Shipwrecks Discovery Leads to Ownership Dispute

Deep sea treasure hunters have located two potentially valuable wrecks lying off the west coast of Ireland, opening the way for a legal battle over who owns treasure deposited on the seabed in international waters.

Shipwreck company Odyssey Marine has filed claims on two wreck sites found after months of scouring the seabed in and around the English Channel with what it said was advanced new search equipment.

The sites lie under between 400 and 600 meters of water about 100 miles to the west of Dingle, Co Kerry.

The Florida-based company said the sites, which are 37 miles apart, appeared to contain the remains of steel-hulled vessels. "Odyssey believes that valuable cargo may be located at or near both sites," said the company.

Maritime historians said the two vessels were unlikely to have been built before the 1850s, when iron hulls started replacing wood, and could have been sailing on a route to or from Britain and the US.

The location of the wrecks, and their dating, means the British government may have a claim on them. They are already working with Odyssey on a project to find and recover a cargo of precious coins carried by the HMS Sussex, which went down off Gibraltar in 1694. Work on that, however, has been suspended while legal complaints from Spain are dealt with.

Spain is also fighting Odyssey for the contents of a wreck site dubbed the Black Swan. Odyssey secretly flew half a million silver coins and several hundred gold coins, with an estimated value of up to $500m (£300m), from Gibraltar to the US in 2007. Spanish authorities forced one of the company's vessels into port at gunpoint and searched it after it left Gibraltar harbor last year.