
DATE: Sunday, September 21, 1997            TAG: 9709210048

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY PAUL CLANCY, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: ASSATEAGUE ISLAND                 LENGTH:  225 lines

ON TREASURE'S TRAIL HIGH-TECH HUNTERS NARROW IN ON SUNKEN SHIPS OFF ASSATEAGUE COAST

Imagine: On a stormy morning nearly two centuries ago, hundreds of people crowded on a mastless, rudderless, sinking ship in a merciless storm, waving handkerchiefs and crying for help.

In the hold: a secret shipment believed to include millions of silver pesos and other treasures bound for Spain and ultimately for cash-desperate France.

But the Spanish frigate Juno, carrying 425 souls - and what might now be valued at a half billion dollars - is rapidly taking on water. The crew tries valiantly to bail by hand. Within sight of land, within a prayer of salvation, a violent squall drives the doomed ship onto a sandbar and all hope is extinguished.

The crew of an American schooner tries to help but loses sight of the Juno as the ship shoulders a last wave and slips to a watery grave.

There are apparently no survivors, but the last word on that question has not yet been spoken.

What is now almost certain is that the Juno did not vanish forever, and that it could lie within shouting distance of the public beach, just beyond the breaking waves.

Almost 200 years later, in 30 feet of water, Ben Benson crawls on the ocean bottom in face mask and wetsuit, bubbles from an air tank streaming behind in the murky green water. The sand is hard-packed and mixed with silt. But there's a subtle rise that's in the rough shape of a ship's bow. Could it be the Juno? Right there beneath his hands?

Benson stops as the dial on his small metal detector jumps. A clump of something the size of a baseball comes up easily from the sand, but a cloud of silt obscures his vision, so he tucks it in his pouch alongside his flashlight. They bang against his hip as he rises to the surface.

As he hands the pouch to Earl Novak and Tom Birch, crew members on his boat, they notice its contents. Tucked into the mud beside a piece of wood that looks like part of a gunstock is something hard and silver, a coin about the size of a silver dollar.

It's a Spanish ``eight reale'' piece with a clear date, 1799, an engraved likeness of King Charles IV and the Latin inscription Dei Gratia: ``Thanks be to God.''

Benson, whose company, Sea Hunt, was formed to explore what he believes to be the wreck of the Juno and other ships that were lost near the Virginia coast, says he now has conclusive proof a significant treasure ship, probably the Juno, lies within three-tenths of a mile of the public beach at Assateague National Seashore.

A Virginia Beach treasure-hunting company, Quicksilver, which has been looking for the Juno for 10 years at another location, sharply disputes the finding. The company says it has conclusive proof that the ship went down 40 miles offshore.

``He's found something,'' Quicksilver chairman Glynn Rogers said of Benson. ``But it isn't the Juno.''

The answer could become a little bit clearer within the coming weeks.

Sea Hunt is scheduled to begin preliminary excavations this week, first probing for more evidence from the site, then gradually sifting through the wreckage. The re-directed downwash from its ship's propeller will clear away sand. But Benson wants to be careful not to damage any artifacts and will proceed slowly.

Eventually, a vacuum device will be used and the contents sifted, sorted and evaluated by archaeologists.

Last March the Virginia Marine Resources Commission gave Benson exclusive rights to retrieve whatever treasure lies buried within two sites just off the Assateague coast.

It is the first such permit granted under a 10-year-old statute giving the state ownership of everything within 3 miles of its coast.

The state is entitled to 25 percent of the proceeds of whatever Benson finds - a typical arrangement between salvage companies and states - and its choice of some of the artifacts. It's not a bad deal for the state because Benson takes all the risks. And the state knows little about shipwreck locations.

David Dutton, director of project reviews for the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, said he is aware there are many ancient shipwrecks off the Virginia coast. ``But in terms of actual location, we know very little.''

This could be one of the most significant finds to date on the Atlantic coast. Sure, North Carolina has its ``Queen Anne's Revenge,'' Blackbeard's sunken pirate ship. The neighboring state begins explorations in October. But Blackbeard's ship was probably stripped of all valuables before being scuttled.

Virginia's coast may yield the real treasure.

And this is just the beginning. Benson, a former submarine electronics technician and a self-styled entrepreneur, has his high-tech sights on a second Spanish warship, La Galga, which foundered in a 1750 hurricane and broke up offshore about 10 miles above the Juno site.

It was carrying gold and silver, as well as mahogany, tobacco and ``badges of the Inquisition,'' which presumably conferred on certain clerics the power to arrest infidels.

There's the intriguing possibility, although far-fetched, that there were horses belonging to officers on board and that these horses made it to shore and became the famed wild ponies of Chincoteague.

Benson knows that's a stretch, but has found that most legends have a basis in fact.

If he finds the ships, Benson says he wants to open a small museum either at Ocean City, Md., or Virginia Beach to display the historic pieces.

There's at least one other intriguing possibility:

In 1891, the presidential yacht Despatch, a schooner-rigged steamship, went aground off Assateague and was torn apart by waves. Benson thinks he's found its remains within a few hundred yards of his Juno site.

The 38-year-old native of Cape Cod, who made a fortune in real estate, oil and timber, will risk $1 million on the projects.

Right now his attention is focused on the Juno.

According to accounts by the few who witnessed the tragedy, the beautiful 34-gun frigate bound from Mexico to Spain in October 1802 encountered violent squalls.

Treasure ships normally went directly from the Gulf of Mexico to Spain, but storms kept forcing the Juno toward the Virginia coast. Finally, desperately, the ship made a run for land.

Among the passengers, besides women and children, was a battalion of African soldiers brought on to guard the shipment.

There was something extraordinarily valuable in the ship's hold, there's no doubt about that.

The Juno had been pounded for a week. Sails and masts were blown to pieces. Its rudder was snapped, its hold filling with water. Passengers and crew pumped desperately, then began throwing everything overboard, from anchors to guns and provisions, to lighten the load.

The crew of an American schooner tried to come to the Juno's rescue, but could only stand off and watch as the ship continued to sink. But it got close enough so that, according to accounts from the not-very-helpful crew, anguished cries for help could be heard.

Then a fog rolled in, obscuring the Juno in its last desperate minutes. When it lifted, the schooner's crew said, the ship was gone.

There were newspaper accounts of the tragedy, but for the better part of the past 195 years, the Juno's location has been cloaked in mystery and layers of mud and sand.

High-tech instruments may have changed all that.

Benson has assembled what he believes is the most sophisticated electronic equipment anywhere to assist in his hunt:

A ``side scan'' sonar device that takes almost-photographic pictures of the bottom and even below that. He has seen images of objects 3 to 5 feet beneath the sand. What may be the Juno appears as a delicate feather among sandy ridges.

A cesium - instead of proton - magnetometer that finds metallic objects buried in the sand.

A global positioning system that tracks his boat's position to within a few inches.

It isn't just electronics that point to the ships' burial places. Benson spent months digging through records in local courthouses and libraries. He sent a researcher to Spain to check archival records.

Some of the most fascinating evidence comes from local residents who have known about mysterious treasure ships for generations.

The day after a 1989 storm stirred the ocean to a frenzy, Leon Rose, a square-set fisherman, felt a tug on his net that was no living thing. He hauled and he hauled and out of the depths rose a 15-foot anchor with timbers from a ship's bow attached. It was encrusted with barnacles and shells.

Damn, that's an old anchor, he thought.

Also attached to the anchor, with a kind of deep-sea glue, was a pewter plate. After being treated and cleaned, on the back of the plate a crude letter ``J'' emerged, along with what could be the rest of the word ``Juno,'' ``Jane'' or ``Jolle.''

Rose wanted to take the anchor home and put it in his yard. ``But my wife raised so much hell I sold it for $500.''

The anchor, now covered with a thick epoxy coating, rests outside Payne's Sea Treasures, a marine curiosity shop in Chincoteague, fake crabs sunning on its shank. ``Captain'' Bob Payne, the owner, turned down an offer of $5,000 for it. ``It's not for sale, now or ever,'' he says.

Then there are the coins.

Last week, after Benson ran an advertisement in a local newspaper, several Chincoteague residents contacted him. One woman, whose mother had walked the beach near the possible Juno site for years, had 20 Spanish coins, all bearing dates in the 1790s. The silver coins were of small denominations, the type that passengers might have carried as the ship went down.

``It's just incredibly exciting,'' said Benson.

There's no smoking gun yet, Benson acknowledges, nothing that definitely says ``Juno.'' But he feels he's getting close.

``It isn't any one piece of evidence,'' he says. ``It's the sum of the evidence. It's starting to add up, like a murder case.''

And he loves playing detective.

Last week, one longtime Chincoteague resident told him about a strange, dark-complected boy found on the beach in the early 1800s. The boy didn't speak English and no one knew where he came from.

He was given the name James Alone.

Could he have been a sole survivor?

Benson seemed as excited about this as he was about the silver coin he found Tuesday. The same day he began investigating.

Where will it all end?

``I started to do this for fun,'' Benson said last week. ``I'm fascinated by technology and I like working in the ocean. Now it looks like it's going to become a monster project.''

As for the Juno, he plans to take his time. ``I'm interested in the whole package,'' he said. ``I don't want to destroy artifacts just to get to the treasure.'' ILLUSTRATION: STEVE EARLEY COLOR PHOTOS/The Virginian Pilot

A Chincoteague woman holds Spanish coins her mother found on

Assateague. Ben Benson believes they're from the sunken ship Juno.

Benson, left, and Earl Novak work in the pilot house of Sea Hunt. At

left, a computer screen monitors a magnetometer below water.

STEVE EARLEY PHOTOS/The Virginian Pilot

Tom Birch, left, and Earl Novak prepare to lower a sonar sensor over

the stern of the Sea Hunt before re-examining the area of what they

believe is the Juno wreck, a few hundred yards offshore of

Assateague. A rival firm, Quicksilver, believes the Juno is wrecked

farther away, about 40 miles offshore.

Ben Benson, left, relaxes as a Spanish coin he found is examined.

The ``piece of eight'' was on a sandbar that Benson suspects covers