At around two o’clock in the morning on July 31, 1715, a hurricane that had been building for days finally caught a combined Spanish treasure fleet strung out along Florida’s east coast, a week after it had sailed from Havana. By daylight, eleven of the twelve ships in the fleet were wrecked on the reefs and sandbars between present-day Sebastian Inlet and Fort Pierce. Estimates of the dead range from roughly 700 to as many as 1,500, depending on the source; what is not disputed is that it was one of the deadliest maritime disasters in Spanish colonial history, and that the silver it scattered across the Florida shoals is still being found three centuries later.
Two fleets sailing as one
The ships that wrecked were not a single fleet but two, combined for safety on the crossing home. The Nueva España Fleet, under Captain-General Juan Esteban de Ubilla, had loaded silver and goods at Veracruz; the Tierra Firme Fleet, under Antonio de Echeverz y Zubiza, had loaded at Cartagena and Portobelo. Together they are estimated to have carried around 14 million pesos in gold and silver coin — enough that the convoy is still sometimes called the “1715 Plate Fleet,” plata being Spanish for silver. A single French frigate, the Griffón, sailed with them but kept further out to sea; it was the only ship in the convoy to survive the storm.
A fleet with nowhere to run
Spanish pilots generally tried to avoid sailing the Caribbean during hurricane season, which ran roughly from July to October. This crossing had been delayed for commercial reasons, and by the time the fleet left Havana on July 24, the season’s risk was already live. Seven days later, caught close to the Florida coast with nowhere to shelter, the ships were driven onto the reefs in the dark. Survivors who made it ashore faced a different kind of ordeal: a stretch of mangrove coastline with no fresh water and no way to signal for help, weeks before relief from Havana or St. Augustine could reach them.
Pirates beat the salvagers to some of it
Spain organized salvage operations almost immediately, recovering a significant share of the sunken treasure within a year using conscripted and enslaved divers. But pirates noticed the undefended camp of recovered silver just as quickly. In early 1716, the English privateer-turned-pirate Henry Jennings led an armed raid on the main Spanish salvage camp near present-day Vero Beach, joined by a young Charles Vane among others, and made off with roughly £87,500 in gold and silver — reportedly about ten years’ income for an ordinary sailor. It was one of the opening acts of the Golden Age piracy boom that followed: Jennings used the proceeds to establish himself at Nassau in the Bahamas, where he became one of the unofficial leaders of the pirate base later broken up by the Royal Navy.
Three centuries of finding it
Spain had recovered roughly 80 percent of the registered treasure by 1716, but a large portion — plus whatever cargo had never been officially registered, a common smuggling practice at the time — stayed on the seabed for more than two centuries. The treasure hunter Kip Wagner found the first artifacts in 1961 and recovered millions of dollars in gold and silver through the 1960s, work that helped establish Florida’s modern system for licensing private salvage of state-owned wrecks. The finds have not stopped: on the 300th anniversary of the wreck in 2015, salvors recovered roughly $4.5 million in gold coins, and smaller hauls continue to surface most years, including in 2025. Under current Florida law, the state retains a right to as much as 20 percent of what is recovered for public museum display, with the licensed salvage company keeping the rest.
Sources consulted: Wikipedia’s “1715 Treasure Fleet” and “Henry Jennings”; History.com’s “Hurricane sinks Spanish treasure ships”; and CoinWeek’s “The Loss of the 1715 Spanish Treasure Fleet.”
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