Buckets and buckets and buckets of treasure.
Hundreds of thousands of colonial-era silver and gold coins worth an estimated $500-million were recently brought from a shipwreck in the Atlantic.
The salvage firm Odyssey will not say exactly where nor name the ship and will not describe the type, denomination or country of origin of the coins except to say they are unused.
Packed in hundreds of plastic containers, the 50,000 coins are worth an average of $1,000 each. [AP story at Globe and Mail]
From the Odyssey Marine Exploration website, shipwreck.net:
In what is believed to be the largest collection of coins ever excavated from a historical shipwreck, Odyssey Marine Exploration recently recovered over 500,000 silver coins weighing more than 17 tons, hundreds of gold coins, worked gold, and other artifacts from the wreck of a Colonial period shipwreck code-named “Black Swan”, located in an undisclosed location in the Atlantic Ocean.
The work accomplished to date on this site has diligently followed archaeological protocols using advanced robotic technology, and the artifacts are now undergoing a meticulous conservation process by some of the world’s most experienced coin conservators.