Travellers, chroniclers and antiquaries wrote down where ships went down and where money was dug up, often with the place, the year and the sum. These are some of those passages from the library’s books, in translation, each linked to the page it comes from. Most of the sums are the writers’ own estimates or local report; none has been checked against an excavation.
Sunk with their cargo
Six chests of the Emperor’s gold, off Cadiz
Ulrich Schmidt, a German soldier, was sailing home from South America when his fleet anchored off Cadiz. A captain named Henrik Schetz mistook a fire burning at a mill on shore for the admiral’s lantern, steered for it and struck the rocks. Of the twenty-two people aboard, only the captain and the helmsman survived, by holding on to a tree trunk. Schmidt had been left ashore because the captain forgot to call him aboard.
Besides all the goods of the merchants and others, there sank here into the abyss six chests of gold and silver, belonging to his Imperial Majesty Charles V.Ulrich Schmidt, voyage to the Río de la Plata, in Gedenkwaardige scheeps-togten (Leiden, 1706), p. 73
A king’s revenues in the Baltic
Münster tells how King Christopher of Denmark, after his wedding in 1445, went to Sweden, loaded the treasure collected from the Swedish revenues onto his ships and was caught by a storm on the way home. He died in 1448 without heirs.
All the silver and gold sank with the ship. It is thought that over 1,000,000 guilders’ worth was sunk. The King barely reached land with his ship.Sebastian Münster, Cosmographey (Basel, 1598 edition), p. 1189 (mclxxxix)
A chest of dollars and gold in the Caspian
English merchants trading for Persian silk hired a small Armenian cargo boat to carry their goods from Bildih, near Baku, to Derbent. A storm broke the cables and drove the boat onto the rocks. Everyone got ashore, but the chest of takings went into the water.
There was a Carobia or cheste, wherein were dollers, and golde, which they had receiued for the commodities of the company, which they sold at Bachu, which at the taking out of the Busse, fell by the barkes side into the water amongst the rockes, and so was lost.Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations (London, 1599), p. 425
Pieces of eight off Maldonado
Pernety sailed with Bougainville in 1763 and stopped at the anchorage by Maldonado Island, at the mouth of the Río de la Plata, which he calls one of the worst on the coast. Thirty years after the wreck, the islanders were still dragging coins off the bottom.
An English ship, loaded with piastres, or pieces of eight, was lost there thirty years ago. The inhabitants of the island near the place where it broke apart still seek today to save a part of this cargo. They had fished up with a dragnet two thousand four hundred of them the day before our arrival.Antoine-Joseph Pernety, History of a Voyage to the Falkland Islands (1770), vol. 1, p. 241
An Armada ship in Tobermory Bay
Lang is writing about second sight in the Highlands, and the wreck comes in sideways: one of his witnesses stayed on Mull with Sir William Sacheverell, who was trying to raise the galleon. Lang adds that a cannon from the wreck was in the Duke of Argyll’s possession.
Engaged in trying to recover treasures from the vessel of the Armada sunk in Tobermory Bay. … lately, the fluke of a ship’s anchor brought up a doubloon. But the treasure still lies in Tobermory Bay.Andrew Lang, Cock Lane and Common-Sense (1894), p. 240
Wrecks on Bermuda
Smith collects what was known of the islands before the English settled them, including a story that the name comes from a Spanish ship called Bermudas wrecked there with a cargo of hogs, and the account of Henry May, cast away on the north-west of the islands in December 1593 because the pilots were “either drunke, or carelesse of their charge”.
Our men found diuers crosses, peeces of Spanish monies here and there. Two or three wracks also they found, by certaine inscriptions to bee some Spanish, some Dutch, some French.John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (London, 1624), p. 173
The São Tiago on the Bassas da India
Linschoten was in Goa when news came that the flagship of the 1585 India fleet had been lost on the shoals between Madagascar and Mozambique. In his margins: the pilot’s quarrel with everyone aboard, the cause of the wreck, and the admiral escaping in a boat with ten or twelve others. Langenes retold the story three years later beside the woodcut above.
There were still missing 2 ships of the company that had left Lisbon with them, namely the ship Sant Salvator and the Admiral-ship Sant Iago, of which there was still no news.Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, Itinerario (Amsterdam, 1595), p. 116
Dug up
A pot of Saxon silver in a Suffolk churchyard
Sir Philip Skippon reported the find to the Royal Society and tried to read the coins. He found scarcely two inscriptions alike and guessed that each moneyer had his own stamp, citing King Æthelstan’s law on how many moneyers each town might keep.
In May 1687, at Honedon nigh Clare in Suffolk, the Sexton, as he was digging a Grave in the Church-yard, met with a Skull; and near it his Spade broke a Yellow Earthen Pot, wherein were many Silver pieces of Saxon Mony.Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 16 (1686–87), p. 356
Digging money in Luoyang
In Luoyang, Shen Kuo says, so much old treasure lay underground that a buyer of unexcavated land paid the seller an extra fee for the right to dig. One official paid over a thousand strings of cash in digging money for a mansion, and everyone thought him a fool until his builders turned up a carved stone casket.
Opening the casket, they found several hundred ounces of yellow gold. When sold, the value of the gold matched the exact cost of purchasing the mansion, with the excavation fee included, without differing by a single coin.Shen Kuo, Dream Pool Essays (eleventh century), p. 74
The sailor who built a harbour wall
Stukeley was looking at a long pier of piled rocks near the Roman site he calls Honey Ditches, by Seaton in Devon. Local people said Courd dug up the treasure and paid for the wall himself, that many had dug on the hill since in the same hope, and that his descendants still lived on the estate.
They told me it was built many years ago by one Courd, once a poor sailor, who being somewhere in the Mediterranean, was told by a certain greek that much treasure was hid upon Hogsdon hill near here.William Stukeley, Itinerarium Curiosum (London, 1724), p. 152
Where to dig, and how
A Tibetan guide to a hidden valley
Guidebooks (lam yig) to the hidden lands (sbas yul) of the Himalaya give routes, landmarks, food and dangers, and sometimes where a treasure lies. This one also advises carrying plenty of salt.
In the middle-lower part of that, there is a white boulder the size of a yak. Underneath it is a vase-treasure about the size of a hand. By digging two fathoms deep, it will be found.sbas gnas kyi lam yig kun gsal me long, Ogyen Choling collection, Bhutan, p. 11
A fifth part, by the angel’s leave
The author says his own treasure was assigned to him at Würzburg, and that he raised it with the operation in the eighth chapter of the third book.
It is permissible to demand from the Angel a sum of coined money proportionate unto thy birth, quality and capacity, the which without difficulty will be granted unto thee. Such money is taken from the Hidden Treasures. It is, however, necessary to note that in all Treasures one is allowed to take the fifth part, God permitting the same.The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage, tr. S. L. MacGregor Mathers, p. 33
A carbuncle between Swabia and Bavaria
A pamphlet printed during the Thirty Years’ War under Paracelsus’s name, about the war and the Bohemian crown, which also describes a treasure “that surpasses all the others” in “a rejected place”.
The carbuncle stone lies together with the other precious stones in a small casket... The key lies on top of it, and it is buried in a golden coffin, the golden one in a silver one, the silver one in a tin coffin, and in the place where God would have it.Warhaffte Beschreibung einer Prophecey D. Theophrasti Paracelsi (1632), p. 4
Never recovered
A second pass asked of every wreck and hoard page whether it says the valuables were never recovered. These four came out on top, and none of them has a wreck site that we could find in published sources.
The 1502 gold fleet, and a nugget like a loaf of bread
The “him” is Guarionex, a Taíno king captured on Hispaniola and shipped to Castile in chains. He sailed with the fleet that left Santo Domingo in 1502 carrying the outgoing governor, Francisco de Bobadilla, against Columbus’s warning that a storm was coming. Oviedo gives the same story from the island (Oviedo, Historia general, vol. 1, ch. VII). Most of the fleet sank in the hurricane, and later accounts disagree on the number of ships.
The ship was lost at sea, and along with him, many Christians and a large quantity of gold drowned; among the items lost was a large nugget that was like a loaf of bread and weighed three thousand six hundred castellanos.Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Seville, 1552), p. 13
Prince Rupert’s prize money
Rupert’s Royalist squadron spent 1650 to 1653 taking prizes at sea. Clarendon reports the prince’s account to Charles II: the treasure went down with his own ship, and more with the ship in which his brother Maurice was lost. Clarendon names the sunken ship as the Antelope and puts the loss “in the Indies”; other sources name the Constant Reformation, wrecked off Terceira in the Azores on 30 September 1651. We found no published wreck site.
What treasure had been gotten together, which, he confessed, had amounted to great value, had been all lost in the ship in which himself was.Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, book XIV, p. 68
The loot of Kaffa, 1475
After the Ottoman capture of the Genoese colony of Kaffa in the Crimea, the spoils and captives were sent to Constantinople in a Genoese ship. When it sank, the chronicle says, the Sultan seized the Genoese merchants of Pera and made them pay for the loss. The text does not say where in the Black Sea it went down.
He carried away many souls, and many treasures, and many goods, and loaded everything onto a Genoese ship, and coming in the direction of Constantinople the said ship broke and perished, and went to the bottom of the Sea, and everything was lost.An Italian chronicle printed in Giovanni Francesco Pagnini, Della decima (Florence, 1765); scan digitised by Google, p. 270
Moctezuma’s gold in the lagoon
After the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521, Cuauhtémoc and the stewards of his household told the Spaniards where the gold had been thrown into the lake. The lake has since been drained and Mexico City built over it.
They told where they had thrown the gold into the lagoon, and part of it was found; but not a third part of what had been lost.Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias, vol. 2, p. 517
Where are they now?
What we could find about the stories above, in published sources, as of October 2026.
- The São Tiago was found on the Bassas da India and salvaged: guns identified by the Natal Museum, coins and jewellery, an astrolabe, and a bronze falconet raised in 1985 that is now in Lisbon’s Museu de Marinha (ShipLib). The atoll is a French nature reserve and visits need a permit.
- The Tobermory ship has been searched with diving bells in 1666, by Sacheverell in 1688, by the Pieces of Eight Company in 1906 to 1908 and by the Duke of Argyll between 2008 and 2014. No significant treasure has come up, the hull lies deep in mud, and the records suggest it carried soldiers, not money (Canmore).
- The Hundon pot was the find itself, in 1687.
- Hawkesdown Hill is an Iron Age hillfort and has been a scheduled monument since 1924, so digging for Courd’s treasure would now be a criminal offence.
- The Cadiz wreck has no identified site that we could find. Schmidt’s own pages date it: he reached Lisbon on 30 September 1553 (p. 71). The captain’s name is also the name of the Antwerp merchant family Schmidt mentions as owners of sugar estates at São Vicente in Brazil (p. 68), but he does not say they owned this ship.
- The Maldonado silver ship has no identified site either. Pernety’s visit was in 1763, so the loss was around 1733, close enough to the island for a dragnet to bring up coins.
- King Christopher’s ship appears in Münster; we found no other record of it.
- The Caspian chest is recorded only in Hakluyt. The voyage itself, Christopher Burrough’s of 1580, is well documented (Encyclopaedia Iranica).
From the loss to the printed page
Hover, tap or tab through the rows. Arrow keys move between them.
The Armada ship in Tobermory Bay
1588, in print 1894 (306 years later): Lang, Cock Lane and Common-Sense
How these pages were found
We searched the English translations for words like shipwreck, foundered, hidden treasure and hoard, which gave about eleven thousand candidate pages. A small decision model, TypeSafe’s Jev, then answered four questions about each page: does it report a particular wreck; does it report particular valuables that were buried, hidden or sunk (not treasure in heaven, and not the philosophers’ stone); does it name a place someone could go and look; and is it a record, a legend, a method for finding treasure, law, allegory or fiction. The whole pass cost 64 cents. A second pass over the 1,356 pages that named a place asked whether the valuables were never recovered, for another 6 cents. We then read the top-scoring pages and chose the ones above.
The search only reaches pages that have been translated and that use one of the search words, so wrecks told in other words, or in books not yet translated, are missing. The passages are read from the translations; follow the links for the original page beside them. Passages from books printed in English (Hakluyt, Smith, the Philosophical Transactions, Stukeley, Clarendon, Lang and Mathers’s Abra-Melin) are given as printed, with the long s made round.
