Treasure

A Spanish galleon that sank 352 years ago with a treasure of plundered gold has been discovered in 50 feet of "turbulent and silty" water off the coast of Ecuador, according to the project's Norwegian financiers. The Spanish naval flagship La Capitana Jesus Maria went down in 1645 with a cargo of gold, silver and jewels stolen from Indians in what is now Peru. The treasure is believed to be worth between $3.7 billion and $7.5 billion, according to news reports.

An amateur treasure hunter prowling English farmland with a metal detector stumbled upon the largest Anglo-Saxon treasure ever found, a massive 7th century hoard of gold and silver sword decorations, crosses and other items, British archaeologists said. One expert said the treasure found by Terry Herbert, 55, would revolutionize understanding of the Anglo-Saxons, a Germanic people who ruled England from the 5th century until the Norman conquest in 1066. About 1,345 items have been examined and X-rays have shown that 56 lumps of earth contain metal artifacts, meaning the total will probably rise to about 1,500.

A jury awarded $22 billion to an American company that claims the late Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos stole a golden Buddha statue filled with gems from a treasure hunter, news reports said Saturday. "As far as I know, it is the largest verdict probably in the history of jurisprudence in the world," said Daniel Cathcart, attorney for the Atlanta-based Golden Buddha Corp.

Suddenly, in the shadows of a canyon above Downtown Los Angeles, there was a glint. Not from something shiny in the ground. From Marvin Baker's eye. "There! There's one of the treasure signs!" he exclaimed, pointing to a boulder jutting from a nearby hillside. "It shows where the treasure is." Baker scampered to the rock and brushed away the dust on top. There, scratched into the stone, were symbols--lines and circles worn by age and almost invisible. To Baker, it was a road map to riches.

A judge Saturday ordered the trial of two Californians and four other foreign scuba divers held on an island for 95 days on suspicion of illegal treasure hunting. "It stinks," Paul Martino said after being told of Judge Munsiri Syarkawi's decision to proceed with the trial Monday.

The hull of an 18th-Century British warship exhumed from Delaware Bay yielded only a gold coin, a shoe and some pig iron, but salvagers said Tuesday they believe a fortune in treasure may still be found in the water. "I think (the bay's floor) has treasure, much more than we found," said L. John Davidson, the New Hampshire developer who is financing the $2.5-million recovery effort.

Vengeance probably wasn't very high on your to-do list this holiday season. But it was for Karl S. Ryll, an otherwise unassuming El Monte teacher. Instead of spending his time around the punch bowl, Ryll spent part of his Christmas break halfway across the world, making sure that a treasure hunter named Dennis A. Standefer remained behind bars in a Jakarta, Indonesia, jail. For more than two years, Ryll, 39, has dedicated his energy to tracking Standefer.

Deep in the woods near Brushy Creek stands an old beech tree, its smooth bark etched with dozens of carvings, including biblical references, a heart and a legless horse. Bob Brewer was 10 when his great-uncle, W.D. "Grandpa" Ashcraft, pointed it out on a logging trip 57 years ago. "He said, 'Boy, you see that tree? That's a treasure tree,' " Brewer recalled on a recent visit to the site. " 'You see that writing? If you can figure out what that is, you'll find some gold.'

For Karl S. Ryll, who grew up dreaming of lost treasures in faraway lands, the lure of a sunken World War II ship in the Philippines was too strong to resist. So Ryll pinned his fantasy on a treasure hunter from Los Angeles named Dennis Standefer. The way Ryll tells it, Standefer boasted to investors that he had found a valuable shipwreck off a remote island in the Philippines and needed to raise funds to salvage its valuable mother lode.

When the gold-laden steamboat Central America sank 160 miles off the South Carolina coast in a hurricane in 1857, it seemed like a tragic ending to a tale of greed and hubris. More than 400 men drowned, most of them prospectors dragged 8,000 feet to the Atlantic floor by the bounty they could not or would not let go of.