Big Treasures and Small Treasures Treasure hunters don’t get depressed, because there are still treasures to be found. A cache of gold objects has just been found in Denmark. It is not a huge treasure, but a nice find which in total weight is about 2 pounds. 14.58 troy ounces equals one pound. This means the treasure at today’s rate, the rate when this article was written is about $52,200. I came to this conclusion by multiplying 29 ounces by $1800. It could turn out however the treasure is worth more if the objects are collectable. One treasure which was found was considered priceless. We all know nothing is priceless, but the price would be so high, no one could afford to buy it. It was the Bactrian Gold found in 1978. It was found in Afghanistan by a Greek-Russian archaeologist in an area fittingly known as the Golden Hill. There were graves at the site and five were for women and one for a man. The number of valuable objects which came out of the ground was incredible. It is hard to believe, but 20,600 valuable objects were found. It was not all gold. There were precious stones, gold, silver and even ivory. It is said the objects were from between 100 B.C. and 100 A.D. I find this hard to believe, but it is said someday it will be put in a museum in Kabul, but I believe it will land up in the hands of some terrorist group which needs funding. There was a treasure found in 2007 which had incredible value. Over $500 million worth of treasure was recovered from a shipwreck by a commercial company. Unfortunately for them, maritime law states if a treasure is found on a navy ship it belongs to the country of origin. The treasure was found to be on the Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes which sank in 1804 and belonged to the Spanish navy. The company had moved 17 tons of gold and silver coins and the story got out. This was not all of the treasure the company felt was in the wreck. The company had litigated and lost and on top of losing the treasure they were ordered to pay Spain 1 million dollars for bad faith and abusive litigation. Talk about rubbing salt into the wound. Nobody knows how many lost treasures there are, but we do know about a lot of famous stories about lost treasures, but we cannot be sure they are true or even accurate. Sometimes objects which we think are just plain junk and don’t give a second look to, can be valuable. If you saw a rock on the ground, would you even stop to look at it? The answer for most of us is no. I probably wouldn’t either but sometimes what we think is a rock can be a meteorite and they are valuable. As I am writing this article, I just happened to see a large meteorite on sale at Ebay. The price is $620,000. Shipping is $600. It weighs about 74 pounds. Most of us would not give it a second look. The Springwater Meteorite was found in Saskatchewan, Canada in 1931. It was in pieces and later on more pieces were found. The pieces were big, being 85, 41, and 23 pounds. A later piece was found which weighed 117 pounds and that one is in a museum. One piece was which is only 9 ounces is being sold online for $11,205. This is $1,245 per ounce. This means this meteor is selling per ounce for two thirds the price of an ounce of gold and far more than an ounce of silver. I have a friend who would always look down at the ground when walking. You might think this is strange, but it paid off for him. Every once in a while, he would find something valuable. I remember the day when he came back into the office with a broken gold necklace he had found in the gutter of a street. He took it to a dealer in gold at the time and got a few hundred dollars for it. This was many years ago. He also found a few other valuable objects. There are things most of us don’t expect to be valuable. Sometimes these objects are so beat up you would think they were garbage. Take the British Guiana 1c magenta for example. It is a ripped stamp and yet it is the most valuable in the world. The current estimated price is 9.48 million dollars and yet if you saw it laying on the ground, I bet you would never even bother to bend over to pick it up. The same is true for so many things. How many of you have cleaned out your kids toys and got rid of them when they grew up? Maybe you should have checked to see if they had any value first. Hot Wheels can go for more money than a real car. Take the pink van as an example. It was a 1969 Pink, rear-loading van known as the Beach Bomb. It is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars or the 1968 Over Chrome Mustang which is worth tens of thousands of dollars. Antique metal toys sometimes have good value especially if they still wind up or have all their parts. Sometimes even without all the parts they can still be valuable. In the 1980s the value of rare baseball cards shot up like a rocket. The old card from Honus Wagner sold for $6,606,000. A newer card of Mickey Mantle sold for 5.2 million dollars. Who would have thought when they were a kid abusing their baseball cards by flipping them and throwing them at a wall to see who could come the closest, these cars would have been worth money? I personally had a very large collection of baseball cards I won from other kids in contests and never thought about them that way.
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