Dr. Marcus Heinrich Hermanns from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cologne has recovered three lead bars which may originate from the third century before Christ, 39 meters under the sea off the north coast of Ibiza. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of cologne, Universitaet zu Koeln)
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To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. |
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The writer's thought process seems to have gone off the rails here.
Allow me to speculate:
Sailing ships need ballast in the keel to keep from capsizing when the wind blows on their sails. Normally this ballast is taken out of the ship only when it is beached for repairs or recaulking if it's seams.
When the Spanish returned from the New World with gold and silver, they removed the ballast from their keels and replaced it with gold and silver, thus allowing the maximum cargo for the voyage home.
My theory is that ships were sailing to the Balearic Islands with lead ballast, removing it, and returning to the mainland with silver ballast (as cargo.) Usually, rock was used as ballast, but if you have to remove it and replace it on a regular basis, it might have been faster to physically remove a smaller volume of lead than it is a larger volume of equal weight rock.
