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Barry Clifford Discovers Buried Treasure

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(page 3 of 8)

He applied for and was granted a one-year permit in February 1983. He was granted an exclusive deed to a two-square-mile area more or less directly off the site where Guglielmo Marconi's old transmission tower had once stood near the town of Wellfleet. A month hadn't passed before Clifford was back asking the board for a four-mile increase because at least two other salvaging companies had approached the board for permits to dig for shipwrecks in areas of their own -- sites not coincidentally adjacent to Clifford and crew. Angrily Clifford denounced his competitors as claim jumpers and frauds and asserted they had gone as far as cutting his buoys and placing their own over sites where his magnetometers had indicated metal substances lay buried in the sand.

The competitors, if they were that, were essentially fishermen out of Provincetown and Chatham. Both groups presented similar artifacts (some of which were judged early 18th century) to the board, although both groups claimed they were not expressly searching for the Whydah. "What Barry wanted us to do was give him as much of the coast as he needed," said one board member. "That just wasn't feasible." What Clifford said he wanted was sovereignty over enough area to assure the "integrity" of the wreck once it was salvaged. Most of Clifford's belief was based on the writings of Cyprian Southack, a cartographer dispatched by the provincial governor a few days after the Whydah went belly-up. Southack's journals indicated that the wreck may have been strewn in a four-mile pattern along the beach. Clifford believed that possibility alone entitled him and his newly minted company -- Maritime Underwater Surveys, Inc. -- to stewardship of the larger contested area. The board disagreed and issued permits to all sides, but also established a 4,000-foot demilitarized buffer between the operations theoretically to keep the peace.

Barry Clifford was incensed. He called the board "archeocrats." "I'm a pure archeologist," he told me one afternoon when I first came to see how his operation was going, more than a year after it commenced. "The treasure is really secondary where I'm concerned. It's the romance of this thing that's so appealing. This legal stuff drives me crazy. It's so unjust. It has made me a wild man at times."

If Barry Clifford had simply appeared as one of those people that celebrity innocently anoints and hoists into the public view, however briefly and fleetingly, a human firefly or a historical nova, it would have been one thing. But Clifford's life, as much as anything else, has been a life devoted to a search for buried treasure of one kind or another.

Barry Clifford grew up around Cape Cod, the waters that he is now mining for treasure, His parents were successful brokers in real estate and antiques, occupations that go right to the heart of Cape Cod culture. At 16 he was sent to prep school in Maine, but it interested him only to the extent that he could develop his interest, as he put it, "in women and sports." He was a natural athlete, principally a football player. He won a football scholarship to tiny Trinidad Junior College in Colorado, which he described as a football factory -- it turned out players who went on to illustrious careers in the NFL.

For a while Barry Clifford envisioned himself as a linebacker in the NFL. He continued to tell people he played linebacker; a position he had once played in high school, even though he had been moved to the defensive line in college. In the hierarchy of football, a linebacker is a somewhat glamorous figure -- fluid, in control, very visible. "People refused to accept the fact that I was a defensive lineman," he said. "They said I looked like a linebacker. So I let them think what they wanted to think."