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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Ed Zak, post: 11939, member: 824&quot;]<b>Why these gold bars were long and narrow...</b></p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;ve been to Mel Fisher&#039;s museum in Key West as well as the store at the Gaylord Resort and asked <b>why are many of the recovered gold bars long and narrow?</b></p><p><br /></p><p>Apparently, the Spanish goverment back then taxed anything of value that was brought back from the New World.&nbsp; Obviously, gold was one of those items, so many of the Spanish sailors would smuggle in these gold bars to avoid paying taxes.&nbsp; One of the ways to smuggle in gold was to melt it in long narrow strips so that these sailors could hide them in the leg of their boot as they walked off the ship.</p><p><br /></p><p>Sure enough the government caught on and instructed their tax collectors to &quot;<b>watch the leg of their boot</b>&quot; for smugglers...their boot leg, and hence the term <span style="color: red"><b>bootlegger</b></span>&nbsp; was born as a term for smuggling!</p><p><br /></p><p>I call these I.B.U.&#039;s...interesting but unimportant.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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