belizeanpirate
Greenie
- #1
Thread Owner
I live in Belize and am a citizen of it and would like to know if there is any interest out there to come to Belize to explore for shipwrecks. The government oversight of things here is not very intense and Belize is a country where one could easily find something and disappear, as seen in this story, taken from this great website ( http://ambergriscaye.com/fieldguide/history2.html) detailing Belizean shipwrecks and what is known to have already been recovered from them------ On the main coast of Belize, there is a rocky promontory named Little Rocky Point. In the 60's a Chilean came to Ambergris Caye and purchased a large tract of beach front property north of Tres Cocos (now the Peter Handcock property). Despite his land holdings on Ambergris Caye, his attentions seemed to be focused on Little Rocky Point on the mainland. He hired quite a few residents of San Pedro to help with excavations in the Little Rocky Point area. One day all of the workers were laid off and apparently then the Chilean went back to Little Rocky Point. He then returned to Ambergris Caye, and about the time a Mexican gunboat appeared off the Caye. Both gunboat and the Chilean left the island. Speculation has it that the Chilean had a treasure map of some kind, and may have recovered a substantial treasure that he spirited elsewhere.
Today that kind of thing would be harder to do up on Ambergris Caye but very easy to do out on any of our three atolls. Lighthouse Reef, Turneffe, and Glovers are all littered with shipwrecks with one of them being described as follows-----1785 Spanish galleon lost on the northeastern tip of Turneffe carrying $800,000 in specie (unverified reports indicate the remains of an old ship in this area).
For those trusting souls who like to do things the somewhat legal way, Belize has always been a place where extra cash placed in the right government officials hands can get permits and practically anything you want. But it is also a place still very much inhabited by pirates and where no one takes laws very seriously.
I have not seen very many threads on here about Belize even though it should be a very interesting spot to treasure hunt and there are a preponderance of sunken English vessels littered about that one could claim to have found whilst grabbing booty from Spanish ones and thereby avoiding the wrath of Spain who was once a thief and always a thief. Having grown up in the Caribbean, I look at governments as just pirates with bigger armies pretending to be legit so I have no problem with not rendering unto them what they think is theirs. It seems that some who post here do not think that way, but they have never spent years of labor at treasure recovery shedding their blood, sweat, and tears at it and doing it in a legal way only to find that when they strike the mother load, some government comes along and reneges on their contract and takes it all from you.
Most people who post here probably dont have much money for sponsoring missions of recovery but for those who dream of doing it and who have some means, perhaps Belize could be the place. We definitely have never been swamped with treasure hunters here and no one has any big stories about finding the mother lode so it has either been done very circumspectly in the past or it just has not been done yet.
Today that kind of thing would be harder to do up on Ambergris Caye but very easy to do out on any of our three atolls. Lighthouse Reef, Turneffe, and Glovers are all littered with shipwrecks with one of them being described as follows-----1785 Spanish galleon lost on the northeastern tip of Turneffe carrying $800,000 in specie (unverified reports indicate the remains of an old ship in this area).
For those trusting souls who like to do things the somewhat legal way, Belize has always been a place where extra cash placed in the right government officials hands can get permits and practically anything you want. But it is also a place still very much inhabited by pirates and where no one takes laws very seriously.
I have not seen very many threads on here about Belize even though it should be a very interesting spot to treasure hunt and there are a preponderance of sunken English vessels littered about that one could claim to have found whilst grabbing booty from Spanish ones and thereby avoiding the wrath of Spain who was once a thief and always a thief. Having grown up in the Caribbean, I look at governments as just pirates with bigger armies pretending to be legit so I have no problem with not rendering unto them what they think is theirs. It seems that some who post here do not think that way, but they have never spent years of labor at treasure recovery shedding their blood, sweat, and tears at it and doing it in a legal way only to find that when they strike the mother load, some government comes along and reneges on their contract and takes it all from you.
Most people who post here probably dont have much money for sponsoring missions of recovery but for those who dream of doing it and who have some means, perhaps Belize could be the place. We definitely have never been swamped with treasure hunters here and no one has any big stories about finding the mother lode so it has either been done very circumspectly in the past or it just has not been done yet.
