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Sunken Treasure

-Sunken treasure mainly from sunken treasure ships are legend.

Sunken treasures with plenty of treasure artifact are still somewhere in the Sea and there are probably thousands of sunken vessel and wreck with some kind of treasure and the new scuba diving and underwater exploration techniques make them reachable. 

It is necessary to point to the difference to define the treasure. There are ships like the Chinese trade vessels or Junks who carried Chinese goods and especially Chinese ceramics to many places and harbors in Asia and south east Asia. At that time, from the 15th. to the 18th century Chinese ceramics were trading items, today they are sunken treasures.

The interesting thing is among the Chinese sunken treasure recovered at various places in Asia, there are always plenty of treasures made in Thailand and Vietnam among the . This sunken treasures are mainly ceramics, pottery, coins, metal items and others.

Modern underwater archaeology uses all kind of new technology and technical diving or commercial to located sunken wrecks with sunken treasure. There are sonar equipments, magnetometer and other advanced techniques. And there are modern submersible capable of diving down at treasure hunt exploration. The probably most successful treasure hunt and underwater archeology company today is here.

To do modern underwater treasure hunt, techniques from oil and gas exploration is mainly used aside of conventional scuba diving. This underwater exploration devices are sonar, magnetometer and aerial mapping.

Since the usual magnetometer mostly wont work for this kind of operation some

new type are used, like cesium magnetometer. The conventional magnetometers are tuned to find iron or steel but the old sunken treasure vessels contain almost no iron, the contain mostly bronze items like cannons and coins.

-A good example what is around down in the Sea and how to get it up and visible for the public in specially create marine archeology museum is visible in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia.

Trading Goods around Asia and south east Asia started long time ago. Already at Neolithic ages goods have been traded via the Sea around today China, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines. Traded objects such as cowries found in many places and they had to come from somewhere.

After, goods for trading expanded to metal axes, bells, drums, bronze, etc..With the time several states emerged and trade was increasing. Ceramics, cloth, forest products, weapons and spices such as pepper, mace, clover, and other items such as tin, ivory, turtle shell and silver were traded. Traders from China, India, Europe -mainly Dutch and Portuguese-, Middle East and other countries brought in goods on demand.

The straits of Malacca - or today Melaka- was and still is a water highway between east and west. The Sri Vijaya kingdom situated on the both shores of the Straits of Melaka means today Indonesia and Malaysia started this business already in the 1400 Century. During the early part of the Yuan Dynasty (1280-1368) in China potters at Jingdezhen in China succeeded in decorating whitish local clay with blue cobalt oxide under a clear glaze, overcoming technical difficulties related to the color and the glaze. The date of this major breakthrough in ceramic history could have been around A.D. 1300.

Production of blue and white porcelain grow rapidly during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). All this gave a tremendous push to the Sea trade in Asia since this newly developed Chinese porcelain became a instant export hit the Asian countries and Europe.

Sunken treasure ships and treasure wreck are around those trading routes and the treasure hunt is on.

Treasure ship wrecks in this area are less loaded with gold, silver and precious stones items like the Spanish galleons discovered in Philippine water and the Caribbean.

But today the value of a recovered load of Chinese porcelain, ceramics, pottery and other items have a very high value since in every sunken ship the treasure was several thousands of ceramic and porcelain items with a high value today. Ok get your scuba diving gear out and have a look, but its not as easy.

The treasure ships are quite close to the shores. The involvement of the government creates problems from time to time, but on the other hand makes sure that certain basic rules of underwater archaeological methods for treasure wreck diving are considered and applied.

On top of it the governments usual put their share of the bounty from the treasure wreck on display to the public, as it is done here in the Kuala Lumpur Marine Archeological Museum. This museum is beside the Malaysian National Museum. 

-A mysterious treasure ship has been discovered in the South Atlantic.

With ten tons of gold and silver on board the "Polar Mist" treasure ship sunk in January 2009 close to the Argentinean coast and had since disappeared.

Now a search expedition has discovered the sunken treasure ship. But because no submersible is available the question remains: Where is the Treasure?

Nobody knows what happen in the final hours of the "Polar Mist", a small fishing vessel with the registration number 7946289. The ship left the port of Punta Quilla in southern Argentina on 14 January with the direction Punta Arenas in Chile. The fishing vessel run into a severe storm and the eight crew members were rescued by helicopter and a ship of the coast guard.

But what happen afterwards with the 1980 built "Polar Mist" is not quite clear. When the crew left the vessel in the Strait of Magellan with running engines they put her on a and circular drive. After approximately a days the Chilean tug "Beagle" reached the ship and after a failed rescue maneuvers 40 kilometers off the coast the treasure ship sank, the details are not clear yet.

Now the story of the small ship turned treasure ship gets interesting since there were a ton of gold and eight tons of silver on board belonging to the mining company Minera Cerro Vanguardia and Triton with a total value from 16 to 22 million dollar and where is the cargo now ?

The treasure ship vanished for about a month and has been located after at about 22 miles off Cabo Vírgenes. An inspection of the treasure ship wreck could reveal information about what happen with the precious treasure on board. The metals where bound for Santiago de Chile for refining and to be sold to Switzerland.

Already in April there was an initial attempt to salvage the treasure ship. However, because of disputes with the crews of several rescue ships about payment to the crew it was canceled. A renewed search for the sunken treasure ship cargo was then approved by the insurance company Lloyds has been initiated, the precious cargo insurance. For the managers of Lloyds in London the whole thing starts to smell fishy there is suspicion that the failed rescue operation was in fact fabricated. Nothing has been found yet.

Now, with a submersible or Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) robot from the salvage vessel "C-Sailor ' the sunken treasure, about were total about 9.6 tones of gold and silver have been found, looks like no hanky panky business was involved.