The Sea of Treasure

By Lieut. Harry E. Rieseberg

The adventurous life of Lieut. Harry E. Rieseberg could probably fill a hundred books. But here, in this one dramatic volume, are the outstanding highlights of this world-renowned treasure hunter's amazing carrer. Get set for strange and exciting adventure! Down, down, down we go --- with tthe dautless Lieut. Rieseberg! Let's vist the final resting places of those long-sunk galleons and frigates that perished in the romantic waters of the Spanish Main. See how they look today --- hundreds of years later --- as we search their weary hulks for a fortune in gold and silver, precious gems and artifacts. Read abou the disasters that befell these monarchs of the ocean waves --- the storms; the accidents; the pirates, too, who sent them to their graves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Frederick Fell Publishers, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780883915592

Lieut. Harry E. Rieseberg

LIEUT. HARRY A. RIESEBERG, co-author with A. A. MIKALOW of Fell's Guide to Sunken Treasure Ships Around the World, was recently named "Mr. Treasure Hunter of 1964" by the National Treasure Trove Club. He has written 19 books and over 3,700 articles on treasure hunts and under-sea exploring. Former Chief in the U.S. Bureau of Navigation and Steamboat Inspection, he has been a successful salvager for more than 25 years.

Book preview

Old.

I.    My Business Was

Treasure Salvage

The early dreams for a new career eventually became realities, furnishing color and excitement to the author’s life—treasure-hunting….

A nautical chart is an impressive and satisfying thing to a man who follows the sea. The unglazed paper on which it is printed is full-bodied to the Angers, and its size allows ample room for penciling a course. The seagoing symbols possess a cryptic heraldry that fascinates and appeals to the masculine Hair for pageantry and mysticism. The buoys and beacons plotted along the shore lines are reassuring landmarks and bearings from which to make an embarkation or anchorage, and across the broad expanse of the chart is the clear white paper on which to lay down that completely individual line—the course to be steered.

On numerous occasions my salvage schooner has followed that neat, unwavering pencil notation, marking the course clearly across the sea lanes as a white, frothy wake. The thin straight lines of my plots appeared as a constant broadening trail, undulating with the sea’s swell, veering at times and deviating into small curves and sweeps as the wind and sea played against the craft’s sides. I felt the exhilarating lift of the deck beneath my feet and the forward thrust of the bow; I breathed the tang salt air and flower fragrance wafted from lands still below the horizon. North lay over my shoulder; South was directly ahead.

On the chart a compass marked my direction with the small letter s, as my imagination tinted the letter with all the colors of tawny beaches, blue-green seas, and yellow-green patches of lands, elaborately ornamented it with pieces-of-eight, golden doubloons, ducats and ducatoons, and silver plate, and the glistening of white teeth in many of my native deck hands’ laughing brown faces. In my imagination I was sailing again into the romantic waters of the Caribbean and Gulf seas—back to my treasure waters to work in my chosen field of treasure salvage. It had been my calling for nearly twenty-five years, and my hunting grounds have mostly been the waters of the Spanish Main.

My business has been that of treasure salvage, the search and possible recovery of almost any sort of wealth from out of the long-rotted hulks of sunken shipwrecks. It has been an adventurous career, with its continuous new quests to pull one on, new seas to sail over, new and strange sights to gaze upon far beneath the surface waters of the oceans. It has been a field of endeavor, like most other businesses, often complicated with its difficulties and frustrations, though ever waiting to be resolved in one way or another—mostly to decide just where I was bound next.

And in this decision, there were always practical factors which entered into that choice: the exactness of one’s records and information about a wreck to be searched for and salvaged, how much treasure went down with the ship at the time of sinking and whether any previous recoveries had been made, how far distant the particular wreck’s remains rested, the depth of water in which the hulk rested, working conditions, tides, and most important of all, the cost of the operation. And, complicating such considerations, there has always been with me that basic urge of the treasure-salvor: He long for new seas, new regions, untrodden sea bottoms, deeper and heretofore unexplored depths, new ways to search and bring up his sunken find, and too, the particular type of underwater equipment to be used for each separate operation—scuba, hard-hat dress, diving bell, mechanical robot. Yes, thousands of wrecks, and a terrific lot of ocean spread around over the globe. Where next would it be?

To most people it is a most bizarre and adventurous calling; to me it has been my career.

It has not always been my fortune to travel the seas, following a vocation that has taken me down on the sea floor on untold numbers of times, through ever-changing wonders. For many years I walked the gray cement pavements of the nation’s capital, Washington, shadowed by huge granite government buildings, to a job at a desk where I picked up papers in duplicate, triplicate, even in quadruplicate from one incoming basket and piled them in another outgoing.

In fact, often to this late day, when I sleep restlessly, I find myself in a nightmarish dream rushing headlong down a concrete hall, watching over my shoulder as a long-legged desk leaps hurriedly after me in hot pursuit. And the papers in all their multitudinousness, columned with figures, blow from the desk in a huge funnel-shaped cloud, encircling my head, impeding my progress, drifting high about my feet to hinder my flight. And then, when I awaken and pull the sheets from over my head and realize that it’s only a dream, I thank one of my secretaries who, on one occasion, asked me the question that had really started me off chasing—and finding—the rainbow’s end—a new career.

Up until that day when the lady had first made her inquiry, I had given little thought as to what endeavor I might follow in the future other than the work I was doing. It was simply my job as chief of a division in the United States Bureau of Navigation and Steamboat Inspection Service to handle many columns of figures that were written on great stacks of paper, to supervise many employees, and to follow the usual bureaucratic federal employee procedure from day to day, month to month—and I had already a continuous service of twenty-one years in this most monotonous operation.

Again, a few days later the secretary brought up the question. She had asked about some of the ships lost in the sixteenth century—Spanish galleons and frigates. Where could such records be found? The sixteenth century! The words had a flavor of cutlasses and the black flag, with its skull and crossbones of piracy. She had spoken the words without expression—a routine office question—uninteresting, she must have thought, perhaps rather boring. I looked up at her from my desk, then around at the hundreds of dark green filing cabinets which lined the walls and hemmed me in with the customs and the commonplaces of the twentieth century. The maritime records of the sixteenth century, I informed her, were buried in the Congressional Library. She nodded incuriously. She could visit the library, I said, and dig through the musty records.

However, during the following weeks the question kept coming to my mind. I decided on my own to add to my own sea lore what knowledge I might obtain, and decided to see just what those musty and ancient documents might bring forth. That afternoon, as I sat in the bookstall in the library’s basement, where such ancient documents were kept, I suddenly felt the shackles of my monotonous existence fall from both my spirit and my imagination. The stilted language of the time carried me back into the most amazing era of the sea—the century of discovery and exploration, adventure and historical romance, plunder, carnage, and exploitation. It was an era when great galleons and frigates from the Old World, their rounded sides swollen with huge riches, started on their homeward-bound journey, to fall victims before savage sea-fighters, pirates, and renegades; to founder on unseen reefs in storms or by accident; or to impale themselves on underwater coral pinnacles. Those very same ships, long years ago disintegrated, I thought, with my arms folded upon the files and my eyes far away, their unperishable treasures were still lying on the sea bottoms, encrusted thickly with coral coating, their holds rotted away, yet their remains still heavy with caskets of plundered riches on the very spot where their unfortunate craft had met a final anchorage.

And, after seeing those historic accounts, I was no longer concerned with the business papers and the filing cabinets of the records of the twentieth century under my direction. I remembered to answer my secretary’s question the following day; I gave it to her with gestures and much extraneous description, and she was mildly surprised at my enthusiasm.

From that moment on I plotted my course as surely as I would a nautical chart in the following years. I learned to dive. I studied aged documents and old marine parchments, sifting every bit of information, even traced ancient maps. And, during these years I counted my savings again and again—until, finally, I discovered I could, at long last, charter a small schooner and launch my first expedition for a voyage of discovery. I had reasoned it this way: I might become rich or I might just get experience. But the experience was rich and my expeditions to follow, each on a larger scale than the one before, paid off. No longer was I on a fool’s chase. I left my desk job forever and became a professional salvor of sunken treasure.

I found it not a very crowded field of endeavor, other than those enthusiasts using scuba apparatus; and they, due to the difficulty of obtaining financial backing, find it almost impossible to follow it on a large scale on account of the difficulty of such equipment penetrating actual wrecks and the limited depth range. I doubt if such a job classification is even recognized among the 27,501 occupations catalogued in the United States Department of Labor’s dictionary. But today treasure salvage has its rewards for any man who can meet its challenge, and who has the initiative and daring, most especially those of a serious mind who, perhaps, have taken courses in such recognized schools as that of the Coastal School of Deep Sea Diving, in Oakland, California, which graduates specialists only for underwater operations by the larger construction corporations.

During my own years of active treasure salvage, when such schools were nonexistent and one had to go on his own, I have brought up from the bottom of the seas almost a half-million dollars in real treasure, and there are still billions of dollars remaining in the holds, the safes and strongboxes of sunken hulks, as well as huge fortunes still resting beneath the sea-level bottom where the wrecks themselves have long years ago disintegrated—with at least 80 per cent of this vast hoard within reach of modern diving equipment. Down through the years I have examined many thousands of ships’ documents, shipping papers, courts-martial records, and marine underwriters’ reports, even long-dead ships’ logs; I have consulted and examined the ancient and modern records in many archives of foreign governments; and from these and other sources, established the authenticity of many thousands of treasure-laden shipwrecks that would be reasonable business ventures.

On numerous occasions during my twenty-five years of underwater exploration in the search of treasure, with this information, I have descended to the bottom of the waters to the positions indicated by such research, and returned many times with tangible evidence warranting salvage operations.

This treasure is scattered along the seaways of the world, along every channel through which ships of all types have passed during the past three hundred years. And each dead hulk marks an historical incident in the violence of nature or man—for no ship dies peacefully at sea. And only the shallower depths in which these golden argosies rest have been explored; scarcely a half-dozen divers and underwater explorers—and these with mechanical devices, diving bells, diving tanks, observation spheres and robots—have penetrated the seas’ fastnesses; none very far or in search for treasure itself. Defeat by both depth and extreme water pressure has been the lot of most deep-sea salvors. It is a kingdom in which man has hitherto been forbidden to enter, with safety, in his salvage operations.

Yet this practically unexplored underwater world of sunken wrecks conceals huge fortunes which tragedy and history, pirates and buccaneers, storms and hurricanes and accidents have left lying in their depths. Year after year, these tragic misfortunes have deposited on the sea bottoms an inconceivably large share of the richest cargoes as well as the rarest treasures of every martime nation; from that great and continuous array of ships: of once proud galleons, stately high-pooped frigates, lofty East Indiamen, fast-sailing clipper ships, heavily manned men-of-war, and even palatial ocean liners, which down through the centuries to the present have carried the fabulous wealth and riches of all races to the ports of the world. And of this succession of trade, rich merchandise, and fabulous treasures, untold fortunes have been each year exacted as tribute and toll by that greatest of all pirates, Davy Jones—until today his realm retains in his keeping approximately one-eighth of all the world’s extracted gold and silver. It rests in the wealthiest treasure-tomb of the twentieth century, in these rotting hulks and rusted wrecks, seemingly like a picture of the legend of the Sargasso Sea come true—great ships and large pieces of ships, in many places heaped in promiscuous jumbled masses and piled one upon another, huge mounds of long-rotted wooden masts and spars and their fantastic treasure cargoes galore. And amid their wreckage the ghosts of drowned officers and seamen who manned the craft still haunt their shattered decks, ever guarding their riches!

They are still there—waiting….

In this day of unbelievable uranium strikes, neorich Texas oil millionaires, and dynamic, self-made stock-market tycoons, these huge fortunes rest within reach of the average man with adventure in his soul and a fine mixture of courage and daring together with a burning desire for wealth in his heart; for these fortunes, literally billions of dollars worth on today’s market in gold and silver and jewels and other unperishable treasures, lie just beneath the surface waters of the rivers, the lakes, and the seas, just begging to be salvaged—and spent! The so-called proverbial "pot of gold at the end of the rainbow," becomes a mere bagatelle in comparison to what has been deposited on the bottoms of these waters of the world. History records that since the day the first ship rode the seas, the precious wealth of man has continued to accumulate with increasing rapidity, until today, concealed in the sand, the mud and ooze of the sea bottom, within these rotted hulks and remains of the ships that foundered down through the centuries, there has accumulated within this little-explored underwater region the rarest of treasures of most every maritime nation—truly ransom for one thousand and more kings!

To seek these sunken treasure caches one does not need colorful treasure charts to show the resting places of these golden cargoes—there are many firms who advertise the sale of such maps purporting to furnish the exact sites of treasure-laden wrecks. The enthusiastic, credulous, and trustful victims who purchase such fictitious highly-decorated products usually find their purchase of small, if any, valuable use at all. The treasure-hunter or salvor today need only to consult the records of customhouses, archives, ship’s logs, and other maritime sources to obtain authentic locations of these sunken craft; then he needs the diving knowledge, equipment, patience, the necessary funds, and some luck to seek his finds. And he will find this new field of endeavor the most thrilling adventure in the world today, for it is real!

Too, the treasure hunter and salvor will often find that the general public erroneously considers such a subject as quite fantastic, a search which only wastrels and dreamers put their faith in; however, it is they that are the ones who know so little about so much; for, there is more gold and silver and other treasure lying on the bottoms of the waters of the globe today than there is stored in the combined treasuries of all nations! This is an estimate that comes not from the pages of the Arabian Nights or some other particular nightmarish hallucination; it is a substantiated figure based on research into the maritime archives of every nation where the tragic histories of lost treasure-carrying ships are filed; also, the fact is further authenticated by the numerous salvage operations in which millions of dollars worth of riches have been and are currently recovered. To list such a precise catalog of known projects which would keep hundreds of treasure-hunters, divers, and salvors busy for several lifetimes would entail a bookshelf of such volumes. This I know, for I have built up, throughout the past twenty-five years, just such a register—Fell’s Guide to the Sunken Treasure Ships of the world—the first and only catalogue like it of more than one thousand such wrecks, compiled in collaboration with my associate A. A. Mikalow, famed deep-sea master diver and underwater explorer.

The further I have penetrated into this most fascinating and opportune subject—and that of my own past experience of professional search and salvage—the more I have come to realize I have so far merely scratched the surface of the thousands of treasure-laden wrecks which still rest at the very spot where they sank with their precious cargoes—for this is a new world I have spent so many years of my career in as a pioneer. It is an unexplored and unknown realm, save for a few tiny spots out of the huge vastness of the watery region. To me, there is tragic drama in the history of each of these ill-fated wrecks, which still shelter their rich cargoes of incalculable riches, decades or centuries after disasters of some nature had overwhelmed them and sent them down to their final anchorage. Even the mere name of these craft illuminates and produces flashing scenes in my imaginative mind, as I visualize their dramatic end. These long-dead ships sail again for me, and the quiet undersea waters burst into flaming and violent life.

I might say that in my assembling of these early accounts and histories of the thousands of foundered ships lost at sea and in other waters of the world—those which had gone down through the centuries with consignments of gold, silver, and other valuables—an initial hobby that led to later research in numerous foreign countries and their marine archives from original documents, the stupendous collecting I had engaged in became the beginning of and was the basic incentive that led me into the field of salvage on numerous of these ill-fated wrecks scattered throughout the waters of the southern seas. I believed that the treasure cargoes were still down there, ready for the taking, unless some previous salvage operations had been made prior to my own ventures.

But to follow such a calling and the new career I realized that I must have diving experience. This I obtained at the Washington Navy Yard, then located at 26th and M Streets. It wasn’t long before I was donning the diving dress used by the navy divers and taking a look at the bottom of the Potomac River.. Day after day I returned to the Navy Yard to complete my course, and after my day’s work, I found myself at home, poring over maps and old manuscripts, visualizing the huge treasure caches that rested on the seaway’s bottom in rotting hulks just waiting for salvors to reclaim them. My early experiences at salvage, like most businesses which take on a pioneering procedure, were of little consequence, being nothing more than experiments and small-scale operations. However, the many years that followed these initial exploratory ventures brought huge returns to both my financial backers and myself; though in these, I used most of my own share of the finds to finance other expeditions by my own organizations—the Romano Marine Engineering & Salvage Corporation, and the Lieut. Harry E. Rieseberg Expeditions, Inc.—both of which were operations of international scope in their field. All were not successes; some turned out to be duds and huge financial losses; thirteen brought returns of great value.

On one of these latter expeditions I met with an accident—one that to this day has left me with a partial lameness in my left leg—a grim memento from that adventure. However, a number of further expeditions followed, each successful, until I found the work much too arduous with a crippled limb. And, retiring from the actual work, other than in a consulting capacity, I began writing of my experiences and the subject itself. Even to this day I receive salvage offers from those who wish to finance such undertakings and who endeavor to persuade me to give up my semiretirement and direct new searches. These offers, quite often, are of a most enticing nature, difficult to turn down, but a little too strenuous for my taste under the circumstances.

Often I have thought of those earlier days of my youth when I read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure island, and how I cherished in my heart, as every boy has at some time or other, the hopes I had that someday I, too, might sail the waters of the Caribbean and Spanish Main in my own ship, skirt palm-fringed bays and atolls with their broad beaches and pink and white sand to