沈没船の引き上げにライフルはいらないでしょ（違法）

南部スペイン沖で遺物の引き上げを行っていたグループがスペイン政府に逮捕されたそうです。引き上げられた遺物は金・銀などはもちろん大砲の弾、ローマ時代の碇、トラファルガー海戦の鉄砲弾などなど。このグループはライフルやマシンガンなども船内にあったそうです。

スペインの南岸には８００隻ほどの１６-１８世紀のガレオン船が沈んでおり、さらにポルトガル領海にもスペインのガレオン船が１５０隻ほどあるそうです。ほとんどの船は長い航海の帰りに浅瀬に乗り上げ、水深１０－１５ｍ程の場所で沈没しました。世界各地には５０００-６０００隻ほどのガレオン船が沈没しているそうです。

Spanish police arrest galleon plunderers

· Boat trawled country’s huge shipwreck cemetery
· Robot, satellite and sonar used to hunt for artifacts

Dale Fuchs in Madrid
Monday February 6, 2006
The Guardian

Spanish police have broken up a ring of undersea looters who have spent the last two years allegedly plundering the archaeological treasures of Spanish galleons and other historic ships that sank off the coast of southern Spain.
At the weekend, the local civil guard in Cádiz announced the arrest of two Hungarian men and an American woman believed to have set up an on-deck laboratory on their ship, the Louisa, where they used hi-tech equipment – including an undersea robot worth €600,000 (£410,000) – to illegally identify, salvage and treat artifacts from the wrecks. More arrests are expected.

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The shallow waters in which they operated, a colonial-era hub of trade with the New World, is the country’s largest shipwreck cemetery, holding an estimated €1.5bn in sunken gold, silver and pearls, according to Juan Manuel Gracia, president of the Association for the Recovery of Spanish Galleons. The treasures were the ill-fated cargo of 800 overloaded ships that settled to the bottom of the Gulf of Cádiz from the 16th to 18th centuries.
The loot confiscated in the weekend’s arrest included 27 cannonballs from the 17th century, three Roman-era anchors, a Phoenician vase, and bullets from the Battle of Trafalgar, all of which will be sent for analysis and preservation at the Centre for Underwater Archaeology in Cádiz. The treasure-hunters apparently located the pieces using maps translated from old Spanish and photocopies of other documents found in the Archive of the Indies, in Seville.

The pirates navigated the depths using four global positioning satellite system receivers, eight underwater metal detectors, a 30-metre suction hose and two sonars sending signals from the seabed.

The rest of the confiscated cargo attests to the world which apparently the underwater scavengers inhabited, civil guard commander Antonio Dichas told reporters on Saturday. On the Louisa, police found five M-16 assault rifles, a semi-automatic shotgun, and cartridges. “They had no other justification for the weapons than to defend themselves from other plunderers,” Mr Dichas said.

To hide their finds from rivals and the authorities at the Port of Santa Maria, where they had docked since 2004, the ring used oxygen tanks with hidden compartments, police said.

Many companies use similar hi-tech equipment to legally salvage wrecks in the US, Latin America and the Caribbean. But in Spain, the government has refused to grant permission to search and salvage, said Mr Gracia. He founded the Association for Recovery of Spanish Galleons in 1996 to push the government into taking greater initiative in recovering Spain’s lost gold, silver and gems before other countries scoured the seabed.

The arrest of the looting ring comes as Spain is embroiled in a dispute with Britain and the US over the Sussex, a British warship that sank in the Mediterranean in 1694 with $4bn (£2.3bn) in gold coins aboard. Britain claims the ship, and hired an American company, Odyssey Marine Exploration, to recover the hulk. Spain, however, lays claim to the waters off the Straits of Gibraltar, and believes it has the power to oversee the operation.

Seabed trove

· Roughly 800 galleons from the 16th to 18th centuries rest on the seabed in the Gulf of Cádiz, off southern Spain, nexus of trade with the Spanish colonies.

· Another 150 galleons went down off the coast of neighbouring southern Portugal.

· The ships are believed to have contained a total of €1.5bn (£1.02bn) in gold, silver and pearls.

· Most of the shipwrecks along the Spanish coast occurred when rotting hulls hit shallows, where they were ripped apart. They rest at a depth of 10 to 15 metres (33ft to 49ft); some are buried under layers of sand. Pirates were rarely to blame.

· Between 5,000 and 6,000 Spanish galleons were sunk along Spain’s colonial trade routes, in the Caribbean, around Panama and Florida, as a result of hurricanes and tropical storms.

Source: The Association for the Recovery of Spanish Galleons

引用元：http://www.guardian.co.uk/spain/article/0,,1703217,00.html?gusrc=rss