2/1/18 Report - 1715 Fleet Burials Question. Gold Treasure To Go On Display. Recovered Treasure Hunter. Shipwrecks.

Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of treasurebeachesreport.blogspot.com.

I'm going to catch up on some miscellaneous items today.

In an email message Gaylen C. said, Have been doing some research and have noticed that in everything I have read so far there has never been a single mention of finding a grave, or even remains, of the Spanish sailors and soldiers of the 1715 fleet wrecks. Of the say 700 who died, some percentage of them washed up on shore. More died after the camps were established. Some must have been buried somewhere on land. Certainly any burial by the Spanish would look very different from an Ais burial. Have you heard of any of the remains of the Spanish being discovered?

I talked to a few people about this and asked a couple of people and didn't come up with much.  One thing I did find was this from a National Parks Service web site and mention of human bones at the Higgs site found in Tequesta (See link below.).

...The earliest episodes of Spanish, French, and English settlement on the eastern shore of North America followed voyages of exploration in the 16th century. The original attempts at colonizing were made in Florida, the Carolinas, and Virginia. In 1565, the first lasting European community was established by the Spanish on the east coast of Florida, at St. Augustine, which survived attack from competing forces in colonization of the New World. An essential feature of the fortified settlement was the Roman Catholic mission church with its associated burial ground. Where they are uncovered in the course of modern day improvement projects, unmarked burials of the 16th and 17th centuries provide evidence for identifying the historic locations of successors to the founding church sites that gradually disappeared in the layerings of later town development. The archeological record shows shroud-wrapped interments were customary in the city's Spanish Colonial period. Traces of coffins or coffin hardware do not appear in Colonial burials before the beginning of English immigration to the area in the 18th century. Graves of the Spanish colonists occurred in consecrated ground within or adjacent to a church. They followed a pattern of regular, compact spacing and east-facing orientation. These characteristics, together with arms crossed over the chest and the presence of brass shroud pins are a means of distinguishing Christian burials from precolonial Native American burials sometimes associated with the same site...

And here is the mention from the Tequesta article.  

Charles D. Higgs," local historian, came close to discovering its presence some 25 years ago, but although he found quantities of both European and Indian artifacts buried in the site, he failed to associate it with the wreck of the Plate Fleet. His examination revealed for 500 feet along the beach in the wind and tide-eroded bluff a concentration of bones, both animal and human, iron spikes, clay pipes and a peculiar assortment of pottery sherds. On the higher land he discovered evidences of building materials - bricks of red clay, shell mortar and plaster, decorative and roofing tile and wooden stakes..

Here is that link.

http://digitalcollections.fiu.edu/tequesta/files/1966/66_1_02.pdf

I don't know what happened to all of those deceased.  You'd think it would be taken care of as quickly as possible considering the hot humid weather and survival conditions.  I haven't heard much about any graves or remains being discovered other than the above.  If you can provide that information, send me an email.

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SANTA ANA, Calif. – More than $50 million worth of gold bars, coins and dust that's been described as the greatest lost treasure in U.S. history is about to make its public debut in California after sitting at the bottom of the ocean for more than 150 years... 

Below is the link for more about that.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/01/29/gold-treasure-recovered-from-1857-shipwreck-to-make-debut.html

The remains of a risk-taking treasure hunter who vanished in June searching for $2 million in buried gold have been identified, authorities said.

Eric Ashby was presumed to have drowned in a rafting accident on the Arkansas River in Colorado last June, Fox 21 Colorado Springs reported. A month later a body was found downstream. Last week, a local coroner announced that the body had been positively identified as Ashby’s through DNA...

Here is that link.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/01/29/body-found-in-arkansas-river-in-june-identified-as-colorado-treasure-hunter.html

Thanks to Dean R. for those links.

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Two shipwrecks, including one possibly dating back to the 14th century, have been found at the bottom of the sea as part of a project to open a new maritime museum in Stockholm...

https://www.thelocal.se/20180126/swedish-divers-find-two-new-incredible-shipwrecks-in-the-baltic-sea

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We are still having some unusually high tides along with some excellent negative tides.  The surf on the Treasure Coast is running around three to five feet.

Happy hunting,
TreasureGuide@comcast.net