A RESPONSE TO ODYSSEY'S CRITICS 上市 Deposited
The E-Sylum: Volume 10, Number 23, June 10, 2007, Article 22
A RESPONSE TO ODYSSEY'S CRITICS
Author Robert Kurson penned an opinion piece published for the
New York Times on June 8. Titled 'Curators Under the Sea', his
piece addresses critics of sea salvors such as Odyssey."Last month, a Florida-based treasure-hunting company made
perhaps the richest undersea score ever. It discovered, somewhere
in the Atlantic, a Colonial-era shipwreck containing more than
500,000 silver coins and hundreds of gold coins. Total estimated
value, according to one coin marketer: $500 million."In days of yore, pirates would have swarmed to such a bounty,
declaring the treasure their own. Today, it attracts a new breed
of raiders who believe just as strongly that the treasure is
rightfully theirs — and who get just as angry when things don’t
go their way. They are the academics — professors, curators,
historians and others who study, archive and preserve historical
artifacts. Many of them despise the commercial treasure hunters
for, as they see it, rampaging through shipwrecks with little
regard for the delicate history at hand."The same case was made in 1991, when two recreational scuba
divers discovered a World War II German U-boat — complete with
its 56-man crew — that had sunk just off New Jersey. No military
expert or historian had known of this wreck, its sailors or its
story, and so it fell to these two ordinary men to embark on a
six-year, fantastically dangerous quest to solve the mystery."As it happened, there was no treasure aboard this U-boat, but
academics made virtually the same accusation: the divers, they
said, were going to trample history in their quest to put a
name on the warship."Nothing could have been further from the truth. Not for the divers
ho undertook huge risks to preserve the U-boat. And not for treasure
hunters, who have even greater incentives to be careful with
their finds."Do they know how to handle the rarities they find? The academics
scoff at the idea. But many of the finest conservation labs, the
most up-to-date equipment and the best-trained archaeologists can
be found on just the kind of treasure hunting quest that discovered
the recent Colonial-era wreck."The real bottom line is this: if treasure hunters didn’t do this
kind of work, no one would. Without them and the people they work
with — the divers, fishermen, tipsters and amateur historians —
many of these wrecks would stay lost forever. Without the lure of
a big and romantic payoff, no one would even look."Academics don’t drag magnetometers and side-scan sonar equipment
across the seas. They don’t risk their lives, as the U-boat divers
did, by removing their air tanks and corkscrewing through a
labyrinth."To read the complete article, see: Full Story
- 2007-06-10
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