Lost Treasure

At the library the other night I checked out the book Sunken Treasure On Florida Reefs by Robert Weller.

If I were not a Christian, I could easily get annoyed with this guy!

He and his buddies found my treasure.

On July 31, 1715, a hurricane wrecked a fleet of twelve Spanish galleons on the east coast of Florida. Seven thousand crewmen and passengers died in the shipwrecks.

These ships carried 14 million gold coins, tons of gold bars, thousands of chests full of silver, caskets brim full of emeralds, gold chains, fine porcelain, jade Aztec statues, and all sorts of other goodies.

Were there any justice in the universe, all this would be mine.

But it isn’t.

None of it is because of the hornets.

You see, back in the 1950s when I was a Boy Scout, I won many swimming and diving competitions. Those days were precursors to my present-day shape like a beached whale. Nevertheless, I swam like a fish and a former Navy frogman trained me in underwater techniques. I knew my way around under the surface.

Even in those long-gone days of my youth I expressed an interest in Jacksonville history and local archaeology. I’d helped excavate an Indian burial mound with a local society and written a report of the excavation for Florida State University. And I dove with a group conducting an archaeological survey of the Ichnetucknee River.

I thought I was hot stuff.

Met this guy, an insurance agent. I’d never heard the term “wheeler dealer” but that describes him. He wanted a diver to go treasure hunting at a shipwreck site near Sebastian Inlet. He looked to recruit a diver who would work “for the experience”.

Can you spell sucker?

J.O.H.N!

There were other adults involved in the enterprise but I remember nothing about them. I recall that we made several practice runs to archaeological sites I knew about in the Jacksonville area. We recovered a human skull with a Spanish colonial period bullet rattling around inside it, a knife blade, and a few other artifacts.

The older guys made one trip down to Sebastian and returned with several cannon balls proving they had located the Spanish shipwreck under less than ten feet of water. Visions of gold occupied everyone’s thoughts.

But, to finance a dive on the 1715 treasure wrecks of Sebastian, we needed cash money.

The grownups came up with this scheme to film an educational movie for tv, a whole series of movies about these two kids who rode their bikes to Florida historical sites and discovered things.

I was to write the script and to act as cameraman – all without pay, of course.

The grownups came up with these two kids, Buffy and Biffy, ten-year-olds, white shorts, pith helmets, shinny bikes.

The group traveled out to Fort George Island to film these kids exploring slave cabins, shell middens, and a couple of mysterious stone tombs which legend attributes to pirates, patriots, or plantation damsels.

I filmed Biffy and Buffy at the slave cabins, with a whale vertebra, at the mound… then we went to the stone tombs deep in jungle undergrowth.

I set up the camera tripod. The kids approached the tombs — and began screaming.

They had blundered into a huge nest of ground wasps, hornets, yellow jackets — stinging bugs.

I shouted for them to freeze. Wasps attack movement. But the kids danced and swatted and screamed — and each of them got stung over 20 times. The wasps swarmed around me, I froze and did not get stung once.

We loaded the kids up for a drive to the hospital (stopping at a corner store to buy meat tenderized to rub on the stings — told you I was a Scout and knew about such things).

The two kids’ mothers put their foots down (how else would you say that?)—No more ventures into the wild woods for their precious little darlings. Intimidated grownups drifted away to play golf or whatever insurance agents do. Without a ripple the film project turned belly up. So did the treasure hunt in Sebastian Inlet.

I never got to dive on my treasure wrecks.

About ten years later Kip Wagner’s dog found a Spanish well which wreck survivors had dug on the beach. Wagner swam straight out to the wreck of the Nuestra Senora de la Regla.

He recruited divers and his group recovered, “a flowered gold chain 11 feet six inches long…and silver coins that could not be counted, they could only be weighed… over a ton of silver, and 3,000 ounces of gold coins”. They also recovered diamond and emerald rings, a gold cross, silver plates, cannon, silver candlesticks, clay tobacco pipes and …

And all sorts of stuff I would have found ten years earlier if those dumb kids had not kicked that wasp nest.

So I never dove on the wreck; never recovered the Spanish treasure.

Perhaps God had other plans for my life.

Come to think of it, if I had brought up the treasure, I would never have finished high school, never gone to college, never joined the army, never moved up north, never met Ginny, never sired my children, never lived this life, never written this blog.

So I suppose I have discovered a treasure after all, one sweeter than honey, more to be desired than gold…

Nevertheless…

Nevertheless…. I don’t know how to end this sentence.

Oh yeah, Robert Weller, the guy who wrote the book that dredged up all my petty grievances all these years later, he found a lot of treasure in the same area.

But, somehow, I don’t want to read any more about his findings.