This is a pretty cool question, I've always wondered about it too. You hear of stories every once in while on the news where some group of divers have found a old sunken ship and it turns out to be one of the huge ships that countries such as Spain sailed to the New World. They called these big ships Galleons, I'm sure it means something in Spanish!

     What makes these ships worth a news story is that they're usually filled to the gills with gold and silver! You see, the Spaniards would come over and just yank the gold, silver and anything else that wasn't tied down and pile it all into their ships. The Galleons would then set sail back to Spain. A lot of them never made it. There were dangerous reefs and powerful sudden storms that sunk many of them. No one knows exactly where they sit on the ocean bottom until someone finds them.

     Nobody knows the answer to your question though, Travis. The Incas and other civilizations didn't really have an accounting department, and the Incas didn't even use money! Their gold and silver was kinda just there all piled up around them. These Spanish Galleons though, when they're discovered, are worth BIG MONEY. Let me try and give you a sense of scale with this.

     I poked around on the web and found a news story about two Galleons that were found about a year ago. The divers were excited because the gold in the ships was estimated to be worth over half a billion dollars. I poked around some more and found out that there are hundreds of undiscovered Galleons that are lying on the ocean bottom! That is some serious dough.

     Why is this gold worth so much? Well, two reasons really. One, there's a whole heck of a lot of it in these ships. And Two, the gold is usually in the form of either coins or artifacts like crowns or jewelry, which gives it an almost priceless historical value. Time to take SCUBA lessons!

Did You Know?

Sometimes the Galleons sunk because they were piled heavy with too much gold!