Free Republic

Edinburgh, Scotland held a Christmas Eve 1715 hanging of a soldier for abortive plot in the abortive Jacobite rising of 1715 The plot was a bold conspiracy of Highlanders to seize Edinburgh Castle itself, which would have been every bit the coup it sounds like. Sergeant William Ainslie and two other soldiers of the garrison had been bribed to admit the plotters via a sally port. Once there, the Highlanders meant to seize the castle’s ample stock of weapons and cash, and also “fire three cannon; that when this signal should be heard by some men stationed on the opposite...

A New Orleans investment firm has begun marketing gold coins from a 300-year-old shipwreck discovered off Florida’s coast. Blanchard and Co. is one of two dealers offering the coins from an area where 11 treasure-laden ships of a Spanish fleet were smashed onto reefs by a hurricane on July 31, 1715. The other dealer is California-based Monaco Rare Coins. John Albanese, a New Jersey-based coin expert who brokered the sales, said in an interview Friday that most of the 295 coins being offered were found by divers exploring the area last year on the 300th anniversary of the disaster.

MIAMI: Treasure hunters off Florida have found $4.5 million in gold coins from a Spanish ship that sunk during a hurricane in the 18th century , the sal vage company said on Wednesday. The ship 'Ten Galleons' traveling from Havana to Spain... "Over 350 gold coins, including 9 Royals were recovered on July 30 & 31 on the actual 300th anniversary of the wreck,"

A Florida man has uncovered gold artifacts worth over $1 million from the wreckage of a Spanish fleet that sank in a storm off the Florida coast three centuries ago. The find by Eric Schmitt was announced late Monday by a salvage company that owns the rights to the site where the coins and jewels were found. "The treasure was actually found a month ago,” Brent Brisben of 1715 Fleet — Queens Jewels LLC told Florida Today. Keeping word of the haul from getting out was "particularly hard for the family that found it," Brisben added. "They’ve been beside themselves."...

The Earth could be headed for a 'mini ice age' researchers have warned. A new study claims to have cracked predicting solar cycles - and says that between 2020 and 2030 solar cycles will cancel each other out. This, they say, will lead to a phenomenon known as the 'Maunder minimum' - which has previously been known as a mini ice age when it hit between 1646 and 1715, even causing London's River Thames to freeze over.

Santa brought us a new Sunspot prediction to be added to NASA’s incredibly high series of at least five ill-fated predictions starting in 2006. NASA’s latest peak Sunspot Number for Solar Cycle #24 (SC24) is down 60% from their original, but it still seems a bit too high, judging by David Archibald’s recent WUWT posting that analogizes SC24 and SC25 to SC5 and SC6 which peaked around 50, during the cold period (Dalton minimum) of the early 1800′s. According to Yogi Berra “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Team leader Dr. Mausumi Dikpati of NASA’s National Center...