A Titanic expedition
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This is a digitised version of an article from The Cayman Compass's print archive. Occasionally, the digitisation process introduces transcription errors, or other problems.
See the article in its original context from September 1992.
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Today, he is somewhere off the coast of Portugal on his way to the site of wreck of the Titanic some 400 miles south of Newfoundland aboard the research vessel Seamussell.
This is not the first deepwaterexpedition Mr. Humphreys has been on, for, as he readily admits, 60 percent of his life is dedicated to the salvaging the sunken ships. But this will be his first visit to the wreck.
As head of what is called the 'Marex-Titanic Expedition', Mr. Humphreys considers this venture unique. Its purpose is to salvage what is left of the artefacts from the wreck for placement in an exhibit to honour the seamen and passengers who were killed in the tragic accident. At the same time, it discourages would-be treasure hunters from picking at the wreck.
Since the wreckage of the luxury liner was first located in 1985, a French company had recovered over three hundred artefacts including old coins and personal items, many of which have been sold into private collections. Revelation that another expedition was being planned led to the formation of the Marex-Titanic expedition. Mr. Humphreys, President of Marex (International) Inc., and Jack Grimm head a team of four.
Mr. Humphreys and his comrades hope to fulfill the dream of Mr. Robert D. Ballard, the man who headed the expedition which originally found the Titanic after some 73 years: that artefacts from the wreck be kept out of the hands of treasure-seeking commercial expeditors.
The team was scheduled to leave Italy yesterday, 10 September, to proceed through the Straits of Gibraltar to an area just 400 miles off Newfoundland. He expects the expedition to last approximately three weeks.
The dive will take him some 12,000 feet down with the assistance of underwater vehicles. The crew will attempt to retrieve artefacts on the debris field but nothing from within the ship as they have no intentions of entering the actual vessel. He expects to find wine bottles, mail bags, coins, and parts of Cont'd on page A4 Some 1,513 people perished on the morning of 14 April 1912 when the British luxury passenger liner, the Titanic, slammed head-on in to an iceberg just before midnight about 95 miles south of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
A gigantic hole ripped through the structure of the "unsinkable" Titanic, at the time the largest ship afloat, and caused it to sink some two and a half hours later. The ship was steaming at 21 knots, adjudged at the time to be too fast, through an ice field when the accident occurred. Some 2,340 passengers and crew were on board the Titanic when the White Star liner left Southampton, England, for its maiden voyage to New York. Only 745 were saved, many of them women and children.
The captain, most of his officers and a number of wives who refused to be rescued went down with the ship.
U.S. Senate ruled that operators were negligent in the disaster. Gold bars found near the site of the Maravillas from page Al the ship, items which will become part of the travelling exhibit. While this is a major expedition in terms of its historical value, Marex (International) Ltd., has gained fame of another kind, and, I must add, much fortune from the rediscovery of the Nuestra Senora de las Maravillas just 40 miles north of West End, Grand Bahama. The company's shallow water divers, many of whom are Caymanians, are presently on the site of the wreck, Mr. Humphreys explained.
This is believed to be one of the richest cargoes ever to sail. History has it that the Maravillas was one of several ships which sailed to Madrid, Spain from Portobello, Panama after a stop in Cuba. She was loaded with some 30 to 40 tons of gold, silver, porcelain and emeralds mainly from South America estimated to be worth 1.6 billion today. Near midnight of 4 January 1656, the galleon fleet strayed from the course into the shallow waters of Little Bahama Bank, and in the darkness was rammed by another ship, and sank a short while later.
Modern-day attempts to salvage the wreck began in the early 1970s. The work led to the rediscovery of the Maravillas during the 1986 expedition of Maritime Archaeological Recovery of which Mr. Humphrey is president. MAR holds salvage rights to a 161 square mile area of the Little Bahama Bank. The company keeps 75 percent of any treasure found, the other 25 percent goes to the Bahamian government.
A representative sample of the artefacts and treasure recovered have been placed on permanent display in the Treasure Museum across from the Hyatt.
