For those who are not familiar with "Bahia 2."
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A band dedicated to expolio of sunk boats falls
The actions lowered thanks to the prisoners
By, FERNANDO PEREZ AVILA
Seville. “1561. Ship Santo Antonio. Seville. Shipwreck in the Guadalquivir”. Fast, nervous, red handwriting blue on a small card of archivist who becomes yellowish with the passage of the years. He is one of 3,000 documents on shipwrecks that the historian had in his power Claudius Bonifacio, Italian settled down in Seville and now stopped by the Civil Guard like presumed member of a band of delinquents dedicated to expolio of submarine archaeological rest. They are the seven members of this organization that have been arrested in this second phase of the operation Bay.
Bonifacio had managed to complete an enormous collection of sunk boats worldwide. For it it used almost 30 years of work, most of them between the File of Indians and the Protocol of Notary's offices. The historian got to say publicly that no longer some needed file to know where they could be left rest of boats. He counted on a series of navigation charts, among them one of the coast of the end San Vicente marked by done crossings ball-point pen. Each cross marks the more or less approximate point where it sank a boat, reconstructed through letters, newspapers, stories of survivors…
An excellent work of historian with illicit aims. The Civil Guard surprised Bonifacio sleepy in his house of Triana and there same she found him, in addition to the documentation, a GPS, a detector of metals very falsified, a measurer of resistance of the subsoil, prisms binocular with incorporated light, cartography, a notebook with annotations and some pieces of archaeological rest. The technological equipment was inside a knapsack that the agents got to baptize like kit of the expoliador.
In his three files of green color they appeared, divided according to the zone in which still they remain the rest, Spanish, English, French and Dutch ships that take centuries resting in waters of the Straits of Gibraltar, next to the Cabo of San Vicente, in the Caribbean, the Pacific and until in India and the Philippines. Of some there are bibliographical references, in almost all they appear the name of the captain and the load that took. Of others one only knows to the name of the boat and the year in which one sank.
The historian was an indispensable piece, the man who provided the key information so that the rest of the band could locate the treasures that soon sold. The pieces had their buyers. In this case one was North American companies, among them the Odissey company, announced in its day its intention to recover the treasures of the HSM Sussex, 1694 in the Straits of Gibraltar with a gold shipment silver and that the ship sunk - the experts think that he took ten tons of gold and one hundred of silver, that could be valued in 4.000 million euros.
The prisoners are the heirs of the pirates of the Louisa, the boat that already was catched at the beginning of year by the Civil Guard as a result of the sale of ten Spanish tubes and from that expolio on great scale in the Straits was organized. Some of the prisoners, among them Claudius Bonifacio and the ringleader of the band in Madrid, Jose Valero, appeared in mass media in several occasions, to the thread of that first stage of the operation Bay. Simply they were rival of that band that fell and tried to eliminate the competition assuring that the business of the cazatesoros had entered decay.
Four people have been arrested and more imputed in Madrid, where a bullet of tube of century XVII has been confiscated, rest of amphoras, a sonar of lateral sweeping, daily navigation charts and of work. In Algeciras a professional submariner and with him fell a robot of submarine shooting to remote control with capacity to work to a depth of 500 meters. Another people have been imputed more in Cabo de Palos (Murcia), where the Civil Guard found a trap, plates and recipientos coming from shipments of ships and necks of amphoras Roman. Also there was a halting in Real City. The Sevillian historian completes the list, perhaps the man who knows more in the world on sunk boats.
5/8/06
?? so what has the sequel been? That was 5 years ago. Incidentally that article tends to show just how bad a literal interpretation can be, even to changing the context to an extent.
