mch

go . OUR ANCESTORS CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
The captain stayed down for only a few minutes, not using up
all his time. When his helmet was unscrewed he looked very
satisfied, even smug, but did not say a word to anybody. He simply
ordered his cable basket pulled up and in it the astonished
crew saw a green metallic human hand, hollow and full of sand.
Then Condos let loose his best salty sea language and called all
his crew and Stadiatis especially the dumbest idiots that ever
sailed the Mediterranean. He told them that down under there
was a whole ship full of stone and bronze statues 1 A sunken
treasure.
Up to this point the history of this event is clear and simple,
but not so, further on. The official version of the authorities and
the stories of the crew are quite different. To understand this discrepancy,
we have to talk a little about the Greek sponge fishermen,
particularly from the Aegean. First of all, they are great
divers, who can stand and survive water pressure down to 180
feet for several minutes. Anything of value that could be retrieved
from such depth is their prey. Flooded houses and
sunken galleys have been mines of gold, silver, copper, bronze,
and lead. As I mentioned before, a Roman galley usually had as
many as six big wooden anchors with crossbars of lead, and one
single shipwreck could yield two or three tons of this valuable
metal. Condos and his crew would not let their prize of naked
women and horses drift away, not if these statues were made of
precious metal that could be sold with no questions asked.
Condos became a rich man, for a while at least. He ordered a
new bigger ship built for himself and started smuggling arms
across the Mediterranean, mostly French army rifles. He wanted
to be a big businessman and went broke. His ship was sold for
debts, and he had to return to the sea and dive for sponges until
the cramps got him and he became half paralyzed. He died in
1926 in the home of his daughter, who had given him his last
shelter in Suez, in Egypt. The gods had abandoned the man who
once was so lucky.
But to return to that time in October 1900, off Antikythera
after Condos had cleared the wreck of anything valuable that he
could lift out and sold it, he informed the owners of his tartan,
the Lyndiakos brothers, about the wreck off Antikythera and
suggested that the Greek government should be informed and