PORTLAND
Treasure hunter to test waters off Haiti
By CLARKE CANFIELD
Associated Press Writer
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A treasure hunter from Maine plans to take his vessel and crew to Haiti to survey a shipwreck despite the political turmoil in the Caribbean country.
Greg Brooks, a partner in Sub Sea Research LLC, and a crew took the company’s 105-foot vessel, Diamond, to Haiti’s southern coast in January after Brooks signed a contract with Haitian officials allowing his company to excavate shipwrecks.
The crew discovered three shipwrecks, including one that Brooks says could be a Spanish galleon carrying a billion-dollar treasure.
Despite the political uncertainties in Haiti, Brooks said he intends to return there this week to conduct more surveys of the wreck.
“No one’s told me no,” Brooks recently said in his office in Portland. “Until they send out their Navy, which they don’t have, or their Air Force, which they don’t have ... I’m just going to do it.”
Brooks’ attorney, Sandy Burnett of Tallahassee, Fla., said he doesn’t anticipate problems with Brooks’ contract, even though the Haitian government has changed with the rebel uprising that forced Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of power and out of the country on Feb. 29.
Brooks said the contract calls for his company to keep 65 percent of the recovered treasure, and to give 35 percent to the Haitian government.
There are “obvious concerns” about working off the Haitian coast, Burnett said, but he doesn’t think the crew will in danger.
“Haiti’s dealing with its own issues, and those issues don’t reach out to somebody like Greg,” he said.
Brooks, 52, went on his first treasure hunt 11 years ago when he bought a used Canadian Coast Guard cutter, recruited crew members and set off for waters off South Carolina in search of loot from a sunken pirate ship.
He’s been at it ever since, making enough money to earn a living.
The Canadian cutter is gone and his latest ship, the Diamond, is a former U.S. Navy torpedo retrieval vessel. The Diamond and two smaller boats are kept in Key West, Fla., when they aren’t in use.
Brooks stays at his home in Gorham when he isn’t at sea. In time, he hopes to build a nonprofit shipwreck museum and aquarium on the Portland waterfront.
Despite the project in Haiti, Brooks’ primary focus these days is a wreck off the Florida Keys that he believes is the remains of the 18th-century French merchant ship Notre Dame de Deliverance, which was loaded with gold, silver and other riches when it sank in a hurricane.
But he’s also had a longtime fascination with Haiti, whose waters are rich with shipwrecks because they were regularly traversed by ships centuries ago, and because the Haitian government hasn’t allowed them to be excavated, he said.
Brooks thinks the most valuable of the wrecks that his crews found off Haiti is a 78-cannon ship of nearly 200 feet that sank in the 1700s. “We know it’s a very rich wreck because of some of the gold bars we’ve seen,” he said.
When the Diamond arrived at its survey site in January, children who lived in a village on shore floated out to the boat using empty plastic jugs and Clorox bottles, said Donnie Freedman of Brunswick, who has worked with Brooks for 21/2 years. A group of 20 or so of the kids sat on the stern to watch the crew at work.
Fishermen paddled their canoes to the boat to talk to the boat’s pilot, a Haitian hired by Brooks who spoke the native Creole. At one point, a group of men who identified themselves as police came out to the vessel.
“It opened my eyes as to how they work there,” Freedman said. “I’m not used to police toting around shotguns and Uzis.”
The police visit didn’t amount to anything, and Brooks is confident there won’t be any trouble when they return. But he has concerns.
“Lately what they’re starting to do is take potshots at people from a distance,” he said about violence in other parts of Haiti. “That’s what we’re worried about.” |
Topic: Treasure in Haiti :)
