That didn’t stop others from envying his life—one in which they imagined him cruising the Caribbean, wind in hair and cognac in hand, in search of the next lost treasure. Few thought about the life he lived every day. He was away from home almost all the time, which made a normal existence impossible and his marriage a challenge. It was hard for him to have a meaningful conversation about his job—almost no one in the world did what he did, or could even imagine it. Even the treasure itself had a tragic patina: Much of it came from wrecks in which people had died violently at sea. Still, he
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