♪ ♪
WOMAN (over radio): With up to a billion bucks of treasure on the line,
this is going to be a fight all the way to the finish.
MAN (over TV): 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".
MAN (over TV): Lawyer James Gould is representing Spain in
its legal battle with Odyssey Marine.
GOOLD (off-screen): 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 gotta get it back.
GOOLD (off-screen): But that doesn't mean that a US judge has to agree with me.
I've got to prove it.
NEIL: As far as I'm concerned, it didn't belong to Spain.
NEIL (off-screen): We were conducting salvage operations
in international waters.
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.
MAN (off-screen): What, for you, is the difference between treasure
hunting and marine archaeology?
NEIL: Well, there's the thing.
How long have we got?
(theme music plays)
TOM (off-screen): 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.
TOM (off-screen): 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.
TOM (off-screen): But you can't let your concentration stray.
And we came across quite a number of shipwrecks
in that area.
TOM (off-screen): You know, a lot of these shipwrecks were unidentified.
And so, we just kept doing that, mowing the lawn,
funding more wrecks.
TOM (off-screen): And then, all of a sudden, with the sonar,
we came across little hard dots,
which represents a debris field.
NEIL: It didn't look like a shipwreck.
Unless you knew what you were looking for,
you wouldn't give it a second glance.
NEIL (off-screen): So, they were going to put an ROV in the water,
we were going to go down and have a look at this.
SEAN: 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.
TOM: We drove towards the area with the ROV so that we tried
to get a big picture of what it looked like.
SEAN: Then, suddenly, Zeus turns on its lights and, boom,
there are these rocks on the seabed and the ROV crawls in.
NEIL: When you looked out the gloom and you saw down,
these molehills.
TOM: The ROV operator, he screamed, "That's coins".
And the room just exploded because everybody else had
been kind of afraid to say it.
MAN (over radio): Look at that lot.
MAN (over radio): Yes. MAN (over radio): Wow.
MAN (over radio): Yay.
MAN (over radio): Thousands.
TOM: 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.
TOM (off-screen): He loves the adventure.
GREG (off-screen): 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.
SEAN: If you've got 15,000 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.
TOM: I think we had investigated six targets that day.
And, so, when you suddenly had success, it's great joy.
TOM (off-screen): This was the last shipwreck of the day.
SEAN (off-screen): The site's a monster.
It's 282 meters long, 100 meters wide.
TOM (off-screen): It represented the size of a football pitch.
It was unbelievable.
And we just kept finding bundle after bundle after
bundle of coins.
NEIL (off-screen): 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?
SEAN: The ship wreck is something that has a keel,
it has hull, you can make out different clusters or material
or pottery or cannon.
But this was just scattered as far as the eye could see.
SEAN (off-screen): There is no part of the structure of a ship.
It's gone. And it's confusing, right?
NEIL: So, then, that's when the underwater detectives bit
comes in, and reads the map and sees what it is.
SEAN: And Zeus started to fly across the seabed,
not touch anything, just take photographs.
NEIL: Click, click, click, click, click, click, click,
click, click, click, click, taking pictures.
TOM (off-screen): It would oftentimes take two days,
three days 'til we collected enough images to
stitch them together.
NEIL (off-screen): I think was it 13, 14,000 images of this photo mosaic.
Wow.
What have we got here?
I've got this perfect map.
It was unbelievable to see these mounds.
SEAN (off-screen): 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 100-storey window.
TOM: You know, initially, we can't even say it's from one
ship because it was scattered so far and wide.
SEAN (off-screen): 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?
GREG (off-screen): 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.
(ringing)
JAMES (off-screen): I got this call out of the blue.
Hello, Jim Delgado.
It was Greg.
Oh, hey, 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.
JAMES (off-screen): 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 sight like that?
I said "No, I never had".
It seemed rather strange.
Said, "Are, are they pattered or positioned in a way that
suggests that maybe a ship fell over and capsized,
or is these more of a wreck buried?".
JAMES (off-screen): He said, "No, it's just this money".
I said, "Well, that's interesting.
I've never seen anything like that".
JAMES (off-screen): And when I hung up, I wondered,
what was that all about?
And that's the last I thought of it for a while.
NEIL: Right way, we knew that there's a lot of value
in these coins.
NEIL (off-screen): So we decided on a methodology for an
excavation in the site.
TOM: We designed special tools to be able to protect these
very fragile clumps of coins or artifacts that we had
anticipated recovering.
GREG: Wow.
TOM (off-screen): 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.
NEIL: This stuff's really worse than baby poo
on a blanket.
TOM: And then recording all the details of each coin and
giving it an artifact number and logging it.
TOM (off-screen): 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 'til we could 'em ashore.
TOM (off-screen): And Greg was out there every time the vehicle came out and,
you know, looking at, at what we had brought up.
GREG: It's a lot of coins down there.
NEIL: 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.
TOM (off-screen): We didn't know at the time, but, ultimately,
we covered 17 tons of silver coins.
And we did it in roughly three weeks.
TOM (off-screen): 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.
TOM: We quickly filled up the cargo spaces of the plane,
and we still had buckets and, so,
they went unto seats and got individually trapped
into the seats.
GREG: This is so surreal.
♪ ♪
TOM (off-screen): 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.
SEAN (off-screen): 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.
WOMAN (over TV): 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.
WOMAN: ...of the latest treasure rescued
from the bottom of the sea by the North American company
Odyssey.
WOMAN (over TV): 17 tons of silver and gold coins.
Up to $500 million.
ÁLVARO (off-screen): 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.
ÀLVARO (off-screen): 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 for 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, to Spanish waters
and we're just trying to prove if that treasure belongs to Spain".
ELISA (off-screen): It is very difficult to express what we felt because
we are against treasure hunter companies because they just
work for private benefit.
IVÁN (off-screen): 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.
ELISA (off-screen): 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.
ELISA (off-screen): So, we call our ambassador in Washington and the Embassy
helped us to contact James Gould.
♪ ♪
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.
GOOLD (off-screen): But it turned out that Odyssey had filed a lawsuit a month before,
an advert at the back of a newspapers 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.
SEAN (off-screen): 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.
SEAN (off-screen): 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.
ÁLVARO: Spanish laws say that you cannot earn money selling
the, the cultural heritage.
ÀLVARO (off-screen): But Greg was someone that believes everything is
possible is you fight for that.
MAN (off-screen): We know it's a ship.
GREG (off-screen): We know it's, well, maybe.
MAN (off-screen): But, as opposed to?
GREG (off-screen): 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 (off-screen): They're lightening it, if you will.
GREG (off-screen): Exactly.
ÁLVARO: 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.
JAMES: 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.
JAMES (off-screen): 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.
♪ ♪
ELISA (off-screen): We knew we had to be very quick to
identify the shipwreck.
There was no time to be angry or, or to cry.
We have to defend the heritage.
GOOLD (off-screen): I've got to prove it was a Spanish shipwreck.
So, the first question is, what had happened in history
at that spot?
GOOLD (off-screen): 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.
GOOLD (off-screen): 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.
GOOLD (off-screen): 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 St Mary.
JAMES: At the time, Spain is still a global, powerful empire,
but its influence is waning.
JAMES (off-screen): 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.
JAMES (off-screen): Where does he get that money?
He gets it from his Latin American colonies,
and specifically orders his warships to load silver from
themids 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.
JAMES (off-screen): A small British force of ships intercepts
the Spanish vessels.
And 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.
(gunfire)
The single shot from Amphion goes right through the hull of
Mercedes and launches 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 it rains debris all over the ocean as well
as well as onto the nearby ships.
JAMES (off-screen): 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 fleet literally
destroyed by nelson.
JAMES (off-screen): All of this hinges on what happens on that spot of water
back on October 5th, 1804.
GOOLD (off-screen): 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, bulls eye,
the exact location where they had been taking the coins.
GOOLD (off-screen): 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 sight,
what Odyssey's own records revealed.
JAMES (off-screen): Only Odyssey's own data, it's 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.
ÁLVARO (off-screen): Gibraltar is a place in dispute.
It's a rock that is in the land of, 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 'til they get out out of they port.
TOM: The Spanish made it very clear that should we leave
that harbor they would capture us.
MAN (over TV): In six-foot swells,
a Spanish government gunboat
intercepts the salvage vessel the Odyssey Explorer.
MAN: I advise you, captain of the Odyssey Explorer,
we are going to board your vessel.
MAN: Any interference with our transit in international waters
will be a clear violation.
MAN: We are going to approach your vessel and go aboard.
Get ready please.
Get ready.
ÁLVARO: The Odyssey Explorer had been in Gibraltar,
I don't know, for months.
ÀLVARO (off-screen): And each day it 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.
TOM: Sure enough, both ships were seized,
took 'em into Spanish ports,
took a lot of things off of the ship.
TOM (off-screen): We, of course, already stripped the ship of anything
from the Black Swan.
We did not have any of the, 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, they were not very nice about it.
JAMES (off-screen): 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 located.
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 (off-screen): 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.
VICTORIA (off-screen): And they were interested in knowing where a number of
ships were approaching off the Bay of Cadiz.
And, at one point, we had altogether 50 different ships
for their data pace for that one area.
VICTORIA (off-screen): And then they became interested in one particular
ship and all the most detailed information that one could
possibly find was of interest to them.
VICTORIA (off-screen): 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 bad and said, oh, just relax, no problem,
we have everything under control.
So I said, "Well, it's not under control here".
VICTORIA (off-screen): 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 then said, "Oh, we can't tell you anything.
We're not about to say what the ship is that we found
or, or where exactly we far.
But if you want, we'll give you a hint".
VICTORIA (off-screen): 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.
GOOLD (off-screen): Meanwhile, Greg Stemm is issuing sworn statements under oath
that they had no evidence that would confirm what ship it was.
ELISA (off-screen): It was very hard to believe that they were all the
time denying it was Las 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.
GOOLD (off-screen): 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.
GOOLD (off-screen): 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 the shipwreck, something Odyssey had denied all along.
♪ ♪
JAMES (off-screen): We were in Houston at a meeting.
And when the meeting was done, Jim, in his quiet way said,
"Got a second? I wanna ask you a question".
GOOLD: I had these images, some of which I couldn't understand,
and he could look at.
GOOLD (off-screen): And, instantly, starts pointing out everything that
I had been puzzled by.
JAMES (off-screen): 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 gun port had been.
JAMES (off-screen): A section of hardware from the rudder that steered the ship.
A chest of belongings including candlesticks,
silver platters, things of that sort.
GOOLD (off-screen): So, then, we start taking little Post-it markers and
pasting them all over the photo mosaic to
keep track of them.
JAMES: 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 (off-screen): We could see that that was a shipwreck.
But was it the Mercedes?
JAMES: It was in the right place, from approximately that time period,
based on the type of ship,
the type of fittings and the guns.
JAMES (off-screen): 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.
GOOLD (off-screen): Hundreds of hours of waiting for something to come into
sight and then doing a screen grab.
And, all of 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?
JAMES (off-screen): Were we wrong about it being Mercedes?
It felt like we were back to square one.
It was incredibly frustrating.
GOOLD (off-screen): Obviously, it was problematic.
What was I gonna do?
So I got 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, wait a minute, on the Mercedes manifest
there's specific record that the ship was carrying two
"canones bronce inútiles",
useless, obsolete bronze cannons.
GOOLD (off-screen): It's a smoking gun that this is the Mercedes.
How could it be anything than that?
ELISA (off-screen): 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.
GOOLD (over PA): 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.
NEIL (off-screen): Whilst we were on the ship, for me,
all the clues started to point towards this is
pretty much the Mercedes.
MAN (off-screen): Right from the start?
NEIL (off-screen): Yeah, from me anyways and the archaeologists
looking at it, yeah.
It was fairly obvious that they were Spanish cannon.
Obviously, there's coins saying "1804".
NEIL (off-screen): 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.
ÁLVARO: Once day, they said to me that they were looking for
the descendent of the merchants that put all
the gold in the cargo of Las Mercedes.
SEAN: There are 811,000 coins on the Mercedes, of which,
around 74%, three-quarters belong to private individuals.
SEAN (off-screen): 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.
WOMAN (over TV): After all this,
it might just come down to finders keepers, losers weepers.
♪ ♪
JAMES (off-screen): At times, what it felt like is you'd win some ground
but every step of the way a constant push back.
GOOLD (off-screen): 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?
GOOLD (off-screen): But that doesn't mean that a US judge has to agree with me.
♪ ♪
ÁLVARO (off-screen): Greg knew very well that if he win this battle
he would change the story of archaeological treasures
in the deep ocean.
GOOLD(off-screen): What would happen on the final day?
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.
ELISA: It was a victory, yes.
It was a great victory, yes, yes.
IVÁN: My strongest feeling was good lord, that's fantastic.
One man is not the owner of our cannon heritage.
Every one of us are the owners of the historical heritage.
ÁLVARO: The judge said that the treasure should go back
to, to Spain.
GOOLD: As the judge said at the 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.
TOM: 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.
NEIL (off-screen): I thought it was unfair and unjust,
and I genuinely feel sorry for Odyssey
and the way they were treated.
ÁLVARO: This decision was crucial for their business.
ÀLVARO (off-screen): 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, the treasure.
WOMAN (over TV): 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 a 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.
GOOLD (off-screen): 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 (off-screen): 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.
GOOLD (off-screen): And then two planes, which had taken separate routes,
arranged to land, meet and land wingtip to wingtip.
GOOLD (off-screen): And then the immediately the Guardia Civil took security
control of everything.
IVÁN (off-screen): The day that the coins came back to the airport of Madrid,
that was a fantastic day.
The Guardia Civil accompanied all the coins in serial tracks
with some helicopters.
And it was very spectacular.
VICTORIA: That was big news.
So, for me, once again the whole story sort of comes up again.
ELISA (off-screen): 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.
GOOLD (off-screen): By then, I was in a daze.
NARRATOR: Two years later,
Odyssey is fined a million dollars 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.
IVÁN: We have won the legal battle.
Now we are obliged to win the scientific battle.
IVÁN (off-screen): At 8:00 in the morning, the first day,
we put the ROV in the water.
And it began to descend, descend until one kilometers, 1,140 meters.
Until it was going down, down, down at the very middle
of the wreck.
It was fantastic.
IVÁN (off-screen): We discovered several iron cannons and bronze cannons,
two culverins.
The concentration of silver objects.
And we had discovered part of a fork with the initials of
the captain of the ship.
The captain was Don Jose, J, De Goicoa.
IVÁN (off-screen): When you think that that fork was in the hands of Don Jose De 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.
ELISA (off-screen): Las Mercedes was a tragedy.
That's why it was decided to install a commemorative plaque
to the people that died at that explosion.
JAMES: And the wreck site itself had meaning for
descendants of those who had died on that ship.
JAMES (off-screen): 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.
JAMES (off-screen): 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.
JAMES (off-screen): And that is the story of Nuestra Señora De Las Mercedes.
That's what it's all about. Not coins.
(music playing through credits)
Captioned by Cotter Media Group.