Fall of the silver fleet (1715)
The sinking of the silver fleet in a hurricane off Florida in July 1715 was a shipwreck in the 18th century. During the catastrophe, eleven ships of a Spanish silver fleet sank , which were supposed to bring the profits from the Spanish colonies in America to Spain.
history
prehistory
During the War of the Spanish Succession , the system of annual silver fleets that brought the treasures from the Spanish colonies in America to Spain had stalled. In 1702 an Anglo-Dutch fleet had completely destroyed the returning silver fleet in the Bay of Vigo . After this disaster, the Spaniards tried only three times during the war to bring a silver fleet back to Spain. Two of these attempts failed. In 1708 the Cartagena silver fleet was wrecked by an English fleet, and in 1711 a storm destroyed the fleet's ships off the north coast of Cuba . As a result of the lack of silver transports and the high costs of the war, Spain faced national bankruptcy towards the end of the war , while considerable treasures were accumulated in the Spanish colonies that were awaiting transport to Spain. After the Peace of Utrecht , the Spanish King Philip V ordered in 1713 that as many treasures as possible had to be brought to Spain with the next silver fleet.
Journey of the mainland fleet
The mainland fleet under Captain General Don Antonio de Echeverz y Zubiza left Spain on July 9, 1713 and sailed for Cartagena in what is now Colombia. The squadron, which consisted of two warships, two merchant ships and a supply ship, had cargo loads for Cartagena, Portobelo in Panama and Havana . After his arrival in Cartagena, Echeverz commissioned the viceroy of Peru to bring the treasures from Peru and Chile to Portobelo, where they were to be loaded onto his ships, as usual. In view of the loss of the silver fleet from 1708, which had been destroyed off Cartagena by an English squadron under Admiral Wagner, the viceroy had already had the gold and silver treasures transported overland to Buenos Aires , from where they had been shipped to Spain. Thus, Echeverz could only load the ships of his fleet with a little silver from Cartagena and with private silver transports, which is why they also loaded other cargo such as tobacco and Brazilian wood . In September 1714 the fleet finally sailed to Havana, where Echeverz was waiting for his superior Ubilla's fleet.
Journey of the New Spain Fleet
The New Spain fleet, originally consisting of eight ships under Captain General Don Juan Esteban de Ubilla , had already left Spain on September 16, 1712 and reached Veracruz in Mexico on December 3, 1712 . There, however, the onward journey was delayed by two years. A storm destroyed four ships in port and damaged the rest, then the squadron had to wait for the arrival of the mule caravan that brought the cargo of the Manila galleon from Acapulco to Veracruz. It was not until May 4, 1715 that Ubilla sailed with two warships and two escort ships to Havana, where his squadron united with the mainland fleet. To do this, he added a small frigate to his squadron. According to the loading lists, the four ships from Ubilla carried a total of 6,388,020 silver pesos , plus table silver , jewelry and a small number of gold coins. The onward journey was delayed further, however, as numerous merchants intrigued with the governor to also have their freight transported with the silver fleet. Finally, Ubilla still had to wait for jewelry intended for the Princess of Parma , the new wife of King Philip V.
Departure of the united silver fleet
Only on July 24th, when the dreaded hurricane season had already begun, the fleet was able to leave Havana. The flagship Ubillas was the war galleon Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion , while Echeverz on the Nuestra Senora del Carmen y Antonio , the formerly English Hampton Court , an English ship of the line with 70 cannons captured by the French in 1707 , formed the end of the fleet. In addition to these two warships, the fleet consisted of two other warships and four heavily loaded escort ships as well as two supply ships called Pataches . In addition, the French warship Grifon, under Captain Antonio Daire , which was loaded with over 48,000 silver pesos destined for France, joined the fleet. The ships left Havana in calm weather and, propelled by favorable winds and the Gulf Stream , sailed through the Florida Straits in good weather .
Sinking in the hurricane
Already on July 29th, heavy seas announced a storm. A hurricane had formed southeast of Cuba and moved north. On July 30, the storm changed course and was now heading west precisely towards the silver fleet, which was sailing north along the east coast of Florida. Ubilla tried to turn his fleet into the wind to avoid the impending stranding, but on the night of July 30th to 31st, the fleet south of Cape Canaveral was hit by the storm. Two ships sank in the sea, while the two heavy warships shattered in the early morning off the coral reefs off the coast, with Ubilla and Echeverz almost the entire crew being killed. The other ships were driven against the sandbanks and eventually stranded.
Only the French ship Grifon escaped sinking, as its captain had steered the ship further northeast in the middle of the storm. The ship survived the storm and was finally able to reach Brest on August 31 , without the captain being aware that his ship was the only one of the silver fleet that had escaped sinking.
Rescue of the survivors and first recovery of the treasures
Over 1000 sailors, soldiers and passengers died in the disaster. About 1500 survivors were able to escape to the coast, which is covered by swamps and jungle, where they were far from the nearest European settlement, so that many died of injuries, exhaustion, hunger and thirst. After the highest-ranking survivor, Admiral Don Francisco Salmon, discovered that apparently no ship had escaped the sinking, he sent Captain Sebastian Mendez with a dinghy to the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine , 190 km to the north , for help. In addition, on August 6, he sent the pilot Nicolas de India with 18 men on another dinghy to Cuba. The small boat actually reached Havana after ten days, from where the governor Vicente de Raja immediately sent a salvage and rescue expedition with a ship and seven sloops to Florida. Captain Mendez also reached his destination after three days, so that help from St. Augustin also reached the scene of the accident shortly afterwards. The Spaniards immediately began to recover the sunken treasures. With the help of Indian divers, among others, they were able to recover gold and silver worth 5.2 million pesos from the sunken ships and bring them back to Havana by the end of December 1715. In August 1716 the first parts of the saved treasure finally reached Cádiz .
News of the sunken treasure fleet spread quickly, so that pirates and privateers also showed up off East Florida. At the beginning of January 1716 the pirates Henry Jennings and John Wills attacked the Spanish camp Palmar de Ays with two small sloops and 300 men , captured the approximately 60 defenders without resistance and were able to steal 120,000, according to other information even 350,000 silver pesos. Despite these attacks, the Spaniards continued the treasure hunt and were able to recover further remains of the gold and silver treasures before they stopped the search in July 1716. Officially, only gold and silver worth 1,244,900 Pesos could not be recovered, but modern researchers suspect that due to the widespread smuggling of silver and especially gold on the silver fleets, treasures worth around 2.2 million Pesos were not were found. According to the current value of these treasures were about 550 million US dollars worth. Pirates and looters searched for further treasures until around 1718, before the wrecks off the Florida coast, which was still largely uninhabited by Europeans, were forgotten.
Rediscovery of the treasure fleet
Finds until 1960
At the beginning of the 19th century, a surveyor found several hundred gold and silver coins in a bay near Fort Pierce Inlet . In 1928 the wreck of the escort ship Urca de Lima was discovered off Fort Pierce . Artifacts from the Spanish colonial era were found south of Sebastian in the early 1940s , but the discoverer, the amateur historian Charles D. Higgs , thought they were the remains of an attempt at colonization or a pirate camp and did not associate the finds with the sunken silver fleet.
Start of the systematic treasure hunt
In the late 1950s, the contractor found Kip Wagner from Ohio after a hurricane a silver coin on a beach. He went to look for where this coin came from. After years of research and extensive searches, he discovered the remains of the Spanish salvage camp from 1715 and was able to find the remains of a treasure ship off the coast with the salvage company he founded, Real Eight Corporation . In 1963, Wagner teamed up with Mel Fisher . Divers from her company, now known as Treasure Salvors , recovered gold, jewels, Chinese porcelain and the corroded remains of over 150,000 silver coins from the wrecks off the coastline now known as the Treasure Coast . After Fisher relocated his treasure hunt to the Florida Keys in the 1970s , where he looked for the wreck of the Atocha , his daughter Taffi Fisher-Abbot continued the search on the Treasure Coast until 2010. On June 24, 2010 the company 1715 Fleet - Queens Jewels took over the search. Just 17 days later, she found a cannon barrel filled with gold and silver coins, which confirmed the legend that even the cannon barrels were used to smuggle gold and silver. The search for further treasures continues to this day, in 2013 and 2015 divers of the company discovered further treasures of the sunken silver fleet worth several million US dollars.
Aftermath
Because of the rich treasure finds, a journalist called the coast in 1961 the Treasure Coast ; this name is used today for the coastal region of the three counties Martin , Indian River and St. Lucie .
The land where the Spanish salvage depot was located in 1715 was donated by the owner Robert McLarty to the State of Florida in 1971, which founded the Sebastian Inlet State Park with the McLarty Treasure Museum there. The museum is located on the site of the former Spanish camp and presents an exhibition about the sinking of the silver fleet as well as artifacts from the shipwrecks. Some of the treasure finds from the wrecks of the silver fleet are presented in the Mel Fisher's Treasure Museum in Sebastian, which opened in 1992 . However, the remains of the wrecks have hardly been explored by archaeologists, but rather all of them tracked down by private treasure hunters. They paid little attention to the historical significance of the finds and were mainly interested in usable treasures. Only the location of the wreckage of the merchant ship Urca de Lima was declared Florida's first Underwater Archaeological Preserve in 1987 .
In the film A treasure to fall in love with , a treasure hunter finds a treasure from the silver fleet that sank in 1715.
literature
- Robert F. Burgess; Carl J. Clausen: Florida's Golden Galleons. The Search for the 1715 Spanish Treasure Fleet . Florida Classics Library, Port Salerno, Florida 1982. ISBN 0-912451-07-6
- Lowell W. Newton: Juan Esteban de Ubilla and the Flota of 1715 . The Americas, Vol. 33, No. 2, Oct. 1976, pp. 267-281 ( JSTOR 980786 )
- Colin Woodard : The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down . Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008, ISBN 9780547415758 , pp. 103–112 ( excerpt (Google) )
Web links
- 1715 Fleet Society. The official website dedicated to marketing the 300th anniversary of the 1715 fleet disaster
- National Park Service: The Spanish Treasure Fleets of 1715 and 1733. Disasters Strike at Sea
- Internet presence of the treasure hunt company 1715 Fleet - Queens Jewels, LLC
- Mel Fisher's Treasures: 1715 Fleet History
Individual evidence
- ↑ 1715 Treasure Fleet: History. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on February 1, 2015 ; accessed on January 23, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Spiegel Online: Off the coast of Florida: Divers family finds gold treasure five meters deep. Retrieved August 20, 2015 .
- ↑ National Geographic: 300-Year-Old Spanish Shipwreck Holds Million Dollar Treasure. Retrieved August 21, 2015 .
- ^ Spiegel Online: Coins from the year 1715: Divers find gold treasure worth millions. Retrieved August 20, 2015 .
- ↑ TC Palm: Who came up with the 'Treasure Coast' name? Retrieved January 23, 2015 .
- ↑ Florida State Parks: Sebastian Inlet State Park. Retrieved January 23, 2015 .
- ↑ Florida State Parks: Mel Fisher's Treasure Museum. Retrieved January 23, 2015 .
- ↑ Florida´s Museums in the sea: Urca de Lima. Retrieved January 23, 2015 .
