Today's value of sunken treasures

[Bobadilla]

Hi guys,

Bronzecannons,
Thanks for the link, you are right that it is not exact but, at least it can give you some orientation. The problem is that the most interesting treasure shipwrecks were between 1500 and 1750.....

Regarding value taken from Fishers' museum, it is difficult to take it as a base. All artifacts come with the certificate of Atocha, it means that the shipwreck has been already identified and you get an artifact with complete story which puts the price much higher. Here you have some examples of artifacts from Fishers':

High-grade authentic silver coin Reales from the ship sell for anywhere from $4,000 to $14,000. Likewise, an Atocha gold bar is listed for $88,000, an emerald ring for $150,000, a gold filigree locket with gold chain for $400,000, and a gold and emerald brooch for $1.1 million.
One Piece of Eight would never cost USD 26.00. Nowhere. Even here in the Dominican Republic, the third world country, if you are lucky enough to find some of them, generally directly from fishermen or their relatives, you will not get them under USD 200.00 per piece and it would be from unknown shipwreck.

Lobo

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[Mackaydon]

O2,
27.5-ish GRAMS versus ounces.
Don........

[O2ptima]

oops

[Au_Dreamers]

Originally Posted by cuzcosquirrel
"Dunno how this helps much.
When talking about the value of a cargo, rough estimate figures in pesos like "200,000 pesos anually" are in silver pesos. They are equal to about a piece of eight. They are not used as a weight device, never seen them used as a weight device when assigned in this manner."


This is how I've always understood it also.

It wouldn't make sense to use weight because how could an ounce of silver and an ounce of gold both be a "peso" when gold was 16X (1715 era) silver value?

I dunno about you but I'd much rather have a peso of gold if that is the case.


"The Royal Treasure consisted of 46,095 pesos, 6 reales and 10 maravedis in gold doblones; 309 castellanos, 7 tomines and 6 grains of gold dust; and 646 castellanos in two small gold bars"...... "1,485 pesos in silver specie, three gold chains values at 747 pesos..."

As above from cuzcosquirrel a pesos was the value of an 8 reale...
Sixteen maravedis equaled one real and sixteen reale were worth one escudo.

[O2ptima]

So if value measured at price of silver...

[cuzcosquirrel]

I read of a guy who in 1600 in the Phillipines bought a gold chain for 170 pesos.

I think the value of a legible piece of eight is about 150 - 200 dollars. A real fine one might go for 600. There is a 1690's lima piece of eight on e-bay I think for 700 right now. It is a really great piece. On the other hand, I have tried to buy cookie coins off of e-bay to melt in the 30.00 dollar range.

Gold coins for about 1k per escudo, rarity coming in to make them more expensive or less. I don't know about gold bars, maybe 300% melt, depending on the wreck. Silver about the same, especially splash bars and plata corriente chunks.

So you never know what you have untill you have it. And I think it is admitted, that you will never get all of what was there, maybe a high fraction of the total.

The only shipwreck coin I ever found was a little sliver of a marevedis. It wasn't worth anything, except for the provenance. I had planned to give all the stuff I found to the archeologist there anyway, and to them it was probably invaluable. I hope it someday goes on display and people can look at it and say, "there it is."

Another thing I found was a small piece of jade with some carving on it, like really small ~2 carats. From looking at auctions, I know this stuff is not worth a whole lot. Was I going to keep it? Turn it in to the park? No. It didn't fit the parameters of what I was told to look for, so I tossed it into the face of the sand dune I had found it below.

Stuff like that is for displays and museums. And there you have it. Part of what you find as you scour for reals and gold bars, as many treasure hunters have come to find out, as they look down at a piece of bronze, a cannonball, or chunk of wax, is that they feel responsible for finding it and want to show or preserve it for others, so that they will get the same thrill when they see it. Before you know it, you have started a museum with cannons on display.