Alas we are still trying to educate archaeologists about announcing their findings. When a press release is issued, normally you'd expect supporting image content. In this case notta :(

Re-posted on behalf of Andy Brockman

Dear Mr Sleeper,
Thank you for your comment.

Under the terms of the “Deed of Transfer” which gifted HMS Victory to the Maritime Heritage Foundation, the MHF agrees that the site of HMS Victory site may not be “disturbed” without the express authorisation of the UK Secretary of State for Defence, currently Philip Hammond.
You can download the whole Deed at… http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/AboutDefence/Co...
The letter we quote from Mr Routh simply confirms this fact and it also confirms a written answer given to the UK Parliament by the Defence Personnel, Welfare and Veterans Minister at the Ministry of Defence Andrew Robathan MP on 17 July 2012, where Mr Robathan clearly stated that no decision has yet been taken on how to proceed with the management of the site. http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2012-07-1...
You are reminded that misleading Parliament is just about the most serious offence a British Politician can commit. Thus, had permission to “disturb” the site to prepare to recover artefacts or excavate the site been granted by Mr Hammond, Mr Robathan would have said so.
In the light of that we can conclude Odyssey does not yet have official permission to “disturb” the site or lift anything from the wreck site of HMS Victory.
In fact we know that, at the time of writing, Odyssey has produced a Project Design which the MHF has submitted to the Government and the MOD’s archaeological Advisory Group and Expert Panel for comment. Odyssey has also carried out an authorised “Pre-disturbance” Survey. That is the limit of the activity which has been sanctioned by the UK Government.

It follows that any preparations to lift material Odyssey and the Maritime Heritage Foundation might make are an unauthorised disturbance of the site. This is at best presumptuous, assuming the Secretary of State’s decision is a mere Rubber Stamp when in fact granting permission to recover artefacts at this time is far from a given. At worst the work represents a wilful disregard of the wishes of the British Government as stated to Parliament by Ministers through the Deed of Transfer.
It is also the case that works on the seabed within UK Marine Licencing Zone, even simply moving sediments to prepare artefacts for lifting, requires a licence under the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009. That licence has to be granted in advance by the Marine Management Organisation… http://marinemanagement.org.uk/licensing/marine.h....
There is no record of either Odyssey Marine Exploration or the Maritime Heritage Foundation applying for such a licence for HMS Victory and, as we report, the penalties for offences under the MCAA Act are a fine of up to £50,000 and/or a Prison Sentence of up to two years.
We are placing this information and the latest news about Odyssey’s operations on the Victory in the public domain because we believe that all interested parties, including archaeologists, the wider public who care about our shared heritage and investors in Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc. should have the best, most complete and most up to date information upon which to base their opinions and decisions about this matter of national and international interest.

Meanwhile, at the time of writing Odyssey Explorer is still on station over the Victory and deploying equipment in spite of Mr Routh’s assurances that she has been ordered to stop by the Maritime Heritage Foundation.

We stand by our story- If Mr Routh is telling the truth, and at the moment we must assume he is, Odyssey is out of control.

Andy Brockman

But I return to the points I made in response to your previous post-

The only evidence the Victory site is in danger comes from Odysseys own surveys. Independent evidence from Wessex Archaeology was inconclusive and Odyssey has a conflict of interest which means its assertions have to be independently verified.

Sovereign Immunity can be enforced if there is a political will as the Spanish have shown. Odyssey will have crossed any sovereign Spanish vessels off its high value wrecks list for the foreseeable future.

The Dutch salvors were caught and the stolen cannon was confiscated by the Dutch authorities. That action involved the UK, French and Dutch authorities, albeit acting in an uncoordinated way. The French involvement came about because French customs officials boarded and searched the Dutch vessel for drugs- a primary task of such agencies as you correctly point out.

English Heritage is currently developing links and common approaches with law enforcement agencies in other jurisdictions with a view to making such actions more effective in future. Indeed, as a small part of that effort I have sat in a seminar with colleagues from the Dutch Heritage Agency and Law Enforcement where we discussed how to deal with these admittedly difficult issues of cross border investigation and protecting sovereign shipwrecks located outside territorial waters from predatory treasure hunters and commercial salvors. .

I would also make one final point, which is purely about ethics and morals.

As someone who works alongside injured service people on Operation Nightingale and has friends in the Police and Armed Forces who have been made redundant or have taken early retirement under the UK Government austerity programme I can understand the anger and frustration of anyone involved in those Services and Agencies faced with the current climate of cuts, short termism and increasing demands placed on limited human and material resources.

However, and here I also speak as the grandson of a Royal Navy CPO who was drowned on active service in 1943; many people, including many in the Armed Forces and many serving and retired mariners, believe there are some things which are more important than profits for a few and respecting the graves and memorials of our service men and women and those lost at sea is one of them.

As we saw in Mr West's letter to "The Times", a direct descendant of Admiral Balchen who died on the Victory is appalled that the Admiral and his crew are seen as a source of profit for a commercial salvage company.

As a nation we might sometimes choose to excavate and record historically important wrecks, especially those which can be shown to be genuinely under threat, in the public interest. That is how the Mary Rose excavation came about. However, If we as a nation allow Odyssey, or anyone else, to profit from the sale of material from our historic shipwrecks which are graves and memorials, we might just as well also sell off the metal from our village war memorials or the mass produced "trade goods" like toothbrushes, spoons and tin mugs, which are found on the bodies of soldiers on the Somme or around Ypres. An action the historian Andy Robertshaw has likened to "killing them twice."

Posted on behalf of Andy Brockman

Dear Graham,

Firstly Heritage Daily and I have not set out to offer definitive solutions to conservation and management of HMS Victory. That is not our job.

The articles about HMS Victory have been designed to offer news and analysis of what may well turn into one of the most serious heritage scandals of recent years.

Because of the secrecy and misinformation which surround this story we have also tried to present information which the British Government, Odyssey and the Maritime Heritage Foundation would probably rather you did not know; but which anyone who cares about the conservation, management and presentation of our shared heritage on land or sea needs to know.

We also feel this material will be of use to Odyssey's investors.

As I am sure you are particularly aware, Heritage Daily is followed on the Yahoo Financial message board regarding OMEX, where it is clear that very few investors are aware quite how thin the evidence for bullion aboard HMS Victory is and quite how circumscribed Odyssey's freedom of action is by stated UK Government policy and the mechanisms set up to manage the wreck which are led by independent expert maritime archaeologists, historians and lawyers, not Odyssey or the MHF.

As we pointed out in the investigation, the Ministry of Defence recently confirmed to the Maritime Heritage Foundation that it did not accept Odyssey's definition of "Trade Goods," and "Personal Property" and that the vessel had the same status as Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes; that is she was a sovereign vessel going about Government business. The MOD also stated that the site had to be regarded as a single archaeological entity which means Odyssey will not be allowed to cherry pick what items it lifts if it is allowed to lift any.

I can also tell you that many individuals and organisations who are qualified to attack this problem have been spurred on by the mishandling of the HMS Victory wreck site to the extent that they are now engaged creating just the kind of practical management and conservation solutions you are asking for and we will report those as we will continue to report the activities of Odyssey Marine Exploration and the Maritime Heritage Foundation.

Our reporting acknowledges that the vast majority of the worldwide archaeological community and international organisations such as UNESCO, do not believe a site excavated for profit with funding provided in part or whole from the sale of artifacts as Odyssey and the MHF proposes to fund the Victory project, represents archaeology in any legitimate sense.

This is not a view from the dizzy heights of an academic ivory tower. It is a view derived from the experience of thousands of hardworking, committed, often underpaid and over worked, archaeologists working in communities all over the world. Many of us spend a depressingly large amount of our time trying to prevent the theft of the past to feed the private antiquities and collectors market. Our practice leads us to believe a for-profit approach to the past encourages looters by boosting the market for artifacts and antiquities, but also it inevitably limits and distorts our knowledge and perception of that past by falsely equating cultural value with financial value.

For-profit excavations; the mining of history; must inevitably concentrate on sites which can turn a profit for stock holders, rather than those which offer the most important information for our collective national and international archives. There are better preserved and arguably more historically important 18th century shipwrecks than HMS Victory such as HMS Stirling Castle on the Goodwin Sands, but Odyssey is not seeking to excavate her; why? Because there is no rumour of treasure aboard the Stirling Castle which can be used to build the appearance of an investment opportunity in the media.

To put this in perspective. Under Odyssey's business model the tomb of Tutankhamun would not have been excavated because the company would not have been allowed to sell artifacts and the site could not return 10x profits after costs. [That figure is not made up- it comes from the brochure of Odyssey's business partner Robert Fraser Marine.] Neither would we know anything about our early ancestors in Africa who inconveniently did not pass on unsourced gossip about bullion in the Amsterdamsche Courant.

In other words the Odyssey/MHF contract is simply a treasure hunt for Odysseys investors, however smartly it is dressed to look different in a cloak of technology, publications, museum exhibits and television infomercials.

As to protecting the site. Of course AIS is not a complete answer, although it was deemed useful enough to be monitored by Odyssey to the same end as I suggested, as Odyssey Papers 24 discusses.

Equally, the agencies in coastal powers have a range of priorities and limited resources as you so rightly point out.

Posted on behalf of Andy Brockman

Thanks for your comment Graham,

The situation is that the only evidence for the HMS Victory wreck site being in danger from trawling comes from Odyssey's own surveys.

We have to be sceptical because Odyssey has a financial interest in showing the site is in danger and must be excavated.

When Wessex Archaeology looked at the site on behalf of the UK Government they found the evidence for recent damage was inconclusive.

That is why archaeological best practice and the UNESCO convention, calls for monitoring as part of the management of the site. It may be necessary to recover surface finds to a museum or even excavate, but the independent evidence required to endorse that course of action does not exist yet.

In addition, as Heritage Daily has shown, it was Odyssey's publicity and activity on site, not the Wessex Report, which placed the site in danger from other commercial salvage efforts.

The latest article simply points out that until the site was gifted to the Maritime Heritage Foundation in January 2012 HMS Victory and the remains of her crew were protected under International Law. Anyone from anywhere interfering with the wreck without the permission of the UK Government was committing an offence-period.

The site can be monitored using AIS and other imaging techniques and the waters are patrolled by Royal Navy and French fishery protection and coast guard vessels and aircraft to name just two nations with an interest.

As viewers of the "Treasure Quest" infomercials will recall during the "Legend" programme on Victory, a warship is seen in view of the Odyssey Explorer and the OMEX vessel is overflown by a French Air Force Atlantique maritime reconnaissance aircraft.

Also we must point out the Dutch vessel was caught- the cannon they lifted is now in custody-not earning the salvor money in an auction house or metal smelter.

It cost Odyssey millions of dollars to defend the Mercedes case in the US Courts and they lost at every turn.

The question Heritage Daily poses is what salvage company is going to risk that kind of cost and almost certain defeat, if it knows a Government will defend its rights under sovereign immunity.

In the end it is perfectly possible to protect these sites. Fundamentally it is dependent on the will to do so.

Posted on behalf of Andy Brockman

Sorry for the typo... thanks for pointing out :s

You can see the responses of the shareholders at: http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/Stocks_%28A_to_...

We also recommend looking at the rest of their threads... as you can guess, its all about money, silver, treasure, market shares...

e.g. "the M and G sites..the Victory is not important at this time. We have to get that silver and when we do the sp will go up because OMEX will have proven itself and that is good for further work in the future."

Heritage Daily agrees and offers our support to help preserve this floating monument to the bravery of our armed forces.

http://www.heritagedaily.com/2011/05/how-signific...

Our pleasure... you have a great website!! www.per-storemyr.net