2/10/18 Report - More on Holed Coins and One Ole Timer's Finds. Espada Ancha. The Antiquary.

Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.

Source: Smithsonian Bulletin (See link below)

I got a long email from Southern Digger in response to my post on holed coins.  The note is too long to post as written.  I'll give you part of it today.

I have found some, but less than a half dozen, holed coins in South Florida. The most interesting, a 1792 half reale, had one crude hole and hatchet marks in the King's Head. This was found in an 1837-38 camp of the Philadelphia and Louisiana Volunteers in SW Florida. Although Seminoles had previously camped in the area, no signs of Indian habitation--historic or prehistoric was noted in the camp area. 

While researching and reading an early journal during my research in Washington DC and in Florida, a reliable source who moved south with the army ... opened an above-ground, bark-covered Seminole grave. He and a few others studied and recorded the procedure of the burial and the objects left. Afterward, they returned the items and re-covered it. However, he noted that many of these same volunteers who came south with the regular army were opening the graves and removing the trinkets and leaving them in disarray... 

Because of their superstition and hatred to the whites, the coins usually are defaced. If anyone finds a holed coin which was defaced, you can bet it had come through the hands of the true discovers of our continent.

Regarding my half-real, it is probable that it was removed from a Seminole Grave in the area of Fort McNeil--an area SE of Orlando where Osceola was born and spent part of his life.

I made a point during one vacation to visit the supposed grave of Osceola--minus the head--at Ft. Moultrie, S.C...

I'll have more of Southern Digger's email concerning a vast collection some other time.  Thanks for the email S. D.

You might want to read The Seminole Indians of Florida - Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1883-84, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1887, pages 469-532.  Below is the link.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19155/19155-h/19155-h.htm

Here is one paragraph from that report pertaining to object made of silver coins being worn.

The ornaments worn by the men which are most worthy of attention are crescents, varying in size and value. These are generally about five inches long, an inch in width at the widest part, and of the thickness of ordinary tin. These articles are also made from silver coins and are of home manufacture. They are worn suspended from the neck by cords, in the cusps of the crescents, one below another, at distances apart of perhaps two and a half inches. Silver wristlets are used by the men for their adornment. They are fastened about the wrists by cords or thongs passing through holes in the ends of the metal. Belts, and turbans too, are often ornamented with fanciful devices wrought out of silver. It is not customary for the Indian men to wear these ornaments in everyday camp life. They appear with them on a festival occasion or when they visit some trading post.

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Here is a nice web site on Spanish Colonial swords from Mexico. The title of the page is Espada Ancha: Swords of Mexico and Spanish Colonial America.

Here is one of the illustrations from the site, and below is a link if you want to see more.

http://www.vikingsword.com/ethsword/espadaan/

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And here is a digitized magazine that you might enjoy browsing.

The Antiquary: A Magazine Devoted to the Study of the Past.  Click here to view.

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If you want to be happier, give the other fellow the benefit of the doubt.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net

2/1/18 Report - 1715 Fleet Burials Question. Gold Treasure To Go On Display. Recovered Treasure Hunter. Shipwrecks.

Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.

I'm going to catch up on some miscellaneous items today.

In an email message Gaylen C. said, Have been doing some research and have noticed that in everything I have read so far there has never been a single mention of finding a grave, or even remains, of the Spanish sailors and soldiers of the 1715 fleet wrecks. Of the say 700 who died, some percentage of them washed up on shore. More died after the camps were established. Some must have been buried somewhere on land. Certainly any burial by the Spanish would look very different from an Ais burial. Have you heard of any of the remains of the Spanish being discovered?

I talked to a few people about this and asked a couple of people and didn't come up with much.  One thing I did find was this from a National Parks Service web site and mention of human bones at the Higgs site found in Tequesta (See link below.).

...The earliest episodes of Spanish, French, and English settlement on the eastern shore of North America followed voyages of exploration in the 16th century. The original attempts at colonizing were made in Florida, the Carolinas, and Virginia. In 1565, the first lasting European community was established by the Spanish on the east coast of Florida, at St. Augustine, which survived attack from competing forces in colonization of the New World. An essential feature of the fortified settlement was the Roman Catholic mission church with its associated burial ground. Where they are uncovered in the course of modern day improvement projects, unmarked burials of the 16th and 17th centuries provide evidence for identifying the historic locations of successors to the founding church sites that gradually disappeared in the layerings of later town development. The archeological record shows shroud-wrapped interments were customary in the city's Spanish Colonial period. Traces of coffins or coffin hardware do not appear in Colonial burials before the beginning of English immigration to the area in the 18th century. Graves of the Spanish colonists occurred in consecrated ground within or adjacent to a church. They followed a pattern of regular, compact spacing and east-facing orientation. These characteristics, together with arms crossed over the chest and the presence of brass shroud pins are a means of distinguishing Christian burials from precolonial Native American burials sometimes associated with the same site...

And here is the mention from the Tequesta article.  

Charles D. Higgs," local historian, came close to discovering its presence some 25 years ago, but although he found quantities of both European and Indian artifacts buried in the site, he failed to associate it with the wreck of the Plate Fleet. His examination revealed for 500 feet along the beach in the wind and tide-eroded bluff a concentration of bones, both animal and human, iron spikes, clay pipes and a peculiar assortment of pottery sherds. On the higher land he discovered evidences of building materials - bricks of red clay, shell mortar and plaster, decorative and roofing tile and wooden stakes..

Here is that link.

http://digitalcollections.fiu.edu/tequesta/files/1966/66_1_02.pdf

I don't know what happened to all of those deceased.  You'd think it would be taken care of as quickly as possible considering the hot humid weather and survival conditions.  I haven't heard much about any graves or remains being discovered other than the above.  If you can provide that information, send me an email.

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SANTA ANA, Calif. – More than $50 million worth of gold bars, coins and dust that's been described as the greatest lost treasure in U.S. history is about to make its public debut in California after sitting at the bottom of the ocean for more than 150 years... 

Below is the link for more about that.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/01/29/gold-treasure-recovered-from-1857-shipwreck-to-make-debut.html

The remains of a risk-taking treasure hunter who vanished in June searching for $2 million in buried gold have been identified, authorities said.

Eric Ashby was presumed to have drowned in a rafting accident on the Arkansas River in Colorado last June, Fox 21 Colorado Springs reported. A month later a body was found downstream. Last week, a local coroner announced that the body had been positively identified as Ashby’s through DNA...

Here is that link.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/01/29/body-found-in-arkansas-river-in-june-identified-as-colorado-treasure-hunter.html

Thanks to Dean R. for those links.

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Two shipwrecks, including one possibly dating back to the 14th century, have been found at the bottom of the sea as part of a project to open a new maritime museum in Stockholm...

https://www.thelocal.se/20180126/swedish-divers-find-two-new-incredible-shipwrecks-in-the-baltic-sea

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We are still having some unusually high tides along with some excellent negative tides.  The surf on the Treasure Coast is running around three to five feet.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net

5/2/14 Report - Sedwick Auction Results, 5000 Years of California Violence, Digging Up Your Personal Past and My Most Valuable Find

Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesrport.blogspot.com.

There was one standout among the gold cobs auctioned off by Sedwick yesterday.  It brought in over $76,000.  The next highest price for a gold cob was around 23,000.  A common price range for gold cobs was one to two thousand, with just a handful bringing in less than one thousand.

Here is the lot description for the big winner.

Lima, Peru, cob 8 escudos, 1701H, Philip V, extremely rare, from the 1715 Fleet. S-L25a; KM-38.1. 26.95 grams. Almost round, evenly struck and perfectly centered, this would be an exceptional specimen for any date, let alone one that is missing in Calico and the State of Florida collection (theirs is Charles II). In fact we can trace only one other example for Philip V, an AU 55 of demonstrably inferior strike but with perhaps slightly more evidence of the coins' having been created from a modified 1700 die. The present coin is at least AU 58 but bears areas of red staining and gray coral that preclude professional encapsulation. What is more important is that the strike is nearly perfect--well centered and even--and the effect in hand is sheer beauty. From the 1715 Fleet.

The two standouts among the world gold coins were two had final prices of nearly $5000. 

Both of those were Brazil (Rio mint) reis.  Each of those sold for just under five thousand dollars.  A good number of lots in this category did not sell.  An the expected standout in this category did not sell.

There was a clear standout in the US gold coins.  It was the USA (Philadelphia mint), $10 capped-bust Liberty, 1801, encapsulated NGC UNC details / improperly cleaned. KM-30. Lustrous and attractive, with minor marks only, the surfaces very faintly hairlined from cleaning, popular early gold with high catalog value.

It sold for just over $15,000.

The auction continues today.


Two more days remaining to respond to the blog poll.  It is proceeding very nicely.  I'll get more out of the results than might be immediately apparent.


On the Treasure Coast the wind is out of the South right now.   The higher surf will be this morning, then decreasing through the day and for a few more days.


It seems to me that we get a very sanitized, or should I say "politically correct" version of history, so much so that I was really surprised when I learned just how dangerous life was on the US frontier in the 1700s.  I did some research and read about some of my ancestors, including one thirteen-year-old boy, who, with his mother and brother were captured by the Indians, took a bullet in the leg but managed to heal during captivity, later escaping to freedom by swimming across the Monongahela River in an area that I personally know to be about a hundred yards across. 

I guess I actually bought into the sanitized view of history that I received.  However a new study shows that California, the land of Flower Power and Peace, has a long history of violence that goes way back before the white man arrived.

Here are some excerpts taken from an article describing an archaeological study that examined 16,820 burials from over 5000 years of history in Central California.

From shooting their enemies with darts and arrows to crushing their skulls and even harvesting body parts as trophies, the ancient foragers of central California engaged in sporadic, and sometimes severe, violence, according to a new archaeological study spanning 5,000 years.

The article goes on to say, Chronicling 16,820 burials from 329 sites among 13 different ethnographic groups, the data reveal that the most common type of violence over the millennia was so-called sharp-force trauma, caused by projectiles like arrows or atlatl darts, which appeared in 7.2% of the burials studied.

Another 4.3% of the hunter-gatherers suffered apparent blunt-force trauma to the head, while just under 1% showed evidence of dismemberment, with limbs, scalps, or heads having been removed after death.

Interesting article! 

Here is the link if you want to read more about that study.

http://westerndigs.org/from-stone-darts-to-dismembered-bodies-new-study-reveals-5000-years-of-violence-in-central-california/


I'm going to recommend genealogical research to you once again.  I know I've done it before, but I am continually amazed by what all can be found on the computer these days.  It has been very productive for me and in ways that I never would have imagined.  Not only have I learned a lot about my ancestors, but I've discovered tons of good detecting leads in the process.

I've mentioned this before, but you can join Ancestry.com for a free trial period.  That will give you a access to a lot of very good resources.

Yesterday I showed an example of a land use map from 1870 that I found on the web site.  That was only one example of the many types of excellent research resources you will find there.

Of course you can compare those old maps to more current maps if you need to.   I was using maps of land that I was very familiar with, so I didn't have to do that.

One thing I learned is that reading history is one thing, but finding your personal connection makes it really come alive.  There is another step beyond that though.  You can visit the places where your roots were formed and actually touch the past.

One thing I learned in a new way is that history can be very personal.  If you make the connections,  you can learn a lot about out how your family ended up where it is today and how it connected to what was going on in the world.

I have learned a lot about my father's family that I am sure he never knew.  He was too young to know some of the whys and hows of his early life, yet through all of the digitized records I've been able to piece much of it together. 

I've communicated with cousins this year on both coasts that I never knew I had until I did this research and learned that they were also researching the family.  That is how I was able to make contact with them and learned from them what they had discovered through their research.  We exchanged both information and pictures.
  . 
Besides discovering relatives that you never knew about, and you might even learn what happened to crazy so and so.  After going through the process myself, I'd be surprised if you don't discover a lot you never knew about your family.  I benefited greatly from the time my wife put into the process.  It is much like detecting, the more time you put into it, the more you benefit.  Things come together more quickly when you have already collected some of the pieces.

Every day history is being made.  Every day information about you and I is being accumulated online.   More of it is going online than I ever suspected.   It is really surprising how much can be found.

History is going into the ground every day too -  much more than could ever be excavated or studied.

My now deceased father nearly a half century ago told me that his father or grandfather had tools stamped with a swastika.   I don't know why he told me that or why it is something that I remembered, but I guess it made an impression.  Not only did I remember that one statement, but now I have a pair of those pliers and found the swastika, which proves what he said.  It seems unlikely that one casual comment made about fifty years ago would result in an item of personal history being resurrected from the earth. 

I thoroughly enjoyed digging up some of my personal history, including some of my old toys from the small home where I was raised.  When I visited that home, I was able to walk directly to the exact area where there was a slight depression just to one side of an old Pussy Willow tree that created a nice shady spot to play in the cool dirt in the summer.  I made roads in the dirt with my toy tractors and trucks there, and sadly, that is also where my yellow baby duck that I had just won at the county fair by throwing coins into cups ate a toadstool and died. 

I could not see it any more clearly than if I were there today, and I guess in a way I am.

Nobody else in the world knew that spot like I did.  Nobody else knew how I played there, what toys I used and how special that one small area was to one young boy.  Talk about an advantage for a detectorist!  I can actually see the past, and in more ways than one.  

Nobody knew that one small spot like I did and never will.  I walked right to it, and quickly dug up a part of my personal history.  No find has ever been more valuable to me than that.



I think I'll leave it there for today.



Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net