"VOC... What they want, may not be what they get. Stay tuned"
I really hope they get to excavate this wreck or at least recover all the guns for recording and display.
It would be an absolute crime to leave this wreck in-situ now it has finally been discovered.
The British Goverment would never sanction the cash to do the excavation themselves, and I cannot see any charitable trust ever raising the sums needed to work in these depths.
The general public knew very little of this wreck or its history until it was located and published by Odyssey and the rest of the story should be told.
A lot less information will be lost through excavation and (if needed for funding purposes) the sale of duplicate items (after recording), than will be by leaving the wreck where it is to be looted, trawled over and destroyed by environmental forces.
At least 90% of the obtainable knowledge about the ship and its contents have been lost already, so the loss of another 1% or 2% through excavation is immaterial compared with the remaining knowledge we would gain.
If this is how all goverments are going to act in the future, there will be no point at all in researching and locating wrecks just for them to be left in-situ, as their location will only increase the chance of looting.
Much better to locate, excavate and record as its the knowledge that we need and not necessarily the long term preservation of material items.
Knowledge of our past is the real value for our future generations, and not just boxes filled with artefacts sat in museum archive stores.
Apart from a few Salvors and interested wreck hunters who have looked for this wreck for years, I believe their has been no academic institutions or goverment departments that had every spent a day looking for It, but now it’s found the heritage departments all appear out of their offices to have a say on its future.
The public have a right to their history, and it should not be the right of any unelected archaeologist to prevent this information coming to light.
