Treasure of the Great Basses Wreck

Mike Wilson and two teenagers, Bobby Kriegel and Mark Smith cruise the reef to photograph three big but friendly groupers, when they discover two small cannon—an exciting find.  Wrecks have sparked the imagination of divers and non-divers alike.  On the next dive, they discover a scattering of silver coins.  The exploration of an old wreck transformed into a treasure hunt.  The find started the story of what came to be called the Great Basses Reef wreck or the Taj Mahal wreck. At that point, I am hooked into the story.

Every summer, I select a few books to read while sitting in the late evening Alaska sunshine.  My selected themes are pretty narrow, shipwrecks, nautical adventures and finding sunken treasure.  The Treasure of the Great Reef by Arthur C. Clarke, author of countless science and science fiction books, tops the list this year.  The book, written in 1964, hid in plain sight for a couple of years on the “to be read” shelf one of the several bookcases that populate my home.  I loved Clarke’s science fiction as a kid.  I did a rather elaborate book report on his one of his first novels, A Fall of Moondust, in my ninth grade English class.  I made a scale model of the transport Clarke described and simulated a "breaking news" format for the oral presentation to the class.  I earned an “A” for that effort.  You may not recognize the name, but many will know his most famous novel, 2001:  A Space Odyssey. I can only imagine what a report would have been like had I been reporting on this current selection.

Wrecks and sunken treasure fascinates many of us.  So it is with me since the discovery of the mother load of the Atocha in 1985, the first treasure-laden wrecks to snag my interest.  I learned that investors in that enterprise receive treasure, not cash, when the annual division is made.  I recall bulk treasure from the Atocha being sold on early variants of the cable home shopping channel shortly after the division of treasure found in 1985.  I own a small piece of the Atocha, in the form of a replica coin stamped from the melted down from one of the thousands of silver bars discovered in the wreck.   A book about the Atocha is also on my summer reading shelf.

The coins were instrumental in identifying the wreck.  Not only were the coins minted in the same year, Clarke describes another unusual feature, 

“when we weighed the cemented coin masses and calculated how many coins they contained the answer came out to be almost exactly 1,000.    It was obvious what had happened; the coins had been packed in bags of 1,000 which had been sealed after counting…When the ship had gone down, the bags lasted long enough for the outer layers of rupees to become cemented together by the action of the sea.  Thus, those inside the lump were perfectly preserved while the whole mass retained the shape of the original bag.”

The Wikipedia article on the wreck features the above image of one of the coin-bundles-in-the-shape-of-bag, showing exactly what Clarke described.  Looking at the image I can imagine bags of silver coins on the bottom, fused into a mass over time by the peculiar chemistry of seawater and silver.  Searching further, I found that the some of the coins are now being sold online for prices ranging from $399 to $549.