TREASURE HUNTERS: A THING OF THE PAST??

"Protecting our underwater heritage is extremely important and increasingly urgent as no site or shipwreck is now out of bounds for treasure hunters. New technologies have made deep water wrecks easily accessible and these technologies are getting cheaper." This is a warning recently issued by Lyndell Prott, the director of UNESCO's Cultural Heritage Division. Underwater treasure hunting has now been banned under a new convention adopted by UNESCO. The 2001 document also recommends that wrecks or archeological sites and their contents be left in their watery graves. The convention covers "all traces of human existence having a cultural, historical or archeological character which have been partially or totally underwater, periodically or continuously, for at least 100 years." This is good news especially in the BVI where we have a large number of historic shipwreck sites. Around Anegada alone an estimated 200 wrecks dating from the 1500s to the 1960s have been mapped. Some of the oldest European shipwrecks recorded in the Americas are to be found in the waters off the Horseshoe Reef and many of the surviving wrecks hold important archaeological information about the circumstances surrounding the wreck, the lives of the people on board, the cargo and the construction and technology of the vessel. The wreck of the Rhone has become a major tourist attraction for divers from all corners of the globe, but more remains to be done to discover and protect other major underwater archeological sites in BVI waters. Through the years a lot of valuable and historically significant items have been removed from many of our underwater archeological sites and this is a well known fact. It would not surprise us to see items from the wreck of the Rhone being auctioned in London or New York for thousands of dollars. In fact, many shipwrecks in British Virgin Islands waters have suffered irreparable harm caused by salvage activities and souvenir hunters removing items from the wrecks. Some artefacts require special conservation treatment to preserve them once they are removed from the water. Without the appropriate treatment they may disintegrate and be lost forever. The BVI and the entire Caribbean is still very vulnerable to the silent but steady work of treasure hunters and so-called "salvors". The Caribbean is also home to the only sunken town in the New World Port Royal, Jamaica. This exceedingly important site has been described as an underwater Pompeii and a world heritage site. Australian laws dating back to 1976 are very severe about underwater "pirates" and fines up to $50,000 and sentences up to a maximum five years imprisonment can be imposed on offenders. In the BVI we have become increasingly aware of the importance of our underwater heritage and we hope that our government will persevere in enacting measures to protect and manage historic shipwrecks and archeological sites within our territorial waters. We hope that government agencies and the local divers organisation will investigate the potential and ramifications of the recently adopted UNESCO convention in order to better protect our Treasured Islands' underwater heritage.