Hello everyone
Here is another newspaper story San Antonio Light September 28 1936
Sunken Treasure
By Edwin C. Hill
A treasure seeking expedition
which is even now properly At first glance.
appear to be the remotest connection
between young Otto, archduke
of Austria, and the barnacled hulk
of- an old steamship, lying these
many years on the Atlantic sea.
floor off the coast of Virginia.
But the association is there?or, at
least, some people who believe in
the enduring power of anathema
will tell you so.
For young Otto of Austria, son
of ,a tragically unfortunate royal
house, and the hulk of the steamship
Merida are strangely, linked
by the historic "curse of the House
of Hapsburg."
Are combing the ocean for the gold bullion
which went down with the Merida,
seeks also the emeralds and rubies
which once belonged to the Emperor
Maximilian of Mexico and his
empress, Carlotta.
The Monroe Doctrine. Washington ordered
Napoleon to get out of Mexico or
take the consequences. An. army
under General Sheridan was ready
to cross the Rio Grande and enforce
the order.
Napoleon deserted Maximilian and withdrew
the French troops. The Mexican republicans
arose, overthrew the
monarchy, and shot the unhappy
Maximilian against, a stone wall
at Queretaro.
Carlotta, stunned by the tragedy,
went mad. For 5 years she lived
on, in a chateau in Belgium, her
darkened mind still dwelling in the
past, still dreaming that she was
the empress.. She was still alive
when the Great war began and the
German troops poured through
Belgium under strict orders not to
molest her home where an American
flag floated over the gateway.
When the unfortunate Maximilian
was captured and shot In 1867
his treasure was seized by the Mexican
republic. Early In 1911, when
Porfirio Diaz, the dictator of Mexico,
was overthrown, a , group of
Mexican aristocrats fled with the
treasure. They escaped from Mexico
on board the American steamship
Merida. And the Merida
steaming northward to New York
was rammed and sunk on May 12'
1911, by the steamship Farragut
off the Virginia capes.
Maximilian was a brother of the
Austrian e m p e r o r , Francis Joseph.
His wife, Carlotta, was a
daughter of Leopold I, king of the
Belgians. When they were married
in 1857, she was only 16, very Beautiful,
very ambitious. Maximilian
was then governor or Milan, for
the Austrian* at that time held all
of northern Italy.
Louis Napoleon, Napoleon 3rd
dreaming of a new French empire
In North America, and seizing his
chance while the United States was
rent by civil war. sent an army
to Mexico and occupied the country.
Persuaded by Louis Napoleon
and urged by the ambitious Carlotta,
his wife, Maximilian consented
to be crowned emperor of Mexico.
Civil war ended, the
United states government turned
its attention to Mexico and its re-
Responsibilities under the Monroe
In the meantime,It has been told
that the treasure of jewels and
gold which had been hers and
Maximilian's had been smuggled
from the .Mexican treasury to the
ill-fated ship Merida.
Over that treasure hung the curse
which has followed the Hapsburg
family to this day. For-this
greater part of the treasury was
from looted temples. Back in the
Sixteenth century an ancestor of
Maximilian robbed a Burmese temple
of rubies" and diamonds Carlota,
herself, added to these a store
of gorgeous emeralds from ancient
Aztec temples In Mexico.
One must believe that the anger of
Burmese and Aztec priests followed
their stolen Jewels from all that followed.
Maximilian dethroned and executed;
Carlotta, a mad woman,
doomed to live on half a century
in her madness; the treasure itself
at the bottom of the sea
And young Otto, too, may be under
the blight of the curse which
was leveled against the house of
Hapsburg a hundred years ago by
the Countess Karnlyl, whose son
had been executed by the Austrian
government. Face to face with Emperor
francs,, Joseph, she spoke'
these frightful words: "May heaven
and hell blast your happiness! May
your family be exterminated! May
your children be brought to ruin
and your life wrecked! And yet
may you live on in lonely unbroken
find horrible grief to tremble when
you recall the name Karnlyl."
Hardluck
.
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