Short Stuff: Did a shipwreck double the size of the United States?

**Josh Clark** (0:04)
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff, Josh, Chuck, Jerry, Dave. Let's go back in time.

**Chuck Bryant** (0:11)
Do you know who else is in the room with us?

**Josh Clark** (0:14)
Jerry Murphy?

**Chuck Bryant** (0:15)
No. Do you know who wrote this article?

**Josh Clark** (0:18)
No.

**Chuck Bryant** (0:19)
Not you.

**Josh Clark** (0:20)
Okay. Because I was going to say, I didn't even know about some of this stuff.

**Chuck Bryant** (0:25)
Yeah. Maybe the densest three pages you've ever seen written was written by our old colleague, Kristin Konger.

**Josh Clark** (0:35)
Konger. This is seriously incredibly well written. She did a great job.

**Chuck Bryant** (0:40)
Kongs did a great job. And Kristin is thankfully still around in the podcasting biz. She has her great show Unladylike that she used to co-host with Caroline.
But eventually Caroline left, and Konger kept doing it by herself. And it's still great, still around. She has a Unladylike book, and we think the world of Konger. So still support her, please.

**Josh Clark** (1:04)
Way to go, Konger, and way to go for this article, because it really is incredibly well done, especially for something she probably wrote in a day, maybe a day and a half, you know?

**Chuck Bryant** (1:13)
We used to crank these out.

**Josh Clark** (1:15)
Yeah, we did. So the whole story starts in 1993 That's where Konger put it, and I think that was the right place, the right way to go.
Out on the Gulf of Mexico, there's a guy named Jerry Murphy, who was a fisherman there, and he was trawling in the Gulf of Mexico. And when he brought the net up, there was some debris in it. He just assumed were rocks at first, but I guess he took a closer look and we're like, those are silver coins that are fused together because they've been underwater for so long. Hot damn.

**Chuck Bryant** (1:48)
That's right. So he did what anyone would do. He got in touch with an attorney. He said, can I keep this stuff?
And then he contacted history experts and said, where did these things come from? And then about a year after that, they finally said, hey, dude, do you know what this is? This is from the ruins of the El Casador or the Hunter. And this is a ship that disappeared in 1784, after it set out from Veracruz, Mexico with 19 tons of Spanish currency, which was silver reels at the time.

**Josh Clark** (2:24)
Yeah, they were newly minted even. There was apparently a mint in Mexico, and they were headed to New Orleans.
And at the time, you're like, well, why does Spain care about New Orleans?
Spain cared about New Orleans because that was the capital of the Louisiana colony owned by Spain at the time. Sure, you thought it was France. No, there was a period where Spain owned Louisiana, and it was during this time. And the reason they sent 19 tons of silver coins to New Orleans was because New Orleans currency had recently become devalued. There was a lot of counterfeiting going on. There was a lack of hard currency around. So they were bringing this hard currency to pay the soldiers, to pay government officials, and it went down. I can't imagine being King Carlos II and being like, are you kidding me? We lost 19 tons of silver coins forever.

**Chuck Bryant** (3:21)
Yeah. And so King Carlos was like, I imagine face palmed and said, oh God, is this like, is Louisiana even worth all this, you guys?

**Josh Clark** (3:31)
He said, I hate Mondays.

**Chuck Bryant** (3:34)
He did. Ian Garfield.
It's so far away. We lost all this money. We just won it from the French a couple of decades ago. Like, do we really want to be in the Louisiana business anymore? And so, well, we should back up a little and just explain who he was. He was a cousin to King Louis XV of France. I said 25th, just a little behind the scenes there. Josh corrected me.

**Josh Clark** (3:59)
It was awesome.

**Chuck Bryant** (4:00)
In 1762, Louis ceded the Louisiana territory to Carlos with the Treaty of Fontainebleau.
And it wasn't because they were family. It was basically he wanted to keep Louisiana out of the hands of the Brits.

**Josh Clark** (4:16)
Right. Better in the hands of a cousin that's ruling another country than in the Brits who he has no friends with, you know?
So now, Louisiana and New Orleans is under Spanish rule. And it was actually a pretty smart move because after the Seven Years War ended, King Louis had to cede all of the Louisiana territory east of the Mississippi to the Brits as part of the treaty, except New Orleans. And the reason New Orleans is such a plum was because if you wanted to move goods from one place to another, there were no railroads, there were no stagecoaches, you did it on the river. And the Mississippi in particular was a very valuable river because it went from the top of the continent to the bottom. And when you got your stuff down in New Orleans, you could prepare for a seagoing ship, put your goods on that, and now from the Gulf of Mexico, you can take that stuff and sell it anywhere in the world.