Nearly a year after Odyssey Marine Exploration recovered roughly $500-million in coins from a shipwreck it code-named “Black Swan,” the Tampa treasure-hunting company has finally gone public with the ship’s suspected identity.

Odyssey said Thursday that evidence may point to the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes y las Animas, a Spanish ship that was blown up by the British off Cape Santa Maria, Portugal in 1804. The disclosure will have little impact on the protracted legal battle between Odyssey and the government of Spain as to who owns the vessel’s treasure, but the announcement confirmed what was already widely believed in Spain and elsewhere.

An attorney for the Spanish government said he would go “full speed ahead” with trying to force Odyssey Marine Exploration to give back the 17 tons of silver coins and other artifacts already removed from the shipwreck site last year. A customs form in the court file indicated the coins were raised from that general location and flown out of Gibraltar to Tampa.

Oddessy marine issues a press release in which Greg Stemm, Odyssey’s Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer said “As our Motion for Protective Order explained, we had hoped to maintain the confidentiality of information we consider to be speculative. Experience has shown us how difficult it is to prevent unwarranted speculation about the identity and potential value of our finds once the possible identity of a site is made public, but we also respect the need to make sufficient information public to satisfy the requirement to alert potential claimants.”

No doubt that the legal and public relations battle concerning the treasure will continue for some time. Odyssey officials believe the court will award them the majority of the treasure as the salver. Spain is arguing that it should all be returned because it was never expressly abandoned.

Editors Comment: However the legal issues play out, which is a topic far beyond my knowledge or capabilities to analyse, I do have a fundamental problem with the Spanish claims. Surely 200+ years is enough time to get off of ones ass and look for and recover property that you consider to be yours. I understand that it much easier to let someone else undertake the risks and do the heavy lifting, then parade yourself into court with self righteous indignation over ones cultural heritage being plundered. I wonder what the Inca and Mayan Indians think about all this?

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By Diana Aydin, Jewish Exponent Feature

When Tom Pilitowski was about 6 years old, and at home because of the flu, he took out his brother’s coin collection, kept in Whitman folders, and cleaned the coins “with a pencil eraser.”

“Not sure why I decided to do that,” he said. “He’s my older brother, Billy, and as the younger brother I probably wanted to do something to help him out. And noticing his coins were ‘dirty,’ I decided to clean them.”

The act of kindness wasn’t appreciated when his brother saw what he had done.

Pilitowski, a coin dealer and president of U.S. Rare Coin Investments (www.usrarecoininvestments.com), knows better now, but the experience was his “very first exposure to coin collecting.”

“The passion slowly developed over time, and it was others around me that noticed that [development],” he said. “I didn’t realize that I’d become a ‘lifer’ in the profession [till] years later.”

Like Pilitowski, a collector’s passion for collecting items like stamps or coins can start in childhood.

Editors Note: Tom also did an interview on 3-12-08 with CoinChat Radio

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NGC has discovered that 2008-W Uncirculated Silver Eagles have been struck with two different reverse types. Many are aware that Silver Eagles issued in 2008 show numerous subtle modifications to their design. NGC has now confirmed that 2008-W Uncirculated Silver Eagles were also struck using reverse dies of the pre-modification style, or reverse type of 2007.

The two reverse styles are very easy to distinguish from one another. As NGC previously reported, the most obvious identification diagnostic is the U of UNITED on the coin’s reverse. On the Reverse of 2008, the U has a spur on the right side of the letter. The Reverse of 2007, has simply a bowl-shaped U, without spur or downstroke. A number of other diagnostics are evident and are illustrated below.

NGC is designating 2008-W Silver Eagles with reverse style of 2007 as REVERSE OF 2007. Coins of the newly modified style, or Reverse of 2008, are encapsulated without designation. “This is a significant hub variety,” comments Rick Montgomery, NGC President. “It has very clear diagnostics, and appears on one of the most widely collected of all US coins. We’re also very proud to be the first to present this information to the numismatic community and to attribute the variety as part of the NGC certification process.”

Read Full Article by NGC on the Discovery

Greg McCoach is an entrepreneur, who has successfully started and run several businesses the past 22 years. For the last 7 of these years he has been involved with the precious metals industry as a bullion dealer, investor, and newsletter writer.

Mr. McCoach’s years of business experience and extensive personal contacts in the mining industry provide unique insights that have generated an impressive track record for The Mining Speculator since its inception in 2001. He also spreads his vast knowledge of the precious metals markets in a weekly column for Gold World.

Greg is also the President of AmeriGold, a gold bullion dealer.

TGR: Going to gold, what would you recommend our readers buy?

MCCOACH: I think people have to decide for themselves if they want to own the physical gold or paper representations of the metal, and they clearly need to understand what the differences are so they can make an intelligent decision for themselves. The paper representation would be gold ETFs or the Central Fund of Canada Ltd. (CEF AMEX). The mining stocks would also be paper representations. They don t represent physical gold themselves they represent a stock.

I own AmeriGold.com. I set that up back in 1999 so that my clients could have a safe and reliable place for trading buying and selling physical gold and silver, platinum and palladium with very low transaction costs. AmeriGold has done very well, particularly in the last six to eight months, when we ve had a ton of people who suddenly want to own the physical metals.

I like owning the physical metals it s just my opinion. Some people don t like it because it gets messy dealing with the physical metals you have to store it somewhere. You incur storage charges if you re putting it in a private safe or vault or depository or if you try to keep it in a safe deposit box of course, you ve got to pay for that. For myself, I just get a good fireproof safe, bolt it in from the inside into a concrete floor, and store it myself. Buy your physical metals.

Read Full Interview from IBT Commodities and Futures