2/12/19 Report - 1715 Fleet Site In Melborne. Shipwreck Dispersion and Scatter. Muckelroy Model.

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.

http://seafarerexplorationcorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Dr.-Robert-Baer-Melbourne-Beach.pdf

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.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Evolution-of-a-shipwreck-Muckelroy-1978_fig3_264469355

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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

8/15/16 Report - Flintlock Pistol From Treasure Coast Beach. Thoughts On Religious Relics. World Wide Web 25 Years Old This Month.

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

Flintlock Pistol Found After Hurricanes of 2004.
Photo submitted by Darrel Strickland.

Lately I've been showing some noteworthy treasures that were found a few years ago, especially after the hurricanes of 2004, which was some of the best hunting we've had since the legendary Thanksgiving Storm of 1984.  A lot of treasure was found by a lot of people after Francis and Jeanne. You've never heard of most of it, and I'm only showing a few pieces.

The flintlock pistol shown above was found by Tom K., who found the pistol "at Wabasso Beach going north towards Golden Sands in the wet sand near the water's edge."  Thanks for sending the photo and email Darrel.

I don't know if Tom ever got the pistol cleaned up or not, but he wasn't in a hurry to clean it at the time because he thought it might be damaged in the process.

Tom also found some rings that day.

Here is charm or rosary piece found back then too.

Photo submitted by Darrel S.

I've shown some of the famous religious pieces found by the salvage divers, and Laura Strolia has provided authoritative research on some of the most fascinating ones. Click the following link to go back to a post containing some of Laura's research on the Pelican of Piety.

  http://treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com/search?q=pelican+piety

Before Laura's research was published, the gold Pelican of Piety was often mistakenly referred to as a reliquary.  A reliquary is meant to contain a relic.

I recently found an article about first-class relics being sold on the internet.  A first-class relic is an item or piece of an item directly associated with event's of Christ's life or the physical remains of a saint, for example bone or hair.

One person wrote an article about selling first class relics and wants the practice stopped. The author of that article, Ryan Scheel, had the following to say.

The listing of first class relics “is incredibly insensitive to the Catholic faith in way I doubt would be tolerated for other religions,” Scheel said. 

“But also...common decency should tell eBay that profiting off of the sale of body parts is ghastly and unethical, no matter who the remains belonged to in life.”That's why Scheel decided to launch a petition calling for eBay to remove the listings of the first class relics. He hopes to obtain signatures from at least 25,000 Catholics in order to alert the site of the illicit sales.”

Here is the link to that article.

http://www.ewtnnews.com/catholic-news/US.php?id=14075

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Did you know that August 5 was the 25th anniversary of the first web site.  That web site described the WorldWideWeb project and said the following.

"The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents," the world's first public website reads, going on to explain how others can also create their own web pages.

"The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone."

I found that information on thehackernews.com, which is a good site for those who want to stay informed about computer security.

Many large corporations have been hacked by China.  Google admitted they were hacked.   If Google, who has all of those bright computer scientists, couldn't prevent being hacked, who can?  If you don't maintain the finest security practices and if you have anything that the major players might want on your computer, you probably have been hacked, whether you know it or not.

Computer security isn't all technical.  A lot of it is behavioral.  Hackers take advantage of natural and naive human behavior.

On a side note, the Stuxnet super-virus was created to damage Iran's nuclear centrifuges, and it did its job fairly well even though the controllers were isolated.  Somebody had to use a USB or some other portable storage device to install it the virus.   More powerful versions are now being developed.

I started this post talking about a centuries old flintlock pistol, and ended it with cyber warfare.  How things have changed!

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Here is one note on old rings that appear large enough to be worn by a giant or on a big toe.  They were made to be worn over a glove.

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There are no storms right now, and the surf will run around one or two feet for the next several days.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net