MADRID, Spain: Spain laid formal claim Thursday to a shipwreck that yielded US$500 million (€324 million) in treasure, saying it has proof the vessel is Spanish and demanding that a U.S. deep-sea exploration firm that recovered the booty give it all back.

Culture Ministry officials said the 19th-century shipwreck at the heart of a year-old dispute with Odyssey Marine Exploration is the Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes — a Spanish warship sunk by the British navy southwest of Portugal in 1804 with more than 200 people on board.

The Spanish government filed evidence Thursday backing up its claim with a U.S. federal judge hearing the case in Tampa, Florida, where Odyssey is based.
Washington-based lawyer James Goold, who represents the Spanish government in the case, said U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark Pizzo would now convene the two parties to review the case before deciding who gets to keep the treasure.

“It is the property of the Spanish navy, government and people, and we want it all back,” said Admiral Teodoro de Leste Contreras, who runs a naval museum owned by the ministry.

Goold said at a news conference in Madrid that he expected Odyssey would keep “not a penny” of the salvage.

Spain argues the entire treasure should be returned because naval vessels never cease to be the property of the nation that flagged them, regardless of where they lay, under the principle of sovereign immunity, Goold said.

“Spain has not abandoned or otherwise relinquished in any way its ownership of Mercedes,” Spain argued in Thursday’s court filing.

Odyssey said it would issue a statement after reviewing Spain’s claim and the file provided Thursday to the U.S. court. But company officials has said in the past they believed the court would award them most of the treasure, as they had found it. (more…)

Winter Park, FL – The latest mail-bid Treasure Auction from Daniel Frank Sedwick will close at 5 pm Eastern Time on Thursday, May 29, 2008. Printed catalogs (are available for $25 each, free to bidders) Also lots can be seen online at www.SedwickCoins.com Featured in this Treasure Auction #3 there are dozens of choice gold cobs (mostly from the Spanish 1715 Fleet, sunk off the east coast of Florida).

A second offering of gold nuggets from a 1558 Portuguese wreck off Africa; thirteen “tumbaga” silver bars from a 1520s shipwreck in the Bahamas; an extremely rare ca.-1580 bronze astrolabe in coral, a collection of Spanish colonial 8 reales from cobs through busts; scores of perfectly preserved Chinese porcelains from wrecks off the Philippines; the latest selection of silver cobs from the Consolación wreck of 1681; and the first-ever auction offering of silver coins from the ca.-1810 “Coconut wreck” from deep in the Atlantic.

Many more coins and artifacts are also offered, over 1165 lots in all, with a pre-auction estimate of $625,000 to $900,000 total.

All lots in this auction are available for viewing at Daniel Sedwick’s private office in Winter Park by appointment only. Please contact us at info@sedwickcoins.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or by phone at (407) 975-3325 or by mail at P.O. Box 1964, Winter Park, FL, 32790, for more information and to sign up to receive the catalog for this auction and become a bidder.

By  WERNER MENGES for the Namibian 

THE discovery of a treasure-laden shipwreck, estimated to be around 500 years old, in Namdeb’s Mining Area 1 near Oranjemund early last month is only the first chapter in what could turn into a long slog of archaeological detective work to unravel the secrets of an ill-fated pioneer of sea travel off the Southern African coast.

The easy part of working on an archaeological site like this is the digging up of the site and recovering relevant material from it, archaeologist Dieter Noli, who played a leading part in the first examination of the wreck site in April, told The Namibian in a telephonic interview from Cape Town yesterday.

The hard work is analysing what was found at the site, he said.

That is expected to be painstaking labour that could take months before it is even known what the real significance of the discovery is, he said.

He is convinced, though, that he and his colleagues who will be helping to study the wreck and its contents will eventually be able to find out whose ship this was and what business it was on when it came to an end on that barren stretch of Namibian coastline, Noli indicated.

“We have to piece together the puzzle.  It’s a fascinating story,” he said. (more…)