The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), in collaboration with the FBI, has successfully recovered 37 stolen gold coins of Spanish shipwrecks of the Fleet of 1715 by some treasure hunters who had been hired by the company 1715 Fleet-Queens Jewels LLC.
During work for this company, which is exclusively responsible for salvaging artifacts from these Spanish wrecks, despite being unrelated to archeology and without experience in this field, members of the Schmitt family discovered 101 coins on the so-called Treasure Coast of Florida. whose value amounts to “more than a million dollars” (more than 950,000 euros), according to the FWC. However, They only reported the discovery of 51 of the coins and later stole the other half of the loot.
Given new evidence detected on June 10, which linked Eric Schmitt to the illegal sale of gold coins between 2023 and 2024, US authorities began an investigation that allowed the recovery of coins in private residences, safe deposit boxes and auctions. Five of the stolen pieces had been purchased by a Florida auctioneer, apparently unknowingly.
Advanced digital forensics identified metadata and geolocation data linking Eric Schmitt to a photograph of stolen coins that had been taken at his family’s properties in Fort Pierce. It was also discovered that the investigated placed three of the stolen gold coins at the bottom of the ocean in 2016 for the new investors of 1715 Fleet-Queens Jewels, LLC to find.
“This case underscores the importance of safeguarding Florida’s rich cultural heritage and holding accountable those who seek to profit from its exploitation,” said FWC investigator Camille Soverel.
Following US state and federal laws, the recovered coins will be returned to 1715 Fleet-Queens Jewels. The FWC indicates its commitment to recover the remaining 13 pieces and bring those involved in their illegal sale to justice.
a tragedy
The fleet known today as the Fleet of 1715 left Havana (Cuba) bound for Seville with shipments of gold and silver from the New World, but the convoy was shipwrecked near the coast of Florida due to a hurricane on July 31 of that year. . It was one of the greatest maritime tragedies of all time. Nine ships crashed into reefs and rocks and two others were swallowed by the waves, according to Fernández Duro.
The Spanish lawyer José María Lancho told this newspaper how in 2010 the news drew powerful attention that the heirs of treasure hunter Mel Fisher had sold “the rights” to the located wrecks of the sunken ships of that fleet to the company 1715 Fleet-Queens Jewels LLC. without any institution of the State of Florida or the Kingdom of Spain expressing any obstacle, or even verifying its archaeological solvency to safeguard the public interest related to those sites.
“The sale and purchase of the rights to the sites consisted of one of the most absurd contractual operations, between looters, in history and, of course, defining the discriminatory obsession of the Hispanic legacy among some sectors of the United States,” defended Lancho.
The lawyer denounced almost a decade ago that treasure hunting companies continued to extract their extraordinary content from those wrecks “year after year, tearing it out of its context and destroying the corresponding information, without even a judicial guarantee of the authentic location of the objects in judicial are attributed annually to each specific wreck.
By then the discovery of the Schmitt family of treasure hunters, in the service of 1715 Fleet-Queens Jewels, which is now discovered as even greater predation.
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