Thursday Things: Gold & Plastic Edition

26 June 2025. Vol 7 No 26. By Dan McGirt. #307

Dan McGirt

Jun 26, 2025

Thursday Things is here! This week we drink plastic, dive for gold, and get creative.

If you enjoy this edition, please click the heart icon in the header or at the end of the post to let me know.

I just like sunflowers. Photo by Aleksandr Eremin on Unsplash

Sunken galleon gold!

We recently covered what to do if you find a shipwreck.

It basically amounts to “don’t take anything.”

But you can take pictures!

Gold from legendary 1708 shipwreck holding billions of dollars in treasure is seen in new images

More than three centuries after a legendary Spanish galleon loaded with treasure sank off the coast of Colombia, researches have uncovered new details about gold coins found scattered around the shipwreck.
Dubbed the "holy grail" of shipwrecks, the San Jose galleon was sunk by the British navy near Cartagena in 1708, killing most of the roughly 600 crewmembers on board. The ship was believed to be holding gold, silver, gemstones and other treasure worth billions of dollars.
Now researchers have analyzed intricately designed gold coins found near the wreck, confirming they are indeed from the iconic San Jose. The coins feature depictions of castles, lions and crosses on the front and the "Crowned Pillars of Hercules" above ocean waves on the back, according to a new study published Tuesday in the journal Antiquity.

And you know I never miss an issue of Antiquity! From the research:

Coins are crucial artefacts for dating and understanding material culture, particularly in shipwreck contexts. These sites serve as invaluable repositories of historical information, especially when examining events related to the Tierra Firme Fleet, which connected Spain with the Viceroyalty of Peru between the sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. Recent analysis of artefacts from the San José Galleon shipwreck highlights the merits of such underwater investigations. Among the key finds are hand-struck, irregularly shaped coins—known as cobs in English and macuquinas in Spanish—that served as the primary currency in the Americas for more than two centuries.

Cobs — now that’s a term I didn’t know. Did you?

The ship was carrying chests full of emeralds and 200 tons of gold when it sank.

As for how all this treasure got there, that’s an interesting detail:

In late 1707, Peruvian merchants and officials travelled to Puerto Perico on the Pacific coast of Panama, where all goods and people were transported overland to Portobello on the Caribbean coast. There, they met the Tierra Firme Fleet, commanded by the San José Galleon, which held the exclusive monopoly on transporting royal treasures between South America and the Iberian Peninsula. After the Portobello fair, the San José departed for Cartagena, carrying goods and metals, including the 8-escudos cobs.

Unfortunately, the galleon met the British navy, as noted above, and was sent to the bottom of the sea. I wonder if the British were trying to seize the galleon and its precious cargo, or were just there to sink it?

The cause of the San Jose's sinking has also been debated. British documents indicate that the ship did not explode, according to Colombia's government, but Spanish reports suggest the ship was blown up in battle. (CBS)

It was an explosive encounter either way. As for who the gold belongs to, that, naturally is a big mess:

Since its discovery, multiple parties have laid claim to the shipwreck, including Colombia, Spain and Indigenous Qhara Qhara Bolivians who claim the treasures on board were stolen from them. The wreck has also been claimed by U.S.-based salvage company Sea Search Armada, which says it first discovered the wreck more than 40 years ago. (CBS)

Read the whole thing here: Vargas Ariza D, Jaramillo Arango A, Aldana Mendoza JA, Del Cairo Hurtado C, Sarmiento Rodriguez JD. The cobs in the archaeological context of the San José Galleon shipwreck. Antiquity. Published online 2025:1-6. doi:10.15184/aqy.2025.10095

Yahhhr! Looks like gold to me. Image: Authors via Cambridge University Press.

Creative Market

Creative Market is a resource I learned about in the last week or so. It is not a public domain collection of maps or images of the sort we usually feature, but it could be useful in some future projects of mine, and perhaps useful for you too if you make anything involving graphics, fonts, illustrations, etc.

Creative Market is an online platform where creative professionals sell digital assets like templates, graphics, fonts, and more to buyers completing design projects around the world. The marketplace offers downloadable product files and the licenses to use them for a range of project types.

Discover more than 4 million quality resources created by artists in over 190 countries around the world. Join forces with talented designers to make your projects stand out.

They have Fonts, Templates & Themes, Graphics, Photos, Videos, Illustrations, Icons, Mockups, Brushes (for Photoshop, Illustrator, etc), 3D assets, and more.

Some of these things, I don’t even know what they are! Most of these are for graphic designers with skills far more advanced than mine. (I can insert shapes on PowerPoint and use the image editing presets on my phone’s camera app. That’s about it.)

However, there are cool fonts along with templates for slides, social media posts, stationery, business cards, Notion templates, and other things I could probably use. And maybe you can too — if so, bookmark Creative Market for future use!

And while this is a commercial site, they do have free stuff for download each week. See below.

(Let me add that this is not a paid endorsement — I just found the site and thought it was cool and interesting.)

This week’s free downloads. I’m totally grabbing those fonts! Source: Creative Market

Microplastic menace

Microplastics are the hot new thing to worry about (if you’ve already calmed down about arsenic rice). Tiny bits of plastic are in everything! Plastic is penetrating our brains!

My take on most of these things is that the panic is probably overplayed for clicks and donations, while at the same time having bits of plastic floating around in your bloodstream can’t be good. So maybe let’s take some steps to reduce our exposure to plastic in contact with our food. Like not drinking out of plastic bottles so often.

Maybe stick to glass bottles.

That should help, right?

Apparently not.

Glass bottles found to contain more microplastics than plastic bottles

Drinks including water, soda, beer and wine sold in glass bottles contain more microplastics than those in plastic bottles, according to a surprising study released by France's food safety agency Friday.

Oh, come on!

The researchers found an average of around 100 microplastic particles per liter in glass bottles of soft drinks, lemonade, iced tea and beer. That was five to 50 times higher than the rate detected in plastic bottles or metal cans.

Apparently the plastic particles come from the plastic caps on many glass bottles.

For water, both flat and sparkling, the amount of microplastic was relatively low in all cases, ranging from 4.5 particles per liter in glass bottles to 1.6 particles in plastic.
Wine also contained few microplastics—even glass bottles with caps. Duflos said the reason for this discrepancy "remains to be explained."

Because wine takes no prisoners, that’s why.

This week’s edition is brought to you by Dan’s Advice: Take control of your digital life.