HOT NEWS !

By Alan Sayre


The Franklin Mint has purchased about 360,000 coins recovered from the wreck of El Cazador, a Spanish brig-of-war that sank in early 1784 during a storm in the Gulf of Mexico as it attempted to reach then-Spanish-controlled Louisiana.

The cache will be offered for sale over a cable TV shopping network by the company, which usually produces its own lines of collectibles.

Fishermen discovered the wreck off the state's coast in 1993 when coins were snared in a trawl. Franklin Mint acquired the coins from the salvagers.

"Tales of shipwrecked treasure and dead man's gold have always fascinated us," said M. Moshe Malamud, chairman of Aston, Pa.-based Franklin Mint.

The trove mostly consists of silver coins denominated in reales, commonly regarded as the predecessor to the peso. In their time, reales coins were an international currency, 8 reales trading equivalent to a U.S. dollar until U.S. currency laws of the 1850s banned them as legal tender.

From the International Herald Tribune

A court in this southern French city on Wednesday fined four divers for pillaging artifacts from a Roman ship dating back to the second century B.C.

The divers were each fined €1,500 (US$1,980) for removing 30 objects, including about a dozen Roman vases, from the ship, lying in 57 meters (187 feet) of water off the coast of this Mediterranean port city. Two other divers were acquitted.

The Roman vessel was transporting about 1,000 vases of wine from the western coast of Italy when it sunk off the town of Ciotat, some 40 kilometers (24 miles) from Marseilles.

The convicted divers removed the booty between 2001 and 2005, years after the sunken vessel was discovered in 1984. They were not the only ones interested in the antique treasures.

A 2005 inventory by authorities showed there were only 278 vases and other objects remaining on the boat out of an initial 1,000. Under French law, anyone who discovers a sunken ship must report it to authorities and it becomes part of France's state property.