| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico | February 2009 
Mexico Says US Firm Can't Explore Shipwreck
 Mark Stevenson - Associated Press
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Mexico City — Mexico has denied a U.S. sea salvage company's request to explore and recover artifacts from a sunken 17th-century Spanish galleon in the Gulf, the government said Monday.
The ship in question, the galleon Our Lady of Juncal, was part of a fleet hit by a powerful storm in 1631 in "one of the greatest tragedies that has ever occurred in Mexican waters," according to Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History.
The proposal by Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc. of Tampa, Florida, "is not intended to conduct research and does not have the approval of archaeologists or an academic institution of recognized prestige," the Institute said. It added that "treasure hunters have always had their eyes on" the wreck site.
Odyssey Marine chairman Greg Stemm said in a statement that "the proposal presented to Mexico for archaeological services is in compliance with the UNESCO Convention and would keep all cultural artifacts together in a collection."
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization says on its Web site that the convention aims to "preserve in situ all remains of human existence submerged for at least one hundred years."
The Our Lady of Juncal set sail from the Gulf coast port of Veracruz on Oct. 14, 1631, as part of a 19-ship fleet bearing what the Institute described only as "a valuable shipment of the goods obtained by the king's ministers to feed the Spanish empire." Most of the fleet never made it.
Galleons returning to Spain in that era commonly carried large amounts of silver and lesser amounts of gold from mines in Mexico, Peru and elsewhere.
Odyssey Marine's Web site describes it as "the world leader in deep-ocean shipwreck exploration" and says its teams have found nearly 300 wrecks, including the recently discovered remains of the HMS Victory, a British man-of-war that sank in the English Channel in October 1744.
The company is currently in a legal dispute with Peru and Spain over what could be the most valuable shipwreck ever – $500 million in silver coins salvaged from a Spanish galleon that sank in 1804 off Portugal. |
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