Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
Here is the Executive Summary and Conclusion of an article that you might enjoy reading. It is by
Dr. Robert H. Baer, Professional Archaeologist, Seafarer Exploration Corp.
Executive Summary This paper provides evidence that the Melbourne Beach shipwreck scatter is derived from one of the missing Spanish 1715 Plate Fleet shipwrecks, the Santisima Trinidad y Nuestra Señora de la Concepción.
Conclusion From the evidence, it is concluded that the diagnostic artifacts – the Monteros Platter and the Ramirez Flintlock Pistol recovered at the Melbourne Beach site approxiamately 14 miles north of the 1715 shipwreck sites is undoubtedly cargo from a missing 1715 shipwreck. It is believed that the vessel scatter at the site is that of the Santisima Trinidad y Nuestra Señora de la Concepcieon, the vessel that transported the consigned box of presents including the Monteros Platter from Veracruz to Havana and from Havana to the Florida Treasure Coast where it was recovered almost 300 years later.
Here is the link if you want to read the entire article.
Among other things you will find photos of artifacts, including but not limited to the pistol and silver plate.
Thanks to Dale J. for sending me that link.
The above article refers to the Muckelroy model, which describes the dispersion or scatter of shipwreck artifacts and materials. I thought I once posted a flow chart of the Muckelroy model in this blog, but for some reason I can not find it now. You might enjoy looking it up if you can find it somewhere in this blog or elsewhere.
If you are interested in looking into shipwreck dispersion processes or the Muckelroy model, here is a link that will help you get started.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeology_of_shipwrecks#Muckelroy's_model
Here is a part of that article referring to a paper by Martin Gibbs (2006) that describes some of the human activities that affect a shipwreck site.
A paper by Martin Gibbs in 2006,[11] expands Muckelroy's model to consider human behaviour at the time of the disaster and the long term relationship between people and shipwrecks. This model uses studies of humans involved in disasters to characterise the human activity into phases around the time of the wrecking. This model considers:
- Pre-impact threat phase, in which humans considering the risk may take avoiding action which results in there being no wreck, or may take unsuccessful action to mitigate the perceived threat, for example the wreck location may be the result of attempting to avoid some perceived greater threat. Stowage of cargo may also indicate consideration of threat.
- Pre-impact warning phase, in which humans may take drastic action to avoid catastrophe, for example, running a vessel ashore, jettisoning cargo or running out anchors.
- Impact, in which the decision is made to abandon ship or remain aboard, and, for example, attempt to refloat.
- Post impact, where survivors regroup and, for example, salvage their own goods or make repairs.
- Rescue and Post-disaster where the vessel is abandoned and in which third parties may be involved in salvage or in removing remains that present a hazard to navigation.
In addition to human activities there are the impacts of storms and other things that can affect the scatter hundreds of years later. That is something I've talked about good bit.
I've wondered about some of these things, such as why there appears to be more smaller cobs found on the beach (especially some beaches) compared to the larger proportion of larger cobs found on the shipwreck site found by salvagers. I've considered a number of possible reasons for that including both natural and human but won't get into that now.
Anyway, I think you'll find the above sources interesting reading.
You might also want to take a look at this one.
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191 mph wind and 60-foot waves on Maui? That is what it says.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/02/10/hawaii-storm-brings-60-foot-waves-power-outages/2832866002/
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MagicSeaWeed is predicting a two to four-foot surf for the next few days.
Happy hunting,
Treasureguide@comcast.net
