Meide’s first reaction when he heard La Trinité had likely been discovered was joy, but his second reaction was horror. “The worst thing that could happen to a shipwreck is to be found by a treasure hunter. Better that it not be found at all,” he says, rocking back in his desk chair on the day in late August that I visit him at the St. Augustine Lighthouse and Maritime Museum. He was worried about the worst-case scenario—Pritchett going out at night, diving to the wreck, and stealing artifacts.
Meide’s dread was only amplified when, as he puts it, “Bobby Pritchett went rogue.” As Florida aligned itself with France, Pritchett’s dreams of working with the state to excavate the ship and taking an 80 percent cut evaporated. Meide cringed when he learned that Pritchett was alleged to have taken artifacts such as a cannonball, pickaxe, and ballast stones from the wreck without permission of the state. Says Meide: “He used those to go to admiralty court and try to get ownership of the wreck that way.” Admiralty laws pertain to the open seas, beyond state waters. The bid did not succeed, and Pritchett was ordered to return the artifacts to the Florida Department of State. In Pritchett’s interpretation of his permit, however, he was allowed to bring up artifacts.
Salvors like Pritchett protest that archaeologists are willing to let ships decay in the dark deeps. And what if part of the appeal is a gargantuan cache of coins and gold? Pritchett makes no bones about the fact that the potential profit of treasure hunting historical finds is a powerful lure. “I can go back to developing homes and make three million gross profit a year,” he says. “But I could go out and find one ship that’s worth half a billion.”
On the web’s most popular treasure-hunting forum, treasurenet.com, Pritchett took the moniker of Black Duck (an homage, he says, to the moniker Black Swan, taken by the late “godfather of treasure hunting,” Robert Marx). There, he poured out his thoughts and gripes during the court battle over La Trinité, and estimated the worth of his finds. On April 30, 2017, Black Duck posted, “I believe we are looking at 50–60 mil for what we have found already.” De Bry, the historian, and others vehemently disagree. “The figures Mr. Pritchett gave are absolutely ridiculously inflated,” de Bry says. “One million dollars for a bronze cannon? We know from auction record that similar cannons have sold for $35,000 to $50,000, regardless of their origin.”
Putting an inflated price on artifacts rather than viewing them as cultural and historical treasures that transcend any price is what inflames many archaeologists. For the archaeologist, everything in a wreck matters, explains Delgado. “Archaeology is more than blowing a hole in the bottom of the ocean to find a monument and say, ‘What is it worth?’” he says, “Hair, fabric, a fragment of a newspaper, rat bones, cockroach shells—all things speak volumes. We don’t want artifacts ending up on a mantelpiece or in a private collection instead of taking us on a journey of understanding. I understand the magic of that journey. I was one of those kids who had my first dig at age 14.”