His work encompassed a variety of shipwrecks, including Spanish galleons, pirate ships, Great Lakes freighters, modern luxury liners, Civil War blockade runners, and submarines.

[citation needed] He is a founder, owner, and Vice President of the International Diving Institute, an organization that teaches and certifies commercial deep-sea divers.

The July 2007 cover story in U.S. News & World Report noted that the Hunley "disappeared without a trace" until 1970 when it was supposedly found by "underwater archaeologist E. Lee Spence.

[5][6] Spence's book Treasures of the Confederate Coast, which had a chapter on his suppossedly discovery of Hunley and included a map complete with an "X" showing the wreck's location was published in January 1995.

[16] In addition to the Hunley, Spence has discovered several historically significant shipwrecks, including the SS Georgiana[17][18] (said to have been the most powerful cruiser built by the Confederate States of America).

[21] Spence claims to have salvaged over $50,000,000 in valuable artifacts[22] and has been responsible, through his archival research, for the locating of the wrecks of the side-paddle-wheel steamers Republic[23] and Central America[24][25] from which over one billion dollars in treasure has been recovered.

[26] On April 4, 1989, Spence announced his discovery that Margaret Mitchell, who had claimed her Pulitzer Prize winning novel Gone with the Wind was pure fiction, had actually taken much of her compelling story of love, greed and war from real life.

[27] He claimed that Mitchell had actually based the character Rhett Butler on the life of George Alfred Trenholm, a shipping magnate from Charleston, South Carolina who had made millions of dollars from blockade running and was thrown in prison after the Civil War after being accused of making off with much of the Confederate treasury.