Treasure & Legends
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Letters of Marque and the Legal Theater of Privateering
A letter of marque could turn the same act of robbery at sea into state-sanctioned war one week and a hanging offense the next, a legal fiction that shaped pirates from Drake to Kidd.
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Gasparilla: The Pirate Legend Tampa Invented for Itself
Tampa’s Gasparilla Pirate Festival celebrates a swashbuckler named Jose Gaspar. The trouble is historians have never been able to find him.
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The Cryptogram of La Buse: Olivier Levasseur’s Unsolved Treasure Code
A pirate’s last words supposedly hid a treasure map in cipher. The real history of the code is stranger, and far more recent, than the legend admits.
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The 1715 Treasure Fleet: The Hurricane That Scattered a Fortune Off Florida
A hurricane wrecked eleven Spanish treasure ships off Florida in 1715 — and pirates, not just salvors, were first to the silver that washed ashore.
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The Atocha: The Treasure That Took 363 Years and a Family’s Life to Find
The Nuestra Señora de Atocha sank in a 1622 hurricane with a fortune in gold and emeralds aboard. Finding it took Mel Fisher sixteen years, a family tragedy, and a Supreme Court case.
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Drake’s Drum: The Legend That Summons England’s Dead Admiral
A 16th-century snare drum, a deathbed vow, and a Victorian poem: how Sir Francis Drake became the admiral English legend says will return when the nation is in danger.
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The Spanish Treasure Fleet: The System That Made the Caribbean Worth Raiding
Pirates didn’t raid the Caribbean by chance. Spain built a twice-yearly convoy system to move an empire’s silver across the Atlantic, and that schedule is what drew them there.
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The Whydah Gally: The Pirate Treasure Legend That Turned Out to Be True
Most pirate treasure stories end with an empty hole in the ground. The Whydah Gally is the one wreck where the gold was actually there.
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Sir William Phips and the Treasure of the Concepción
A shepherd’s son with no schooling salvaged a fortune in Spanish silver from a 46-year-old wreck in 1687 — and was knighted for it within months.
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Blackbeard’s Buried Treasure: The Legend With No Treasure
No treasure chest was ever found aboard Blackbeard’s sloop. Here is where the legend of his buried gold actually came from.