Some minions of Tabletop Adventures once had the opportunity to visit the St. Augustine Pirate & Treasure Museum in St. Augustine, Florida, and this seems like an appropriate week to reminisce. This museum includes not only many artifacts from and about pirates, but its owner locates sunken ships so it includes recovered treasures as well.
One popular feature was a cannon, set up as if to fire.
To make it even better, this was an interactive cannon – there was a way to press something to make a cannon sound as often as every 30 seconds. Not everyone in the group was equally excited about this possibility.
The museum showed off many of their artifacts by including them in dioramas.
A closer view of the person in the scene shows him admiring some treasures, necklaces or ropes of pearls.
In the photo above, the chest upon which the person is resting his foot is just barely visible. Here is a closer look.
Pirates from the Caribbean Sea sometimes roamed long distances searching for treasure. In 1692, Captain Thomas Tew took his ship across the Atlantic and south around Africa into the Indian Ocean. In the Red Sea, he attacked a fleet of the Mughal Empire of India, which included treasure ships. Tew is said to have captured treasure worth 100,000 British pounds. (That would be similar to gaining over $12,000,000 in modern times.) Other pirates found out about his success, and in a few years several ships were making the long, long journey to the Indian Ocean in search of Mughal treasure.
These items are ones that could have been taken by pirates in the Indian Ocean.
A ship of the Mughal Empire, carrying a massive amount of silver coins, went down off the coast of what is now Sri Lanka. It was found by divers in 1963 and these treasures are from that ship, including silver coins that have formed a solid mass.
Look forward to details of one more special item from the Pirate Museum, tomorrow!
