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Treasure In The Deep? Cuba, Firm Aim To Find Out
By Guy Gugliotta.
The Washington Post
Staff Writer.
Monday, February 12, 2001
Twice a year, the ships of the Spanish flota set sail from Porto Bello, in what is now Panama,
and from Vera Cruz, on the Mexican coast. They were loaded to the gunwales with Peruvian
gold, Mexican silver and jewels from the emerald mines of Colombia.
The ships headed north to the Yucatan Channel, which separates Mexico from Cuba, before
curling into the Gulf of Mexico for the run to the Havana harbor. It was there, off Cuba's
western tip, that the flota faced its moment of greatest peril.
"That's the corner," Ernesto Tapanes said. "There were a lot of pirates hiding there waiting
for them. And that spot probably has the largest number of hurricanes in the region."
Tapanes and his mother, Paulina Zelitsky, are the leaders of Advanced Digital Communicat-
ions, a Canadian salvage company that has signed a five-year joint-venture contract with
the Cuban government to chart the deep waters off the western coast and search for
sunken treasure.
Last October, to test the expedition's side-scan sonar and its robot submarine, the expe-
dition found and filmed the wreck of the USS Maine, the fabled battleship whose sinking
after a massive explosion in Havana's harbor on Feb. 15, 1898, triggered the Spanish-Ame-
rican war.
In 1912, U.S. government salvors finished building a cofferdam around the hulk, patched it
and towed it four miles out to sea, where they scuttled it with full military honors in 3,700
feet of water. To this day, historians dispute whether the Maine was sunk by a Spanish
water mine, as U.S. authorities charged at the time, or by an internal explosion, as suggest-
ed by a 1976 investigation.
The ADC expedition will not answer this question, for while finding the Maine "proves that
we can do what we want to do," Tapanes said, ADC wants to use its search technology
to find the wrecks of treasure-laden ships that have not been seen for hundreds of years.
"We're interested in the flotas that were going to Havana," Tapanes said. Off Cabo San
Antonio on Cuba's western tip and off the Isle of Youth, about 80 miles east, "we know
there is going to be an extreme concentration of wrecks."
Cuba, isolated as the Western Hemisphere's lone communist outpost, has had neither the
expertise nor the inclination to examine its deep territorial waters with technology that in
the last quarter century has plumbed the oceans' depths far beyond anything ever con-
templated by divers.
Using side-scan sonar to locate foreign objects on the sea bottom and small submarines
and submersible robots to examine and recover artifacts, explorers have achieved remark-
able results: discovering hydrothermal vents near the Galapagos Islands in 8,000 feet of
water; filming the RMS Titanic, sunk 12,000 feet deep in the North Atlantic; and salvaging
thousands of golden coins and ingots from the Gold Rush-era steamer USS Central America,
lying in 8,000 feet of water off the South Carolina coast.
Under the deal negotiated by Zelitsky in 1999, ADC and a Cuban government corporation
will map the deep waters off western Cuba and split any salvage 50-50. ADC expects to
find a lot, and experts say the company is probably right.
"The western end of Cuba would make sense for picking up a ship from Vera Cruz, and some-
one coming out of Porto Bello would sail right by the Isle of Youth," said historian Sherry
Johnson, a colonial Caribbean specialist at Florida International University. "The Gulf itself
was called 'the Spanish lake,' so if you were a pirate, you didn't want to go there."
. . .
The ADC expedition is betting that the residue of these and other adventures lies in the
ocean depths off western Cuba.
"Just by virtue of Cuba's location and history and its position on this trade route, our
success rate should be very high," Tapanes said. "It alleviates the need to look for one
specific galleon. If we find bottles, anchors and stuff, we can say, 'There's a wreck here,'
and be reasonably sure about it."
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