Treasure hunt begins in England

Chapter 649 Gold
To be honest, the overall value of these things should not be as valuable as the whole piece of emerald before, but I have to say that so much gold piled up together, the visual impact is definitely not the kind of black emerald Ore can be compared.

Unlike the black-looking silver coins found before, these gold coins are still as golden as they just fell into the sea even after being soaked in seawater 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. Skold take a lot of photos with the pile of gold.

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

Compared with the unremarkable rough gemstones before, these golden golds are obviously much more attractive to people. Maybe human beings have a natural desire for such golden things.

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

Don't look at the fact that diamonds are very expensive now, but two or three hundred years ago, diamonds were considered a sub-grade gemstone, far less valuable than those colored gemstones, and other gemstones also vary according to the different cognitions of different nations and cultures. There are different prices.

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

But the two precious metals, gold and silver, are different. Gold and silver are naturally not currency, but currency is naturally gold and silver.At least most of the civilizations in the world recognize the value of these two precious metals, which can be regarded as a common ground of 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 cleaning work according to conventional underwater exploration methods.

Fortunately, because of the many previous hurricanes, there are basically no hull structures around, and it is naturally much easier to clean up, at least there is no need to worry about those fragile organic matter.

To be honest, it's not like I haven't seen the golden Liang En before.But holding handfuls of gold coins into the box with your hands is another feeling, at least when faced with so many gold coins, it is definitely impossible to clear them one by one.

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

Of course, for safety reasons, they didn't dare to fill the box up to 1/3 at most. After all, the density of gold is there, and if it is full, the box may not be able to draw water at all.

After the first batch of items were fished out of the water, Liang En, Joan of Arc, and Scout returned to the ship, and then inspected the gold, most of which 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 escudos. The larger the denomination, the larger the size, and the largest one is even as big as Yuan Datou.

You must know that the size of gold coins in Europe is generally small. Only the Spaniards will mint some large and exaggerated gold coins because of tradition. As early as the 13th century before the completion of Spain's unification, the monarchs of Castile had already started to mint super-large gold coins. up.

By the time of Enrique IV in the 15th century, Castile's exquisite and gorgeous oversized gold coins had become well-known in Europe, and other European monarchs also began to use Castile gold coins as a template to cast oversized gold coins for court rewards and diplomacy gift.

For example, this is the case with Henry VII of England. The wise king who ended the War of the Roses and created the Tudor Dynasty minted Sophin gold coins in the form of eight escudo gold coins.

Now Liang En found about [-] eight escudo gold coins, and all of them were almost unused royal figure-eight escudos, which were shipped to the King of Spain from the American colonies at that time.

In the past, 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, and the earliest ones were also obtained in the 18th century.A record $20 was once auctioned.

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

As for the latter two gold coins, the price is only a little higher than that of ordinary gold due to the large output in history, but the two escudo gold coins among them are more famous than the one escudo in history. .

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 Spain's 2 escudos.

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

As the gold coins were gradually taken out from the bottom of the sea, some dark metal discs gradually appeared in the pit. It seemed that there were not a small amount of silver coins in this place besides the gold coins.

Compared with the rare gold coins, these silver coins are the most common Spanish currency, because each colony will issue its own currency, so some people even think that the type of currency in Spain can reach 1/5 of the type of human metal currency.

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

Only those jewels can be seen with high regard, and each piece is packed into a small box.For example, a gold chain with a length of 12m and a very plain appearance.

"Why did this kind of thing appear here?" Looking at the gold chain, Joan showed a curious expression, because this seemingly simple gold chain is not the same as 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, so from a certain point of view, this thing is more like a dog chain.

"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 coin back then." Liang En pointed to the dozens of chains that had been cleared out.

"So for the ships that transported 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."

Different from those modern banknotes, this ancient precious metal currency actually did not have too high requirements on the shape of the currency, the only requirement was the weight and purity of the metal.

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

(End of this chapter)