Colombian army shares pictures of shipwreck carrying billions in lost treasure, including gold, silver and emeralds

Sky News ^ | 8 June 2022

[DiogenesLamp]

They didn't plunder it. It was locked in rocks in the ground before they arrived. They created it.

They enslaved the local populations and forced them to mine it. They treated them horribly including pouring molten lead down their throats to make examples of them.

The Spanish brutality was exceptional in world history, and perhaps not rivaled by any but the Muslims or the Nazis.

They murdered millions, many by simply working them to death. They whipped, beat and executed any of them who couldn't work or refused to work.

Every bit of that Spanish gold is soaked in blood on a scale modern Americans can scarcely comprehend.

Other Freepers who know more about this, tell me if i'm wrong.

[DiogenesLamp]

The Spanish earned it because they had the technology to extract it.

And the whips and guns, because *THAT* is how it got dug out of the ground. The Spanish were absolutely evil in getting that gold. You think slavery was bad here? Spanish slavery was far worse than anything ever done in the US.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks BenLurkin. The mines at Potosi Bolivia have produced a decent fraction of all the silver ever mined on Earth, BTW. Had Spain built universities and developed entrepreneurially and scientifically instead of just being a country where everyone tried to live like kings, they'd probably have been to the Moon by about 1800. :^)

[SunkenCiv]

• Colombian naval officials monitoring a sunken Spanish ship laden with treasure have discovered two other historical shipwrecks nearby, President Iván Duque has announced... a colonial boat and a schooner thought to be from around the same period as Colombia's war for independence from Spain, some 200 years ago.

  San José galleon: Two new shipwrecks found off Colombian coast [BBC]

[SunkenCiv]

• Colombian Treasure Find Could Shed Light on Spain's Colonial Past but Spark Legal Battles [12/05/2015]
• Robot sub finds 'holy grail of shipwrecks' with treasure worth billions [05/23/2018]

[SunkenCiv]

to help put colonial Spanish wealth into perspective:

[snip] According to the economist J. M. Keynes, the English foreign debt was paid off from the Queen’s share of the proceeds, and there was enough left over (£42,000) for her to capitalize a new venture, the Levant Company, a firm which played an important part in the development of British foreign trade (see Keynes, Treatise on Money ). [/snip]

Sir Francis Drake: A Pictorial Biography by Hans P. Kraus
The Famous Voyage: The Circumnavigation of the World, 1577-1580
https://www.loc.gov/rr/rarebook/catalog/drake/drake-4-famousvoy.html

[Scrambler Bob]

Scoop
Squirrel away
Shut up

[unlearner]

The only way to benefit from finding lost treasure is to keep it a secret and retrieve it covertly. Apparently the legal battle over ownership of this treasure has gone on for decades.

[Rebelbase]

3000 feet deep puts a bit of a damper on that. Especially in 1981.

[SuperLuminal]

Damn!
Now I’ll have to swim down there and move my guns somewhere else...

[Texan5]

You are not wrong at all in my opinion-my ancestors came from Spain before 1600-but I have no illusions about them-they were horrible people for the most part-Spanish inquisition, invented brand new methods of torture/murder, were greedy, etc-and the way they raped women, pillaged, murdered, enslaved survivors and stole everybody’s stuff when they sacked a place made the Vikings look almost kind. Like most Hispanics, I have some Native American DNA-the Natives were not nice people either, but they were not as greedy or creative in their cruelty as the Spanish were...

[21twelve]

Even bringing in Ehrlichman’s name into it to begin with. I’m guessing to somehow discredit the earlier discovery of the wreck.

I’m guessing that the writer wants the Qhara Qhara nation to get the loot.

[DiogenesLamp]

You are not wrong at all in my opinion-my ancestors came from Spain before 1600-but I have no illusions about them-they were horrible people for the most part-Spanish inquisition, invented brand new methods of torture/murder, were greedy, etc-and the way they raped women, pillaged, murdered, enslaved survivors and stole everybody’s stuff when they sacked a place made the Vikings look almost kind.

Thank you for confirming what I remember having learned of the Spanish in the New World. They were particularly and astonishingly mean.

[Bigg Red]

I suspect you are correction both points.

[Texan5]

The Spanish weren’t all that into civilized behavior in the Old World/Europe, either-the Inquisition stared there with the Spanish as its biggest promoters before they brought it with them to the New World. They also had the reputation as master torturers from all the back to 600-700 AD or so-I’ve always figured they learned all that cruelty way back when Spain was part of the Roman Empire-then the Muslims invaded and they learned more fun stuff from them...

[Grimmy]

Oh!

I was wondering where I left that stuff. Thanks for finding it for me.

I’ll be sure to spot you a few bucks for your trouble.

[SunkenCiv]

nice tea service:
https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/d8/images/canvas/2022/06/08/c32b46e1-ab11-4ef1-87c5-d8da99f0580a_4eb58a9a.jpg
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/americas/article/3180822/gold-coins-seen-unprecedented-images-treasure-laden-san-jose

photomosaic showing cannons:
http://www.2kozak.com/_wp_generated/wp3305de47_05_06.jpg
http://www.2kozak.com/page99.html

the other two ships discovered, with most of this video apparently of the San Jose:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9DL2tb98sw
https://www.youtube.com/c/ZengerNews