Editor's Blog Feb 15th 2012
The Ecstasy of Gold.
Cast your minds back to 2007 when the Odyssey crew pulled Silver and Gold from a shipwreck codenamed “The Black Swan”, brought the booty to Gibraltar, and flew out under cover millions of pounds worth of treasure.
“This surely is the makings of a blockbuster, if they had gotten away with it. Unfortunately, Spain claimed the treasure as their own, as it had been recovered from a Spanish Galleon Nuestra Senora de Las Mercedes.
Spain’s reaction was one of filing in a Florida court to get the treasure back, and I read this morning that their legal wrangling’s have succeeded in the court, ordering Odyssey to hand back the gold.
What really angers me is that the gold’s origins where probably from the Americas, when Spain plundered it from the Incas, Mayans, and Aztecs, melted down all these heathen works of art to make coins to pay for further expansion projects.
I acknowledge that all the European superpowers of the time were playing the same game, but in modern times the courts should see that the original owners were themselves robbed, and if Odyssey has the capability to raise the treasure, then it should be entitled to keep at least 50% and the remainder should go back to those peoples that were robbed by the Spaniards.
Ed.
