... is a record of a voyage to the depths of the Bermuda Triangle in search of treasure. The prize is Spanish silver and Portuguese gold. But the wreck lies five kilometres below the surface – at the outer limits of what today’s manned submersibles can achieve.
The expedition also triggers a political row. The explorers who risk their lives at these hitherto inaccessible depths can be seen as either marine archaeologists or ruthless treasure seekers. Should they be allowed uncontrolled access to this new world? To whom do the deep ocean realms belong?
Our film begins at the colourful port of St George in Bermuda. Here we board the tender which is ferrying the expedition leader, Mike McDowell, to a large research ship anchored in the bay. Mike is Australian, but the ship, unexpectedly, is Russian. Lashed to its deck are two bright-orange, strangely fish-like craft bristling with hi-tech cameras, lights and robotics. 
They are deep-sea submersibles, a relic of the proud days of Soviet science, when money was poured into technologies which would allow the USSR to dominate both outer space and the “inner space” of the deep oceans. But historic change swept aside the Soviet Union and left the scientists without funds. To keep their ship afloat and pursue their science, they must now form alliances with wealthy Westerners.
We meet the small band of adventurers and investors who have come together on the Keldysh. There’s Don Walsh, famous as the former US Navy submariner who reached the bottom of the world’s deepest ocean trench. There’s a renegade marine archaeologist, Jim Sinclair, defying his academic peers’ condemnation of treasure hunts. And, of all things, there’s a lawyer who will dive with them to the ocean floor and protect their interests there.
Also on board is the man whose hunch they are all backing: a marine engineer called Curt Newport. A flashback to dramatic early NASA space flight footage introduces Curt's back story and his critical role in the adventurers' great gamble.
FLASHBACK to 21 July 1961, the date when astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom becomes the second American in outer space. Grissom achieves his sub-orbital flight in a Mercury capsule called Liberty Bell 7. It lasts 15 minutes and 37 seconds. He reaches an altitude of 118 miles, and lands 302 miles from Cape Canaveral in the waters of the Bermuda Triangle.
Here, after a successful splashdown, the Triangle's notorious curse appears to strike. While recovery helicopters manoeuvre to attach cargo hooks, the explosive hatch on Liberty Bell 7 blows prematurely. Sea water pours in, Grissom is forced out. The lead helicopter hooks the sinking capsule but is dragged down by its weight. As the wheels enter the water, the pilots are obliged to uncouple, and the capsule plummets three miles to the ocean floor.
Grissom was rescued, but ill fortune was not finished with him: he died in the Apollo 1 fire in January 1967.
Thirty years later – enter Curt Newport, a man obsessed with the idea of locating and raising Liberty Bell 7. Against all probability, he succeeded. Trawling the sea bed with sonar equipment, he correctly devined which of the dozens of “shadows” he encountered might represent the NASA capsule.
With the Liberty Bell successfully raised, Curt Newport was able to turn his attention to another shadow that had caught his eye at the time but was dismissed because it had the echo pattern of wooden wreck. In the waters of the Bermuda triangle, there was every chance that “wooden wreck” could mean treasure.
This is our springboard for the expedition – a handful of men and women with a co-ordinate obtained as a by-product of the hunt for Virgil Grissom’s space capsule. Could Curt Newport have a second run of good luck?
Our film follows the expedition as it happens, sailing into the Sargasso Sea with no certainty of what awaits below, taking our chances with the adventurers and capturing their moods and reactions. Elsewhere on board, the Russian scientists are trying their best to ignore these distractions as they take their mud samples from the ocean floor, measure currents and hunt for new life forms more fascinating to them than gold.
The submersibles are deployed, and our cameras are on board as they make their long descent to the sea bed. We share the moment of discovery, and the excitement which runs through the ship when two Russian words reach the surface via the eerie burble of the hydrophone – words meaning “coins” and “old”. Immediately – because sounds from a hydrophone can travel through the water for hundreds of miles – the lawyer warns against any audible mention of what is on all their minds: Spanish galleon. The Spanish government has laid claim to all sunken warships from Spain’s colonial era.
The wreck turns out to be neither Spanish nor a galleon. Its cargo is still intact, and causes quite considerable astonishment – it's not what they expect. But we do see Spanish silver and Portuguese gold being brought to the surface after centuries in the total darkness of the ocean floor. Before the adventurers carry off their prize, the Russian scientists gather round with tweezers to pluck off the deep-sea life forms.
This is a rich-textured story with many layers, some comic, some serious, combining adventure, science and history in a most unusual fashion.
Copyright © 2002 David Ash
Copyright © 2002 Context TV Berlin
