Is Shipwreck Salvaging Grave Robbing?

About 20 years ago I was an active recreational sport diver who enjoyed diving on a handful of various shipwrecks in the Great Lakes as well as the Atlantic Ocean. Our sport dive limit was a depth of 130 feet. Most of the shipwrecks I got to visit were anywhere from 30 to 120 feet deep.

Among the things of which I became immediately aware was a contentious debate among divers and shipwreck salvagers about retrieving objects left behind on shipwrecks. This debate has existed for generations and will continue do so, especially now on the eve of a giant auction by Premier Exhibitions of more than 5,550 artifacts recovered from the RMS Titanic that sank in the North Atlantic 100 years ago this day (April 15). Premier is the parent company of RMS Titanic Inc., which is the only company that has legal authority to recover artifacts from the sunken luxury liner.

In reading several stories about this anticipated sale of Titanic items and having visited several Titanic artifact exhibitions, my thoughts today on this 100^th anniversary of the ship’s demise and immense loss of life simply brought back to mind the continued debate about the recovery of artifacts from a shipwreck – any shipwreck.

And mind you, while it is true that the RMS Titanic will live in infamy as the most famous nonwar casualty shipwreck of all time, the debate about the appropriateness  of removing objects from a sunken ship continues on board the decks of sport diving and research boats worldwide regardless the ship’s name.

You perhaps can see the debate clearly, yet this discussion is anything but clear. On the one hand, there are those people who simply feel that removing objects (i.e. personal property) from a shipwreck, especially a fatal shipwreck, is wrong and is nothing more than grave robbing. Another camp feels there is nothing wrong with artifact recovery as a sort of “finders keepers; losers weepers” philosophy. I suppose a third legion of belief is one that is found among researchers and historians in that their goal is simply that of historic preservation – noble, acceptable, all for the common good kind of historic study and preservation.

Yet, there is this nagging notion that a good number of the RMS Titanic artifacts will one day soon become bookshelf, reading table, workbench and work station desk ornaments --- sort of adding to one’s personal home and workplace clutter. Well, I don’t have a response and certainly not a clear-cut opinion on this debate. My limited amount of previous amateur, nontechnical shipwreck diving was done under the personal rule of “Leave It Be”, and in many areas of the world this prohibition on artifact recovery actually is a law. I dove with others who saw nothing wrong with removing items from a shipwreck and that was their own choice. The issue is full of well-meaning sentiment and strong beliefs on both sides and is one that will continue to be debated with no single conclusion of a right or a wrong – it just is.