Florida Treasure Hunters Find $4.5M In Lost Gold

Despite his astonishing find, Bartlett isn’t a full-time treasure hunter, instead diving as a hobby.

“Over 350 gold coins including 9 Royals were recovered on July 30 & 31”.

The coins and other treasures, possibly worth $400 million in all, remain on the sea floor amid the wreckage of 11 ships sunken while traveling from Havana, Cuba to Spain in 1715, the report said. In June, they found about 50 coins with a total of about $1 million.

The Royals discovered, valued at $300,000 each, were made for the King of Spain, Phillip V.

It looks like that strip of Florida coast is very rich in Spanish treasure: some of the coins from the 300-year-old ship still wash up on the Florida coast from time to time. This awesome recovery occurred on the actual 300th Anniversary (of the wreck),’ Brent Brisben, the head of the salvage company, wrote on Facebook.

William Bartlett, 51, was the diver who spotted the gold while working from Brisben’s boat, S/V Capitana.

Brisben’s company now owns the exclusive salvage rights to the remains of the 1715 shipwrecks and serves as custodian for the U.S District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

According to a post in cbsnews.com, Brisben and the rest of 1715 Fleet Queens Jewels found the artifacts that no one has seen a clue of since 1998.

He said he did not hunt treasure for the money, and declined to say how much he would receive under contract with 1715 Fleet-Queens Jewels.

The State of Florida is entitled 20 percent of the recovered artifacts for purposes of displaying in their Museum in Tallahassee, the release said.

And “we work extremely close to shore, which is surprising to most people”, he said. Using a metal detector, he found the coins and “realized that just beyond the breaking waves must lay one of the long forgotten treasure ships of 1715”.