Secrets of the Deep.(Odyssey Marine Expedition's discovery of Spanish shipwreck in Atlantic Ocean)(Brief biography)

One morning last October, the Explorer, a two-hundred-and-fifty-one-foot ship owned by Odyssey Marine Exploration, an American deep-sea treasure-hunting company, left the Port of Gibraltar and headed out to sea. On the horizon, three miles away, sat a Spanish warship. "They're waiting for us," Aladar Nesser, Odyssey's director of international business development, told the Explorer's passengers, among them twelve journalists who had been invited on board to witness what Odyssey's owners expected would be a tense confrontation with Spanish authorities.

In May, Odyssey had announced that it had discovered, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, a colonial-era shipwreck that had yielded seventeen tons of silver coins and several hundred gold ones--possibly the largest treasure ever recovered from the sea. The company had transferred the booty to five hundred and fifty-one plastic buckets, loaded them onto a chartered jet, and flown them to the United States from Gibraltar, a British territory. Odyssey, claiming not to know the wreck's identity, and citing a need to protect it from looters, had given it the code name Black Swan and refused to divulge either its location--other than to say that it is "beyond the territorial waters" of any country--or details about the treasure. In July, however, the Spanish government obtained copies of export documents filed by Odyssey in Gibraltar, which revealed that the recovered coins were Spanish. A Spanish court, investigating whether Odyssey had plundered a national historical site, ordered that the Explorer be seized when it left Gibraltar waters.

As the Explorer's captain, Sterling Vorus, steered toward the warship, two smaller vessels--patrol boats from the Guardia Civil--appeared, aiming for the ship's port side. Vorus made radio contact with the captain of one of the boats, who ordered him to follow them to Algeciras, Spain, across the bay.

"Can you confirm that you are ordering me, against my consent, under threat of deadly force?" Vorus asked.

His radio emitted a crackle of static. Marie Rogers, a lawyer for Odyssey, who was standing beside Vorus and listening closely to the exchange, nodded. Vorus said into the radio, "We will cooperate with your orders."

An hour later, the Explorer docked in the port of Algeciras, at a pier where several Guardia Civil officers stood waiting. Eventually, a group of officers boarded the ship and examined the passengers' passports. Vorus was charged with "severe disobedience" and jailed for the night. The Explorer was taken into Spanish custody for three days and searched. Odyssey had long since stripped the boat of documents and equipment that could provide clues to the identity or location of the Black Swan. Even Zeus, the company's eight-ton, two-million-dollar remote-controlled deep-sea robot, which is used for lifting treasure from the ocean floor, had been partly dismantled.

The next day, the "Today" show ran footage shot from a storm-tossed dinghy that had followed the Explorer into the bay, and the Times of London reported that "a Spanish warship threatened to open fire on American treasure hunters yesterday as they tried to flee Gibraltar in the battle for a haul of gold and silver coins estimated to be worth half a billion dollars." Odyssey's dispute with Spain is likely to unfold not on the high seas, however, but in U.S. District Court in Tampa, Florida, where the company is based. In May, a lawyer representing Spain--James Goold, a specialist in maritime law at Covington & Burling, in Washington, D.C.--filed a claim with the court on the Black Swan treasure. Two months later, Odyssey sued Spain for five million dollars in damages.