The 1733 Spanish Fleet of the Keys

Documented wrecks, several now public dive preserves

On Friday, 13 July 1733, the New Spain fleet under Captain-General Rodrigo de Torres sailed out of Havana for Spain, some 22 ships with the treasure of the New World aboard. As they entered the Straits of Florida an abrupt shift of wind warned the mariners that a hurricane was coming. Torres ordered the fleet back to Havana, but it was too late. The next day the storm caught them off the Florida Keys, intensified, and scattered, sank or swamped most of the fleet along some 80 miles of coast, in one of history's most devastating maritime disasters.

The ships carried tanned hides, rare spices, silver, gold and jewels, and the Spanish crown salvaged part of the cargo in the 1730s. Divers found most of the wrecks again from the early 1960s, and treasure hunters took much of what remained, at the cost of much of the sites' archaeological value.

The best known is the San Pedro, a 287-ton Dutch-built ship that carried 16,000 pesos in Mexican silver and crates of Chinese porcelain. She lies in 18 feet of water a mile south of Indian Key, off Lower Matecumbe Key, where salvors recovered silver coins dated 1731 to 1733, anchors and cannon, rigging and hardware from her ballast pile. Her ballast remains, dense river stones from Europe once stacked in her hold to steady her, mixed with flat red ladrillo bricks from the ship's galley and crusted now with coral. In the mid-1980s the Indiana University archaeologist Charles Beeker and the biologist Bill Ruf began working on her and her neighbour, and in April 1989 the San Pedro opened as a State of Florida Underwater Archaeological Preserve, with replica cannons, an anchor from another 1733 wreck and a bronze plaque set among the stones. She is the oldest wreck on the Florida Keys Shipwreck Trail. Hurricane Andrew buried one of the replica cannons in the sand in 1992, and Hurricane Irma uncovered it again in 2017.

Less than a mile away lies the San Felipe, which treasure hunters barely touched. Its ballast pile is still articulated and its wooden timbers exposed, and Irma laid bare more of its hull, making it a rare intact example of an early 18th-century ship.

No wreck under Florida's jurisdiction is off-limits to divers, but disturbing or removing anything from historic sites on state-owned bottomlands without written permission from the Division of Historical Resources is prohibited.