In 1853, The Nashville, a side-wheel steamer, was built. This was the great age of the exciting new form of travel, steamships. (It actually was exciting, because early steam boilers were often poorly constructed, and had a tendency to explode, spraying boiling water on those unlucky enough to be standing nearby.)
During the Civil War, the Confederate government seized The Nashville and deployed it to destroy northern ships. Subsequently, private investors purchased The Nashville and rechristened her The Rattlesnake. They still used the ship to raid and plunder, but went after Union merchant ships so they could sell the captured ships and cargo. But on Feb. 28, 1863, The Rattlesnake ran aground in the Ogeechee River just above Fort McAllister, near Savannah, Georgia. A Union ship, the USS Montauk, steamed up the Ogeechee River and fired on The Rattlesnake, which exploded and sank.
For over a century, The Rattlesnake/Nashville remained in that location. In 1974, however, a diver named Bill Kinsey sought to excavate The Rattlesnake/Nashville. In a report he prepared, Kinsey noted a large buildup of sand on the upriver side of the vessel. In one location on the upriver side only a few inches of the ribs of the ship were visible, but the downriver portions were much more exposed.
Believing that it contained artifacts from the war, or certainly from that period, three other men, Paul Chance, Frank Chance, and David Topper, applied for a state permit to excavate the wreck. The state turned them down. Nevertheless, they began diving operations in 1979 and eventually recovered thousands of artifacts from the wreckage. The Georgia Department of Natural Resources was unaware of their activities until August, 1983 when, upon learning of their “freelance” salvage operation, it ordered them to cease diving immediately and to turn over all recovered artifacts.
And so, the following month, the three men filed a lawsuit in the federal court in Savannah, seeking a ruling whether they were entitled to keep the artifacts they had already recovered. The State of Georgia became a party to the lawsuit, which had the unusual title, “Chance v. Certain Artifacts Found and Salvaged from the Nashville a/k/a the Rattlesnake, Her Engines, Boilers, Tackle, etc.”
Following a trial, in August, 1984 the federal district judge issued his ruling, which often seemed to draw its inspiration from the case’s odd name. The case involved two exceedingly obscure areas of law – admiralty and salvage – along with something called “the law of finds,” meaning the law relating to unclaimed or salvaged property.
And, in that spirit, the court’s ruling is full of statements like, “Modern courts . . . have rejected the salvage law theory that title to property can never be lost. They have instead applied the law of finds under the doctrine of ‘animus revertendi’ (the owner has no intention of returning).” (The most remarkable thing about the case may be that there are other cases from which to draw these same kinds of statements.)
The State of Georgia took a somewhat different approach, arguing that if The Rattlesnake/Nashville was “embedded,” then it became part of the state property on which it rested (the riverbed), and therefore fell within an exception to the “law of finds.” The state reasoned that Messrs. Chance and Topper could not claim the artifacts they had taken, which belonged to Georgia.
The judge cited testimony in the trial that demonstrated that the wreck was indeed firmly attached to the river bottom, and that while portions of it were exposed, its “embeddedness” was sufficient that he was satisfied that it belonged to the State – and therefore, so did the artifacts. He also rejected the divers’ claim that it was their “love of history and their desire to share the precious Nashville relics with the public that inspired their efforts to excavate The Nashville,” and so they should have been rewarded. Instead, he ruled that “their good intentions are not sufficient to bring their actions within the ambit of the law,” adding that because they had initially asked the State for permission, this suggested that they were aware the wreck sat on state property.
And so, the artifacts became the property of the State of Georgia. Some of them can be viewed today in a historical display about the era in the Fort McAllister Museum in Fort McAllister State Historic Park.
But don’t feel too badly for the two Chances and Mr. Topper. They did publish a book about their exploits in 1985, entitled “Tangled Machinery and Charred Relics.”
Which suggests, perhaps, that what they found wasn’t quite as enthralling as one might have expected, after all.
Frank Zotter, Jr. is a Ukiah attorney.
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