Treasure Found

Treasure Found

INTRODUCTION On Saturday morning, you are busy cleaning your room. Under your bed, you discover a box. You look inside. You see a plastic ring, a birthday card with a dollar inside, a shell, and a postcard from a friend. You say, " Wow! I forgot about this stuff. " You have just found treasure.

TREASURE HUNTING Treasure is anything that someone thinks is valuable. Over the years, much treasure has been found. In 1922, Howard Carter found gold and gems in the tomb of ancient Egypt’s King Tutankhamun. In 1874, Heinrich Schliemann dug up an ancient Greek city. In 1964, Robert Marx found a city, too, under the sea near the island of Jamaica. He also discovered thousands of silver coins.

In Florida, Kip Wagner picked up some Spanish coins called “ pieces of eight, " which had washed up on the shore. He knew they had come from a shipwreck. He started to search the ocean floor. He wanted to find the shipwreck. Over time, he found sunken treasure worth millions of dollars.

SUNKEN TREASURE Sunken treasure is especially hard to find because it is under water. Yet, people continue to search for treasure deep under the sea. A Spanish ship called the Atocha (ah-TOH-cha) held one of the most famous sunken treasures. In 1622, a group of Spanish ships, including the Atocha, took on a cargo of gold, silver, coins, and gems. The ships left Havana, Cuba, headed for Spain. They sailed into the path of a great storm. The Atocha and several of the other ships in the group sank near the Florida Keys.

Spain sent ships to find the cargo from the sunken shipwrecks. Divers found the cannon from the Santa Margarita, one of the ships from the group. They could not find anything else because another storm had broken up that ship. They did not find any sign of the Atocha.