Maritime attorney and shipwreck explorer Peter Hess sums up his vocation and avocation this way, “After I bring a lawsuit, I get to bring a wetsuit.” He regaled members of the Explorers Club on Monday with stories of Spanish treasure galleons and California Gold Rush shipwrecks, as well as the legal issues involved in attempting to recover valuable historic artifacts from these sites.

He began by showing photos of treasures found from the wreck of the Atocha, the Spanish treasure galleon sunk in 1622 off the Florida Keys.The ship hit a reef during a hurricane, and a second hurricane spread the wreckage. Mr. Hess said that during 16 years of wrangling over the treasure, there were myriad separate hearings between the U.S. District Court, Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Arguing that it owned the treasure, the U.S. attorney claimed “sovereign prerogative” under common law as successor to the rights of the King of England. (Mr. Hess likened that to Christopher Columbus planting a flag and saying the land belonged to the sovereign king and queen of Spain.) The U.S. District Court, as Mr. Hess describes it, rejected the argument by pointing out “that we had this event in history called the Revolutionary War – and Americans had won, by the way,” and thus America no longer had a sovereign. We have the Constitution instead, Mr. Hess said.

Among the topics Mr. Hess discussed was the “law of finds” (popularly known as “finders keepers”), which still has vitality in a maritime context. Mr. Hess also described the Abandoned Shipwreck Act, signed by President Reagan, whereby an abandoned shipwreck within state waters becomes the property of that state. He also described “the law of salvage,” which rewards voluntary efforts to rescue property imperiled at sea.

Mr. Hess noted several unusual facts. For instance, there are generally few human remains found on shipwrecks, since most people jump off before a ship sinks. Rare exceptions are when a ship goes down very rapidly or people are trapped inside like a tomb – such as submarines, “which are sunk before they sink.”

Other entertaining anecdotes included the sinking of the Lady Elgin in 1860 in Lake Michigan. He said so many prominent Irish Catholic Democrats from Milwaukee were aboard that it helped shift the balance of power to Germans in the city. Mr. Hess said the loss of gold aboard the S.S. Central America, which sank in 1857 off the coast of South Carolina, was substantial enough to contribute to a financial panic on Wall Street.

A lighter moment in the lecture included Mr. Hess showing a picture of a Springfield rifle, about 140 years old when recovered from the ocean but still in surprisingly good condition. “In addition to being a good artifact,” he said, “it can help protect your find.”

Mr. Hess spoke about the pro bono work he has done to help author Gary Gentile in battling the federal government to gain access to the historic Civil War shipwreck the U.S.S. Monitor, located off Cape Hatteras, and presently a publicly owned marine sanctuary.

On March 9, 1862, the Monitor – with its rotating turret – had fought the Confederate ship the Merrimac in the historic first clash between ironclads, only to sink later that year in a storm. Recently Mr. Hess won the legal fight to open the Monitor wreck to skilled divers seeking to explore it.

Mr. Hess also told about being a delegate at negotiations in Paris of UNESCO’s International Convention for the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, a treaty that Mr. Hess criticized as “outrageous” in its hostility to privately funded divers engaged in deep-sea exploration.

Toward the end of the presentation, Mr. Hess showed a cartoon of what he described as “New Jersey treasure.” It showed underwater divers at a shipwreck excited over what they found: “Bruce Springsteen tickets!”

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MONITOR MUSEUM

The Sons of Union Veterans Oliver Tilden Camp no. 26 recently celebrated Ulysses S. Grant’s 183rd birthday. Heading the event was Commander George Weinmann. He and his wife, Janice Lauletta-Weinmann,are leading the charge to build the Greenpoint Monitor Museum at the end of Quay Street, close to the Bushwick Inlet in Greenpoint, near the former site of the Continental Ironworks where the Monitor warship was built.

Though not yet built, the statechartered Monitor Museum sponsors educational programming in local classrooms using Civil War artifacts and playing authentic Civil War music. Both Assemblyman Joe Lentol and Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez support the museum.

Mr. Weinmann has a personal connection to the project. He is a relative of Greenville Weeks, the assistant surgeon aboard the Monitor. Weeks did not go down with the ship, but his hand was crushed by a lifeboat as it attempted to rescue the crew when it sunk in a storm off Cape Hatteras.

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ERICSSON EVENTS

There is a statue in Battery Park devoted to Swedishborn naval engineer John Ericsson, who designed the Monitor.The New York Sun spoke Wednesday with Kjell Lagerstrom of the John Ericsson Society about Ericsson’s historical contributions, including his invention of the screw propeller.

Mr. Lagerstrom said the John Ericsson Society has events three times a year: on March 9, the date of the Monitor battle; on July 31, the John Ericsson birthday celebration at the statue in Battery Park; and on November 23, to mark the date of John Ericsson’s arrival in New York in 1839.