Nothing made Gay Courter happier than being on a ship. She and her husband, Phil, had travelled the world by everything from hydroplane to hot-air balloon, but something about the sea air and the rocking motion of the water gave her an unparalleled feeling of well-being. In late January of 2020, the Courters embarked on their twentieth cruise together—a two-week tour of Southeast Asia aboard a ship called the Diamond Princess. They began their adventure in Tokyo, where they dined on fugu, the occasionally fatal puffer fish. Gay had a tradition of giving every trip a name. She was calling this one Seventy-five and Still Alive. They assumed that they’d already survived the most harrowing bit.
The Courters live by the water in Crystal River, Florida. They have three children and eight grandchildren. They are semi-retired and own a production company that makes documentary and educational films. Phil builds things and plays the banjo. Gay writes. She is the author of eleven books, ranging from “The Beansprout Book,” which, according to her Wikipedia page, “introduced beansprouts to American supermarkets and the general public,” to “The Midwife,” a best-seller in 1982. Her most recent novel, published in 2019, is set on a cruise ship. According to its promotional material, the book juxtaposes “the sumptuousness of a dream vacation with the horrors that lurk around the bend.”
The Courters have a story for everything. The time they first met, when Phil interviewed at the company where Gay worked. (“He moved in before he even began the job, and we’ve never had a date.”) The time they flew a small plane to their son’s graduation and crashed in a field, provoking an epiphany that led them to adopt their daughter at the age of twelve. The time they got invited to the White House. The time they vacationed with a future serial killer. Gay’s kids call her No-Filter Mom. Get her talking about her childhood—she lived in Japan when she was six, by the way—and she’ll mention that her father once bought an aircraft carrier. “Easy to find under ‘Leonard Weisman’ and ‘U.S.S. Attu,’” she told me. One of the first things that comes up when you Google these terms is an article identifying Weisman as a likely member of the Sonneborn Institute, a group of arms smugglers. If Forrest Gump, appearing on the margins of various historical events, were a family, he might be the Courters. Except that the Courters’ stories, however outlandish, tend to be true.
February 2, 2020, was supposed to be their second-to-last day aboard the Diamond Princess. At breakfast, Gay ordered the “famous James Beard French toast,” which she’d been looking forward to the entire vacation. Later, she crushed the trivia contest, leading her team to victory by answering that the largest Japanese population outside Japan can be found in Brazil. She hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to ask for a souvenir photo with Gennaro Arma, the ship’s “devilishly handsome” captain, not wanting to seem like “a dotty old lady.” Still, the couple deemed the trip a success before heading off to see “Bravo!,” widely agreed to be the best show on the cruise.
That evening, as the Courters were packing their suitcases, the ship’s intercom crackled on, filling their stateroom with Captain Arma’s voice. He announced that he had been notified by Hong Kong authorities that a passenger from the ship had tested positive for COVID-19. One of the Courters’ friends had been forwarding them articles about the strange new sickness, but this was the first hint that something was amiss aboard the Diamond Princess. Japanese authorities, Arma said, would be conducting a review of the vessel when it docked in Yokohama. “I will keep you updated with the information on the evolution of the evolving situation,” he promised, ominously.
The Diamond Princess was the site of a major early COVID outbreak and the first cruise ship to be quarantined during the pandemic. More than thirty-seven hundred passengers and crew members were stuck on board for two weeks as health authorities tried to figure out what to do. The Courters attempted to be cheerful. Gay got out her emergency snacks, including a tiny saltshaker that she carries everywhere, because you just never know. But things got scary fast. At one point, the World Health Organization announced that more than half of all confirmed COVID cases outside China were aboard the Diamond Princess.
As the virus swept through the decks, the Courters emerged as minor celebrities, lobbying for evacuation in newspaper editorials and on cable news. “I don’t think we’re safe on this ship,” Gay told ABC. “Frankly, it’s really creepy. It’s like prison camp.” Eventually, more than seven hundred passengers contracted the virus, and at least fourteen people died. The Courters finally flew home on a cargo plane chartered by the State Department and were obliged to quarantine on a military base for another fortnight. Home in Florida at last, Gay set to work on a quarantine memoir. She wrote of the shock of being “a carefree cruiser one moment, then held hostage by a foreign government.”
To compensate for the ordeal, Princess Cruises gave every passenger a credit to use for another trip. Some had had enough, and declined. But, two years later, in early June of 2022, the Courters flew to England, where they boarded the Island Princess for a two-week tour of Norway. It was a comparatively uneventful outing—glaciers, a fishing museum. Gay named the trip Pining for the Fjords, after a Monty Python sketch.
On June 29th, the Island Princess returned to port in England. That morning, the Courters told me, they received word that ship officials wanted to speak with them. They were asked to hand over their passports, and were escorted off the boat. On land, they were told that they were being arrested on European warrants, in connection with money laundering, organized crime, and the trafficking of cultural goods—gold bars from the Prince de Conty, a frigate that crashed off the coast of Brittany in 1746.
Gold is known as “the king of metals” for its scarcity, durability, and dazzling beauty. Even if it is no longer the most precious of native metals in purely financial terms (rhodium now takes that honor, thanks to the catalytic converter), gold retains its unparalleled primacy in the human psyche. Alchemists believed that they would unlock the secret to eternal life if they could turn lead into gold; imperialists slaughtered millions in pursuit of the substance. The golden calf, the golden fleece, the golden ratio, the golden hour, the golden goose—anything gold is profoundly desirable, sometimes driving its seekers to ruin or madness.
Freud thought that gold brought out something greedy in human nature, likening man’s fetish for it to that of a baby holding on to its sh*t. On digs and dives, a kind of gold fever can take hold. “Gold sends people spinning out of control,” one archeologist told me recently. The Prince de Conty wreck was perhaps especially susceptible to inspiring gold derangement: a persistent rumor holds that the ship and its treasure were cursed from the start. The legend’s power only deepened with the tribulations of a varied cast of sailors, speculators, divers, looters, and investigators who became obsessed with the ship’s treasure before the gold bars finally pulled the Courters into their thrall.
“But he’s always been nice to us.” Cartoon by Suerynn Lee Link copied
The Prince de Conty first set sail from Lorient on April 2, 1745. Its owner was the French East India Company, established under Louis XIV. The ship was designed to carry six hundred tons of cargo while remaining quick and maneuverable. Its crew of two hundred and twenty-three men included fourteen carpenters, five pilots, a butcher, a baker, a sailmaker, a writer, and a chaplain. Many were teen-agers. The youngest among them was twelve. The chief surgeon carried a trepanation kit, in case he needed to drain blood from someone’s brain after a mid-voyage blow to the head.
From Lorient, the Prince travelled south along the western coast of Africa, passing between the Canary Islands and Cape Verde, then swung wide around the Cape of Good Hope before finally arriving, six months later, in the Chinese city of Canton, now called Guangzhou. Having set sail slightly too late in the season, the ship encountered monstrous storms, and lost several men. But a trade voyage was a long-term bet. A vessel like the Prince was the eighteenth-century equivalent of an Amazon truck, its delivery times calculated in years instead of days or hours. In Canton, stevedores loaded the boat with luxury goods: ivory fans, painted silks, wallpapers, porcelain, lacquerware, tea, rhubarb, sappanwood, and sarsaparilla root, prized for its efficacy in treating syphilis.
In the mid-eighteenth century, gold could be bought more cheaply in China than in Europe. Sailors were discouraged from doing side deals at foreign destinations, but the practice was widely tolerated, especially among the officer class, as a perk for having taken on a job that entailed mortal risk. “Everybody who set off on one of these boats did so with the goal of making a fortune,” Brigitte Nicolas, the director of the French East India Company Museum, near Lorient, told me. According to her, gold was “the secret merchandise” of the company’s missions to China, weighing heavily on minds and in pockets. For gentlemen smugglers, the most convenient format was the ingot. Some were shaped like shoes, others in rectangles that recall chocolate bars. Another type was known as “pain,” for its resemblance to a baguette. They were all small enough to fit in a palm, and heavy, weighing around thirteen ounces, a little more than a can of soup. One expert estimates that around a hundred ingots were aboard the Prince de Conty as it embarked on its return trip to France.
The homeward voyage was catastrophic. Scurvy set in; English pirates attacked; the ship’s captain, Charles Bréart de Boisanger, was gravely injured in combat. By the time they got close to France, they were “very, very banged-up people,” Nicolas said. On December 2, 1746, after twenty months at sea, the Prince and its crew were several nautical miles off the coast of Brittany, only hours away from completing their mission and returning to land.
Then, in the middle of the night, the wind picked up. Fog rolled in and the sea rose, tossing the Prince violently as rain lashed its threadbare sails. At around 4 A.M., the ship crashed into the rocky coast of Belle-Île-en-Mer, an island in Brittany. The impact was so great that the hull of the boat split in half. “It was a night in Hell,” Nicolas said. Fewer than seventy of the hundred and ninety men who had made it that far survived the wreck.
The French East India Company scrambled to recoup its losses, sending in a salvage team. “We’re pulling out wood and collecting it at the top of the cliff, but this wood is so broken that the majority of it will only serve as kindling,” an architect named Guillois, charged with leading the effort, wrote to the company. Villagers gathered flotsam, laying drenched silks out to dry on the rocks. Guillois warned that locals, “accustomed to pillage,” might “descend during the night without being spotted,” so the company installed guards in a cliffside cabin to watch over the wreck day and night.
Officials brought in a boat to dredge the area, but the operation yielded little. Undeterred, they ordered a diving bell, the latest technology from Paris. Divers retrieved some copper pots, among other items, but the most valuable cargo remained elusive, save for what seems to have been a small stash of gold found by a twelve-year-old boy, which soon vanished from the site.
During a sea voyage, gold—even if it was illicit—was typically stored in crates like any other commodity. But Captain de Boisanger, exploiting a maritime custom that exempted officers from bodily searches, had decided to carry his ingots on his person, fashioning them into a kind of belt. Other officers presumably did likewise, complicating both their own escapes from the wreck and the company’s search effort. “The total quantity of gold that was on this vessel gives one occasion to think that, even if we don’t find it all, we should at least hope to recover some part,” Guillois wrote. So where, then, was it all? Had it sunk to the bottom of the ocean with the corpses of de Boisanger and his men, or had someone quietly made off with it in the aftermath of the wreck?
In the spring of 1974, Patrick Lizé’s tooth hurt. He went to see a dentist not far from the small Norman village where he lived. While being poked and prodded, Lizé, a swimming teacher, went on about his passion for marine archeology, particularly eighteenth-century shipwrecks. The dentist said that he ought to talk to his neighbor, who had just been diving in the Mediterranean for Greek and Roman relics.
The neighbor was an architect named Jean-Claude Lescure, and the two men bonded over their shared interest. Lizé mentioned that he’d been rummaging through dusty files in the National Archives, scoping out possible shipwrecks. He’d homed in on a promising candidate: the Prince de Conty, which, if he was right, was lying, forgotten and untouched for two centuries, off the coast of Belle-Île. Lizé had unearthed the Guillois report, which inventoried the Prince’s bounty. He also had a plan of the site—“a veritable treasure map, in short,” he later wrote, in a memoir. He and Lescure decided that they and their families would spend their holidays on Belle-Île that summer.
As its name suggests, Belle-Île is beautiful and isolated. The largest of Brittany’s islands, it is only about ten miles long and five miles wide. The weather there, in Breton fashion, is infinitely changeable, the emerald seas and sapphire skies of one minute giving way, the next, to a horizonless gray murk. The island is said to have “two faces”—a northern coast with sandy beaches and a far more rugged southern one, with sheer cliffs and a wild, churning sea. The wind has whittled the island’s rocks into surrealistic forms. Even in summer, it can blow hard enough that foam sprays over the clifftops, making it look like it’s snowing. Claude Monet was so enchanted by Belle-Île that he painted some forty pictures there. He wrote that he felt “powerless to render the intensity” of the ocean.
Lizé and Lescure arrived on the island in August and travelled to the area indicated by the archival documents, a discreet cove known as Port Lost-Kah. (The name means “cat’s tail” in Breton.) “We threw on our wetsuits with indescribable impatience, donned our equipment, and jumped into the history-charged water,” Lizé later wrote. They dove for twenty-eight days and found nothing of interest. But Lizé was determined, searching, he wrote, “every hole, every fault, every crevice, every crack, lifting every stone.” Finally, after nearly a month of failure, they cleared some algae and felt a bulge on the ocean floor: a cannonball! The discovery of some sappanwood and shards of porcelain confirmed that they were hot on the trail of the Prince.
Back home, they plotted a return to the island, this time with heavy machinery. Over a poolside dinner, they pitched the plan to Guy Lépinay, a local notary, who agreed to handle the logistics. “At the beginning, it was just for a laugh,” Lépinay recalled, in his own book. “But I thought, Why not?” They pledged to split any eventual spoils three ways. “A desire for adventure was floating in the air,” Lépinay wrote.
The group returned to Belle-Île with thermic compressors and a suction dredge. One afternoon, just as Lizé was approaching shore to quit for the day, he spotted a U-shaped metallic object on the ocean floor. It was encased in a hard black crust, but on one extremity he noticed “a little golden collar, neither the presence nor the nature of which I could explain.” He took out his knife and shaved off a sliver. On land, he showed it to Lescure. They agreed: solid gold. The men bought a canvas suitcase at the port, shoved the object inside, and hauled it back to Normandy.
French law requires anyone who discovers “any deposit, wreck, remnant, or item possessing prehistoric, archeological, or historical interest” in French waters to declare it to authorities within forty-eight hours. The rule is meant to insure that cultural property remains intact and accessible, rather than being hoarded away or sold off by profiteers. As Olivia Hulot, an official at France’s Department of Subaquatic and Submarine Archeological Research (DRASSM), recently explained, “You can’t just walk into the Louvre and take a painting off the wall because you like it.”
The encrusted object clearly qualified as cultural property, even more so when the treasure hunters cleaned it up, revealing that the shining chunk was actually an ingot stamped with Chinese ideograms. Later, Lizé and Lescure would say that they declared the Prince wreck to a local fisherman, who claimed to represent the maritime authority in Belle-Île. Lépinay says that his partners promised they’d taken care of the formalities, and he took them at their word. Whatever the case, no member of the group notified the relevant officials at DRASSM until more than two months later. The men dispute who was in favor of declaring all along and who resisted the idea; in fact, they disagree on almost everything about the whole affair. Lépinay told me that Lizé was “a perfect liar and crook.” Lizé insisted that he was the one who had been cheated, and said that he saw Lescure stuffing ingots into his wetsuit on one dive. “He was very, very naïve,” Lizé’s daughter, Emmanuelle, told me. “It’s a world of sharks—and my father didn’t protect himself.”
When Lizé finally did declare the Prince—behind the backs of his partners—he didn’t let on that he’d found gold, mentioning only “five entirely corroded cannons.” DRASSM granted him permission to bring up the cannons, and, in the summer of 1975, he returned to Belle-Île with a new team. According to witnesses, the site quickly degenerated into chaos. People came and went like wired kids at the end of a birthday party, swarming the innards of a piñata. One diver, recalling a “louche” atmosphere, said that he’d seen Lizé come out of the water with ingots on an earlier dive. The journalist Nicolas Jacquard wrote recently, in Le Parisien, that Lizé and his associates “skin[ned] the remains of the Conty like a band of piranhas would clean a carcass.”
In the meantime, the Lescure family, also on holiday in Belle-Île, was keeping an eye on what Lizé and his new team were up to. Acting on a tip from Lescure, DRASSM raided the site and shut down the dive. Lescure’s son Francois, fifteen at the time, was looking on through binoculars from a clifftop as the authorities approached. “They had four black Zodiacs,” he recalled. “It was like a James Bond film.” As he stood there watching, he felt a hand on his back. “Suddenly, this thug arrived behind us,” he said. “He took me by the shoulders, and he said, ‘I’d like to throw you off this cliff.’”
Obsequious correspondence flew around the country as the opposing sides tried to persuade the authorities that they were law-abiding citizens who had been caught up in another’s shady scheme. “I now find myself in the position of a villain, when those who point the finger are incapable of raising the same finger to furnish proof with a similar vigor,” Lizé wrote in a pleading missive to the French President’s wife, Madame Giscard d’Estaing. He eventually became a renowned treasure hunter, discovering dozens more wrecks, but a shadow hovered over his reputation. “You understand that this situation is intolerable for the marine archeology devotee that I am,” he wrote to one official. “Who hasn’t committed an error in his life?”
The disputes revived the old notion that the Prince might be cursed. Connoisseurs of nautical arcana knew that, before the frigate that crashed into the rocks at Belle-Île, the French East India Company had owned another ship of the same name, lost off the coast of Louisiana, and that, in 1753, the firm had launched a third Prince, which fell into the hands of English pirates. Proponents of the curse theory pointed to centuries of death, injury, ruination, quarrels, and dreams dashed upon the rocks. Lépinay, reflecting on his own dramas involving the ship, wondered whether it “suffered from a macabre predestiny.” When Lescure died, in a car accident, in 1980, some people in his circle insisted that his proximity to the Prince was somehow to blame.
Cartoon by Jorge Penné Link copied
As rumors circulated—gold stuffed into briefcases, gold stashed in attics and car trunks, gold entrusted to elderly mothers—French prosecutors launched an investigation. They confiscated all manner of booty from the three partners and their various associates in a series of searches, but they were only ever able to recover two ingots. Dozens of names came up in the inquiry, but ultimately the authorities brought charges against just five people, including Lizé and Lépinay. After a trial, in 1983, Lizé was ordered to pay a fine of forty thousand francs for possession of stolen goods, while Lépinay and the others received lesser penalties.
Lizé was devastated by the judgment and its implication that he was a petty thief, rather than a brilliant scholar. “He was humiliated for a little administrative fault,” his daughter said. Lépinay, on the other hand, hardly gave the affair a second thought, considering it “pipi de sansonnet”—“starling pee,” or small beans. Both men assumed that the matter was effectively closed.
In the beginning of 1981, excitement swept into western Florida. “French Sailing Family Visits Crystal River,” the Suncoast Sentinel announced, introducing Gérard and Annette Pesty and their children, Sylviane (four) and Eric (eight months). They had just arrived on their fifty-five-foot trimaran, the Architeuthis. Gérard was a pharmacist by training, and Annette a laboratory research assistant. The couple had decided to “cut loose,” the article explained, sailing around the world and recording their experience in books and documentaries. They were now touring North America, having come down to Florida from Canada, via the Mississippi, “to see the manatees—which they pronounce ‘man-atty.’”
Gay recalled, “Once we saw the story about this French couple with similar interests and kids roughly the ages of our kids, we thought, Well, we ought to go meet these people.” One day, the Courters got in their motorboat and zipped out to the middle of the bay, where the Architeuthis was anchored. There they were: Annette with the baby on her back, lifting the anchor; Sylviane doing gymnastics on the rigging; Gérard, streaked with oil and grease, fiddling with the engine compartment. The family struck the Courters as embodying the kind of life they were striving to create—rich in experiences and self-sufficient, but open to the world. “Annette washed diapers, and they were strung on a line,” Gay said. “I was in awe.”
The friendship quickly deepened. By 1984, the families were vacationing together near Great Inagua, an island in the Bahamas known for its flamingos. The Pestys spent summers in France, running their pharmacy, so that they could travel the rest of the year. They often left the Architeuthis in Crystal River, where the Courters took care of the boat and handled various practical matters on their behalf. “It was all very loose and based on trust,” Gay told me.
The Courters speak fondly of this era of “young families doing pretty crazy things”—swimming with humpback whales, flying single-engine planes, “sharing our dreams, problems, children.” One picture from the time shows two sun-kissed, bare-chested kids perched on the crosstrees of a towering mast, with another little boy scrambling to the peak. When the Courters’ cat had kittens, they gave one to the Pestys. “We became their American family, and vice versa,” Gay said. “The connection was deeper than Phil or I have with even our siblings.”
One day in 1986, Gérard Pesty made an impromptu appearance in Crystal River. “He walks in and pops open this briefcase full of gold, and we’re, like, ‘Oh, my God,’” Phil remembered. According to the Courters, Pesty had around twenty ingots. He said that they had come from a French shipwreck and, later, that his sister and brother-in-law, Brigitte and Yves Gladu, a renowned underwater photographer, had found them while diving in Brittany. Pesty’s story was a little vague, but Gay and Phil were more amused than anything. “Gérard was a crazy guy with so many irons in the fire,” Gay said. Pesty took the ingots out of the briefcase and showed them to the kids. “They were playing with them like Legos,” Gay told me. “Honestly, we thought it was cool.”
It was an opportune moment to unload a cache of gold. Several months earlier, Christie’s had auctioned off treasure salvaged from the Geldermalsen, a Dutch ship that wrecked off the coast of Indonesia in 1752. The so-called Nanking Cargo fetched record prices—nearly forty-three thousand dollars for a “fish dish,” eighty thousand for the kind of rare, shoe-shaped ingot that sank with the Prince. Pesty told the Courters that the sale’s success had motivated the Gladus to sell their gold. He’d been in Miami, he said, to meet with a rare-coin dealer; before that, he’d visited London, where he had sold three ingots to the British Museum. He asked the Courters if they’d be willing to hold on to the gold while he was in France, since he was hoping to find an American buyer.
If this wasn’t a typical day in the Courter household, neither was it totally anomalous. (Ashley Rhodes-Courter, the Courters’ adopted daughter, recalls spending her first holiday with the family in the company of a dozen Chinese railroad engineers whom Phil and Gay had invited over for Thanksgiving.) “We did ask a few questions,” Phil said. The Courters talked to a customs agent, who confirmed that the antique gold wasn’t subject to import duties. On a trip to New York to meet with her literary agent, Gay stuffed an ingot in her purse and went to see an expert at the American Numismatic Society, who vouched for its authenticity. “Our thinking was, Jeez, the British Museum’s buying it, so it must be legit,” Phil said.
The Courters unscrewed a light fixture and, for a while, hid the ingots in their ceiling. Eventually, they moved them to a safe-deposit box. When Gérard Pesty and Yves Gladu opened American bank accounts, Phil served as a signatory. Every year, he says, he made sure that his friends filled out their tax forms and filed them with the I.R.S.
In 1997, the Courters’ younger son joined the Pestys on a trip to Île-à-Vache, an island off the coast of Haiti. Toward the end of the trip, Gérard suddenly became very sick. He was at an airport, trying to catch a flight to somewhere with a better medical facility, when he collapsed into his son’s lap and died. Annette had a high fever, and her skin was turning yellow. Someone called the Courters and told them what was happening.
“Falciparum malaria!” Gay exclaimed—the deadliest form of the parasite in humans. The Courters managed to have Annette airlifted to Gainesville. “By the time we arrived at the hospital, I was obsessed, hysterical, and screaming, but they listened,” Gay said. After Gérard’s death, the families remained close. The Courters travelled all over the world with Annette and the Gladus, who now had a big boat of their own. Annette started telling people that she was alive only because of the Courters.
By the time Michel L’Hour laid eyes on the Prince de Conty, he had been thinking about the ship for several years. In 1983, as a new recruit at DRASSM, he had testified at Lizé and Lépinay’s trial, trying to explain that shipwrecks were “essential witnesses to the story of humanity, pages of our collective history that deserve to be studied.” The experience left him frustrated. “The trial was very bizarre,” he recalled. “Nobody seemed to give a damn.” Then, in the summer of 1985, L’Hour was tasked with leading one of his first major dives, at the site of the Prince.
At the time, DRASSM was a young organization with scant resources. L’Hour and a colleague camped out on the side of the Lost-Kah cliff, sharing a tent. They didn’t have the budget for heavy machinery, but L’Hour was so determined to succeed that he invited Lizé to the dive, figuring that, despite his conviction, “at the end of the day, he knew the site best.” (Emmanuelle Lizé calls L’Hour a “venal and pretentious” hypocrite, who treated her father as a criminal while capitalizing on his work.) For two weeks, it rained every day. The wind whipped the water so relentlessly that L’Hour’s team might as well have been diving inside a washing machine. It was impossible to anchor a boat, so when their scuba tanks ran out of air they hiked up the slippery cliff in their dive boots, refilled the tanks, and hiked back down.
The site had already been explored—by Guillois, in the seventeen-forties, and by Lizé, in the nineteen-seventies—but L’Hour and his team managed to salvage some historically valuable items. He was particularly moved by a modest crucifix, which, he wrote, “can only recall to what extent maritime voyages were exposed to dangers that many could confront only by faith.” The team found three ingots—not nothing, but not the breakthrough they had dreamed of. For all his distaste for the “frenetic quest for gold,” even L’Hour, taking the ingots into his hands for the first time, felt a certain magic. He recalled, “It’s crazy, you feel like nothing happened, like no time elapsed, between the guy who touched them in Canton in 1745 and me, holding them now.” In the third week, a major storm hit, sending the team’s Zodiac into the rocks and breaking its propeller, which put an end to the operation.
L’Hour was already one of the world’s leading experts on the Prince, but now the ship became a personal obsession. He nurtured contacts in the treasure-hunting community, developing a reputation as someone who could be trusted with sensitive information. Born in Tunisia, where his father built roads for the French colonial government, he’d been a brainy, taciturn child. “You’re a chatterbox and a lockbox at the same time,” his mother sometimes said. L’Hour leveraged this dual nature in service of the Prince, transforming himself into “a sort of computer,” eliciting bits of gossip and speculation in a seemingly casual manner and then filing them away without a word. “I always had the Prince in mind, but I didn’t talk about it, even if I went back from time to time to dive there, to keep an eye on things,” L’Hour told me. He followed every lead, no matter how far-fetched.
At one point, he received an anonymous phone call asking for a meeting in Paris. L’Hour arrived at a grand café at the appointed hour, where he was greeted by a man who claimed to possess a number of gold ingots purchased from someone who had pillaged the Prince. L’Hour considered himself a pragmatist and hoped that he might broker some kind of deal. But when he reported the availability of the gold to his superiors they told him that a negotiation for the ingots was out of the question. “O.K., we don’t negotiate with terrorists, but the hostage is dead,” L’Hour said recently, still annoyed at the “egghead Parisian” brass. The man walked out of the café, and L’Hour never saw him again.
One day, a source gave L’Hour an intriguing photograph. It showed roughly twenty gold bars strewn across the ocean floor, a few of them nestled between the legs of rust-colored starfish. “That photo gave me proof of something that I’d known for a long time, which was that at least one person who’d pillaged the site in the seventies hadn’t got caught with his hand in the bag,” L’Hour recalled. For the moment, he couldn’t use the photograph without exposing his source. “But I knew it would come in handy someday,” he said. He put it away in a safe, taking care to lock his office door every day when he went to lunch.
In the course of his forty-year career, L’Hour became a storied figure in marine archeology—“Indiana Jones in a wetsuit,” per one sobriquet. In 2006, he became the director of DRASSM. He travelled the planet, excavating wrecks from Gabon to the Philippines, but he never stopped following the Prince. One day in 2017, he received an e-mail from an old contact containing a link to the site of a California auction house called Stephen Album Rare Coins. Alongside Transylvanian ducats and Tibetan srangs, the house was offering five gold ingots—four baguettes and one chocolate bar, estimated to sell for between twenty-two and thirty thousand dollars each. “Nearly identical to the bars from the wrecks of the French East India Company vessel Prince de Conty, and to the Dutch East-Indiaman Geldermalsen,” the catalogue copy read.
L’Hour could not believe what he was seeing. “It was kind of a Christmas present,” he said. The listing even included a link to a 1999 episode of “Antiques Roadshow,” featuring an elegant woman in a gold-buttoned cardigan. She had come with some old porcelain and a pair of gold bars, which she claimed to have found near the Cape Verde Islands, some hundred feet underwater. The program had been shot in Florida. L’Hour detected an accent. “She spoke very good English, but I said to myself, ‘She’s French,’” he told me. The woman seemed slightly ill at ease, tossing her head as she spoke, but it was impossible to tell whether her awkwardness stemmed from anxiety at appearing on television, or from speaking in a second language, or from something more profound.
The woman had a photograph to illustrate her presentation. There it sat, propped on a little easel: a print featuring roughly twenty gold bars and a rust-colored starfish, identical to the photograph that L’Hour had stashed in a safe years before. “I was, like, Putain, there it is!” L’Hour recalled. He had a strong hunch that the woman was lying about the provenance of the gold, so he decided to see if a biologist could identify the starfish. The word came back: the species could be found in shallow waters, such as those at the Prince de Conty site, but not in waters as deep as those the woman had described.
L’Hour was sure that the ingots had been obtained illegally, but he didn’t recognize the woman. He began going through his old lists of suspects. During the investigation in the nineteen-eighties, police had seized a number of items, including photographs, from Yves Gladu. He had joined Lizé’s dive team as an underwater photographer, and his name had come up repeatedly in L’Hour’s inquiries over the years, but no one had ever been able to connect him definitively with the plunder of the Prince. L’Hour pulled up the Gladu family’s Facebook profiles and discovered that the woman in the television clip was Annette Pesty—the widow of Brigitte Gladu’s brother, and the Courters’ dear friend.
By now, L’Hour had been tracking the ingots for thirty-five years. A kind of Javert of the Prince de Conty, he had dedicated a lifetime to retrieving the gold bars from oblivion and to protecting the wreck. As late as 2009, he had warned an admiral that the site, “again the victim of systematic pillages,” was being seriously harmed “by clandestine acts that seem to me never to have ceased.” This was the break he’d been waiting for. He dialled a colleague at the Ministry of Culture and urged him to alert the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Following their arrest in England, the Courters were taken to London for a preliminary hearing. Asked if they would accept extradition to France, they refused. They were granted bail of a thousand pounds each, but they didn’t have the cash on hand, nor were they allowed to visit an A.T.M., so they were sent to prison—Gay to Bronzefield and Phil to Wandsworth. Gay, a diabetic, went for hours without food or her medication. Phil was strip-searched.
Cartoon by Sam Gross Link copied
In their cells, they tried to grasp the contours of their predicament. They had known that French law enforcement was investigating the provenance of the gold bars, and they had received questions from French authorities via a U.S. Attorney. But they had been assured by their longtime lawyers that they had done nothing illegal. They were advised to only answer questions in exchange for immunity, since the gold wasn’t theirs and there was little France could do about it, anyway. They were unaware that a French judge had issued warrants for their arrest and extradition in connection with the trafficking of “national treasure belonging to France.” Gay’s warrant identified her as the “owner of a King Charles Spaniel” and, rather cruelly, described her as of “great corpulence.”
Gay had volunteered as a guardianad litem in the Florida courts for twenty-five years, and she was terrified by the prospect of extradition to France, fearing that she and Phil would never be able to defend themselves in an unfamiliar legal system in a language they don’t speak. “I decided that suicide was the best option if it came to that,” she told me. “I think that’s the only secret I ever kept from Phil.” When their bail came through, they were released from prison, and took an Uber to Cambridge.
The Courters arrived at a house owned by Suzanne and John Curran. “We’d met twenty years earlier on a home exchange,” Suzanne recalled. “Then we sort of kept in vague touch on and off, like you do—Christmas cards and things.” Before their Norwegian cruise, the Courters had stopped by Cambridge for afternoon tea with the Currans. Suzanne said, “We waved them off, and, personally, I thought it was probably the last time we’d see them.” Now the Courters, “completely and utterly shell-shocked,” had become their involuntary house guests for the indefinite future.
For months, the Courters remained in limbo. They accumulated lawyers, eventually racking up more than six hundred thousand dollars in legal fees and living costs, even though they had yet to be charged with any crime. “The injustices of the European warrant system are notorious,” the extradition lawyer Edward Fitzgerald, who represents Julian Assange and briefly worked on the Courters’ case, told me, explaining that France is not required to show evidence in order to request extradition from the U.K., and that a mere accusation of criminal activity can suffice. “The French judge’s decision to issue a warrant was particularly unfair in their case,” he added. (French authorities declined to comment on the case.) The Courters depleted their savings and had to borrow money from friends. That August, they missed the birth of their newest grandson. By October, they had been stuck in England for nearly a hundred days. “They were hollow shells of the people I knew,” their daughter told me.
One day, looking for distraction, Gay and Phil visited the Fitzwilliam Museum. Practically the first thing they saw when they walked into the gallery was Monet’s 1886 painting of a lion-shaped rock on Belle-Île. The Courters had never even been to the island, but now it seemed inescapable. It was as if the curse of the Prince de Conty were taunting them from a gilded frame. They wondered whether Monet had ever felt the ship’s intense aura. “We like to think of the gold under the sea while Monet painted without knowing about the wreck... or maybe he did,” Gay wrote to me one day.
In the spring of 2021, French police raided the homes of Annette Pesty and Brigitte and Yves Gladu. According to reporting by Le Parisien, when the police entered, Brigitte stepped aside and placed a call to Annette. “They found some grist for the mill,” she whispered, unaware that the authorities had been wiretapping her phone. The searches yielded a wealth of evidence: photographs, bank statements, letters from the Courters detailing the sale of ingots. The authorities later confiscated the Gladus’ forty-three-foot catamaran, purchased, in 2010, for a hundred and eighty-five thousand euros.
At a hearing, Yves Gladu admitted to having made some forty dives at the Prince de Conty site in the nineteen-seventies and as late as 1999. He and his wife kept their ingots in a blue metal box in their attic—a kind of clandestine savings account that they were able to draw on throughout their lives, magicking up money from under the sea. L’Hour told me that he was always suspicious of the way that Gladu, whom he knew fairly well after years of working in the same milieu, clammed up whenever the subject of the Prince arose. L’Hour has said that he believes that Gladu “got his hands on the ship’s hold,” which he called “the ‘Mona Lisa’ of underwater archeology.”
Gladu confessed to selling around twenty bars in Switzerland. “They were burning my fingers,” he told the court. Brigitte added that finding the gold “was unexpected, fabulous.” Yet they denied any connection to the hoard that the Pestys entrusted to the Courters. (Through their lawyers, the Gladus declined to comment; Annette Pesty’s lawyer did not respond to a request.) A trial is expected in 2025.
Since their arrest, the Courters had been trying to get a French lawyer. Finally, three months into their detainment, Grégory Lévy and Aurélie Boulbin joined their team. The new lawyers were able to explain some key differences between the American legal system and the French one—the former, for instance, operates on an accusatory model, whereas the latter uses an investigatory one, giving judges wider powers in the evidence-gathering phase. “They had no information,” Lévy said, of the Courters. Furthermore, it seemed that their arrest could have been avoided entirely—it turned out that the French judge had only issued warrants after an offer of immunity, mislaid or misunderstood by the Courters’ Florida lawyers, yielded no response. (The firm did not respond to a request for comment.) The Courters say that they did not know about the offer of immunity until after they hired the French lawyers. Lévy and Boulbin immediately contacted the judge, who agreed to depose the Courters over Zoom. She formally charged them with concealment of stolen goods and money laundering, but retracted the request for extradition. Gay and Phil got their passports back, and, a few days later, flew home.
The Courters, who are now attached to the case as coöperating parties, acknowledge that they failed to ask some pertinent questions about the gold. “Now, looking back, it’s, like, what were we thinking?” Phil said. Gay takes responsibility for what she calls the “‘Antiques Roadshow’ fiasco,” having encouraged Annette to come along to the show after a call from a producer friend. “We had some valuable netsukes, and two matching ivory fans that had been a gift to my father from Madame Chiang Kai-shek,” she recalled. “Annette was staying with us at the time, and I mentioned the gold.” After the program aired, Gay sold three ingots on eBay. “We were getting older and winding down our office,” she told me. “We didn’t want to have to deal with it anymore.”
The Courters say that they have always been truthful about the provenance of the gold, though the head of the California auction house told authorities that Gay “stated that she has been in possession of these bars for approximately 15 years and that they originally were found in the Cape Verde Islands.” The auction catalogue didn’t mention Cape Verde, but made much of the ingots’ likeness to those from the Geldermalsen and the Prince de Conty, without stating directly that they came from the latter wreck. When I asked Gay about this, she said that the auction house had “fudged” the catalogue listing. The Courters’ French lawyers are emphasizing the couple’s guilelessness. “We will try to demonstrate that there was no criminal intention,” Lévy told me. “They sold on eBay. When you want to traffic something, you don’t go on eBay, right?”
The Department of Homeland Security determined that the auction-house ingots rightfully belonged to France, notwithstanding a competing claim from the Chinese government. (David Keller, an agent with Homeland Security, told me that the case almost gave him “an aneurysm.”) At a “repatriation ceremony” held at the French Embassy in 2022, a Homeland Security official said that the department was “proud to have played a role in insuring these artifacts continue to be a part of France’s history for future generations to enjoy.” Yet the British government has remained silent on the three gold bars that remain in the British Museum’s collection. This is despite the fact that, according to the museum’s own Web site, they were acquired from “G Pesty” and came from the Prince de Conty wreck. (“P Courter” also appears on two listings, but the Courters say that this is an error stemming from Phil’s status as a signatory on Pesty’s bank account.) A spokesperson for the museum declined to answer questions about the ingots, saying only that the museum “is actively seeking a resolution to this matter, and has worked cooperatively with the relevant authorities.”
L’Hour continues to track the ship’s treasure, and, in retirement, has become an outspoken advocate for the prosecution of the “morbidly avaricious crooks” who plundered the Prince. He is the author of a new essay on the ship’s “broken destiny,” recently published to accompany an exhibit at the French East India Company Museum. “At Port Lost-Kah a frozen world demands to be brought back to life to better recount the story of this humanity,” he writes, urging French authorities to fund a new expedition. For him, the Prince was “first a maritime tragedy and then a cultural one,” brought on by “pathological greed.”
Whatever the reason—gold lust, bad luck, a malediction—the Prince de Conty continues to bring ill fortune upon those in its ambit, even two hundred and seventy-eight years after its demise. The Courters have paid a heavy price for what initially seemed to be a casual obligation. They are unlikely to set foot in Europe again—in fact, they have stopped travelling almost entirely.
Phil finds it difficult to talk about what happened. Gay talks about it all the time, spending hours on the Internet, trawling blogs about the intricacies of extradition law. “Was our situation typical or unusual?” she asked recently. “How many people without our privileges or resources are being detained in foreign countries without charges?” Both are dealing with physical and mental-health issues brought on by the ordeal. “It is not an exaggeration to say that nothing in my life prepared me for this, and I am no longer the same person I was,” Gay told me. Because of pending legal issues, the Courters haven’t spoken to Annette Pesty or the Gladus in several years. The Courters consider the loss of their old friends to be as consequential as the blows to their reputations, well-being, and finances. Gay said, “The gold was a tiny fragment of our lives together—meaningless, until it wasn’t.”♦
