treasurediver
Full Member
- Mar 13, 2005
- 183
- 289
- Thread starter
- #81
I spent many many years running after the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.Many years making a living from selling the stuff I found on the bottom of the oceans.
It was always hard to sell that stuff.
A friend of mine sold the gold coins he found on a 1700's wreck to a dentist to make tooth fillings. How many times was I told my coins were fakes or the Chinese Porcelain was cheap modern copies.
This is how I learned the need to document all my finds, not just the finding, but also every possible information of how this artifact came to be on the bottom of the ocean, so that I could find it and claim it as my find.
This way I realized that the more information I had about an artifact, the more value it had. It is this information that helped selling the artifact.
Thus, the documenting and documents of and about the artifact are a PART OF THE MARKETING.
Mel Fisher was a marketing genius. He knew how to make a coin desirable. Pieces Of Eight were sold at US$ 50. And some treasure hunters were talking about “melt-down value of the coins”. Mel Fisher managed to bring the price up to US$ 1000. How did he do it?
He told the story of the “Santa Margarita” and the “Atocha” in every detail, to so many people through the news media, that lots of people were fighting to get a piece of it.
Some people were saying that he inflated the value out of proportions, but he could show through sales receipts and sales catalogs, that similar coins, gold bars and artifacts had been sold at similar prices as he did.
These were the heydays.
But the times change.
A genius like Mel Fisher knew how to change with the times. He realized that when you sell an artifact, gold chalice or gold chain, you sell it once and it is gone. But when this artifact was sitting in his treasure exhibit, it became a palpable evidence that his stories were true.People paid and are still paying to see and hear the story of the Atocha and Margarita.
People also pay to see the story of the slave ship “Henrietta Marie” and feel shivers when they see the iron shackles that had been used to shackle the slaves during the long trip across the ocean. Without the story, these shackles would only be rusty junks of iron. It is the story that gives them value.
When we talk about archaeology and history, we mean the story of our shipwreck. When we find an encrusted cutlass that is barely recognizable as such, it can become very valuable if we can tie it in with a famous pirate, because we can prove this was the pirate's ship and we can show and tell the whole story of his capers and how he tortured the sailors of the ships he captured for them to tell where the gold was kept.
People like pirate stories. People like people stories. Is this what they call“the human angle”?
The archaeologist helps us put together the whole story. He is experienced and trained to recognize each artifact and to fit it in to it's precise place in the shipwreck story.
We can sell the story a million times and more. An artifact we can sell only once.
Recently, Spain received the treasure of the “Mercedes” that Odyssey claimed to have a value of US$ 500,000,000. Odyssey used Mel Fishers marketing values.
In Spain, they discarded a large part of the coins as damaged and valued the rest of the coins practically at “melt-down value”. The resulting value of the treasure is not even enough to pay Spain's cost, never mind the cost of search and recovery that Odyssey had.
Just plain bad marketing.
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