Mid-morning on May 17, 2007, a fleet of trucks rumbled out of the British Ministry of Defence dockyard in Gibraltar, the United Kingdom's tiny outpost on the southern tip of Spain. Laden with 17 tons of centuries-old silver and gold coins recently discovered on the ocean floor, the convoy lumbered through a tangle of one-way streets en route to the local airport, where the treasure—estimated to be worth half a billion dollars—was loaded onto a privately chartered North American Airlines 757. The cargo hold was soon filled with more than 400 five-gallon buckets of Spanish coins, and the remaining 107 were placed in seats, their safety belts fastened. The three human passengers—representatives from Odyssey Marine Exploration, a publicly held American company that scours the world for sunken treasure—took a last count before the cabin crew members began preparations for departure to Tampa, Florida.
When Odyssey announced the news the next morning, the uproar was instantaneous. Spain claimed that the treasure had been stolen from Spanish waters, surely looted from a historical site that should have been excavated by archaeologists. Greg Stemm, the public face of Odyssey, fanned the nationalist fury by refusing to name the source of the booty, code-naming the wreck "Black Swan" (after the best seller of the same name by the philosopher and mathematician Nassim Taleb), and declaring that it was recovered in international waters. To make matters worse, the gold and silver had been spirited away right under Spain's nose, from a resented British enclave on its mainland. "These treasures belong in a museum," not up for grabs to the highest bidder, said then–Spanish Minister of Culture Carmen Calvo. Gunboats from the Guardia Civil (Spain's equivalent of the FBI) were dispatched within 48 hours to monitor Odyssey's ships, which were in port in Gibraltar's harbor, and were given orders to detain and inspect them once they entered Spanish waters.
Odyssey is no stranger to controversy. Its discoveries have prompted lawsuits from competing salvagers and governments alike, as well as criticism from archaeologists. The cofounders, Stemm and John Morris, started scouring the seabed with underwater robots for wrecks 20 years ago but left their last publicly traded treasure-hunting company, Seahawk, in 1994, during a battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Now, 10 years after beating the SEC in an intense jury trial, they head what is by far the world's leading treasure-hunting outfit, with two ships and over 150 employees based in Tampa.
UNESCO estimates that three million wrecks are scattered across the world's seabed, and there are some hysterical estimates of their value. Gonzalo Millán del Pozo, the director of the Poseidon Project—a Spanish government-funded organization dedicated to preserving the country's underwater cultural heritage—claims that Spain's 800 lost galleons from the 16th to the 18th centuries alone could be worth over $130 billion.
