Rare Treasure Finds: Where & What to Look For

Learn from the legends and what are the things they found along the way. We might think that all that glitter are gold, well some don’t but some burns too. Thing is, you have to look to unconventional place and think unconventional to finding a litteral treasure.

Step 1: Look for some unexpected places

In other words, don’t head straight for the Caribbean. Instead, try looking somewhere new, somewhere exotic – like, say, New Jersey. Turns out, the Garden State harbored a lot more piracy than you’d think. Most famously, the state (then sparsely populated colony) was one of the last places notorious privateer-turned-pirate William Kidd visited before he was captured in 1700. KIdd was hanged in England, swearing to the end that he’d buried a fortune and would happily trade it for his life. No one was willing to take him up on his offer, possibly because a cache of gold worth roughly $2.4 million in today’s currency had already been found near Long Island shortly after his arrest. But Kidd claimed that another $7.2 million worth of gold was left for the repillageing.

If he wasn’t lying, then it’s still buried. Where? A story published in Issue 14 of the magazine Weird New Jersey suggests that the most likely spot is the Garden States Raritan Bay, where Kidd is know to have anchored and where 17th century gold coins have been found in two different locations.

Further Proof: Two of Kidd’s former crewmen later turned up nearby – living significantly reformed (and reportedly well-financed) lives.

Step 2: Treasures out-of-the-box

It’s true, all that glitters isn’t gold – sometimes, it’s a space rock instead. In 2005, a professional meteorite hunter named Steve Arnold started leasing tracts of western Kansas farmland and scouring theme for the metal lumps known as pallasites, extremely rare meteorites made up of iron and laced with hunks of crystal. Arnold’s search was the result of an extensive study of Pallasites found strewn over one Kansas county since 1900 – all of which were leftover bits from a much larger meteorite that entered Earth’ s atmosphere somewhere around 10,000 to 20,000 years ago.

By Arnold’s calculations, there were still tons of pallasites left to be discovered and in October 2005, he was proven right. More than 5 feet beneath the farm field, he discovered the largest pallasite on record, a 1,430-pound behemoth. And, thanks to a rollicking collector market, Wired Magazine estimated in January 2007 that the rock is worth more than $1 million. In fact, smaller pallasites Arnold has found have sold as yuppie objets d’art for anywhere from $40,000 and up.

Step 3: Look for treasure bigger than a shoe box

You’d hate to miss the forest for the little wooden chests. After all, one of the greatest missing treasures in all of Europe is – literally – the size of a room. Originally given to the Russian Czar Peter the Great as a sign of friendship with Prussia, the Amber Room was just what it sounds like: An 11-square-foot room where just about every inch was covered in precious, intricately carved amber. Today, it would be worth $142 million – that is, if anyone knew where it was. Despite the Russians’ valiant attempts to disguise the room behind wallpaper, the Nazis ended up finding and dismantling it during World War II.

What happened next is all speculation. Various first-and-second person accounts have placed it in an abandoned German min, in a torpedoed Nazi steamboat at the bottom of the Bering Sea, and – most ironically – burnt to cinders by the Allies during an air raid.

Whatever the case, most historians don’t expect the room to ever turn up intact. In 1997, however, German police did bust a man for trying to sell a jasper and onyx mosaic that has once been part of the Amber Room. The lead wasn’t particularly useful, though. It turned out that the man’s father had been part of the escort that brought the room from Russia nearly 60 years before and has swiped the piece then as a personal trophy. In April o 1997, the mosaic was returned to Russia.

References: “Be Amazing” – By: Mental Floss. Authored by Maggie Koerth – Baker with Will Pearson and Mangesh Hattikudur. Pp. 2 – 3.

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Author's Corner

Sweet, I blame you not, for mine the fault was, had I not been made of common clay. I had climbed the higher heights unclimbed yet, seen the fuller air, the larger day. From the wildness of my wasted passion I had struck a better, clearer song, Lit some lighter light of freer freedom, battled with some Hydra-headed wrong. – Oscar Wilde