The Storm, the Silver, and the Standoff Off Plantation Key
A hurricane sank her in 1733. Two centuries later, a treasure hunter's shovel — and a lawsuit — would make her famous all over again.
On July 15, 1733, a hurricane tore through the Florida Straits and caught the Spanish fleet in the open water. Among the eighteen merchant ships sailing home from Cuba to Spain was the San José y Las Animas, a 327-ton vessel built in England in 1728 for the Spanish crown. She carried twenty-six guns and was under the command of Captain Cristóbal Fernando Franco.
As the storm intensified, the San José ran aground off Tavernier Key, near what is now Plantation Key. Water poured into her hull as her crew huddled beneath the deck, waiting out the worst of the wind before finally abandoning ship. They made it to shore on makeshift rafts. Remarkably, every member of the crew survived, even as their vessel settled into twenty-eight feet of water, her cargo scattered and unreachable.
The San José's manifest listed 30,435 pesos in silver and bullion, along with Chinese porcelain, brazilwood, cocoa, and vanilla — a cargo typical of the trade routes linking the Spanish Caribbean to Europe and Asia. For more than two centuries, that cargo lay buried beneath sand roughly four miles southeast of Plantation Key, forgotten beneath the waves.
In 1968, treasure hunters rediscovered the wreck at coordinates 24 degrees North, 80 degrees 29.334 West. Using a magnetometer, they traced a ballast pile 135 feet long and about 40 feet wide, along with twenty-three cannons and two anchors scattered roughly 200 feet from the main site — silent evidence of the ship breaking apart in the storm two centuries earlier.
The man who found her was Tom Gurr, working with support from the Smithsonian Institution under curator Mendel Peterson. Gurr's team used 8-inch airlifts to suck sediment away from the wreck and haul artifacts to the surface, piece by piece, from the seafloor that had hidden them since 1733.
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