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.

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