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Shipwrecked Treasure Galleons – Part I

© Cindy Vallar

While pirates and privateers were a constant threat to the treasure fleets, hurricanes became an even greater enemy. The torrential rains and violent winds whipped the seas into savage furies that destroyed more ships, claimed more lives, and engulfed more treasure than the outlaws who preyed the high seas.

By the end of the 1400s, the Spanish knew about the hurricane season. For this reason they devised a schedule to lessen the risk of a treasure fleet's sinking. Ships left Cadiz in January (later this was changed to March) and Havana in May or June. The timetable worked well in theory, but failed to account for a variety of delays the ships encountered both at sea and in port.

The first treasure fleet disaster occurred in April 1554. A few weeks prior to the arrival of the Nuevo España Flota, four ships departed from Veracruz under the command of Antonio Corzo. Twenty days later a hurricane sank three of the vessels off Padre Island (Texas). Although the San Andres escaped and finally reached Havana, she was battered beyond repair. About half of the three hundred people aboard the San Esteban, Espiritu Santo, and Santa Maria de Yciar perished. With the exception of a single person, those who survived died trying to walk back to Mexico, which they believed was closer than it actually was.

Within two months after those in Veracruz learned of the disaster, they sent out a salvage expedition. Divers located the wrecks and retrieved about half of the silver coins and bullion before nasty weather forced them to abandon their salvage operations. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers most likely destroyed the Santa Maria de Yciar while dredging in the 1940s. After an Indiana businessman discovered coins along the beach in 1967, treasure hunters discovered most of the remaining riches from the Espiritu Santo. In 1973 the Texas Antiquities Committee excavated the remains of the San Esteban. Although much of the hull had been destroyed, archeologists recovered enough to reconstruct and study the Spanish colonial ship. After the State of Texas successfully sued the treasure hunters for what they had recovered from the Espiritu Santo, the University of Texas preserved the artifacts--including anchors, guns, coins, crucifixes, gold jewelry, pre-Colombian objects, tableware, and three astrolabes--for future study.

Perhaps the best-known treasure ship a hurricane sank was the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, the Almiranta or vice-flagship of the 1622 fleet. The 550-ton Atocha carried 133 seamen, eighty-two soldiers, forty-eight passengers, and twenty guns. Copper, silver, indigo, tobacco, cochineal (a scarlet dye), and rosewood filled her holds, while amongst the belongings of passengers and crew were hidden precious jewels and gold bars. When the hurricane struck, it destroyed eight of the twenty-eight vessels comprising the Tierra Firma Flota and scattered the wreckage across the lower Florida Keys and the Dry Tortugas.