Any ideas of age and purpose of this ingot?

L

LilyCL

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Jul 4, 2023
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My daughter found this while we were snorkeling on a recent Caribbean cruise. It is a little over 4 lbs weight, very crude ingot casting (old maybe?), and has a relative density somewhere in the 8.5 area so thinking it is either brass or bronze. Any help on best ways to research historic and any other value appreciated.


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It's cool for sure. Nice find! If you can locate someone with XRF gun, they could get exact metal compositions & possibly date it from there.
 

LilyCL said:
My daughter found this while we were snorkeling on a recent Caribbean cruise. It is a little over 4 lbs weight, very crude ingot casting (old maybe?), and has a relative density somewhere in the 8.5 area so thinking it is either brass or bronze. Any help on best ways to research historic and any other value appreciated.


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Nice!!! Congrats !!!
 

LilyCL said:
No markings on it. I will look into XRF.
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Might surprise you what it might be. It will sure shed some light on it, & help with a identification. A lot of high end scrap yards are starting to use them, so you might try there.
 

Kind of looks like an old loaf of bread......now I'm hungry
 

I have a feeling about this one, we need some Spanish galleon folk to chime in.
 

unclemac said:
I have a feeling about this one, we need some Spanish galleon folk to chime in.
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Might be 4lbs of a lower grade gold!!! That's why I mentioned the XRF gun. I'm excited & Lol I didnt even find it!!! 🤣😂🤣
 

Hopefully its a crude ingot made by pirates from whatever gold and silver they had on hand. Throw some jewelry in the pot as well with whatever other metal it contains.
I’m really hoping for you that what it is!!!
 

Possible tumbaga bar. These bars can have a mixture of metals, and were usally crudely cast in sand molds. They can contain copper, gold, and silver. The spanish cast these crude bars for transport home were they would be further refined. I've herd of bars being 97%copper, and 3 percent gold. They can also be 97%gold and 3 percent copper. There is no standard, and people have been melting scrap into bars for many more years. I recently found a similar bar, on a remote bahamian beach. I have not taken it to have XRF analysis but would like too.....there is a thread on here already about the type of bars I found, but absolutely no one on any site can help with identifying these bars. Mine was about 1 foot down and was completely encrusted. Mine has marks and so do many others on the other thread. Still no one seems to know the true identity and composition. I will link that thread here if I can find it.
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After dissolving the encrustation off the bar, some marks turned up.....seems others have similar bars but no one has figured out the details. Yours looks bigger, and even more crudely cast. Maybe yours is older. There is the other possibility that these are muntz metal, and are related to the sheathing process practiced in shipbuilding in the 1800s ??
 

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