Re: [Goanet] The SS Gairsoppa
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 18:23:04 +0100 (BST) From: Ignatius Fernandes igg...@yahoo.co.uk To: goa...@goanet.org goa...@goanet.org Subject: [Goanet] The SS Gairsoppa Thank you Roland Francis for whetting my appetite about the SS.Gairsoppa and it's treasure of silver found at the bottom of the sea.. Apparently the finders get 80% of the treasure trove and the rest to the owners. Since the silver was looted from the maharajahs by the British, should not either the Government of India or the individual maharajahs make a claim. I very much doubt that Britain would part with anything they would hold on to it for dear life. Good example are the Elgin Marbles and the Koh-i-Noor diamond. Regards Ignatius Fernandes. -- Actually there might be a finder, but it was the British government which tendered for the recovery of the SS Gairsoppa, and the American Odyssey Marine Exploration company won the contract. They indeed will keep 80% of the proceeds. Odyssey Marine Exploration may look like an adventurous venture (it is), but it's very much a for profit professional enterprise which lost 33% of its share-worth a short while ago, when a court ruled that the 15.000 kg of silver coins they had recovered from a sunken galleon off the Gilbraltar coast rightly belonged to the Spanish government. When news of the SS Gairsoppa became known, their shares bounced back - but just 12% (you do the figures ;-) Cheers, p+3D!
Re: [Goanet] The SS Gairsoppa
Very interesting line of thinking Ignatius. If anyone has a case, it would be the maharajah’s descendants and not the government of India, since it happened in 1941 which is before India’s independence. When I said “looted” from the rajahs, I did not mean brazenly snatched from them. It must have been given voluntarily though under much indirect duress. This means that although the British would have legal documents of ownership which would include signatures from the donee rajahs, a good lawyer would easily be able to prove “duress”. For example it would not be improbable to prove that the British Political Agent had told the rajah that if he did not give “x” amount of funds for the war effort, he would arrange to depose the ruler and give the throne to someone else. This happened all too often, though the colonial British government proved to be much more trustworthy than the succeeding one as any of the rajahs will aver. It is also contingent on documents being available with the rulers’ descendants and on the speed with which an injunction is requested in the UK courts. Don’t forget that once the silver is actually salvaged, the finders will walk away with 80%, sell off the silver and dissolve the company. Recovery will then be near impossible. Also there is the question of the affected rajahs uniting to do this and having the funds to pay for their lawyers. The India rajahs have been impoverished from the time that Indira Gandhi broke the India government’s agreement to pay them a yearly royalty and to protect their assets from seizure. Despite all this, my best wishes to the Indian maharajahs. They were a hundred times more concerned with the well-being of their subjects than Indian politicians will ever be. Roland. Toronto. From: Ignatius Fernandes [mailto:igg...@yahoo.co.uk] Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2011 1:23 PM To: goa...@goanet.org Cc: roland.fran...@gmail.com Subject: The SS Gairsoppa Thank you Roland Francis for whetting my appetite about the SS.Gairsoppa and it's treasure of silver found at the bottom of the sea.. Apparently the finders get 80% of the treasure trove and the rest to the owners. Since the silver was looted from the maharajahs by the British, should not either the Government of India or the individual maharajahs make a claim. I very much doubt that Britain would part with anything they would hold on to it for dear life. Good example are the Elgin Marbles and the Koh-i-Noor diamond. Regards Ignatius Fernandes.
[Goanet] The SS Gairsoppa
Thank you Roland Francis for whetting my appetite about the SS.Gairsoppa and it's treasure of silver found at the bottom of the sea.. Apparently the finders get 80% of the treasure trove and the rest to the owners. Since the silver was looted from the maharajahs by the British, should not either the Government of India or the individual maharajahs make a claim. I very much doubt that Britain would part with anything they would hold on to it for dear life. Good example are the Elgin Marbles and the Koh-i-Noor diamond. Regards Ignatius Fernandes.
[Goanet] The SS Gairsoppa
Today's international news tells of a BISN (British India Steam Navigation) shipwreck loaded with a treasure of silver worth about $230m being located by a US recovery and salvage firm. The silver it seems is cored with 2.5% gold which should be a huge addition to the stated value. The ship built in 1919 was acquired by BI sometime later and pressed into wartime service. It was part of a convoy going from Chittagong to England in 1941 and having left the convoy due to a lack of fuel, was sighted by a German Luftwaffe plane and shot down by a U-boat off the coast of Galway, Ireland. The treasure was no doubt a small part of the loot extorted from Indian maharajahs as a token of their loyalty and help in the war effort. What they got in return was a title, tea with HM or lesser royalty and an accompanying portrait later hung in an estate drawing room of a marbled place somewhere in the dusty interior of a princely state. If a colonial power looted nineteenth and twentieth century India, it was not the Portuguese who had to pump in their own money into a poor Goa, not the French who got nothing but tea and a few spices from Pondicherry and Mahe, and certainly not the Dutch who by that time were vanquished by the real capo de tutti cappi of the colonial mafia, the British. France is certainly paying for their sins in Pondicherry by lifetime pensions to the locals who having served their 20 years in the French army overseas starting from age 20, roam around bars in lungis, leading retired lives at age 40, generously paying for their arrack in French Francs. The Brits will never end paying enough to all the colonials now inhabiting their island from Africa, India and the rest of the world, to come close to reparation for all that they brazenly took away. Being BI, the Gairsoppa must have been populated on the decks with lascars (native seamen) from the Konkan, Goa and Chittagong. Lots of Goan seamen must have been drowned in the torpedoing by the U-boat since it is known that only one lifeboat was launched with 6 European officers and 2 lascars, of which only 2 officers survived. A steam ship of the size of the Gairsoppa must have carried a complement of no less than 250 seamen and 20 officers who were required not only to deal with matters of sailing, but also with the additional task of defending the vessel with quick maneuvers that required all available hands, when underwater and above sea prowlers were sighted. The names of those seamen are inscribed in a memorial stone in a cemetery in Chittagong. It would be very interesting if a Goanetter could provide us with those names. They were probably not buried in Goa due to the tight Govt purse of the war years, the thinking being that the cost of distance burial would probably have paid for some 25 pounder cannon that were required to defend Singapore from the Japanese. The name Gairsoppa reminds me of the derogatory description that Bombay boys used for country hicks who made their way recently to the city. If they came from the rest of Maharashtra, they were called Pandus or Sakarams (the latter became in time a common name for the lowly bluebottle aka police havaldars). If the they came from south India they were called Gairsoppas. To this day I don't know what that means or how it came about, but if the haughty board members of BI gave it to one of their ships, no doubt it would have been because a Coimbatore or Travancore maharajah donated a hefty part of his kingdom's exchequer to them either to show off his wealth or to pay a political ransom. To those who are not aware, India's rajahs and maharajahs of yore were more wealthy in their time than the princes, emirs and kings of the Persian Gulf are today. There are many books written on that part of India's past with truly interesting photographs that make such reading so interesting. If there are three subjects that totally fascinate me even today and on which I spent a large part of my boyhood, they are the Second World War, the Italian mob in the US and the extravagant lives of India's native royalty. Roland Francis Toronto
Re: [Goanet] The SS Gairsoppa
Roland - the NY Times suggests the name stems from that of a prominent west coast waterfall. eric. From: Roland Francis roland.francis Subject: [Goanet] The SS Gairsoppa Today's international news tells of a BISN (British India Steam Navigation) shipwreck loaded with a treasure of silver worth about $230m being located by a US recovery and salvage firm. . The name Gairsoppa reminds me of the derogatory description that Bombay boys . Roland Francis Toronto
