Photo: Jack Guez, AFP/GETTY
Six sport divers from a local club were scuba diving in the ancient Roman harbor of Caesarea in Israel, when one of them spotted a small tiny coin, which the diver thought looked like a toy coin from a game of some sort. On further examination, the coin turned out to be gold. Then the divers found another and then another. Later using a metal detector, they found a cache of 2,000 gold coins of various dimensions and weights. The gold coins, most dating from the Fatimid caliphate that ruled much of the Mediterranean from A.D. 909 to 1171, are the largest treasure of gold coins ever discovered in Israel.
As reported by National Geographic: At its height in the mid-tenth to mid-eleventh centuries A.D., Fatimid rule stretched across North Africa and Sicily to the Levant, with trade ties that extended all the way to China. From its capital in Cairo, the caliphate controlled access to gold from sources in West Africa to the Mediterranean, and the currency crafted from the precious metal conveyed the Fatimids’ formidable power and wealth.
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In 1799, Eleanor Reid was only 21 and newly married to Captain Hugh Reid, commander of the Honorable East India Company extra ship Friendship. It was her husband’s first command and he was under orders to carry a cargo of Irish convicts, the result of an Irish uprising the year before, to New South Wales. French privateers prowled the seas. The East Indies charts were rudimentary, at best, not to mention all the other perils of the sea. Nevertheless, Eleanor would join her husband on the voyage. Not only was Eleanor rather fearless, but she was also a keen observer of the life aboard ship and of the cultures of the myriad islands and ports on a voyage that will continue beyond New South Wales, through the East Indies archipelago and on to India.
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