News about Odyssey Marine and their recovery of an estimated $500,000,000 worth of gold and silver coins from a sunken treasure ship went wild. Over the period of May 18, 2007 thru May 31, 2007 I received over 119 Google News Alert notices. Each notice contained links to at least one story and sometimes up to six links per alert. May 18 brought 12 alerts consisting of 38 story links. The first link was to a AP story in the Biloxi (MS) Sun Herald. The articles were fairly factual and mostly based on the initial AP story. That started changing on the second day. And how!
Day two of the saga brought 16 alerts containing 30 story links. While most were factual towards the end of the day the wackiness began. Spain started lusting, publicly, after the gold. A column in “The London Times” announced that the sunken treasure was found off the coast of Tampa. And, of course, no sudden wealth story is complete without at least one long lost relative coming forth to stake claim to, at least, some portion of the loot. In this case it is a man claiming to be a direct descendent of the Captain of HMS Merchant Royal. The Merchant Royal sank in the Atlantic off the south east coast of England in 1641. Many are speculating it is the vessel from which OMR recovered the treasure. So – only 18 plus generations later a fellow wants a share of his great-great-great-great-etc. grandaddy’s personal fortune which was thought to be aboard the ship.
From there it continued with Spain continuing to scream and kick like a spoiled child. A few academicians bemoaned the rape of a pristine cultural asset by a for profit organization. These are, in many cases, the same academicians who, on bended knee with head hung low, serially submit grant requests, for their favorite airy-fairy projects, to philanthropies funded, by of all things, corporate profits.
Possibly the highlight of all the stories, articles and posts relating to the gold was a parody story posted on thespoof.com.
Also of importance during this time OMR stock prices hit new highs several times.
May 31, brought 16 Google News Alerts consisting of 30 seperate story links. This for the most part was due to The Kingdom of Spain deciding to effectivly blockade Odyssey’s research and recovery vessels in the port at Gibralter.
Just a quick note in closing: The Google News Alerts I subscribe to are in English only. The only non-English language I have any experience with is Spanish. Now while the ability to fluently read Spanish would have been very helpful in researching this post my year and a half of Spanish classes in high school 40 years ago failed me. As of today (6/26/07) Google is showing 128,000 pages in all languages versus 83,000 pages in English and about 20,000 pages in Spanish. Based on a significant number of posts and stories some of the Spanish press treated the story with less than complete regard for the truth.