Treasure hunters who found $75m of shipwrecked gold coins

It's may be a risky and expensive business, but treasure hunters Greg Stemm and John Morris's latest haul has made it all worthwhile. We look at the $500m find that's seen shares in their Amex-listed company double.

Treasure hunters Greg Stemm and John Morris made headlines last month when they recovered more than 500,000 pieces of gold and silver from a wreck codenamed Black Swan'. The haul, which could be worth as much as $500m, sent the share price of their company, Amex-listed Marine Odyssey Exploration, rocketing from $4.35 to $9, valuing the company at $400m; and Stemm and Morris at about $14.8m and $12.8m respectively. The ship's identity has yet to be confirmed, but it is thought to be the Merchant Royal, an English ship known as the Eldorado of the Seas', which sank off the Cornish coast in 1641 full of treasure from Mexico.

Stemm, 49, started his career in PR for the Bob Hope organisation before setting up his own advertising agency in Florida. Morris, 57, worked in real estate and built shopping malls in the MidWest and Florida. When the two met in the 1980s, they discovered a mutual love of boats. In 1986 they bought an 85ft exploration ship from a university as a party boat. Before long, they were leasing it to research scientists and treasure hunters and in 1988, fired with "fantasies of sunken gold", they bought a map from treasure hunter Robert Marx and went looking for the wreck of a 17th-century Spanish galleon in the Caribbean.

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