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Holy Grail of Shipwrecks


Captiva

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Apologies to all if this has been previously posted. 

 

Treasure Worth $17 Billion Found in ‘Holy Grail of Shipwrecks’

Discovery of the Spanish galleon San Jose had been kept a secret for three years.

22 hours ago

A Spanish galleon laden with gold was found off the coast of Colombia three ago with the help of an underwater autonomous vehicle operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). But the discovery of the San Jose, which sunk on June 8, 1708, had been kept a secret for years. Only now, with permission from the Colombian government, has WHOI released new details about this amazing discovery. The exact location of the wreck of the ship, often called the “holy grail of shipwrecks,” was long considered to be a never-ending mystery.

The three-masted, 62-gun galleon went down on June 8, 1708, with 600 people on board. When it sunk it was also full of treasure, including gold, silver and emeralds worth as much as $17 billion in today’s dollars. The treasure is now the subject of legal battles between several nations and private companies. Several weeks ago, UNESCO, the United Nations cultural agency, asked Colombia to not commercially exploit the wreck. The exact location remains a state secret.

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16 minutes ago, Intrepido said:

Stolen? The land belong to his owner, and the owner of it in that time was the spanish empire.

 

 

Spain's "ownership" was established via one of the greatest mass violations of fundamental human rights in history, I don't think Spain wants to claim its baggage from this era. If they take responsibility for this cargo, they should also take should take responsibility for the agony and genocide they inflicted on the indigenous people of central and South America which allowed them to acquire that gold. 

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21 minutes ago, Intrepido said:

Stolen? The land belong to his owner, and the owner of it in that time was the spanish empire.

 

 

Spain enslaved and murdered millions of natives while stealing their land, in the name of religion and profit.

 

People slag off the British Empire, but it's excesses were nothing compared to that of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires...and the Ottomans...

 

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9 minutes ago, Intrepido said:

yeah, I loled too when I read those posts.

So, do you deny that Spain exploited and enslaved the indigenous peoples of the Americas? Or does it not count if it's part of "encomienda"? I'm an American and make no mistake we have a blood stained history too, my comments are not meant to demean Spain. But to outright deny any wrongdoing by Spain is revisionism.

Edited by Capt Aerobane
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If you wanna really know what's a massive expoliation, you just have to visit the british museum....

 

Edit:      Returning to the thread, it is very difficult to find a solution to this kind of problems .... A fun example:


This huge hole in the pyramid of Mycerinus was opened in 1837 by the English archaeologist Howard Vyse using dynamite to take out the sarcophagus and take it on a ship  "Beatrice" to The british museum.

The "Beatrice" sank in front of the port of Cartagena (Spain) due to a storm ... He is still there ... Why does not he recover? ..... Easy, to avoid litigation between: Egypt. ... as the first owner of the object, England, as "owner" during the transport, Spain where he currently rests and the English insurer who paid for the loss of said sarcophagus in his day ...

Every treasure the treasure hunters find is a headache for the international court .....

Resultado de imagen de piramide de micerino

Edited by Alvar Fañez de Minaya
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1 hour ago, seanjo said:

Spain enslaved and murdered millions of natives while stealing their land, in the name of religion and profit.

 

People slag off the British Empire, but it's excesses were nothing compared to that of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires...and the Ottomans...

 

It actually was Britain who did that.
Spain gave citizen rights quite fast to all natives who braced catholicism.
Tell me any thing slightly similar to the Laws of Burgos (1512) done by the british or any other colonial empire:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_Burgos

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5 minutes ago, Hethwill said:

giphy.gif

Sure.......... I'm aganist private treasure hunters....... but wich museum?.... Colombian museum?.. Spanish museum?..........  Difficult to decide....

And it can be much more confused.... Imagine.... Spanish gold, in a british ship, sunk in front of mexico for example...... or international waters if you want complete kit......

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f this was a British wreck, that would be relevant. I'm not trying to put one colonial power over another, merely pointing out, as others have, that if anyone should have the rights to the wreck it should be the victims of exploitation, not the powers that exploited them. Spain might not have plumbed the depths Britain did, but that gold is still stolen goods.

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3 minutes ago, Capt Aerobane said:

f this was a British wreck, that would be relevant. I'm not trying to put one colonial power over another, merely pointing out, as others have, that if anyone should have the rights to the wreck it should be the victims of exploitation, not the powers that exploited them. Spain might not have plumbed the depths Britain did, but that gold is still stolen goods.

We all have an opinion, but with the law in hand and in a court, it is very difficult to give the reason to someone in these cases ...
Because even if it is sunken, a ship is considered the country's land to carry the flag, and if there were also dead, it is considered a tomb, which has a different implication. If the waters in which the ship rest are from a different country, the subject it gets complicated .....
And the proof is that discoveries in international waters are usually distributed among the affected countries and treasure hunters (it is usually gold or silver that is easy to distribute) ... While discoveries in sovereign waters, the country is usually the he keeps it, since he does not usually give permission for another to take it out, nor does he report the amount of recovered things ....

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Regardless of where the bulk of it goes....If those who put in the effort to find it are not greatly rewarded, others will not be motivated to seek treasure and those that do wont report their find.

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The indigenous governments are just going to sell it off to the highest bidder anyways and pocket the money. they probably kept it a secret because they didn't have the means to extract the cargo. interesting find though, a shame the wreck probably isn't going to be preserved in the extraction process. It'l be interesting if they ever locate a treasure galleon off the Florida coast.

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11 hours ago, Intrepido said:

Stolen? The land belong to his owner, and the owner of it in that time was the spanish empire.

It always cracks me up when folks say stuff like that.  Uh where you think the Inca's, Maya's, Aztecs and other great nations got all there lands from in the first place?   Every great culture that has been destroyed by another got there lands from some one else.  It's part of the cycle of life. If your not the big dog you become it's scraps.  This goes for all over the globe.  Many of the Native American tribes in North America got to there height of power by wiping out other Native American tribes before white man ever showed up.  So how exactly far back do we go?  Who was the rightful owners of those lands in the first place?  I don't think any one can actually track that far back lol

 

17 billion is a lot of money, would be nice if it was put back into a group that works for saving, preserving historical sites and items.   Some group not tied to any nation, but we all know that some one will have to get there grubby little fingers into that wealth.

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Law of the Flag Definition:

A principle of maritime and international law; that the sailors and vessel will be subject to the laws of the state corresponding to the flag flown by the vessel.

In US v Jho, Justice Garza wrote:

"[T]he law of the flag doctrine ... provides that a merchant ship is part of the territory of the country whose flag she flies, and that actions aboard that ship are subject to the laws of the flag state.

"However ... jurisdiction may be exercised concurrently by a flag state and a territorial state.

"The law of the flag doctrine does not mandate that anything that occurs aboard a ship must be handled by the flag state.... [T]he law of the flag doctrine does not completely trump a sovereign's territorial jurisdiction to prosecute violations of its laws. The law of the flag doctrine is chiefly applicable to ships on the high seas, where there is no territorial sovereign; and as respects ships in foreign territorial waters it has little application beyond what is affirmatively or tacitly permitted by the local sovereign.

"The flag state's jurisdiction is not exclusive when the ship is in a port or internal waters of another state."

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On 5/24/2018 at 3:11 PM, seanjo said:

People slag off the British Empire, but it's excesses were nothing compared to that of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires...and the Ottomans...

 Hold on there, portuguese acted differently from the spanish, you can't put both in the same bag. While the spanish used violence against the Aztecs, Incas and Mayas to get gold, the portuguese used a friendly aproach to brasillian natives with trade agreements and gifts (mirrors, spoons, etc... things they had never seen).

 In India was the same thing, and we only used arms against them a few times because we were forced to that not by own initiative. In Japan we made trade with them peacefully, we even introduced  them for the first time firearms and gunpowder.

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