A Brief History
On July 31, 1715, one of those events that leads to dreams occurred, when a storm off the coast of Florida sank all 11 Spanish treasure ships heading to Spain from Cuba.
Digging Deeper
Carrying a load of mostly silver, the fleet has been dubbed, “The 1715 Plate Fleet,” using the Spanish word for silver, “plata.”
About 1,500 sailors drowned in the catastrophe, although a few survived to tell the tale. Treasure wrecks spawn mighty efforts to find and recover the lost treasure, and the occasional washing up of some of the 1715 Fleet’s treasure on beaches feeds this burning desire for riches.
One of these treasure hunters, Ohioan Kip Wagner, managed to find some of the treasure and told of his find in National Geographic Magazine in 1965, putting some of the treasure on display. Other treasure hunters have since recovered millions of dollars’ worth of gold and silver from the wrecks.
Question for students (and subscribers) to ponder: Have you ever found any treasure?
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Burgess, Robert and Carl Claussen. FLORIDA’S GOLDEN GALLEONS: Searching for the Treasure of the 1715 Spanish Plate Fleet. Independently published, 2022.
Wagner, Kip and LB Taylor. Pieces of Eight (Recovering the Riches of a Lost Spanish Treasure Fleet). Florida Classics Library, 1998.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by Augi Garcia for Daniel Frank Sediwck, LLC Treasure Auction #4, or a rare 8 escudos lima dated 1710, recovered from the 1715 Fleet, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
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