Illustration by Chris Honeysuckle Ellis
At the age of 7, a boy found a gold coin on the beach in front of his father’s villa in the Bahamas. He spent the rest of his life searching for more treasure.
James Herbert “Herbo” Humphreys Jr. was the son of the late James Herbert Humphreys Sr. — “Big Herb” — who was co-founder of Humko Products, a successful cooking oil and shortening company which merged with Kraft in 1951. (Humphreys Boulevard in Memphis is named after the family.) Young Herbo attended Presbyterian Day School and Memphis University School, graduating in 1966. He had many opportunities to travel as a youth and, partly to feed his insatiable curiosity about the world (his hero was Memphis writer-adventurer Richard Halliburton), he joined the Navy in 1967.
Humphreys’ business sense surfaced early on. When he was just 16, he invested $5,500 that he won in an equestrian jumping contest, buying Philippine gold stock at 25 cents a share; it soon rose to $30 per share. Later, on his travels, he was intrigued by the beautiful warm waters off Grand Cayman and predicted that in the future the island would become a tourist mecca. Putting his money where his mouth was, at the age of 22 he developed a Holiday Inn franchise on Grand Cayman — at a time when the island had only two hotels — and parlayed its success into a business empire that included the Holiday Inn Grand Cayman, the Treasure Museum in Grand Cayman, and a treasure museum in the Bahamas.
In Memphis, his home base, Humphreys was a majority stockholder in the Summit Club and part owner of George Garner/Ask Mr. Foster Travel, Inc.
But most of his time was spent with M-A-R Ltd. and its associated corporation Marex International. M-A-R Ltd., founded by Humphreys in 1984, was dedicated to searching for sunken treasure. Marex International, an adjunct of M-A-R founded in 1990, looked for investors to help fund the treasure-hunting expeditions.
The flagship of Marex was the R.V. Beacon, a super-sophisticated salvage and recovery ship currently anchored off the Bahamas, where it salvaged the wreck of the seventeenth-century Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de la Maravillas, one of the greatest treasure troves of all time.
Far from being a swashbuckling adventurer, Humphreys was a boyish-looking, low-key man with a speaking voice so soft you sometimes had to strain to hear it. His cabin on the Beacon reflected his unpretentiousness: It looked more like a library with a bunk thrown in as an afterthought. The books on the shelves reflected his interest in adventure and his love of the sea. One of his most prized volumes was a copy of Fell’s Guide to Sunken Treasure Ships of the World, a gift from Big Herb on Herbo’s sixteenth birthday. On the inside cover it said, “Hope you find $10 million. Love, Dad.”
Humphreys, a husband and the father of two children, kept his family life private, but he was quite public on most of his other ventures, including his longtime support for the Nicaraguan Contras (he was a major general in the FDN Legion, a Contra organization).
It was his treasure-hunting exploits, however, that brought Humphreys his real celebrity. In 1983, he made his first important undersea discovery: the wreck of the H.M.S. Thunderer, a British warship that went down in 1780 off Honduras. He called the discovery “one of my biggest thrills.” Several cannons from the Thunderer were donated to the Royal Naval Engineering College near Plymouth, England.
Humphreys’ expedition to uncover the treasures of the Maravillas was followed by explorations of wreck sites in Central America, South America, Madagascar, and the Mediterranean.
At his funeral service, treasure-hunting partner Tim Hudson said, “I think his greatest legacy was his enthusiasm and adventurous spirit. … He was always looking for the next treasure project to get involved in. That was his passion.”
