The Shipwreck Corner

They sell for pittance of what they were bought for on eBay. You can snatch some up for far less than what they sold for.

 

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Yes @Clawcoins I've had a couple of great deals on , mainly, the packaged stuff selling really inexpensively usually by people who are not collectors who bought them on a whim. Usually the sellers are selling a multitude of non coin related items at the same time so they are estate sales.
My latest win on Ebay was two Henry III pennies from the Brussels Hoard which cost me less than half the price of single pennies I've bought.

 

SS Tilawa Tragedy - "The Indian Ocean Titanic".

These coins turned up this week after an epic journey from the USA via France and as a result of the EBay Global Shipping Program was hit with extra charges. Lessons learnt but back to the thread as I am delighted with the coins that were struck to perpetuate the memory of the sinking of the SS Tilawa.



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This is the privy mark on the Britannia. An anchor with the date 1942 and SS Tilawa above.

And this is the privy mark of the Krugerrand.



SS Tilawa was an ocean liner of the British India Steam Navigation Company launched in 1924. She was the only passenger liner sunk during World War 2, targeted by a submarine of the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Indian Ocean on 23 November 1942, with the loss of 280 lives. HMS Birmingham and S.S. Carthage rescued 678 people. The survivors were extremely lucky as the Imperial Japanese Navy did not usually rescue or assist survivors and in fact went out of their way to murder them in cold blood including civilians. Ironically the Japanese upheld many of the traditions and structures of the British Royal Navy but chivalry and decency were not included and they had no respect or mercy for their defeated adversaries even if they had shown outstanding courage and resolve.

Many years ago, I read this book by Dr Mark Felton which makes grim reading.




The ship carried a cargo of 60 tonnes of silver bullion that was secretly recovered by a salvage company in 2017. This led to a legal dispute over ownership of the cargo between the salvors and the government of South Africa, the original owner of the silver.

The salvage was accomplished at a huge depth and transported to the UK and surrendered to the Receiver of Wrecks. The Salvors assumed that as it was a British Shipwreck the UK government could confirm ownership and salvage rights to them and this initially was granted in the Salvors favour but later overturned in the Supreme Court.

It is easy to find the full story online, but skip Wickipedia and browse this superb website set up by a descendent of a Tilawa casualty; Silver Bars - Part 2

 

Deep diving into the VOC vessel Hollandia.
I have a number of coins recovered from the Hollandia. They can be found in remarkably good condition. These are two of them. The first is a "Silver Rider" Dutch Ducaton and the second is a Spanish Mexican 8 Reales "Pillar Dollar".
The 8 Reales is pedigreed to the Hollandia on the NGC registry but they did not add the attribution to their label although it was requested.











A joy of being a coin collector and bibliophile is that you read before and after you buy a coin and often this results in fascinating research of subjects you many not have otherwise encountered.
If you have a coin recovered from the Hollandia, or in fact any Dutch VOC vessel or minted by the VOC this is a great book although the numismatic content is completely outweighed by everything else.

Hollandia Compendium: A Contribution to the History, Archeology, Classification and Lexicography of a 150 ft. Dutch East Indiaman (1740-1750)
This is the description of the book I've copied from Amazon.
The wreck of the Dutch East India Hollandia, which sank off the coast of Southwest England in 1743, is one of the most coherent and exhaustive sources of information about the history of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), 1602-1795. A collection of artifacts from the Hollandia, on display at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, has drawn increasing interest to the activities of the Company's exceptional international enterprise - particularly with regard to production, trade, and transport. The VOC succeeded in maintaining an almost worldwide trade and transport network for nearly two centuries. Artifacts from ships such as the Hollandia provide clues to the inter workings of the Company as a whole. The Hollandia Compendium is an interplay between historical and archaeological data, thus providing an elaborate and detailed visualisation of the VOC and its functions as a trading company. The present study is a catalogue of objects originating from the wreck. It is a lexicon of administrative usage of the VOC. Additionally included are discussions of the significance of VOC Ships to the development of a historical-archaeological discipline for further investigation of these wrecks, and a survey of historical sources, both material and written for information on ships of the VOC in the mid-18th century.

As the precis indicates this is more than an inventory of the artefacts recovered it gives a real insight into life and trade of the time. There are hundreds of line drawings of the objects alongside their descriptions including tools for all types of trades, medicines , weapons, utensils even bee hives!
It's a huge book , not quite matching the size of ERIC II but getting there.