At 2 a.m. on July 31, 1715, a hurricane tore eleven Spanish galleons apart off the east coast of Florida, throwing some 1,500 sailors into the sea and sending an empire's fortune in silver and gold to the bottom. This deep dive dissects that single night and its three centuries of consequences, from a bankrupt Spain desperate for the Plate Fleet's cargo after the War of the Spanish Succession, to the French frigate Le Griffon whose captain's unfamiliarity with the coast kept him in deep water and saved his ship.

We follow the Spanish salvage camp that used enslaved divers and burned the Urca de Lima to the waterline to hide it, the pirates Henry Jennings and Charles Vane who extracted the camp's location from a captured mail captain and stole roughly 87,500 pounds of treasure, and how that raid helped fund the Golden Age of piracy in Nassau ...