Jakarta, July 25 (DPA) For years, treasure hunter Klaus Keppler, the owner of a salvage company, has been looking for the wrecks of ships that had been carrying gold, silver or pottery. Now, after a long dry spell, he has got lucky. Twice. And one of them was a ship that ran aground en route to India.

Keppler -- who has recovered a 10th-century wreck and the Forbes, a British vessel that ran aground in 1806, off Indonesia -- contentedly surveys his treasures in a Jakarta port storehouse, holding up a huge lump of silver coins.

'Hurry up, this thing is incredibly heavy,' the 70-year-old German urged a photographer, but with a big smile on his face.

The divers of his salvage ship, the Maruta Jaya, have recovered many kilogrammes of silver coins from the Forbes as well as cannon, gold jewellery, crystal, silverware and 400 bottles of wine.

'Those gentlemen on board knew how to live well,' he says.

The many different coins will sell especially well, he believes, spinning a large one between his fingers: 'One coin can be worth between $50 and several thousand.'

This is even more so if the history of the artefact is known. Keppler hired a young man to scour archives around the world for information about the Forbes.

The vessel sailed the seas under a commission from the British king, a kind of pirate with a royal permit. It ran aground on a reef off Belitung island, between Borneo and Sumatra, en route to India Sep 9, 1806.

Captain Frazer Sinclair and his crew survived. The Mampango reef was only charted five years later.

Upstairs in Keppler's storehouse, four archaeology students measure, photograph and describe every recovered coin and enter the results in a databank.

'Everything gets documented,' Keppler says. Officials from various Indonesian ministries who must accompany every search trip make sure that no treasures are squirreled away.

The Indonesian state receives 50 percent of all revenues derived from treasure hunts in its territory.