Horatio Nelson by Lemuel Francis Abbott
Credit: National Galleries Of Scotland/Getty Images
After a two-decade legal battle, more than 2,000 pieces found on a pair of early 19th-century shipwrecks are to be auctioned off, including a cannon used at Trafalgar and a letter seal belonging to Admiral Nelson.
The money raised at the auction will be split between the Uruguayan state and the heirs of the diver Héctor Bado, who led an effort in the 1990s to locate historical treasures from the HMS Agamemnon, once captained by Nelson, and the Spanish ship El Salvador.
The auction, to be held in Montevideo in May, is the result of a series of court decisions and an agreement between the government and the right-holders to the treasure, given that Uruguayan law previously allowed for private parties to seek and claim bounty from the sea floor.
A painting of Nelson's four flagships at anchor, with the HMS Agamemnon in the background on the left
The decision to auction off the troves from the historical ships has been criticised in both Uruguay and Spain. In an editorial, Spain’s ABC newspaper said when “treasure hunters reach an agreement with a government, society loses out as it watches historical heritage being lost”.
The Salvador, which sank in a storm in 1812 killing the crew of more than 500 men, has a trove including a vast range of personal objects and military equipment including artillery as the ship was carrying a complete detachment of cavalry soldiers when it went down.
Photographs of the retrieval effort show the bones of the drowned Spaniards.
The most remarkable object yielded by the wreck of the Agamemnon, known as Nelson’s favourite ship and which participated in the Battle of Trafalgar before sinking in 1809, is the small seal belonging to Nelson, which he used to imprint his surname and a star shape on wax.
In a separate case, the Uruguayan government is refusing to apply the same shared-proceeds solution to Nazi loot, notably a massive bronze eagle bearing a swastika, recovered from a German warship that sank off the coast of the South American country during World War Two.
This week the Uruguayan government revealed that it is appealing against a court ruling ordering it to put the eagle up for sale and to award half of the proceeds to the businessman Alfredo Etchegaray, who bankrolled the team that retrieved the Nazi sculpture and other objects from the cruiser Admiral Graf Spee in 2006.
“We are appealing against that decision and there is no auction on the cards,” Javier García, Uruguay’s defence minister, told the Uruguayan newspaper El País.
“We don’t want it to fall into the hands of someone who could use it to worship the Nazis”, the minister added. Mr Etchegaray agrees that the eagle must not become part of a Nazi shrine, but says there are alternatives to it being locked away out of view as it currently is in a navy building.
“The interested parties should be museums, states, institutions or a combination of individuals who can guarantee an academic purpose, because history and its objects must be remembered, explained and contextualised,” Mr Etchegaray told the Spanish online newspaper Público.
The 400kg spread eagle with a swastika wreath in its claws was displayed on the bows of the Graf Spee, before the ship was scuttled by its captain after sustaining damage from British warships in 1939.
The German government protested when the eagle was briefly put on show in Montevideo after its recovery, and has pressured Uruguay not to allow the piece to be put up for general auction, where Mr Etchegaray claims it could be sold for as much as $15 million.
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