Back in 1994, NASA was transporting an ET-70 fuel tank from New Orleans to Cape Canaveral,
to be delivered to the Kennedy Space Center.
It was a two-boat job—an ocean-going barge named Poseidon and its tugboat escort, the
J.A.
Orgeron.
But right around here, off the coast of Florida, the two got caught in a tropical storm, and
the tugboat lost power.
The barge, with its fuel tank hangar acting as a sail, started to drag the tugboat further
out to sea—they requested help from the local Coast Guard, but the local Coast Guard
was like, “oh sorry, we’re busy not dying in a tropical storm right now.”
At that point, the tugboat’s only option for survival was to cut the barge—and its
millions of dollars worth of cargo—loose.
Now, most people might see this and think, “hmm, this is a bad situation,” but there’s
a different group of people who might see this, and also have a large marine vessel,
a thorough understanding of maritime law, and possibly a psychopathy diagnosis and think
“oh, actually, this is an awesome situation.”
Why?
Well, because, it turns out that due to some obscure, ancient maritime laws, the first
person to drag this barge back to shore would be able to legally claim a percentage of its
cargo from NASA.
Yeah, that’s right, you can still legally plunder ships…
kind of.
Let me explain.
Normally, cases like this don’t come down to obscure maritime laws that need to be explained
in six minute youtube videos.
A few dozen large cargo ships are lost at sea every year, and in most of these cases,
the company that owns the ship doesn’t need to go to admiralty court with whatever yahoo
happens to paddle up to their multi-million-dollar mistake first; usually what happens is something
called “contract salvage.”
The way this works is pretty straightforward; whoever owns the ship in peril will draw up
a contract with a dedicated salvage firm to save as much of the ship or cargo as possible.
Take, for example, the Costa Concordia—the universe’s answer to the question, “what
would happen if we let an Italian drive a boat?”
This was one of the biggest salvage contracts ever awarded, and was fought over for months.
It eventually went to two firms—Titan Salvage and Micoperi—who worked together to refloat
the ship and scrap what was left for a predetermined sum.
But I’m not here to talk to you about how contracts work; I’m here to ask a much more
interesting question: what happens if a ship is salvaged before a contract is written?
The intuitive answer is, well…
nothing.
If someone crashes their car, and you tear the rearview mirror out of the smoldering
wreckage, you don’t get to keep it.
That would be stealing, and also, like… weird behavior.
But at sea, there’s no such thing as weird behavior, and so there exists a little-known
legal principle called “pure salvage”—the idea that if someone volunteers to rescue
a ship, they should be entitled to a percentage of its cargo.
If that sounds old-fashioned, it’s because it is: the Byzantine empire developed this
principle because any ship that wasn’t rescued would just get scooped up by pirates, and
it turns out that in the intervening 1500 years, we just kind of couldn’t think of
any better system.
But as you might imagine, the modern legal proceedings for “hey I just rescued this
guy’s sinking ship and now I want his stuff” are… a little complicated.
So, let’s go back to our story, where a tugboat had to make the tough decision to
abandon millions of dollars worth of spaceship juice in the ocean off the coast of Florida.
Just before the J.A.
Orgeron cut the barge loose, it contacted the captain of a nearby oil tanker named the
Cherry Valley who believed he could help.
He attached tow lines to the tugboat and barge, and managed to drag them safely back to Port
Canaveral.
Now, this was a relatively rare situation where someone had—accidentally—met all
three modern legal criteria to make a pure salvage claim.
The first of these is called “real peril;” if you’re trying to claim the cargo, you
have to prove to a court that the cargo was actually in danger.
You can’t just drag a boat to shore on a nice sunny day and demand some of its cargo.
The degree of danger is also relevant—the court will usually determine how much the
salvor is entitled to based on how much danger the cargo was in in the first place.
The second condition is “voluntary service,” which is kind of a weird one; basically, anyone
can be a salvor—a baby in an inner tube could be a salvor—but only if the baby volunteered.
In other words, you can’t make a pure salvage claim if you had to save the cargo.
The coast guard, for example, can’t make pure salvage claims because it’s their official
duty to guard coasts.
This also applies to anyone who’s under contract to save the cargo—the firms hired
by the Costa Concordia folks wouldn’t have been able to turn around and say that they
were actually doing pure salvage instead of contract salvage, even if it would make them
more money in the end.
And generally, anyone working on a ship would be under a similar sort of contract, so you
can’t just start looting things as soon as you see a big wave approaching.
This also rules out anyone acting in self-preservation; if, for whatever reason, saving the cargo
also means saving yourself, then you don’t get money for being a good boy.
The last condition is “success,” and this is a bit of a harsh one.
Pure salvage claims are made under what’s called a “no cure, no pay” basis, which
means that if you fail to successfully salvage anything—regardless of how much time, risk,
or money you put in—you get nothing.
This is part of the reason why pure salvage is so uncommon these days, particularly for
actual salvage firms, because spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a salvage mission
where you might not get any money whatsoever is not what we call a big brain business move.
There are a few modern exceptions to this, mostly in cases where the ship or cargo aren’t
saved, but where someone does something to stop the ship from leaking oil everywhere
and turning the ocean into pelican soup—that got classified as salvage in 1989 when the
soyboy SJWs took over our admiralty courts.
So, our story does have a happy ending: after fulfilling these three criteria, the crew
of the Cherry Valley took the tugboat to court in Louisiana and were awarded 6.4 million
dollars—an eighth of the value of the barge and cargo—and then presumably sailed off
into the sunset, to do whatever it is that oil tanker crews would do with 6.4 million
dollars.
Now, I don’t know what oil tanker crews would do with their salvage money.
But I know what they should do: subscribe to our sponsor Nebula, so they can watch Half
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