His recent discovery record is so good that syndicates are now anxious to back his searches: These men represent the Toronto bid. Wealth and money are big topics to four elegantly vulpine gentlemen who are visiting Hatcher in his hotel room. And the pieces are usually top quality because the cargo was being carried to wealthy buyers." "Right away we can say, well, now we know that such and such a pattern was being made at this time. "A curator is always interested if they can know for sure where and when the ship sank," says Patty Proctor, a ceramics expert at the ROM, which has a large soup bowl from the Geldermalsen. There is a good deal more of it, and it's worth top dollar to collectors and museums when a wreck finder can provide exact provenance. These days, porcelain can often bring in more money than pieces of eight. "I got fond of pottery as I got involved with treasure searching." But he picks them up with reverence and gruff knowledgeability. Sitting on a table in front of him are a few small priceless bits of porcelain, looking awkward beside this bear of a man whose formal education stopped somewhere in high school. "It takes years to clean it up and get it ready for auction," he says in his broad and affable Australian accent. The Tek Sing itself had rotted away, and its tons of ceramic cargo had become a ship-shaped coral reef. What had appeared to be the outline of a ship on side-scan sonar turned out to be a solid mass of porcelain, upward of 350,000 pieces. Three years ago, after a number of unsuccessful searches that had left his investors short-tempered and impatient, his dive teams located the wreckage of a Chinese vessel called the Tek Sing (True Star), which went down in 1822. But its major cargo was 150,000 pieces of Chinese trade porcelain, which brought more than $20-million (U.S.) at auction.Īnd now Hatcher has an even larger find. The Dutch merchant ship had been ripped apart on an Indonesian reef in 1752, and contained a quantity of gold ingots and coins. The Geldermalsen was one of his biggest finds, back in 1983. "They've got a few pieces of mine from the Geldermalsen, I believe," he says, scratching his brush-cut head thoughtfully. Hatcher has a drop-in at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum on his agenda this afternoon.
And that means auctions at Christie's and goodwill visits to museums. What does one do with treasure? You sell it, of course.
But for a modern treasure hunter, there is a whole other side to life.
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