1715 Spanish Treasure Fleet in Sebastian, Florida

The 1715 Fleet was a Spanish convoy of eleven treasure ships, joined by one French warship, that sailed from Havana for Spain and was wrecked by a hurricane on the coast south of Sebastian Inlet.

The fleet carried the silver and gold that had piled up in the Americas during the War of the Spanish Succession. The 1715 Fleet Society history states that the eleven ships making up the fleet assembled in Havana in the summer of 1715, combining the Tierra Firme squadron out of Cartagena with the New Spain flota out of Veracruz. The French warship Griffon was ordered to sail with them so word of the departure would not leak.

The cargo was enormous by any measure of the time. Captain Antoine d'Aire of the Griffon put the whole lading at 15 million silver piastres, or pieces of eight, according to the same society history. The flagship of General Juan Esteban de Ubilla alone held some thirteen hundred chests with 3,000,000 silver coins. Florida State Parks, which interprets the story at Sebastian Inlet State Park, puts the flagship's charge at more than 3.5 million pesos in treasure.

The convoy left Havana on the morning of July 24, 1715, in calm weather, riding the Florida current north along the coast that now runs from Fort Pierce past Vero Beach to Sebastian. The ships stayed well offshore to use the current and avoid the reefs, and for five days nothing seemed wrong.

A hurricane drove the fleet onto the reefs of the Indian River County and St. Lucie County coast before dawn on July 31, 1715, and every Spanish ship was lost.

Swells from the southeast appeared on July 29, and by the afternoon of July 30 the wind off Cape Canaveral had passed thirty knots. The 1715 Fleet Society account places the strike around 4 a.m. on July 31, when the storm threw the ships one after another onto the reefs off the barrier island between the Sebastian area and Fort Pierce. Ubilla died when his flagship broke apart.

The loss of life was heavy, though counts differ. The society's history puts some twenty five hundred people aboard and well over one thousand dead, while older summaries and recent Sebastian Daily coverage cite figures from about 700 to 1,000. Only the Griffon escaped, because her captain steered northeast into the storm; she reached Brest, France, on August 31, 1715, unaware that the Spanish ships were gone.

Survivors came ashore on the beach east of the Indian River Lagoon with little food or water, and on August 6 a launch left for Havana to raise the alarm. That boat took eleven days to reach Cuba, and relief ships with salvage gear, officials and soldiers followed within days.

Sebastian is tied to the 1715 Fleet because the Spanish survivors' and salvors' camp, called Palmar de Ays, stood on the barrier island opposite the Sebastian River, and the flagship sank offshore there.

Spanish archival records place Ubilla's flagship at Palmar de Ays, across from the Ays River, which is known today as the Sebastian River, according to the 1715 Fleet Society. A 1774 map by Bernard Romans marks the same stretch with a note that the admiral of the Plate Fleet perished opposite that river. Florida State Parks states that the location of the camp is now the site of the McLarty Treasure Museum, inside Sebastian Inlet State Park on State Road A1A.

The one wreck that can be tied to a named ship with some confidence lies close by. The society identifies the Cabin Wreck, about two miles south of Sebastian Inlet and logged by the state Bureau of Archaeological Research as site 8IR23, as the first 1715 site found and worked by Kip Wagner's Real Eight group. Other wreck names in common use were assigned by treasure hunters and are not proven.

The disaster also named the region. The Sebastian River Area Chamber of Commerce history says it was the sinking of the 1715 Spanish Plate Fleet that gave the Treasure Coast its name, and it records a 1988 find not far from Sebastian Inlet of an estimated $300,000 in pieces of eight, jewelry and other artifacts.

Spanish salvors working from the Palmar de Ays camp near Sebastian recovered over 5,000,000 pieces of eight by late October 1715 and kept diving until 1718.

Salvage sloops from Havana, joined by vessels from St. Augustine, dragged the bottom for chests of coin and brought up gold and jewelry within weeks, the 1715 Fleet Society history records. By September the admiral in charge of the camp asked for 25 soldiers to guard the recovered treasure. Work slowed when autumn seas made diving unsafe, though efforts continued well into 1718.

The camp drew raiders. In January 1716 the English privateer Henry Jennings, sailing the sloop Barsheba with John Wills in the Eagle under a commission from the governor of Jamaica, seized the Palmar de Ays camp and carried off some 120,000 pieces of eight, two bronze cannon and two iron guns. No casualties were reported in that raid.

When the Spanish left in 1718, much remained on the bottom off the beaches south of Sebastian Inlet. Merchant ships fished the marked sites for years, and then the 1715 Fleet was forgotten and left undisturbed for nearly 250 years, until modern divers returned in 1960.

The 1715 wrecks off Sebastian are still salvaged under exclusive rights held by one company, with state oversight and a share of finds going to Florida.

Florida law sets the ground rules. Section 267.061 of the Florida Statutes declares that treasure trove and artifacts abandoned on state-owned lands or state-owned sovereignty submerged lands belong to the state, with title vested in the Division of Historical Resources. That is why 1715 Fleet material found in the water off Sebastian Inlet State Park is not finders-keepers.

In May 2025 the salvage company that holds the rights, 1715 Fleet Queens Jewels, LLC, applied to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for a 20-year reauthorization of a Corps permit originally issued in 1995, covering ten shipwreck sites, Sebastian Daily reported. In September 2025 the same outlet reported that crews had recovered more than 1,000 silver coins and five gold coins in one summer season, and that the company keeps 80 percent of recovered items while 20 percent goes to the state (Sebastian Daily).

The detailed stories of the individual wreck sites, the gold and emeralds, the salvage law, Kip Wagner and Mel Fisher each have their own pages in this Sebastian history series; this page keeps to the fleet as a whole.

The McLarty Treasure Museum at Sebastian Inlet State Park, built on the survivors' camp site, is the public place near Sebastian that interprets the 1715 Fleet.

The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and closed Mondays and Tuesdays, according to the Sebastian Inlet State Park hours and fees page. The park itself is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and admission is $8 per vehicle for two to eight people. The Sebastian Fishing Museum in the same park is open daily from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. except major holidays, per the park history page.

Last verified: October 11, 2026, on the Florida State Parks website (Sebastian Inlet State Park hours and fees).