The two regimes that govern a thing recovered from water are not variants of one another. Salvage rewards a volunteer who rescues property from peril at sea and returns it to its owner, who keeps title and pays an award. The law of finds gives title itself to the finder, and gives it only where the previous owner has abandoned the thing. Courts sitting on inland lakes and rivers have on the whole reached for salvage, and the reach is a mistake of fit rather than of doctrine.
Salvage was built around three facts of the sea. The peril is immediate; the owner is identifiable and wants the thing back; and the rescuer acts without time to negotiate. A cargo of timber floating off a wharf presents all three. A barge that settled on a lake bed a century and a half ago presents none of them. There is no peril in any sense the doctrine recognises: the object has been where it is for longer than the doctrine's remedies have existed. There is no owner attending the outcome. And there is nothing here that could not have been negotiated at leisure.
What follows is not that the recoverer should always take title. Abandonment still has to be shown, and mere lapse of time shows it only where the owner had the means to recover and did not. But the inquiry a court should be conducting is that one, and salvage substitutes for it an inquiry into the value of a service that nobody requested.
[[PASSAGE B]]
Whether a thing lifted from a river bed belongs to the person who lifted it is usually asked too early. Before either regime is consulted there is a prior question about the bed. In most inland jurisdictions the bed of a navigable water is held by the state, and things embedded in it are treated as part of it. A hull sunk into silt is not lying on the bottom in the way a coin lies on a pavement; it is within the soil, and the soil has an owner that has never gone anywhere.
That is why the argument from the passage of time proves so much less than it is asked to prove. Time is evidence of intention only against a party who had a choice, and the original owner's intention is not the only intention that matters once a second title has attached. A hundred and fifty years of inaction by a shipping company says nothing about the state, which acquired its interest by operation of law and cannot abandon by inattention.
The practical objection is that this leaves recovery unrewarded and therefore undone. It is a real objection, and it is met in the ordinary way, by agreement: a permit, a share, a condition about where the recovered material is deposited. What it does not justify is inferring a transfer of title from silence, which is what the finder's case requires and what a court asked to award title on that basis is invited to do.
