1. Between 1520 and 1820, so many Spanish treasure fleets sank in Florida’s shallow offshore waters

2. that today’s divers call these waters

4. The kings of Spain and their fleets made deposits in this bank for 300 years.

5. Today, the withdrawals have just begun.

6. Copyright 2000, Randolph Femmer. All rights reserved.

7. Part One:

8. On Friday 13th, July, 1733, 22 ships set sail from Havana, Cuba bound for Seville, Spain. They carried 20 million pieces of eight and other treasure worth at least $600,000,000.

9. Two days later, the entire fleet, under the command of General Don Rodrigo de Torres y Morales, was gone -- stricken by a massive hurricane in the Florida Keys.

10. The wreckage lay strewn from reef to reef -- from key to key. In the warm shallow waters off Key Largo lay the 60-gun galleon El Infante beneath ten feet of water. The Los Tres Puentes lay in 12 feet; El Poder de Dios lay in 20 feet; and the Herrera and San Francisco in 18 feet.

11. Spanish treasure fleets carried wooden chests filled with hundreds of these Eight Escudo coins.

12. These coins are from the Combined Armada of 1715 which sank off the coast of present day Vero Beach, Florida. These are the famous “pieces of eight” of pirate lore.

13. Eight Reales This “piece of eight” (eight reales) is from the wreck of the Nuestra Senora de Concepcion.

14. The Highway of the Indies

15. The Highway of the Indies

16. If this coin and others from sunken ships could talk, this is one of the stories they would tell:

17. Part Two:

18. In the early summer of 1715, two powerful treasure fleets met in the harbor of Havana, Cuba. One of these was the Tierra Firme Flota under the command of Capitan General Don Antonio de Echiceis y Zubiza who would not survive the summer.

19. The Tierra Firme Flota carried > gold, > silver, > emeralds, and > pearls from Spain’s new-world colonies in South America.

20. The other fleet was the New Spain Flota carrying the gold and silver of Mexico. The fleet’s commander, Capitan General Don Juan Esteban de Ubilla, along with 1000 others, would die in the tragedy that lay ahead.

21. The flagship of the New Spain fleet was the Capitana It carried 1300 treasure chests containing over 3,000,000 Pieces of Eight.

22. On July 24, 1715, all eleven ships of the two fleets would sail from Cuba together as the The fleet carried 7,000,000 reales in gold and silver bound for Seville, Spain. Combined Armada

23. But King Philip V of Spain would never see the Armada of 1715 nor its treasure. Early in the morning of July 31, the entire fleet was struck by a powerful hurricane off Florida’s east coast.

24. By dawn, the wreckage of the mighty armada lay scattered along the reefs and beaches from Sebastian Inlet south to Vero Beach, Fort Pierce, and Jupiter Inlet. The Treasure Coast

25. Some of the treasure was recovered in the succeeding months. But 280 Caribe Indian divers lost their lives during the salvage efforts and 300 armed men commanded by an English privateer attacked the Spanish salvage camps and stole 350,000 silver pesos.

26. Click each year to learn about its wrecks.

27. Peterson, Mendel, 1975. The Funnel of Gold. Little, Brown, and Company, Boston. pp. 361-375. For Further Reading Meylach, Marty 1971. Diving to a Flash of Gold. Florida Classics Library, Port Salerno, Florida. Earle, Peter, 1980. The Treasure of the Concepcion. Viking Press, New York.