The Spanish Conquistadors and their successors found no gold on the mainland of Florida, but they certainly lost a lot of it, courtesy of hurricanes, around the coast.
In fact, the first gold found by the Conquistadors in 1494 came from the island of Hispaniola (today, the Dominican Republic) and this was followed by discoveries in Puerto Rico in 1508, Jamaica in 1509 and Cuba in 1511 (world history.org). Whether or not swampy Florida was considered unpromising or just low on the list is uncertain, but the Spanish were right to ignore it in their first phase of exploration.
As Guy ‘Harley’ Means, Director and State Geologist, Florida Geological Survey, explained to this author: “Florida is part of a large carbonate platform called the Florida Platform. The rocks that underlie the state are sedimentary and are, for the most part, limestone and dolostone. There are no natural deposits that contain either gold or silver.”
Means continued: “However, you can certainly write about the Spanish fleet that wrecked off the east coast that carried gold and silver. People still find gold and silver coins along what is called the Treasure Coast.” And so I shall, but further on!
First Footers
It is ironic that neither of the two most famous names associated with the early European discovery and colonisation of the New World – Christopher Columbus and Sir Walter Ralegh – ever set foot in what became the United States. Columbus first made landfall in The Bahamas in 1492 and, in his subsequent three voyages, explored the Lesser Antilles in 1493, Trinidad and the northern coast of South America in 1498, and the east coast of Central America in 1502 (Wikipedia).
About a century later, Ralegh, in two searches for the mythical El Dorado, was only to be found on the north coast of South America in and around what is today Guyana (Alchemist 99). It is true that he was involved in the foundation of Roanoke Colony in present day North Carolina, and subsequently the ‘Lost Colony’ in Chesapeake Bay, neither of which survived, but luckily he entrusted these ventures to subordinates.
Instead, it is almost certain that the first European to lead an expedition to the south-east of North America was the lesser-known Juan Ponce de Leon.
He had sailed with Columbus on his second transatlantic voyage and became governor of Puerto Rico in 1508. Subsequently, following a legal battle with Columbus’s son, Ponce de Leon decamped for the American mainland in 1513, making landfall in a peninsula he named La Florida.
During 1513, and a subsequent (failed) attempt at colonisation in 1521, Ponce de Leon charted much of the Florida coast, and undertook a series of explorations into the interior. But whether he was looking for gold per se or – and here myth overtakes reality – was involved in a quest to find the fabled ‘Golden Fountain of Youth’ is, at best, uncertain.
Juan Ponce de Leon. Portrait of the Spanish explorer and conquistador.
The Fountain of Youth
Perhaps the earliest reference to what has been interpreted as ‘the’ (or ‘a’) Fountain of Youth is to be found in the writings of Herodotus, nearly 2,000 years before Ponce de Leon’s time.
In short, the sixth century BCE Persian king, Cambyses, had his eye on extending his empire by annexing Ethiopia and sent a group of ‘Ichthyophagi’ or ‘Fish-Eaters’ (possibly Babylonians) to spy out the land.
The Ethiopian king quickly saw through this deceit but nonetheless engaged in conversation which, in part, focused on the longevity of Persians by comparison to Ethiopians. The Fish-Eaters said that 80 years was the ‘fullest measure’ for a Persian.
As Herodotus wrote: “Then it was the turn of the Fish-Eaters to ask the king how long his own people lived … ‘The majority’, he answered, ‘live to be one hundred and twenty, with some living even longer than that. … When the spies expressed astonishment at the number of years, the king led them to a spring from which there came a scent like that of violets. … So delicate was this spring water, the spies reported, that nothing could float on its surface: wood and even things lighter than wood, just sank to the bottom. (Certainly, if reports of this water were true and that the Ethiopians used it for everything, then it would indeed have explained their longevity.)
“From the spring, the spies were led to a dungeon full of men, where everyone was shackled with fetters of gold. (This is because, among the Ethiopians, it is bronze which ranks as the rarest and most precious of metals).” (Herodotus, Book III trans Tom Holland).
This is not the only story of the Golden Fountain of Youth from the Classical Age. Alexander the Great also spent some time searching for it, and given that Ponce de Leon, a minor aristocrat, was an educated man, it is likely he would have heard these stories.
In any event, it is clear that Ponce de Leon’s quest (mythical or not) was a failure. He found neither gold nor regained his youth, and in fact died in 1521 in Cuba at age 47. (Alexander died when he was 32).
The Fountain of Youth. Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1546.
Extracting and Exporting
Ponce de Leon missed out. But the same cannot be said – at least in precious metals terms – of his Spanish compatriots, who between discovering gold and silver in a series of locations in what is now Latin America, and stealing other people’s (Aztec, Inca and, latterly, the Musca of Colombia), became incredibly successful.
At the time this exploitation began, i.e. at the end of the 15th century, it has been calculated that there were no more than 88 tons of gold in Europe. By 1560, the Spaniards had shipped a further 100 tons and, in so doing, had enriched “the Spanish Crown beyond its wildest dreams”. (worldhistory.org)
This practice of exporting vast amounts of precious metals to Spain (commonly at a ratio of 80%/85% silver to 15%/20% gold) endured deep into the 18th century, but while extracting the metal was one issue, transporting it was quite another. For one thing, there were the British to contend with.
In 1579, for example, Sir Francis Drake succeeded in relieving the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de la Concepción of 26 tonnes of silver and 36kg of gold off the coast of Peru.
More stimulating, at least to modern eyes, was the fate of the San José “which was sunk in 1708 by British forces near Colombian’s coasts. Its wreckage was discovered in 2015 and is believed to contain the record $17bn in gold, silver, and other precious stones. Its place is a national secret. In November 2023, the Colombian government are looking to recover the treasure.” (Wikipedia).
Worse than these occasional attacks, at least as far as the Atlantic trade was concerned, was the Florida weather. Particularly detrimental were the hurricanes of 5 September 1622 (which sank eight ships off the Keys, including the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, which was carrying some 40 tonnes of gold and silver, and 32kg (71lb) of emeralds); July 1715 (which wrecked 11 ships carrying “a large amount of gold bullion and about 14 million pesos of silver”
(ibid)); and 14 July 1733, which proved the undoing of at least six ships “with a year’s collection of New World treasure aboard” (keyshistory.org).
Many of these ships sank in comparatively shallow water, which meant that, in a few rare cases, loss of life was not severe. But it also meant that from time to time, coins and other precious items washed up on the beach. Unsurprisingly, this led to a series of attempts at salvage, which were often successful. For example, in 2015, “Queens Jewels, LLC and their founder Brent Brisben discovered $4.5 million in gold coins off the coast of Vero Beach,
Florida; the coins come from the 1715 Fleet shipwreck site known as the Corrigan’s wreck”. (Wikipedia) Moreover, it resulted in the new name – the Treasure Coast – being added to maps from the later 1960s onwards.
Ponce de Leon missed out. But the same cannot be said – at least in precious metals terms – of his Spanish compatriots, who between discovering gold and silver in a series of locations in what is now Latin America, and stealing other people’s (Aztec, Inca and, latterly, the Musca of Colombia), became incredibly successful.
The Treasure Coast
The story is explained succinctly by Janie Gould writing in the November/December 2007 edition of the Indian River Magazine: “There was a time when our three counties had no special name other than, perhaps, Indian Riverland. St. Lucie, Martin and Indian River counties were defined by their principal towns, which also served as their county seats – Fort Pierce, Stuart and Vero Beach. There were no other towns of any consequence in the region.
“It had been rumored for years that there was sunken treasure off our coast, and occasionally, you’d hear of a beachcomber finding a gold coin or two after a storm. Then, in the 1960s and 70s, organized and well-equipped treasure salvors started finding huge amounts of gold and silver that they brought up from the wrecks of a fleet of Spanish galleons that sank in a hurricane in 1715. ...A gold rush was on, and the sleepy communities of Vero, Sebastian, Fort Pierce and Stuart were transformed. It wasn’t long before folks started calling the region the Treasure Coast.
“Ed Register of Fort Pierce was executive director of the St. Lucie County Chamber of Commerce from 1962 to 1967. He says he has no idea where the idea for the Treasure Coast originated. ‘It just kind of evolved,’ he said.”
Florida's Treasure Coast
Postscript
Speaking of shipwrecks and Florida, the author found himself in Stuart, at the centre of the Treasure Coast (and also known in fishing circles as ‘Snook City’), in 1997, soon after the movie Titanic had been released, and was witness to the following interchange between two young Stuart locals, only one of whom had seen the film: “And then, when the ship sank...” “What, it sank!?!”
