The fate of earthly and underwater treasures is amazing. Nothing is known about them for many hundreds of years, and only thanks to chance the secret can be revealed. There are treasures about which almost everything is known for certain, but it is not possible to raise them to the surface.
About half a century ago, an American published a very interesting map, which depicted the island of Florida along with the adjacent islands. The entire surface of the map is painted with pistols, skulls, disgraceful trumpets and sabers. In addition, it bears the names of the world's most famous pirates. And if you look closely, you can also see small crosses, in total - up to two dozen.
The description of the map says that it shows the places of the richest treasures that were hidden and lost by pirates. The treasures, they also say, are currently valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. The crosses indicate the places where the treasures are located on land and on the seabed, and it is also indicated which of the pirates hid the treasures in this or that place.
The cost of this unusual card is only one dollar, and it is intended mainly for tourists. It makes no sense to judge how accurate this map is; moreover, it is unlikely that a real treasure can be found from it. However, the fact that untold treasures rest on the seabed and ocean floor is true.
The richest marine treasury is considered to be the Caribbean Sea basin. In the 16th century, American conquerors transported treasures to Europe along this sea route. But there, on the Spanish galleons, heavily laden with zloty and jewels, pirates were waiting. At the same time, it should be noted that a relatively small amount of this wealth fell into the hands of pirates, much more went to the bottom along with ships destroyed during attacks or caught in a storm. According to rough estimates, about a hundred thousand ships sank in the Atlantic Ocean alone over several centuries, the cargo of which is estimated at hundreds of trillions of dollars.
Jewelry made of precious stones, ingots of silver and gold, coins - all of this fell to the bottom along with sunken or wrecked ships. And there were a lot of such cases.
So, in particular, in 1595, not far from Florida, the Spanish ship Santa Margarita sank, in the holds of which there were jewelry worth more than eight million dollars. In 1598, the San Ferdinando ship sank in the Caribbean with twenty million dollars worth of jewelry on board.
In 1628, a powerful hurricane raged in the Florida Strait, which sank 11 Spanish galleons, which were carrying untold wealth to Europe. The gold transported by these ships is estimated at one billion two hundred million pesetas.
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In 1716, forty-two ships from Holland sank after being caught in a violent storm in Table Bay. At the same time, the cargo, the cost of which exceeded 460 million guilders, also went to the bottom.
This list of disasters can be continued for a very long time. Dying in the depths of the sea, the British, French and American ships carried away gold, platinum, silver, precious stones.
It should be noted that there were plenty of attempts to recapture the stolen treasures from the water. However, in most cases, these attempts were unsuccessful, and at times tragic. The money spent on treasure searches, as a rule, did not pay off. At the same time, one can recall the happy times when adventurers still managed to raise to the surface treasures that seemed lost forever.
So, in 1917, off the coast of Northern Ireland, the English warship Laurentik was blown up by a German mine and sank. On board it was over three thousand gold bars weighing 43 tons. This was a payment to Canada for military supplies. Never before in the history of navigation has there been a case when so much gold went to the bottom at one moment. The ship sank at a depth of about 40 meters, and it was only about 18 meters from the surface of the water to the deck of the ship. The British government almost immediately organized rescue work, which entrusted Gybon Damant, an experienced diver who became famous for his descent to great depths.
At first, everything indicated that the rescue operation must be successful. However, in reality, it turned out that saving the treasures from the Laurentik is an extremely dangerous and difficult business. With great difficulty, the divers, with the help of explosives, managed to break into the armored storeroom in which the gold was stored, and extract a small part of the ingots to the surface.
Due to bad weather, the rescue work had to be stopped for some time. When, a week later, the divers resumed them and returned to the ship, their amazement knew no bounds - the pantry with gold turned out to be completely empty. The divers searched all corners of the room with their hands, but they did not manage to find any ingots.
As it was established later, the impacts of the waves of the raging sea were so strong that they reached the sunken ship, as a result of which its hull was strongly deformed, the seams parted, and the gold bars fell into the hold where they mixed with silt sand, stones and various debris. The divers were forced to reuse explosives. They washed away the sand deposits with jets of water, which was supplied through hoses from above. And they cut the hull of the ship into pieces.
Thus, over seven years of hard work, by 1924, 2,186 gold bars were raised to the surface. For this, the divers descended to the bottom of the sea five thousand times. But 25 gold bars remained under water.
Another illustrative example is the salvage of jewels that sank along with the British steamer "Agept".
In May 1922, a large passenger ship collided with a French ship in the fog, and sank to the bottom in twenty minutes. The collision took place in a deep-water area, in the Atlantic Ocean, where the depth reaches 120 meters. For diving equipment of that time, it was just a huge depth. But despite this, it was decided to start rescue work.
Divers descended to the sunken ship in a special chamber, through the windows of which they examined the ship and supervised the work. With the help of special winches and grippers, the jewels were lifted onto an auxiliary vessel. The operation lasted six years; more than a million dollars was spent on it. But all these expenses paid off, because 865 gold bars, 80 thousand gold coins and 6 tons of silver were raised to the surface.
In the last century, the greatest treasures were discovered by American adventure hunters Mel Fisher, Baria Clifford, Bert Weber and Jim Haskins.
The most famous and fortunate of these was Mel Fisher. It was he who managed to discover in the summer of 1985 the treasures of the Spanish ship "Atocha", which sank in a storm in 1622 off the coast of Florida. He raised from the bottom of the sea more than 1100 silver, 200 gold bars (each of which weighed about 15-37 kilograms), as well as jewelry - gold chains, rings, emerald brooches, pendants, as well as a very beautiful cross, decorated with emeralds. In addition to jewelry, he also discovered an arsenal of weapons from the seventeenth century. This treasure has been valued in total at 400 million US dollars.
Barry Clifford became famous for his search for the Wyde pirate galley, which ran aground in 1717 and sank several hundred meters off the coast of Florida. There were true legends about the treasures of the pirate ship: before being wrecked, the pirates managed to rob up to fifty ships. In total, this treasure was also valued at $ 400 million. There were about 4.5 tons of gold sand alone on the gallery. The search was carried out in 1984, according to rough estimates, the value of the treasures raised to the surface was $ 15 million.
Jim Haskins and Bert Webber became famous for another, no less large "catch". They managed to find in 1977 the remains of the Spanish galleon "Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion", which sank off the coast of Haiti in 1641. They managed to raise 32 tons of silver in coins and ingots to the surface, as well as antique porcelain dishes and gold jewelry. The treasure was valued at $ 14 million.
But the largest treasure was discovered in May 2007. The Odyssey company, which specializes in the search for sea treasures, announced that its specialists managed to find about 500 thousand silver and zloty coins, but at the same time refused to name the ship on which this wealth was located.
After an investigation, it was found out that the treasures were found at the place where the Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de la Mercedes sank, which in October 1804 was attacked by English ships on its way from Peru to Spain near the coast of Portugal. The value of the treasure was estimated at 370 million euros.
Another treasure was discovered in the winter of 2009. One of the Internet publications reported that a ship with diamonds, platinum and gold was discovered off the coast of Guyana, which was sunk during the Second World War by a German submarine. As reported, the ship left one of the ports in Europe and followed to the United States, and the valuables transported by it were intended to pay for Lend-Lease.
And in July of the same year, 2009, German treasure hunters reported that they found the remains of the British pirate ship Forbes, which contained about 1.5 tons of precious stones, silver coins, Ming dynasty porcelain, firearms and gold jewelry. The ship sank in 1806 off the coast of Kalimantan. The silver coins alone were valued at $ 10 million.
But do not think that treasure seekers are always lucky. Years of dangerous, exhausting work, as well as huge amounts of money spent on treasure searches, were sometimes completely unsuccessful, sometimes only a few coins could be found. There are many cases when divers paid with their own health for trying to raise treasure from the seabed. So, for example, it happened with the diver Lambert. At the end of the nineteenth century, he decided to take up the search for gold from the steamer Alfonso XII, which sank in 1885 off the coast of the Canary Islands. The vessel was at a depth of about fifty meters. At that time, only the most desperate, hardy and experienced divers dared to descend to such a depth. Lambert blew up three floors of the ship, three decks with dynamite, and reached the ship's storeroom, where there were boxes of gold. The diver raised seven of them to the surface. But he paid very dearly for this: he was paralyzed, and he remained disabled for the rest of his life.
Currently, to ensure the protection of underwater cultural heritage, UNESCO has adopted a concept for the protection of underwater cultural heritage (November 2, 2001). This is an international treaty that prohibits the commercial use of the discovered treasure This is a kind of response to the destruction and plundering of the cultural heritage, which is gaining in scope every year.