Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes

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The sinking of the Mercedes, painting by Francis Sartorius (1734–1804).
The approximate location of the Mercedes shipwreck off the southern coast of Portugal

The Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes ( Spanish for Our Lady of Grace ) was a Spanish frigate .

She sank off the coast of Portugal on October 5, 1804 . Even before the Spanish declaration of war on Great Britain on December 12, 1804, four British frigates attacked four Spanish frigates coming from South America. In the naval battle of October 5, 1804 , a Spanish ship exploded and the other three were captured. The 1805 Naval Chronicle describes the event at length in English.

Discovery and return of the treasure to Spain

The Spanish government suspected that the US company Odyssey Marine Exploration discovered the shipwreck and secretly recovered its treasure. In September 2011 a US appeals court in Atlanta confirmed this view and awarded the salvaged gold to Spain.

On February 25, 2012, the treasure, which consists of more than 500,000 gold and silver coins, was flown to Madrid by two transport planes of the Spanish Air Force. The coins, whose value is estimated at more than 350 million euros, are to be distributed among several museums and collections.

Peru also made claims to the treasure, as the coins were minted in 1796 in what was then the Spanish colony.

See also

Web links

Commons : Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Helmut Pemsel: Sea rule. A maritime world history from the beginning to 1850. Augsburg 1995, p. 355
  2. ↑ [1] The Naval chronicle: containing a general and biographical history of the royal navy of the United kingdom with a variety of original papers on nautical subjects (digitized from a copy of the library of the University of California on Internet Archive )
  3. ^ Treasure hunters ordered to return £ 250m of loot to Spain - The Telegraph, June 4, 2009
  4. ↑ Treasure hunters report millions found in the Atlantic - Spiegel Online, September 26, 2011
  5. ^ Court decision: Biggest ship's gold treasure goes to Spain - Spiegel Online, September 22, 2011
  6. ↑ a b Spain brought back millions of coins from the USA at derstandard.at, February 25, 2012 (accessed on February 26, 2012).