Exhibitions: A Trove Come True

There used to be lots of gold in them thar hulls. Over the centuries, Spain exacted an estimated $8 billion in tribute from its New World colonies, and probably $1 billion of that was hijacked by pirates on the high seas or sank beneath the waves during storms. These lost riches still haunt the imagination, and to addicts no space-age adventure is as exciting as the search for sunken treasure. Exciting and occasionally profitable. An engrossing sampling of one briny trove, the salvage of an armada wrecked in the 18th century off Florida, was put up for auction last week in Manhattan's Parke-Bernet Galleries (see color). The loot brought some $227,450.

Staid Parke-Bernet was so captivated by its romantic consignment that for a month preceding the auction the gallery staged a $100,000 exhibit around it, including a hurricane room with simulated thunder and lightning and a reconstructed captain's cabin with an open chest of gold coins and a live macaw. Handsome though it was, the display merely hinted at the real splendor of the original hoard. The Silver Plate fleet, commanded by Captain General Don Juan Estéban de Ubilla, bore silver and gold worth today's equivalent of about $14 million, together with Chinese silk and porcelain and a sumptuous set of jewelry intended for the bride of Spain's King Philip V.

Full Fathom Five. On July 31, 1715, while the fleet's nine merchant galleons and two men-of-war sailed northeast in a stately procession along the Gulf Stream from Havana, an early hurricane bashed them with 100-m.p.h. winds against Florida's offshore reefs, between 30 and 50 miles south of what is now Cape Kennedy. Only one galleon survived. Captain Ubilla and more than 1,000 of his men drowned. The battered remains of the ships' hulls sank in 30 feet of murky water. Spanish recovery crews, pirates and poachers, hampered by deceitful currents, sharks, barracuda, moray eels and needle-sharp coral, recovered only $6,000,000 worth of the cargo.

A full five fathoms the treasure lay for the next 250 years. In 1949, a Sebastian, Fla., contractor named Kip Wagner began to collect the blackened silver coins that occasionally washed ashore. None of them, he noted, were dated later than 1715. Wagner began ransacking libraries for data on the 1715 catastrophe. He managed to obtain 3,000 feet of microfilmed documents from Seville archives, found details of the Silver Plate fleet's cargo manifestoes plus testimony from the official investigation of the wreck.

10-lb. Ingots. In 1961, Wagner and a syndicate of seven friends, called- Real Eight Co., Inc., took out a salvage search lease with the State of Florida (in return, the state gets 25% of their take). First underwater teams located, with the aid of magnetometers, two wreck sites, marked only by piles of the original ballast stones and cannon (the wood hulls had long since been eaten away). The teams shoved the 50-lb. stones aside and cleared away loose sand with a hydraulic blaster.