WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2008-05-08 Time: 00:00:00 Posted By: Jan
By Donna Bryson
The ship was laden with tons of copper ingots, elephant tusks, gold coins – and cannons to defend itself against the pirates lurking off Africa about five centuries ago.
But it had nothing to protect it from the fierce weather off a particularly bleak stretch of coast. It sank, only to be found last month by men seeking other treasure.
De Beers geologists had stumbled on the wreck on April 1 while prospecting for diamonds of Namibia’s southwest coast. “If you’re mining on the coast, sooner or later you’ll find a wreck,” said Dieter Noli, the archaeologist who is researching the ship’s origins, this week.
Namdeb Diamond Corporation, a joint venture by the government of Namibia and De Beers, reported the find on Wednesday and plans to hold a news conference about it in the Namibian capital next week.
Namdeb had cleared and drained a stretch of seabed and built an earthen wall around it to keep the water out so that its geologists could work. Noli said one of the geologists saw a few ingots, but had no idea what they were. Then they found what looked like cannon barrels.
The geologists stopped searching for diamonds and sent photographs of their finds to Noli, who had done research in the Namibian desert since his university days in Cape Town in the mid-1980s. Since 1996 he has advised De Beers on the archaeological aspects of its operations in Namibia.
The find “was what I’d been waiting for for 20 years”, Noli said.
Judging from the notables depicted on the hoard of Spanish and Portuguese coins, the type of cannon and the navigational equipment, the ship went down in the late 1400s or early 1500s, around the time Vasco da Gama and Columbus were plying the waters of the New World, “a period when Africa was just being opened up, when the whole world was being opened up”, Noli said.
He and Bruno Werz, a marine archaeologist who was one of his lecturers at the University of Cape Town, are trying to piece together the story of the mystery ship. They divide their time between inventorying the find in Namibia and researching in museums and libraries in Cape Town.
Eventually, they will go to Portugal, whose ships were particularly active in the area 500 years ago, and to Spain to search for records of a vessel with a similar cargo that went missing.
The wealth aboard is intriguing. Noli said that the large amount of copper might mean that the ship had been sent by a government looking for material with which to build cannons.
Trade in ivory was usually controlled by royal families, another indication that the ship was on official business.
But why was the captain holding so many coins? Shouldn’t they have been traded for the ivory and copper?
“Sending a ship to Africa in that period – that was venture capitalism in the extreme,” Noli said. “These chaps were very much on the edge as far as navigation was concerned.”
Noli has found signs that worms were at work on the ship’s timbers and that sheets of lead were used to patch the holes, indications that the ship was old when she set out on her last voyage.
Imagine a leaky, overladen ship caught in a storm. “And down you go,” Noli said, “weighed down by your treasure.” –
Source: http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?art_id=vn20080504084149678C799589