Re -Train Your Brain To Happiness: Treasure

Showing posts with label Treasure. Show all posts

March 08, 2016

Pirates Of The Caribbean Were Just Lucky With The Weather

Henry Morgan once put his long and lucrative career in privateering down to a misspent youth, being “more used to the pike than the book”.

Black Sam Bellamy, the Robin Hood of the sea, liked to boast of his peculiar blend of dash and gallantry. Jack Sparrow, portrayed on screen by Johnny Depp, cited “skulduggery and pernickety-nee”.

Yet a new study suggests that the real pirates of the Caribbean may have owed their success to something much less glamorous: a distinct lack of shiver in their timbers.

Researchers counting Spanish shipwrecks and ancient tree rings have found that the scale of hurricanes in the tropics fell by as much as three-quarters after 1645, leaving the seas far calmer than they have been at any time since.

Historians often refer to the years between 1650 and 1730 as the golden age of piracy, when trade tussles from Tortuga to the Barbary Coast gave free rein to any man in command of a seaworthy ship, a hearty crew and malleable scruples.

Nowhere did the pirates flourish more than in the West Indies, where the likes of Blackbeard, William Kidd and Calico Jack became rich at the expense of Spanish shipping.
This period happened to coincide with an abrupt drop in solar activity known as the Maunder Minimum.

From about 1645 to 1710, sunspots — vast magnetic storms on the surface of the Sun that are linked to solar flares and violent outbursts of burning gas — turned up as rarely as once every six months, compared with four or five times a day in the modern era.

The outcome was a cooling of the Earth, which meant calmer seas and thus fewer cyclones.

Scientists and historians at the universities of Huelva in Spain and Arizona and southern Mississippi in the US looked at records of 657 Spanish ships that had been wrecked in the Caribbean basin between 1495 and 1825 in an attempt to map out a history of cyclones in the region.

They also used the size of the rings in 38 ancient slash pine trees from Florida Keys, which tend to grow much less in years of fierce winds and surges of seawater whipped up by storms.

Their calculations, published in the journal PNAS, show a decline in hurricanes between the middle of the 17th century and the early years of the 18th.

Thar, in short, she did not blow — at least not as much as she used to.
By Oliver Moody

With many thanks to The Australian

Tortuga - with many thanks to Google Maps.

Reprise - Jarrod Radnich plays the theme from Pirates Of The Caribbean

The Holigost: 600 Year Old Pride of Henry V’s Fleet May Have Been Found

Spanish Galleon San Jose Discovered Laden With Treasure Off Colombia

Shipwreck Discovered From Explorer Vasco da Gama's Fleet

Captain James Cook's Ship Endeavour 'Found'

A "Merbot" Retrieved Artifacts From Louis XIV’s Sunken Flagship "La Lune"

How A Diamond Rush Led To The Discovery of An Ancient Treasure Ship - The Bom Jesus

Henry VIII’s Favourite Ship,The Mary Rose, Resurfaces In Portsmouth

Top Ten Lost Treasures of the World

Will Hair Unlock The Secrets Of The Bounty Mutineers?

Sir John Franklin's Long-lost HMS Terror Believed To Be Found

Ancient Skeleton Uncovered At The Antikythera Shipwreck

December 07, 2015

The Virgin Rainbow: World's Most Beautiful Opal

An opal so fine it has been valued at over $1 million is about to go on public display for the first time.

Our world produces some incredible rocks. Take the opal, a precious stone that forms out of silica, in the dark under the surface of the earth. When cut and polished, it flashes with a gorgeous array of colours, from pale milky hues to deep reds and blacks.

Now, an opal that has been named the finest ever unearthed will be making its public debut next month as the centrepiece of an exhibition opening at the South Australian Museum, Adelaide.

Called the Virgin Rainbow, it was discovered in the opal fields of Coober Pedy by opal miner John Dunstan in 2003.

It's actually an opalised fossil, from an extinct cephalopod called belemnitida that existed during the Mesozoic era. During that time, much of South Australia was under a vast inland sea filled with prehistoric aquatic reptiles called plesiosaurs. These died and sank to the bottom of the sea, buried over the millennia by sediment.

When the sea dried up and the land turned into a desert, the acidity levels in the shallow top layer of the sandstone increased. This released silica from weathering sandstone into the layer of clay beneath, where bones and pockets left by disintegrated bones lay buried, carried down via groundwater.

Further weathering lowered the acidity levels, which allowed the silica gel to harden into opals in the pockets and impressions left by decayed animal material, like cake poured into a mould, or to soak into bones and create a replica of the internal structure.

The famous Australian opal fields of Coober Pedy are located in this region. No other environment in the world is known to have undergone this same process, which is possibly why over 90 percent of the world's opals come from South Australia.

With thanks to You Tube

Elizabeth Taylor's famous pearl sells for $11.84m at NYC auction

Sotheby's to sell 400-year-old diamond - The Beau Sancy

Christie's To Auction 'Perfect' Diamond: Mined in Botswana

White diamond set to fetch record $39 million at Sotheby's auction

Archduke Joseph Gem To Fetch At Least $15m at Auction

Elizabeth Taylor Quotes

South Africa's Cullinan Mine Unearths 'Exceptional' 29.6-carat Blue Diamond

Why Diamond Engagement Rings Are A Scam

Cartier Exhibition Features Pieces Once Owned By Elizabeth Taylor and Grace Kelly

The Bahia Emerald - The 400 Million Dollar Rock

25 Things You Didn't Know About Jewelry

The Royal Jewels

Argyle Diamonds: Pretty In Pink

Up On Sale Pink Diamond Could Fetch $28 million

The Rare ‘Blue Moon’ Diamond Is All Set To Become The Most Expensive Jewel, When It Goes Up On Sale

‘Fascination’: Graff’s $40 Million Diamond Transformable Watch

A Brand New Phase Of Carbon Has Been Discovered

World’s Second-Largest Diamond Found In Botswana

Some Of The Rarest Jewels In The World

Pakistan Claims Koh-i-Noor Diamond

Australian Company Lucapa Finds Huge Diamond In Angola

Argyle Violet Diamond Expected To Fetch Up To $4m At Auction

The Lesedi la Rona Diamond Could Fetch $US70m

Ancient Gemstone Lapis Back In Fashion

The “Oppenheimer Blue" Diamond Sells For $57.6 million at Christie's

Top Ten Lost Treasures of the World

Lucapa Diamond’s Road To Riches In Angola

Elizabeth Taylor's Bulgari Jewellery Goes On Show In Melbourne

The Foxfire Diamond

December 06, 2015

Spanish Galleon San Jose Discovered Laden With Treasure Off Colombia

Colombian authorities have discovered the wreck of a famed Spanish ship, the 'San Jose.' The galleon sank over 300 years ago with a large cargo of gold and jewels aboard.

The long-lost shipwreck of the 'San Jose,' a Spanish galleon, has been discovered, Colombia's president Juan Manual Santos announced late on Friday.

The ship, which sank over 300 years ago, is said to be laden gold, silver, and precious stones.

"Great news: We found the galleon San Jose," the president wrote on Twitter.

The ship was found near Colombia's Rosario Islands, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) off the coast of the city of Cartagena. The ship, which belonged to the fleet of King Philip V as he battled English forces during the War of Spanish Succession, sank in 1708, likely killing the 600 people aboard and sending some 11 million gold coins to the bottom of the sea.

The president did not mention, however, the long-standing legal battle over the wreck of the San Jose with the US-based salvage firm Sea Search Armada (SSA). In the early 1980s, SSA and Bogota had been partners in the hunt for the ship and had agreed to split the treasure. In 1981, SSA said it had located the general area where the galleon went down.

The government later reversed its agreement and said any proceeds would belong solely to Colombia, prompting a lawsuit from SSA. In 2011, a US court declared the then-unfound ship the property of Bogota.

British news outlets said on Saturday that the trove on board the ship is estimated to be worth around $1.5 billion (1.3 billion euros).

With many thanks to DW.com

From The Australian:
By Graham Keeley

Spain is considering a legal claim against Colombia for the estimated $US1 billion found on the wreck of a galleon that sunk off the South American coast 300 years ago.

The San Jose was the main ship in Spain’s gold fleet, and was carrying precious metals from the mines of South America to Spain. It was loaded with an $US11 million worth of gold and silver coins and jewels when it was sunk near the Rosario islands by a squadron of English warships in June 1708 during the War of the Spanish Succession.

President Santos of Colombia has hailed the discovery as the biggest find of underwater heritage in the “history of humanity”. However, Jose Maria Lassalle, secretary of state for culture, said that Spain would study the legal arguments on which Colombia had based its claim to the treasure.

Spain has aggressively pursued ownership of similar discoveries of treasure on its sunken galleons and is considering a claim.

“The Spanish government will ask Colombia for precise information of the application of the law of their country which justifies their intervention on a Spanish shipwreck,” Mr Lassalle said.

He reminded Colombia how it won a legal battle for 17 tonnes of gold and silver coins found in 2007 on a Spanish frigate that was sunk off Portugal in 1804. A US court rejected Peru’s claim to the hoard on the ground that it had come from its territory.

Henry VIII’s Favourite Ship,The Mary Rose, Resurfaces In Portsmouth
How A Diamond Rush Led To The Discovery of An Ancient Treasure Ship - The Bom Jesus

Pirates Of The Caribbean Were Just Lucky With The Weather

A "Merbot" Retrieved Artifacts From Louis XIV’s Sunken Flagship "La Lune"
Will Hair Unlock The Secrets Of The Bounty Mutineers?