The pillage (掠夺) and destruction of ancient shipwrecks and sunken archaeological sites by treasure hunters seeking gold and other valuables may be illegal under the terms of an international treaty under discussion by UNESCO's 188 Member States.
"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," warns Lyndel Prott.
According to estimates by commercial salvors (寻宝者), there are some three million undiscovered shipwrecks scattered across the world's oceans. Even the figures for the known wrecks are impressive. The Northern Shipwrecks Database for example contains 65,000 ship loss records for North America alone from 1500 AD to the present. The Dictionary of Disasters at Sea by Charles Hocking (1969) lists 12,542 sailing ships and war vessels lost between 1824 and 1962.
Then there are sunken cities such as the trading town and pirate stronghold(海盗堡垒) of Port Royal in Jamaica, which disappeared beneath the waves after an earthquake in 1692. Or the remnants of ancient civilisations, such as the Lighthouse of Alexandria in Egypt, and the Neolithic villages being discovered under the Black Sea, which some believe could help explain Noah's great flood.
These treasures of cultural heritage are under serious threat. Technology now allows extraordinary access to the ocean depths for determined and well-financed treasure hunters. And the potential rewards are huge. In 1985, American salvor Mel Fisher discovered the wreck of the Señora de Atocha, a Spanish ship that sank off the Florida Keys in 1622 with her cargo of gold, silver and jewellery worth an estimated US $400 million.
An archaeologist can spend ten years or more studying a ship, conserving its objects and publishing its findings. We gain an enormous amount of information and knowledge from this work. With treasure hunters, all of this is lost. This is tragic, for humanity as a whole.
