In 2007, Odyssey Marine Exploration, a marine treasure hunting company, found a Spanish colonial-era shipwreck while surveying the waters off of Gibraltar for the colonial-era HMS Merchant Royal wreck. Odyssey salvaged the wreck, code-named Black Swan, in secret, recovering 594,000 silver coins estimated to be worth $500 million. After salvaging the coins, Odyssey transported them to the US for auction to the public. The ship was later confirmed to the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, a Spanish war frigate sunk by British ships in 1804 after it was blown off course returning from Peru. The Mercedes carried a mostly civil cargo comprising of Peruvian silver and several citizens’ personal cargos. Shortly after Odyssey publicly announced its find, …show more content…
However, “the Mercedes was not exclusively in non-commercial service when it sank” (Gomez, 218), but also carried civil cargo from twenty-five Spanish citizens and silver from Peru (Alderman, 3). Even though both the descendants of the twenty-five cargo owners and the government of Peru both filed claims to ownership of the cargo, the courts ignored these claims and had the coins shipped directly to Spain. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Spain had standard insurance system in which partners would fund ships through credit, or purchase space on Spanish warships (Gomez, 217), to spread out losses and divide profits from shipping (*insurance, 233). Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that, upon the loss of the Mercedes, the private shippers were compensated through insurance. This, however, still leaves out Peru’s claims to the cargo of the …show more content…
Between 1803 and 1804, the Mercedes left Peru for Spain, was blown off course, and was sunk by a British fleet. Since she never arrived in Spain, it makes little sense for the coins to have been “returned” to Spain. Instead, Peru should have received its preferential rights as both the cultural and historical country of origin. Since Peru was a colony of Spain in 1804, the court ruled that the coins belonged to Spain. However, under the law of State Succession’s article 13, a decolonized sovereign State has full jurisdiction over all of its natural resources (*Vienna). Peru argued that since these natural resources were taken from Peru as a result of vicious colonial exploitation, the silver coins should be repatriated (Alderman,
Black Water Rafting Case Analysis Black Water Rafting has outgrown their original business plan, goals, and partnership setup; to ensure growth, protect itself from impeding competition, and to ensure future financing Black Water Rafting must establish a strategic plan for the next two years. Because of external pressures from both competition and uncertainty about their primary tour, which accounts for 66.7% of their income, Black Water Rafting must diversify their offerings to customers to ensure future growth and a competitive advantage. As external market conditions and the environment change, such as the land rights of the native tribes of New Zealand, private landowners and a new hotel proposal, Black Water Rafting's profitability and ability to react in the market is affected.
merchandises just for silver. More than 600,000 pieces of silver coins were taken from each of
Firstly, the Caribbean smuggling was viewed as necessary and positive in the late eighteenth century. According to William Taggart, a British sailor traveling to testify at his smuggling trial in April 1760, the illegal transportation of goods from the Spanish port of Monte Christi led to general prosperity in the area, as there were only 100 relatively poor families and that the governor had full knowledge of this and demanded a tax of one silver Spanish coin. Taggart mi...
Blackbeard was a brave and most outspoken sea rovers who operated during early 1700s in the coastal regions of the English Southern parts of the New world. His piracy activities, together with his co-pirates are key sectors in United States of America’s history. Happening in the time eminently known as the golden age of piracy, their brave advances in sea robbery facilitated the gradual demise of sea hijacking and theft on the deep seas.1
Black Swan Events are unplanned events that has a huge impact, these events can be environmental or financial events that are unpredictable or unexplainable.
Even though there were many factors contributing to the Challenger disaster, the most important issue was the lack of an effective risk management plan. The factors leading to the Challenger disaster are:
Workers grew concerned about their situation as the century progressed, after the Silver Crash of 1893. The Sherman Act of 1890 (SHRM, 2014) obliged the Treasury to buy silver every month at market value. The government had bought almost all the silver from the mines. This also caused the depletion of gold. People presented their issued notes to the government and received gold instead of silver. Workers organized and tried to improve their lot in life. Management and government opposed their efforts. J.P. Morgan had an upper hand here. Morgan purchased the debt of the Treasury for 3.5 million ounces of gold in exchange for $65 million worth of 30-year gold bonds. During this time of panic, J.P. Morgan acted as the Nation’s bank.
Imagine you’re peacefully sailing along on a giant cruise liner in the middle of the ocean. But suddenly, you feel a shaking and the boat starts to tip. But how could this be? This boat is supposed to be unsinkable. People run to the far side of the boat, trying to avoid impending doom. Panic sets in aboard the Titanic. There are many theories of the cause of this loss of life, but I believe that the primary cause of catastrophic loss of life on the Titanic was the poor communication between crew members because a critical iceberg warning was never delivered to the captain, the Titanic was traveling at full speed in an ice field, and the captain of the ship was very relaxed about the iceberg, making it not seem like a threat.
"The Wreck of the Henrietta Marie." The Mel Fisher Maritime Museum. 2001. Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society, Inc., Web. 13 Dec 2009. .
In Shipwreck at the bottom of the world, Jennifer Armstrong tells the story of Ernest Shackleton and his crew's expedition to the South Pole which quickly goes awry, leaving the men with no ship and only the supplies that could be carried on one's back. One particularly intriguing passage occurs shortly after Shackleton gave the order to abandon ship and after he made the decision to try and reach Paulet Island on foot. In preparation for the journey, Shackleton dropped his heavy gold cigarette case and coins on the ice and then pulled out his Bible, ripped a page from the book of Job, and dropped the remainder of the Bible to rest on the frozen sea. He read an excerpt from that page before folding it and sliding it into his pocket: "Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath gendered it? The waters are hid as with a stone, And the face of the deep is frozen." These words are from Job 29-30 and are spoken by God.
The tragic history of the Titanic, the sinking of the “unsinkable” giant of a ship shocked the entire world and contributed to important shifts in the mass consciousness of the people who lived at that period and assessed the achievements of new technologies and their role. However, one would have been hardly able to predict in 1912 that this tragedy, no matter how significant and meaningful, would leave such a deep imprint on the history of human civilization. The continuing interest in the fate of the great vessel has taken the form of various narrations and given rise to numerous myths enveloping the true history and, in this way, often obscuring the facts related to the tragedy. In recent years, this interest has been emphasized by the dramatic discovery of the wreck and examination of its remains. The recovery of artifacts from the Titanic and the exploration of the site where it had sank stimulated new speculations on different issues of the failure to rescue the Titanic and the role of different factors contributing to the disaster. These issues have been traditionally in the focus of discussions that caused controversies and ambiguous interpretations of various facts. They also often overshadowed other parts of the disaster story that were confirmed by statistical data and revealed the impact of social realities. The social stratification of passengers that reflected the social realities of the period and its class interests determined the chances of survival, with most of those perished in the Titanic disaster having been lower class individuals.
A prime example of the possible contributions of underwater archaeology is the Ulu Burun shipwreck. The Ulu Burun shipwreck is the remains of a Late Bronze Age (~1600 – 1050 BCE) trading vessel dated to about 1300 BCE. The shipwreck was discovered in 1982 off the coast of Ulu Burun, near the modern city of Kas, Turkey. This fifty-foot long vessel was resting at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea at a depth of approximately 150 feet. Eleven sets of excavations were conducted from 1984 to 1994 in order to deliver the artifacts to the surface for analysis. From this wreck site, archaeologists now have a more detailed and precise understanding about the trade and distribution of commodities in the Late Bronze Age.
There are mysteries which man can only guess at, which may only ever truly be solved in part; the SS Edmund Fitzgerald’s sinking is one of them. At the time it was launched in 1958, the 729-foot long, 75-foot wide freighter was the largest ship to ply the Great Lakes. Although, on November 9, 1975 the ship embarked upon what would become its final voyage. She was carrying 26,000 tons of iron ore pellets and bound for Detroit, and though the day was bright, in her path laid great turbulence. On November 10, at 1:00am, the first signs of trouble appeared, and prevailed into the afternoon. As the waves built, luck was neither with the ship nor the crew. At 7:10 PM, Captain McSorley delivered what was to be his final message "We are holding our own." Ten minutes later, the Fitzgerald could neither be raised by radio, nor detected on radar, and no distress signal was received. With that, the ship and crew of 29 men sank to the bottom of Lake Superior. Several expeditions have been mounted to the wreck and have been the subject of some controversy. There are many theories for how the Fitzgerald found itself hundreds of feet below the water; however none of them have been proven indefinitely. One possible cause of this disaster includes the ship crossing the Superior Shoal, with water as shallow as 22 feet. Additionally, the ship may have suffered a stress fracture and broke apart on the surface. Another possibility is that the ship succumbed to the forces of the Three Sisters, a Lake Superior phenomenon, consisting of massive waves. These current theories are merely conjectures, and since each holds the possibility of being true, it cannot yet be determined which one actually is.
According to Munsterberg’s film theory, the motion picture is an original medium in that it aesthetically stimulates the spectator’s senses. Although both still picture and theatrical play can possibly leave images on the spectator’s retina or brain, each element of motion picture, including camera angle and work, lighting, editing, music, and the story itself, appeals to somewhere more than just retina or brain— the element of motion picture truly operates upon the spectator’s mind. Speaking of Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, the film unfolds a story of physically and mentally repressed ballerina’s life. Due to the film’s effective filming and editing techniques, the film successfully increases excitement as well as suspense in the story. Since Black Swan captures not only the real world the ballerina lives in but also the other side of the world the ballerina has within her mind, its spectator would experience a fantastic world where one ballerina lives in two different worlds at the same time. Even though the still picture and the theatrical play also give the spectator either a visual or an aural image, motion picture is the one that stimulates the spectator’s senses with its story, color, sound, acting, filming, and editing.
While this proposition is true, it did not in any way stop Turkey from asserting jurisdiction over acts in a foreign ship that resulted in the death of Turkish nationals aboard the Boz-Kourt as the ship is placed in the same position as national territory. The same principles of international law that apply between the territories of two different States apply and international law does not prohibit the cognizance of the acts aboard a foreign ship. This conclusion would have been amended had there been a rule of customary international law that established the exclusive jurisdiction of the State whose flag was flown. However, France failed to conclusively prove the existence of such a rule of customary international law and so, the previous conclusion