VGLD NEWS ARTICLE 11/10/99
The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, November 10, 1999
Castro's gold rush
A Canadian company has joined hands with Havana to go treasure -hunting for Spanish galleons of gold. But Miami's Cuban exiles call it piracy
By Susan Bourette
Havana -- Ed Burtt squints into the white-gold Caribbean sun and he sees Treasure Island.
He's a compact man with a sailor's tongue, a mind for detail and a lust for adventure.
He also possesses what every treasure hunter covets but typically finds only in fables: an ancient treasure map pointing to a trove of riches and gems buried in the sand and coral along the coast of Cuba.
"It's every childhood fantasy to meet a man with a twinkle in his eye who sells you a treasure map, for a hundred bucks, with a big 'X' pointing to where the gold chest is, the one guarded by a pirate at the bottom of the sea. That has never happened. Until now," the 59-year-old, Canadian shipwreck-chaser says, pulling out a map drawn nearly 400 years ago that supposedly marks a legendary shipwreck site a few kilometres from Havana's harbour.
Mr. Burtt, expedition captain of Orillia, Ont.-based Visa Gold Explorations Inc., the second Canadian company to chase treasure off Cuba, is hoping the map will lead him to the motherlode: the Santissima Trinidad, a Spanish galleon that was swept to the ocean floor in a hurricane in 1711, taking with it an estimated $500-million in precious cargo.
Two weeks ago, Visa Gold announced to the world that it had found hints that it was hot on the trail of a vast trove of riches. The discovery included a ballast pile, indicating that a ship's hull should be within reach.
Now, it's an early Sunday morning, nearing the end of hurricane season, on the outskirts of Havana. The iridescent blue sky upstages the decaying opulence of the pastel city to the east. The sea is silent for the first time in a week. A perfect day to be on the water.
Mr. Burtt climbs aboard the Explorad'oro, a 40-foot vessel crafted specifically for this high-tech treasure hunt.
Today, he and his team of Visa Gold officials are staging a road show of sorts. A group of Canadian brokers and investors and the company's president, former solicitor-general Doug Lewis, are taking a spin on the Fantasy, a sleek white cruiser that trails behind the Explorad'oro. Gripped by the gold rush, the investors are here, hoping for a glimpse of the golden chalice and a handful of precious artifacts sewn into the seabed that were detected by Visa Gold's underwater equipment two weeks ago.
Talk on the Fantasy eventually turns to Bre-X -- the fabled $3-billion mining hoax -- the biggest swindle in Canadian corporate history.
But this adventure isn't a quest for fool's gold, the Canadian team insists. The treasure is here. All they have to do is find it.
Havana was the last stop on the silver route for the Conquistadors carrying riches pillaged in the New World and bound for the Castilian empire. Many of the ships never made it far from the harbour, their underbellies ripped open by reefs, hurricanes, and the roundshot of pirates. As many as four hundred of the royal ships were thought to have sunk in the Havana harbour in a single hurricane in the mid-1700s.
How much treasure is buried in galleon alley? Some peg the booty at upwards of $1-billion (U.S.).
But the seas have been reluctant to relinquish their secrets. It took Mel Fischer, the doyen of American treasure hunters, 16 years to find the Atocha -- a Spanish galleon carrying riches valued at nearly $700-million -- off the Florida Keys in the 1980s.
When Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, he declared the treasure part of the national patrimony of Cuba. A keen diver in his youth, he ordered the state-owned Carisub corporation to scour Cuba's coastline for decades to find it, but was thwarted by a lack of sophisticated technology. He's now turned to this Canadian company for help. The two parties have agreed to split the haul.
That doesn't sit well 90 kilometres north in Miami.
The leaders of the city's 100,000 Cuban exiles denounce the Canadian company's joint venture with the Castro government as modern-day piracy.
"Eventually, this treasure will all end up in the hands of a dictatorship. The Canadians are helping to keep the Cuban people in poverty by maintaining Castro in power," charges Ninoska Perez Castellon, a Miami radio personality and spokesperson for the Cuban American National Foundation. "It's so pathetic. It's truly unfortunate that the Canadians have become Cuba's newest privateers."
Spain has also launched a legal and diplomatic offensive to claim the wrecked Spanish galleons wherever they lie in the world's waters, claiming that its cultural heritage is at stake. It scored its first victory in July when an American judge ruled that two boats sunk off the coast of Virginia in 1802 belong to Spain.
But the Canadians aren't worried. "This is a completely different situation," Mr. Lewis says. "These ships are in Cuba's waters and can't be touched by Spain." Back in Havana, Castro is counting on the gold and silver to help spark Cuba's moribund economy.
If the Canadians do find the treasure, the fastidious Spanish bureaucrats of the 17th century certainly deserve some of the glory. They kept detailed records of the cargo aboard the galleons, save for the untold millions in contraband goods hidden from the royal court, smuggled by the ships' captains and crews, and by the Jesuits helping to bankroll the Inquistion. Determined that the New World gold and silver sunk with the galleons be recouped for the king's coffers, they also kept exhaustive records of shipwreck sites.
It was there, in Seville, hidden in the stacks of royal parchment paper, that a Visa Gold's researcher found their first clue to uncovering the mystery of the Santissima Trinidad.
According to scrap of paper found in the archives, a Cuban ceramic-tile maker claimed in 1711 that a neighbour was stealing firewood from near his kiln and he wanted to register a survey of his land with the Spanish authorities. While the map clearly delineated his property, it also showed a pile of stones along the coastline, a cairn that a shipwreck's survivors erected as a signpost to the lost galleon. Some of the ship's contents were retrieved before a second hurricane hit two days later, sweeping its hull further into the Caribbean.
Mr. Burtt believes the map provides a key lead. Over the years, olive jars dating back to the 17th century have washed ashore. Local fishermen have also found gold and silver coins near the site, located about six kilometres from Havana.
But he and his company are relying on more than local lore and an ancient map to find the riches entombed in Cuba's sand and coral.
Visa Gold has invested about $750,000 in its venture, including $150,000 in high-tech equipment. In addition to a global-positioning system, an underwater tow camera beams up pictures of the ocean floor and records the images on the ship's VCR, and a side-scan sonar system paints a picture of the sea's bottom. A magnometer dragged behind the boat is used to detect iron -- chains, anchors and cannons as well as the stone ballast piles that were buried in the galleon's hulls to keep them upright in fickle winds. And a search-and-recovery computer system records winds, currents and drifts culled from the ancient navigator's reports to calculate every mathematical possibility of where the ship may be.
However, no amount of high-tech equipment can replace months of drudgery and dogmatic perservance trawling Cuba's waters, Mr. Burtt adds. More important, he says, are the skills of the team's archeologist, and its Cuban and Canadian divers.
Mr. Burtt is a seaman with first-class credentials.
He says gold runs through his veins, having been born in Kirkland Lake, Ont., home of one the earliest Canadian gold mines. He trained as an metalurgical engineer and runs a metal-products business in Belleville, Ont., when he's not in the Caribbean hunting treasure. He has also worked for the FBI, hauling up drug boats and with the Canadian government, looking for bodies, shipwrecks and planes in Canadian waters.
But his passion for chasing shipwrecks was born in his search for the H.M.S. Speedy, a British vessel that sank in Lake Ontario in 1874. It took him 18 years -- working on and off -- to find it, but he's never looked back.
His first brush with the ancient Spanish galleons was off the coast of Florida, working alongside Mel Fischer in his hunt for the Atocha. Two weeks before Mr. Fischer hit the jackpot, Mr. Burtt was scooping up gold coins from the bottom of the ocean. He wasn't there for the big find, but his appetite for treasure-hunting was whetted. Mr. Burtt says it's the intellectual drama that fuels his passion for the hunt.
"You have to imagine the winds, the drift, the screaming rats, the captain's last gasp for air as the ship went down. You also look at the log books of a ship's navigators and try to imagine how it all smashed apart. You contemplate all of this information, and then you plug it into the computer."
If a wreck is found, however, excavating it won't be easy. The Cuban coastline is plagued by sharks, stingrays, rockfish and sea urchins that make diving conditions among the most difficult in the world.
"The first rule of the sea is never touch the bottom," explains Phill Wright, Visa Gold's archeologist, and one of the team's key divers. "It's very easy to stick your hand into a crevice and if you do, watch out. You're going to get bitten."
The details of how the joint venture will reap profit from the treasure are still being haggled over. Sethu Raman, the man responsible for initiating the project with the Cubans and Visa Gold's secretary-treasurer, dreams that one day the company will franchise stretches of its 5,000-sq.-kilometre search territory to other shipwreck chasers. "Just like Macdonalds," he says.
There are thoughts of a museum in Cuba that could boost tourism. There are also book rights and movie rights to consider.
No one knows what TerraWest Industries Inc. was planning for its haul, had the company found a pot of gold at the bottom of the sea. TerraWest, the first Canadian company to trawl Cuba's waters in search of treasure, failed last year after about three years' exploration. It's now midday and two Cuban snorklers are scouring the seabed a few metres from the the Explorad'oro. The investors and brokers who sit nearby on the Fantasy are drinking in bittersweet Cuban coffee, the Caribbean sun and the Visa Gold story.
Will the gods of the galleons -- who have closely guarded the sea's secrets for centuries -- look more kindly on Visa Gold?
"I don't know," Mr. Burtt says, after considering the question for several moments. "I wish I'd never fallen in love with chasing shipwrecks. The truth is, I really don't know. But it's an incredible adventure."
Copyright 1999 The Globe and Mail
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