Hurricanes unearth Florida beach treasure

INDIALANTIC, Fla. — It is the stuff of pirate legends, but don't waste your breath asking Joel Ruth on what stretch of Florida's Treasure Coast he found his hoard of Spanish pieces of eight — just waiting to be scratched out of the sand with bare fingers.

Treasure hunters guard their secrets.

Especially if, like Ruth, they have just found about 180 silver coins worth more than $40,000.

To most Floridians, hurricane season is the time to board up windows and dread the worst. But to professional and amateur treasure seekers, it is the time to comb beaches for lost riches.

"It's why we're called the Treasure Coast," said Ruth, a 52-year-old marine archaeologist.

It takes the big storms like Jeanne and Frances to rake several feet of sand off the beaches and expose gold, silver and gems sunk and scattered centuries ago.

But making a find takes more than walking the beaches with a metal detector. What separates those who make a real find from the legions of beachcombers is knowledge and patience, Sir Robert Marx said.

Marx is an underwater archaeologist and marine historian who has written 800 popular and scientific articles and 60 books on the subject.

His colleague Ruth, for instance, has been keeping his eye on a certain stretch of beach in Brevard County, Fla., for 20 years, Marx said. He and Ruth think the find is part of a sunken treasure fleet.

But it took Jeanne to bring a slice of the shoreline back to where it was in 1715, he said. That is the year a famous treasure fleet of about a dozen ships sank in a hurricane, bloated with treasure headed for Philip V of Spain, Marx said.

Captain-General Don Juan Esteban de Ubilla, commander of the flotilla, set sail in the late summer 289 years ago. Under pressure from the king to bring treasure to boost a war-ravaged economy, Ubilla set sail even though hurricane season already had started.

The fleet hugged Florida's Atlantic coast, heading north in the hopes of catching the trade winds of the Gulf Stream. With no more warning than a morning of steel-gray skies, a tempest snapped the ships like matchsticks, a few survivors would later relate.

Nautical records of salvage attempts and previous finds pointed to the spot Ruth staked out to search. Others know the spot and have made finds there, too.

The basic rules of treasure hunting on beaches include finders keepers, but digging into dunes or in protected areas is prohibited.

Because riches go to those who are there first, "You have to be Johnny on the spot," said Mitch King, vice president of the Treasure Coast Archaeological Society.

And you have to be quick, Ruth said, because the high tides right after a storm often dump several feet of sand back on the same beaches, leaving the treasure well below the reach of most metal detectors.

"You could be walking over a million dollars in coins and never know it," said Ruth, who makes a living on salvage efforts and identifying and restoring ancient coins.

He headed out with his metal detector on the morning of Sept. 26, when Jeanne's winds started slacking off. He would not say where he went other than "somewhere in Brevard."

"I made a find almost immediately — a big green [piece of] eight," he said.

It was green from age but was not worn or corroded, which told him the coin had spent most of the time deep under the protection of the sand — making it far more valuable to collectors.

Ruth stayed for about four hours, filling his pockets with coins until his batteries were about dead and the high tide's waves bashed him against the sandy cliffs.

He went back the next day, but there was too much sand piled up and he found nothing more.

Although some marine archaeologists would call them plunderers, professional treasure hunters say they give more discoveries to museums and make more historical finds because their ventures pay for new searches a life in academics could not finance.