{"id":195528,"date":"2025-10-12T19:13:14","date_gmt":"2025-10-12T19:13:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/195528\/"},"modified":"2025-10-12T19:13:14","modified_gmt":"2025-10-12T19:13:14","slug":"indiana-jones-of-the-deep-reveals-race-against-shipwreck-looters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/195528\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Indiana Jones of the deep\u2019 reveals race against shipwreck looters"},"content":{"rendered":"

The \u201cIndiana Jones of the deep\u201d has revealed his fears that the looting of shipwrecks is being made easier by technological advances and has said his life \u201cis a race against the bands of looters and plunderers\u201d.<\/p>\n

Mensun Bound, who discovered Sir Ernest Shackleton\u2019s Endurance three years ago, in 10,000ft of water, said \u201crogue organisations\u201d were now able to go anywhere in the oceans.<\/p>\n

The British maritime archaeologist said he had made \u201cheartbreaking decisions\u201d about which wrecks to survey, adding that he was haunted by one he initially rejected that within years was comprehensively plundered.<\/p>\n

\"Taffrail,<\/p>\n

FALKLANDS MARITIME HERITAGE TRUST\/ZUMA\/ALAMY<\/p>\n

\u201cIt seems to me sometimes that my whole life has been a race against the bands of looters and plunderers,\u201d Bound, 72, told the Cheltenham Literature Festival. He was speaking about his book Wonders in the Deep, written with the journalist Mark Frary.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt worries me a lot. The technology is just getting better and better, and cheaper and cheaper. There is nowhere we cannot go in the oceans these days.\u201d<\/p>\n

Autonomous underwater vehicles which are able to operate untethered to surface ships and to stay submerged for days have been hailed as revolutionary for those seeking the estimated three million shipwrecks scattered across the ocean floor.<\/p>\n

Advances in surveying and excavation techniques have increased the number of discoveries as well as raising fears of surreptitious salvage and theft.<\/p>\n

Bound, who was born in the Falkland Islands and whose Endurance mission was funded by an anonymous donor, said he worried about the artefacts left on Shackleton\u2019s ship<\/a>, which the explorer abandoned in 1915 when it became stuck in pack ice in the Weddell Sea.<\/p>\n

\"Men<\/p>\n

Endurance had to be abandoned in 1915 when it was crushed by the Antarctic ice<\/p>\n

FRANK HURLEY\/SCOTT POLAR RESEARCH INSTITUTE, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

\u201cThe bell of the Endurance is just sitting there<\/a>. Yes, protected under the Antarctic Treaty but there are rogue organisations which I know would go there and help themselves to that,\u201d Bound told the festival, in a session chaired by Georgina Godwin.<\/p>\n

He has undertaken scores of shipwreck surveys. \u201cI\u2019ve had to make some heartbreaking decisions in my time about which wrecks I could save,\u201d he added. \u201cIt was pretty brutal stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bound said it was to his everlasting regret that he had turned his back on Roman shipwrecks when he was young. He told the festival<\/a>, which is sponsored by The Times and The Sunday Times, that in the mid 1980s he had been told about a \u201cvirgin wreck\u201d found by skin-divers in the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause I was young, inexperienced and certainly arrogant I had this view that if the wreck didn\u2019t come from antiquity it wasn\u2019t important,\u201d Bound said. \u201cBut about four or five years later I wisened up and realised this was something of outstanding archaeological importance.<\/p>\n

\"British<\/p>\n

Mensun Bound was once told about a virgin wreck in the Mediterranean. When he went to examine it five years later he found only a stain in the sand<\/p>\n

JOHN LAWRENCE\/SHUTTERSTOCK<\/p>\n

\u201cSo my wife and I went back to have a look at the wreck and we could not believe it. In the intervening five years it had been completely erased. All that was left was this stain in the sand.\u201d<\/p>\n

The deepest known shipwreck is the USS Samuel B Roberts<\/a> which lies nearly 23,000ft down after being sunk in the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippine Sea in 1944. Bound said even this could come within range of future expeditions.<\/p>\n

\"USS<\/p>\n

Frary said there were disputes about who owned rediscovered ships<\/a>. He cited the example of the San Jos\u00e9, a Spanish galleon that could be \u201cthe richest shipwreck ever found\u201d.<\/p>\n

The galleon was sunk by the British off Cartagena, Colombia, in 1708, during the War of the Spanish Succession, and was found in 2015. The value of its gold and silver cargo is estimated at $17 billion.<\/p>\n

\"Illustration<\/p>\n

A painting by Samuel Scott of the destruction of the San Jos\u00e9<\/p>\n

ALAMY<\/p>\n

Frary said that although technological advances had made its retrieval possible \u201csometime soon\u201d the court arguments over who owns the ship and its contents may not be resolved easily.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s in Colombian water, it\u2019s a Spanish galleon with dead Spanish sailors on board, the English sank it, the treasure on board was looted from Bolivia and there are various American companies<\/a> who say they found it first,\u201d Frary said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo whose is it? The technology has reached the level now where it may be able to be retrieved soon but it is stuck in the courts while people decide whose it is.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The \u201cIndiana Jones of the deep\u201d has revealed his fears that the looting of shipwrecks is being made…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":195529,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-195528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195528\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/195529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}