it.
Years of litigation.
How could a US court say no, no, no, finders keepers,
never mind Spanish history?
But that doesn't mean that a US judge has to agree with me.
¶ ¶
DE CÓZAR: Greg knew very well that if he win this battle
he would change the story of archaeological treasures
in the deep ocean.
GOOLD: What would happen on the final day?
(chime)
And then the decision of the senior judge in Tampa
came in by email.
"The ineffable truth of this case
is that the Mercedes
is a natural and legal patrimony of Spain."
We won. We won.
Well, then, I called Elisa immediately.
And then there were, there were some yells and shouts.
Mm-hmm, yeah.
DE CABO: It was a victory, yes.
It was a great victory, yes, yes.
NEGUERUELA: My strongest feeling was good lord, that's fantastic.
One man is not the owner of our common heritage.
Every one of us are the owners of the historical heritage.
DE CÓZAR: The judge said that the treasure
should go back to, to, to Spain, yeah.
¶ ¶
GOOLD: As the judge said at the end of this process,
"There had been a continuous core campaign
of bad faith, deception, and deflection."
The one good thing that one can say here
is it had a positive outcome
and the lesson is there to stand.
¶ ¶
DETTWEILER: Just to have the court turn against us
and to lose a battle that we thought we would surely win,
it was a devastating impact to the company.
CUNNINGHAM-DOBSON: I thought it was unfair and unjust,
and I genuinely feel sorry for Odyssey
and the way they were treated.
DE CÓZAR: This decision was crucial for their business.
So, Odyssey couldn't just give up.
They had to appeal the court's decision,
and they were going to do as much as they could
to keep the treasure.
BROADCASTER: The deep-sea treasure hunting company Odyssey
says it will appeal a ruling this week by a Florida judge.
The judge ordered it to hand over to Spain
a half million dollars' worth of gold and silver coins.
¶ ¶
GOOLD: But the day came when they had to turn over the coins
and other objects that they had in the US.
The Spanish Air Force
had agreed to send two Hercules military cargo planes.
The coins were put on the aircraft.
So, as we packed up at MacDill Air Force Base
and the ramp of the plane comes up,
I've still got this worry about, well, what happens
if the Supreme Court decides
there should be a stay of execution?
¶ ¶
(radio chatter)
There came a point just as we were leaving US air space
that I could get through, and I start yelling,
"Are we okay? Are we okay? Are we okay?"
(radio chatter)
GOOLD: By the time we got to Newfoundland,
I'm yelling over this terrific din of the propellers
and the vibration in this plane,
"Are we clear? Is the coast clear?"
And I hear, "You're okay. You're okay".
And that was that.
And then two planes, which had taken separate routes,
arranged to land, meet and land wingtip to wingtip.
And then the immediately the Guardia Civil
took security control of everything.
¶ ¶
NEGUERUELA: The day that the coins came back
to the airport of Madrid
was a fantastic day.
The Guardia Civil accompanied all the coins
in trucks with some helicopters.
It was very spectacular.
¶ ¶
STAPELLS: That was big news.
So, for me, once again the whole story sort of comes up again.
¶ ¶
DE CABO: It was a very special moment,
and it's something so unusual.
I mean, we were waiting for five years.
GOOLD: I was part of the motorcade
to take it down to downtown Madrid to a secure facility.
Let's remember that, at the end this case,
our objective was to get all of those buckets back to Spain.
It took all of this time and all of this money
and all of this effort.
It was a great relief. Mm-hmm.
By then, I was in a daze.
(door slams)
NARRATOR: Two years later, Odyssey is fined $1 million
for, in the words of the judge,
"bad faith and abusive litigation."
As one chapter in the story of the Mercedes closes,
another is starting.
NEGUERUELA: We have won the legal battle.
Now we are obliged to win the scientific battle.
¶ ¶
At 8 o'clock in the morning, the first day,
we put the ROV in the water.
And it began to descend, descend,
until 1 kilometer, 140 meters.
And it was going down, down, down
in the very middle of the wreck.
It was fantastic.
We discovered several iron cannons and bronze cannons,
two culverins.
A concentration of silver objects.
And we have discovered the back of a fork
with the initials of the captain of the ship.
The captain was Don José, "J," Goicoa.
When you think that that fork
was in the hands of Don José Goicoa,
we said, good lord, good lord, this is the very, very proof
that we are in the same ship of the archive of Seville.
No doubt this is the Mercedes.
DE CABO: La Mercedes was a tragedy.
That's why it was decided
to install a commemorative plaque
to the people that died at that explosion.
¶ ¶
DELGADO: And the wreck site itself had meaning
for descendants of those who had died on that ship.
It doesn't matter how far back it goes,
families remember these events
because suddenly a ship is sunk and nobody comes home.
It's the story of officers standing on a deck
on a nearby ship watching in horror
as their wives and their children disintegrated.
The British sailors standing there in shock
as a simple shot from Amphion sets off the magazine,
and Mercedes explodes with such violence.
And of everything that played out after that
that profoundly changed the course of history for Spain
and potentially for all of Europe.
And that is the story of Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes.
That's what it's all about.
Not coins.
¶ ¶
Captioned by Side Door Media Services