LordM October 2017 giveaway (theme: "Treasures & Discoveries")

Hi. Welcome to October!

Fall always gets me in a celebratory mood, as we discussed in September's giveaway thread.

As with last month's giveaway, this will basically be a regular discussion thread, to which folks can post whatever they like.

This month's theme is "Treasures & Discoveries".

Anyone can discuss anything they deem appropriate along those lines: found treasure, interesting coin roll hunting or circulation finds, shipwrecks, barn finds, fossil hunting, antique shopping, garage sale "treasures"... archaeology ... in other words, anything, coin-related or not, as long it has something to do with treasures (great or small), or interesting discoveries.

The one thing I ask of you to enter the giveaway is that you please put the phrase "entry post" in your first post to this thread, since that will assist me when I do the drawing at the end of the month. This way each person will get one chance in the drawing, and it won't be as difficult for me to sift through all the secondary discussion posts to see which one is eligible. If the random number generator lands on your first post, you win.

I will make the random drawing on or shortly after November 1, 2017. There's only one prize this month, though I might add an additional fossil shark tooth giveaway to this thread later (especially if I happen to go out and find some more this month!)

Before we get to chatting, I expect you'll be wanting a look at the loot, eh?

Prize: a British India (Madras Presidency) 10-cash coin of the East India Company, 1808, salvaged from the Admiral Gardner shipwreck.

It comes with a little information sheet in its pouch, so I'll let that tell most of the story:




South West Maritime Archaeological Group

More info: Wreck of the Treasure Ship Admiral Gardner, by Doug West (owlcation.com)

So, let's talk treasures and discoveries, be they coins or not. Stuff worth millions, and stuff worth pocket change (or maybe stuff that IS ... or was ... pocket change).

 

I LOVE stories like this!

Not the part about the trespassing, of course (I have some friends who are not beyond a bit of "poaching" at times - and I confess that in my less-considerate younger days I too would just go detecting anywhere without a thought about permission) but I love hearing about such finds.

 

DIGGER'S DIARY: I CALL THIS ONE "THE" COIN

The coin described here was found in 1998. The writeup text was mostly taken fom a 2010 Internet posting. This one ceased being my oldest coin find in April, 2011, when I found a Roman coin from circa 395 AD on a colonial site here in Georgia, and a ca. 1300-1310 English silver penny of Edward I during my 2013 England dig trip.

This is no longer my oldest dug coin nor my most publicized find, and it was never the most monetarily valuable, but I'm still sentimental about it.

When I found the coin in the fall of 1998, Hurricane Earl was blowing across the Florida panhandle to hit us from the landward side. I was out at a site in the woods that had been cleared (bush-mowed but not root-raked), and the wind was blowing in 40-50 MPH gusts, but there wasn't much rain. I wasn't getting many signals at all, and the few I did get were old iron nails. I was using a Fisher 1280-X underwater detector, which worked very well as a dry-land relic hunting machine. I was digging just about every signal.

One signal, near a big tree, was "hotter" than the rest, and I had to whack through a web of small roots to get into the soil. From a few inches down, a part of the neck of a very old black glass bottle came up, which was encouraging. Then, a a few more inches down, almost a foot deep overall, there was a little squarish piece of copper. I didn't recognize it as a coin, at first. I thought it was a seal of some sort.

My examination of the find was cut short when some men strolled into the clearing, asking if it was my van parked out by the road. I told them yes. They asked me to move it so they could clear the big tree that had fallen across the road, right in front of it! Off in my own little treasure-seeking world, I had been completely oblivious to things like dying hurricanes and wind and fallen trees! The hardwired headphones on that Fisher detector were very snug and shut out a lot of ambient noise.

A few months later, I met Bill Hendrick of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who was doing a story about the sinking of two tankers off our island by the German submarine U-123, in 1942. When my hobby came up in conversation, he expressed an interest in doing a little sidebar piece about my coin and its connection to the lost Santo Domingo de Asajo mission. (By this time I had identified the coin and sort of figured out the historical connection. A lot of the other details were filled in by Dr. John Worth, the historian who Mr.Hendrick contacted for the story).

When the story ran in the paper, it was picked up by the Assocated Press wire and run in various places around the country. As a matter of fact, somebody I didn't even know clipped it and submitted it to Western and Eastern Treasures magazine, where it ran under the "Treasure In The News" column- I was surprised to read about my own find there!

Aside from its historical and archaeological significance, this coin has a very important sentimental value to me, as well. I was showing it and the newspaper clipping off at work, and struck up a conversation with a nice lady there.

We developed a friendship, and were married in October of 1999. (She's not really that interested in coins, but at least this one served as that initial conversational icebreaker.)

So you can see why this coin is special to me on so many different levels.





Transcript of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution article from February 25, 1999:

SPANISH COIN GIVES CLUE TO STATE'S PAST
St. Simons Island-- Robertson Shinnick has found a tiny piece of Georgia's past-- lost for more than 300 years. Searching the ground on this resort isle with a metal detector last fall, the 33-year-old coin collector dug a foot into the black soil and found an odd-shaped coin. "I had in my hand a small, squarish piece of copper with a strange design on it," Shinnick said. "I knew the Spanish colonial mints struck millions of silver coins, but this was obviously copper. "It was a mystery until I identified the design as the monogram of Philip IV of Spain, who reigned from 1621 to 1665." Turns out the four-maraved coin, a low-value sort of penny of its era, had been hand-forged in Spain about 1658. It isn't particularly dear to collectors-- it's worth about $65-- but it's valuable to Georgia historians. John Worth, director of programs for the Calhoun-based Coosawattee Foundation and one of the top experts on 17th century Spanish missions along the Georgia coast, calls the coin "quite a find." He says Shinnick's coin gives a clue about the long-lost mission of Santo Domingo de Asajo, built in 1595 to convert Native Americans to Christianity. It was destroyed by English-backed slave traders in 1661, rebuilt a year later, then burned by British pirates in 1684. "There were about 30 men, women and children, and friars, but no soldiers. A small garrison of soldiers was located on nearby St. Catherine's Island," Worth says. Other traces of the early Spanish period, such as olive jars and pottery shards, have been found on St. Simons, says Worth, who's done extensive studies on the island. But coins such as the one Shinnick found are rare along the Georgia coast. Shinnick's may be the first found on St. Simons. "Its significance is in our common state heritage," Worth says. "It is a bit of actual, concrete evidence of the Spanish missions, right here in Georgia." Shinnick, a bellman at the King and Prince Resort, found the coin on private land at Hampton Point, where million-dollar mansions are being built. One side of the time-blackened coin shows the royal monogram of Philip IV and a Roman numeral for the denomination. The other shows the letters "RX" _ for "rex," or "king,"according to Worth. "Because the friars couldn't touch coins, my best guess is it was dropped by a passing soldier or an Indian," says Worth, whose Coosawattee Foundation aims to protect former Native American sites in the Southeast. "It's just a good history lesson from an era that's been lost."

 

Yes, and I later found a very plain brass flat button, which a digger from the St. Augustine, Florida area later identified as late-17th to early-18th century Spanish, based on its shank. So that was likely another relic of the lost mission.

The site was pretty "clean" as relic hunting sites go: not a lot of targets. They probably used a lot less metal at a 17th century Georgia mission site than was used in the later colonial and 19th century sites in the area.

Aside from the few nails which were made of iron, I think the only nonferrous targets I found were the coin and later a piece of copper wire and the button. The place was, relatively speaking, "clean as a whistle" and a very sparse target environment, so I was running the detector with zero discrimination, in All Metal mode, and digging every signal.

 

Love dat Garbage Cat! Great story. @Hiddendragon is clearly a treasure hunter. I'm just the same way, and have been, since childhood.

Ahhh, but if it "spoke" to you, you'd have been right to keep it, regardless.

Van Gogh's "Starry Night" was, after all, once just "someone's art project".

When Garbage Cat sells for 1.8 megacredits in a 23rd century auction, the proud winner will have YOU to thank for sparing it from the landfill. He might even know about you, from DNA or other forensic traces you've left behind. They'll have amazing equipment then.

PS- Garbage Cat's rather delicate looking tail is intact, too. From the sound of things, that's pretty remarkable.

 

Oh, that is treasure hunting, all right. I've done that myself.

Never seen a vending machine that took cents, though, not since the penny gumball machines when I was a kid.