21093: Ayiti Libere: Maine treasure hunter to test the waters off Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Ayiti Libere <ayitilibere@yahoo.com>

Maine treasure hunter to test the waters off Haiti
By CLARKE CANFIELD
Associated Press Writer
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) - A treasure hunter from Maine
plans to take his vessel and crew to Haiti to survey a
shipwreck despite the political turmoil in the
Caribbean country.

Greg Brooks, a partner in Sub Sea Research LLC, and a
crew took the company's 105-foot vessel, Diamond, to
Haiti's southern coast in January after Brooks signed
a contract with Haitian officials allowing his company
to excavate shipwrecks.

The crew discovered three shipwrecks, including one
that Brooks says could be a Spanish galleon carrying a
billion-dollar treasure.

Despite the political uncertainties in Haiti, Brooks
said he intends to return there this week to conduct
more surveys of the wreck.

"No one's told me no," Brooks recently said in his
office in Portland. "Until they send out their Navy,
which they don't have, or their Air Force, which they
don't have ... I'm just going to do it."

Brooks' attorney, Sandy Burnett of Tallahassee, Fla.,
said he doesn't anticipate problems with Brooks'
contract, even though the Haitian government has
changed with the rebel uprising that forced
Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of power and out of the
country on Feb. 29.

Brooks said the contract calls for his company to keep
65 percent of the recovered treasure, and to give 35
percent to the Haitian government.

There are "obvious concerns" about working off the
Haitian coast, Burnett said, but he doesn't think the
crew will in danger.

"Haiti's dealing with its own issues, and those issues
don't reach out to somebody like Greg," he said.

Brooks, 52, went on his first treasure hunt 11 years
ago when he bought a used Canadian Coast Guard cutter,
recruited crew members and set off for waters off
South Carolina in search of loot from a sunken pirate
ship.

He's been at it ever since, making enough money to
earn a living.

The Canadian cutter is gone and his latest ship, the
Diamond, is a former U.S. Navy torpedo retrieval
vessel. The Diamond and two smaller boats are kept in
Key West, Fla., when they aren't in use.

Brooks stays at his home in Gorham when he isn't at
sea. In time, he hopes to build a nonprofit shipwreck
museum and aquarium on the Portland waterfront.

Despite the project in Haiti, Brooks' primary focus
these days is a wreck off the Florida Keys that he
believes is the remains of the 18th-century French
merchant ship Notre Dame de Deliverance, which was
loaded with gold, silver and other riches when it sank
in a hurricane.

But he's also had a longtime fascination with Haiti,
whose waters are rich with shipwrecks because they
were regularly traversed by ships centuries ago, and
because the Haitian government hasn't allowed them to
be excavated, he said.

Brooks thinks the most valuable of the wrecks that his
crews found off Haiti is a 78-cannon ship of nearly
200 feet that sank in the 1700s. "We know it's a very
rich wreck because of some of the gold bars we've
seen," he said.

When the Diamond arrived at its survey site in
January, children who lived in a village on shore
floated out to the boat using empty plastic jugs and
Clorox bottles, said Donnie Freedman of Brunswick, who
has worked with Brooks for 2{ years. A group of 20 or
so of the kids sat on the stern to watch the crew at
work.

Fishermen paddled their canoes to the boat to talk to
the boat's pilot, a Haitian hired by Brooks who spoke
the native Creole. At one point, a group of men who
identified themselves as police came out to the
vessel.

"It opened my eyes as to how they work there,"
Freedman said. "I'm not used to police toting around
shotguns and Uzis."

The police visit didn't amount to anything, and Brooks
is confident there won't be any trouble when they
return. But he has concerns.

"Lately what they're starting to do is take potshots
at people from a distance," he said about violence in
other parts of Haiti. "That's what we're worried
about."



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