Pirate Treasure

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It is still out there folks -- or is it... From the Australian branch of NEWS.COM:
Billion-dollar pirate treasure trove found
TREASURE hunters believe they have found a legendary trove of 18th century jewels and gold coins worth billions of dollars on Chile's Robinson Crusoe island.

The island in the Juan Fernandez archipelago, 700km west of Chile was a refuge for corsairs crossing the Pacific Ocean.

Legend has it Spanish navigator Juan Esteban Ubilla y Echeverria stashed a fortune on the island in 1715.

It was later found by a British sailor Cornelius Webb and reburied in another area. An expedition using a metal-detecting robot believe they have pinpointed the site.
The Guardian has some more:
600 barrels of loot found on Crusoe island
The archipelago is named after Robinson Crusoe, but perhaps it should have been called Treasure Island.

A long quest for booty from the Spanish colonial era appears to be culminating in Chile with the announcement by a group of adventurers that they have found an estimated 600 barrels of gold coins and Incan jewels on the remote Pacific island.

"The biggest treasure in history has been located," said Fernando Uribe-Etxeverria, a lawyer for Wagner, the Chilean company leading the search. Mr Uribe-Etxeverria estimated the value of the buried treasure at US$10bn (�5.6bn).

The announcement set off ownership claims. The treasure hunters claimed half the loot was theirs and said they would donate it to non-profit-making organisations. The government said that they had no share to donate.
Nice government -- this has lawsuit written allll over it... The technology used is very cool as well:
This most recent announcement, however, deserves greater credence because of the equipment used by the treasure hunters: a mini robot that can scan 50 metres deep into the earth. The robot, dubbed "Arturito", was invented by Chileans and over the past year has grabbed headlines by breaking some of the country's biggest criminal mysteries.

First, the robot detected the buried arsenal of a rightwing sect known as Colonia Dignidad. The guns and rocket launchers were buried at some 10 metres and while the authorities had searched for years, the robot found the buried weapons almost instantly. Then, in the case of missing businessman Jose Yuraszeck, Arturito was able to analyse the soil and identify the molecular composition of human bones, allowing investigators to dig straight to the body of the murder victim.

- BUT -

Reading the New Scientist, we have the story but some questions:
Robot claims 'treasure island' booty
A robotic treasure hunter has laid claim to the find of the century, on the very archipelago that inspired the novel Robinson Crusoe.

The robot, called "Arturito" or "Little Arthur", is said to have discovered the 18th-century buried treasure on the island of Robinson Crusoe - named after the book. The island lies 660 kilometres from the coast of Chile in South America.
And the questions start to creep in:
The Chilean company responsible for developing Arturito, Wagner Technologies, announced at the weekend that the robot had found the booty by probing 15 metres below ground. The company plans to start excavating in a matter of days, as soon as permits can be obtained.
So they are claiming 800 barrels of gemstones and ingots but have not actually set eyes on them. A bit more from the New Scientist -- they asked Adam Booth who is an expert in Ground Penetrating Radar about Arturito:
Adam Booth an expert in GPR archaeology at the University of Leeds, UK, says it would be necessary to use a low-frequency signal to search at 15 metres' depth. But this would decrease the resolution of the signal, he says. It would be "very, very difficult", to distinguish between different metals so far down, Booth told New Scientist.

But Booth says further details could be gleaned by using other techniques in combination with GPR, such as magnetometry, which measures disturbances to the Earth's magnetic field.

Robert Richardson, a robotics expert at the University of Manchester, UK, says a robot could feasibly hunt for treasure, but believes a human controller would be crucial. "It is difficult to interpret GPR images, requiring a trained operator," he says. "It sounds more of a mobile sensing platform than a robot."

Marvin Pitney of US company Subsurface Radar Solutions agrees that it can be tricky to identify sub-surface objects accurately. "It takes years of practice," he says. "But once you get really good at interpreting images you can tell the difference between metals and plastic."
OK so technically it is possible but not an easy task. I tried Googling Wagner Technologies and Chile and only returned hits referring to this story including this one from this blog:
Crusoe Island Treasure Claim was a Hoax!
Well, here's a surprise. They were lying when they said that Arturito had discovered 800 tons of treasure. Just a big fat calculated lie to draw attention to their stupid little robot. They're sheisters and snake-oil salesmen. What's sad is that, Chile is nothing but an technological backwater, and always will be. And this just reinforces that. Anyone that thinks that some mental dwarf living on the wrong side of the equator is going to develop technology that the industrialized world doesn't have is an idiot. There is no technology on earth that can say for certain that a mass of metal 50 feet underground is gold or iron. The only people that don't know that are the idiotic talking heads that swallowed this story hook, line, and sinker because they're so incomprehensibly dense.

And, when the technology does exist, it won't come from Chile. Certainly not from the criminal idiots at Wagner Technologies or Wagner Industries or Wagner Security or Wagner Transportation or Wagner whatever they call themselves tomorrow. Chile is a confederacy of dunces and criminals.

WAGNER RENOUNCES CLAIMS TO CHILE�S BURIED TREASURE
Government Expected Contentious Debate Over Rights To Loot

(Oct. 5, 2005) A new twist in the story of buried treasure on Robinson Crusoe Island, which has kept Chile and the world in suspense for the last three weeks, surfaced Monday after Wagner Technologies renounced all claims to the treasure supposedly worth US$10 billion.

Wagner Technologies, the company that claims it discovered the treasure, met late Monday with government officials in Valpara�so in what was expected to be a contentious debate over the rights to the treasure.

But according to Fernando Uribe-Etxeverr�a, lawyer for Wagner Technologies, the company does not believe it is capable of excavating the treasure; all it wanted was the free press.

This abrupt turn of events surprised government officials, who were prepared to discuss excavation permits and decide how to divide the treasure with the company. Wagner instead agreed to turn over the coordinates to the government on the condition that if the treasure is excavated, a portion would be given to a number of Chilean charities, as well as the island�s residents.
Riiiggghhttt... There is ten billion dollars worth of treasure sitting there and we don't want to claim any of it because we do not have the ability to dig a fifty foot hole in the ground. Cripes -- I'd be out there with Buttercup that same day.

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on October 14, 2005 8:29 PM.

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