In July 1715, a fleet of Spanish ships departed Cuba with a stockpile of gold and silver coins collected from Central and South America.
About a week into the journey, a hurricane veered into the path of the fleet, and all but one ship sank off the east coast of Florida. Some historians have estimated that $400 million worth of gold, silver and jewels were lost beneath the waves, and the area became home to some of the continent’s most coveted maritime treasures.
Over the summer, 1715 Fleet Queens Jewels, a shipwreck salvage company, chipped away at the long effort to recover the fleet’s bounty, discovering more than 1,000 silver and gold coins collectively valued at about $1 million.
The company, which owns the exclusive rights to salvage from the fleet, found the coins in June and July, in a stretch of ocean known as Florida’s Treasure Coast.
The silver coins are reales that were minted in the Spanish colonies of Mexico, Peru and Bolivia, the company said in a news release this week. Many have visible dates and mint marks, and their exceptional condition suggests they may have been part of a single chest or shipment that spilled when the ship broke apart.
“Each coin is a piece of history, a tangible link to the people who lived, worked and sailed during the golden age of the Spanish Empire,” Sal Guttuso, the company’s director of operations, said in the news release. “Finding 1,000 of them in a single recovery is both rare and extraordinary.”
The bounty of roughly 1,000 large, silver coins was the company’s biggest haul from the 1715 shipwreck site since 1990 — the year the diver who made this summer’s discovery was born, Mr. Guttuso said in a phone interview on Thursday.
The preservation of the coins was striking, and it gives historians a “time capsule” of what was in treasure chests during the Spanish Empire, Mr. Guttuso said. Most of the coins were minted in Mexico City, he said.
The recovered coins will go through several conservation efforts, including electrolysis to mitigate salt and corrosion. The company must also weigh, photograph and log each coin before the collection can be displayed to the public.
“For 1,051 coins, it’s going to take a minute,” Mr. Guttuso said.
Once the coins are cleaned and cataloged, the State of Florida will be able to request that up to 20 percent be donated to museum exhibitions. The company then plans to split the remaining coins with the subcontractors who discovered them, Mr. Guttuso said.
A typical successful expedition might yield a handful of coins, and divers can usually grab them and return to their boats with ease, Mr. Guttuso said.
But during one outing this July, a diver found so many coins that he peeled off one of his scuba gloves and started piling them inside.
In a video taken that day, the diver can be seen returning to the ocean surface and dumping dozens of worn, silver coins onto the expedition boat. He glances toward the camera with a smile as the coins clatter onto the deck.
“Yeah, buddy!” another treasure hunter exclaims in the video.
The treasure hunters were able to discern traces of a burlap sack on some of the coins, and records show that coins on Spanish ships were typically packed into chests in sacks of 1,000, Mr. Guttuso said.
With each chest holding 3,000 to 4,000 coins, one “great mystery” already looms large over the next expedition season, which begins in May, Mr. Guttuso said.
“Are there other sacks out there, or were those salvaged?” he said. “It will be interesting to see if the remains of that chest are still out there.”
Hannah Ziegler is a general assignment reporter for The Times, covering topics such as crime, business, weather, pop culture and online trends.
The post Over $1 Million Worth of Treasure Is Recovered From 1715 Spanish Shipwreck appeared first on New York Times.
