Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.
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Part of the Saddle Ridge Hoard: One Can of Gold Coins.
Source: CoinWorld.com
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Mr. Owens did some very extensive research and names a variety of possibilities but ends without being able to answer the question concluding, "Perhaps in the end, the story was not about the burier of the hoard, rather, as Kagins described it, about John and Mary discovering the fabled pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Then he quotes Prentice Mulford saying, "It is mysterious Providence that impels any poor fellow to dig his pile, bury it for safe keeping, and then go off and die in some out of the way place without being able to leave any will and testament as to the exact hole where his savings lay."
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... Led by archaeologist Carlos León, the team has logged 681 shipwrecks off Cuba, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Bermuda, the Bahamas and the US Atlantic coast.
Its inventory runs from the sinking of the Santa María to July 1898, when the Spanish destroyer Plutón was hit by a US boat off Cuba, heralding the end of the Spanish-American War and the twilight of Spain’s imperial age...
It found that 91.2% of ships were sunk by severe weather – mainly tropical storms and hurricanes – 4.3% ran on to reefs or had other navigational problems, and 1.4% were lost to naval engagements with British, Dutch or US ships. A mere 0.8% were sunk in pirate attacks...
Archaeologists have located the remains of fewer than a quarter of the 681 vessels on the inventory to date...
Here is the link for the rest of the article.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/mar/01/spain-logs-shipwrecks-maritime-past-weather-pirates
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I heard somebody say that fewer people carry change these days. I think he was talking about coins, but I think people are carrying less paper money too. They simply don't pay with cash very often.
If people are carrying less money, it only stands to reason that they would lose less money. That mean fewer easy targets for the coin shooter and require some changes in detecting strategies. It might mean focusing on older coins rather than coins that were recently lost.
I suspect it won't be long before people quit carrying money altogether. They can pay with a card, smart phone, or some newer way. The end of money won't mean the end of metal detecting though. There will be older coins that haven't been found yet, but as the numbers of those dwindle, detectorist will probably focus more on relics or other kinds of targets such as nuggets, meteorites or lost smart phones. The reduction or elimination of physical money definitely has implications for detectorists as well as metal detector designers. Another change might be increased targeting of non-metallic objects, including paper money.
I enjoy eye-balling, which is mostly about non-metallic targets. Many years ago when I was in school, one day our gym class went out to pick up trash on the football field. I found a dollar bill under the bleachers. That is my earliest memory of finding paper money. I still occasionally target paper money, and as with metal detecting, there are strategies.
One thing I've successfully done is visit fair grounds or other busy event locations early in the morning and check the fence rows on the down-wind side of the site. I've done that several times with some degree of success.
One place you can find paper money on the beach is in the sea weed line. Also I know where there is one place in the water in front of a busy resort where there is a shallow water dip that collects paper money. There have also been several times when I was detecting in the water and seen a bill come floating by. So far my biggest paper money finds have been twenties.
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I happened to see an old episode of the TV show River Monsters, and the fellow was catchting Bull sharks in the Indian River Lagoon at Fort Pierce. He also seemed to spend a lot of time down by the power plant.
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The Treasure Coast is having a one foot surf and very small tides. Those conditions make for easy water detecting.
Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net
