Treasure Hunting Ship

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Ship is treasure hunt condo

4-story boat is platform for search off Melbourne Beach

BY LINDA JUMP
FLORIDA TODAY

PALM BAY - At first glance, you might think the Polly L is a four-story oil rig when it's perched in the Atlantic, just a few miles off Melbourne Beach.

Like those operations, this ship is involved in digging for treasure. Yet the booty it seeks is not black gold but the shiny, metal variety.

Doug Pope, the 58-year-old who helped design the $2.3 million ship five years ago, has yet another description: "I call it my movable condo on stilts."

There are only 300 like it, and Pope's is believed to be the only one used for "underwater archaeology" -- a fancy term for hunting treasure on submerged wrecks. Pope and his crew are trying to determine what's on a site that Pope thinks contains the remnants of two of the ships from the 1715 Plate Fleet that sank in a storm. The ships were returning to Spain with treasure that included gold bars, gold and silver coins, jewelry, china and other treasures.. . . . .

Big rig. Doug Pope helped design the $2.3 million Polly L, a ship he calls a condo on stilts. Rik Jesse, FLORIDA TODAY
About the Polly L
Weight: 200 tons
Hull: 2,100 square feet
Height: 4 stories for boat, can be lifted another 68 feet
Cost: $2.3 million
Power: 6 diesel engines
Treasure Coast' history
From the 15th to 18th centuries, the Spanish dug silver and gold from Mexico, the Caribbean and South America and cast it into coins and chains. Each summer, ships protected by warships carried the treasure from Cuba along Florida's east coast toward Spain. In 1715, a storm sank 10 to 12 ships on the shoals between Sebastian Inlet and Fort Pierce, with survivors setting up camp behind the current site of the McLarty Museum. More than 1,000 died, most from exposure. Spanish salvagers from St. Augustine, pirates and British sailors claimed to have found 30 percent to 80 percent of what the ships officially carried. A surveyor noted the Spanish campsite on a 1939 map. And in 1959, a part-time resident of Indian River County, looking for driftwood, found some coins. Since then, treasure hunters have recovered millions of dollars in cargo.

    



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