Starting My Treasure Hunting In England

To be honest, the overall value of these things together should not be as valuable as the previous whole piece of emerald, but it has to be said that with so much gold piled together, the visual impact is definitely not that kind of black emerald. Ore can compare.

Unlike the dark-looking silver coins found before, these gold coins are still as gleaming as if they had just been dropped into the sea even after being soaked in the sea for hundreds of years.

Soon, Liang En, Joan of Arc and several other divers dived into the water together, and then started digging after helping Mr. Scold take a lot of photos with the pile of gold.

Everyone is very motivated, because the company has a clear calculation method for bonuses for crew members and divers, so any discovery means that everyone can get additional benefits from this exploration work.

Compared with the inconspicuous rough gemstones before, these golden golds are obviously more attractive to people. Maybe humans have an innate desire for such golden things.

The most important thing is that compared with those gems, gold is a standard hard currency and can be used directly as money. This is definitely incomparable to those gems.

Although diamonds are very expensive now, two or three hundred years ago, diamonds were considered to be second-level gemstones, far less valuable than colored gemstones. Other gemstones also have different perceptions according to different nations and cultures. And there are different prices.

The reason why these expensive gems have such prices now is purely because the West has occupied the international voice in modern times. With the rise of China, the price of jade in the international market has also been rising, which can explain some problems. .

But the two precious metals of gold and silver are different. Gold and silver are naturally not currencies, but currency is naturally gold and silver. At least most civilizations in the world recognize the value of these two precious metals, which can be regarded as a common denominator for human beings.

Because the water depth was only six or seven meters, Liang En simply directed everyone on the spot to carry out the overall salvage and cleanup work according to conventional underwater exploration methods.

Fortunately, due to the many previous hurricanes, there are basically no hull structures around, so cleaning up is naturally much simpler, at least there is no need to worry about those fragile organic matter.

To be honest, it’s not like I’ve never seen Golden Liang En before. But holding handfuls of gold coins into the box with your hands is a different feeling. At least when facing so many gold coins, it is definitely impossible to clean them one by one.

Because the water depth in this area was very shallow, Liang En and the others simply put the gold into iron boxes. Use the winch on the ship to pull up the iron boxes with drainage holes on them.

Of course, for safety reasons, they did not dare to fill the box with only 1/3 at most. After all, the density of gold was there, and if it was full, the box might not be able to pull out water at all.

After the first batch of things was fished out of the water, Liang En, Joan of Arc, and Scood returned to the ship and inspected the gold. Most of them were gold coins, but some were jewelry and even rough gemstones.

The gold coins here have three denominations, namely eight escudos, two escudos and one escudo. The larger the denomination, the larger the size. The largest one is even as big as Yuan Datou.

You must know that European gold coins are generally small in size. Only the Spanish will mint some large and exaggerated gold coins because of tradition. As early as the 13th century before Spain completed its unification, the monarchs of Castile had already begun to mint super-large gold coins. .

By the time of Enrique IV in the 15th century, Castile's exquisite and gorgeous super-large gold coins were already well-known in Europe. Other European monarchs also began to use Castilian gold coins as a template to mint super-large gold coins for palace rewards and diplomacy. Gift.

For example, this was the case with Henry VII of England. This wise king who ended the War of the Roses and founded the Tudor Dynasty minted Soforin gold coins after the eight escudo gold coins.

Now Liang En has found about 600 eight-escudo gold coins, and they are all almost unused royal eight-shaped escudos, which were shipped to the Spanish king from the American colonies at that time.

Previously, there were less than 30 such gold coins in the world, and most of them were still collected in major museums. The number circulating in the antique market was very small. At the same time, the earliest ones were from the 18th century. There is a record price of $200,000 at auction.

Of course, if this batch of goods in Liang En's hands is shipped, it will definitely drive the collectors outside the museum completely crazy, because this is equivalent to increasing the number of such gold coins by dozens of times, and the value will naturally be greatly increased. Decreased.

As for the latter two gold coins, due to the large production volume in history, the price is only a little more than the ordinary gold price. However, the two escudo gold coins are more famous in history than the one escudo. .

This is because in order to resist the financial threat from Spain, Louis XIII introduced machine-made coin technology in 1640 to cast a gold coin substitute with the same weight and fineness as the Spanish 2 Escudo.

This exquisite and reliable gold coin gradually won the trust of the market and resisted Spanish penetration in the French financial market to a certain extent. It was the famous gold Louis in history and the predecessor of the gold franc.

As the gold coins were gradually taken out from the seabed, some black metal discs began to gradually appear in the pit. It seemed that in addition to gold coins, there were also a large number of silver coins in this place.

Compared with the rare gold coins, these silver coins are the most common Spanish currency. Because each colony will issue its own currency, some people even think that Spain’s currency types can reach 1/5 of the types of human metal currencies.

If Liang En and the others simply classified the gold coins according to size, etc., then they simply put the silver coins in piles into boxes and stuffed them into the warehouse.

Only the jewels could be looked at, each piece packed into a small box. For example, a 12m long gold chain with a very plain appearance.

"Why does this kind of thing appear here?" Looking at this gold chain, Joan of Arc showed a curious expression, because this seemingly simple gold chain was not the same as the other jewelry salvaged in the same batch. style.

More importantly, this thing is 12m long. Considering that Europeans do not have the habit of hanging gold chains around their necks like Indians, from a certain perspective this thing is more like a dog leash.

"This kind of gold chain is not a kind of jewelry, but a special item called a money chain. It is said that it was used as a tax-free coinage back then." Liang En said, pointing to the dozen or so chains that were cleared out.

"So for these ships that were transporting treasure across the Atlantic at that time, they often carried a lot of these gold chains, just like the gold and silver coins they carried."

Unlike modern banknotes, the ancient precious metal currency did not actually have high requirements for the appearance of the currency. The only requirements were the weight and purity of the metal.

At least before entering the era of paper money, this kind of precious metal currency was not much different from metal ingots in transactions in many places, so it is not surprising that this kind of special-shaped currency appears in addition to regular coins.