Posted on 06/08/2022 6:57:49 AM PDT by DUMBGRUNT
The Royal Navy sank the galleon in 1708 during the War of the Spanish Succession, but its resting place had been a mystery for more than three centuries. Today its contents could be worth billions.
...Experts speculate that the ship was loaded with at least 200 tons of treasure, including millions of high-purity gold doubloon coins, as well as many silver coins and emeralds that the Spanish empire had plundered from South America, worth up to $17bn (£13.5bn) today.
The salvage rights have been subject to decades of litigation and are contested by a professional salvage company that claims to have first uncovered the wreck in 1981, as well as Colombia, Spain and the Qhara Qhara nation of indigenous Bolivians who claim the Spanish extracted the wealth from its people.
US-based salvage company Sea Search Armada - owned by investors including the late John Ehrlichman, the White House adviser under President Nixon convicted for his role in the Watergate scandal - claimed to have first found the wreckage in the early 1980s.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.sky.com ...
ping
One of my favorite periods of history to read about.
A dream since I was a little girl. I must have a moral deficiency. Except….it’s not the wealth to me. It’s the discovery. In which case, I must have a mental deficiency. ☕️
Nice share this early morning.
Typical leftist twaddle.
They didn't plunder it. It was locked in rocks in the ground before they arrived. They created it.
I’m the same way. It’s about the adventure, the hunt, the discovery. Finding these treasures hundreds of years old, is almost like time traveling. Holding something in your hand that was last held 300-400 years ago. It’s not about what they’re worth, it’s about the wonder of it all.
Well, there was that room that Pizarro ordered the Incas to fill up with gold, and if gold was later dug up by enslaved Indians (as it was) to take back to Spain, the Spanish could be said to have plundered it.
“You didn’t build that!” - Barack Obama
Mr taxman we seen no stinking gold.
One thing that I do know - if I stumbled on a huge find like that, I’d scoop up a bit before letting anyone know about it.
Yeah then they garroted the king anyway.
—”Except….it’s not the wealth to me. It’s the discovery. “
It is about climbing the mountain, the peak is a denouement.
“Seaward ho! Hang the treasure! It’s the glory of the sea that has turned my head.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
My favorite sunken treasure shio involves a modern freighter called the SS Politician that went down off, IIRC, the Scottish coast with a load of booze and money.
Not all of which was recovered.
officially recovered, that is
Wondering why the writer felt compelled to snidely include Ehrlichman’s association with Nixon.
Magnificent!
The Spanish earned it because they had the technology to extract it.
I knew a woman whose daughter worked on the Atosha find... lots of cool stories.
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