The Earthen Cargo: Pottery of the 1715 Fleet

Olive jars, K'ang Hsi porcelain, and the clay that carried an empire's goods — what the fleet loaded, what the sea returned, and how to read a piece.

Every 1715 Fleet ship was, first, a floating warehouse — and the packaging of the Spanish empire was fired clay. Three kinds of ceramic came off the wreck sites: the Spanish olive jar (botija), the shipping container of the entire colonial system; K'ang Hsi Chinese export porcelain trans-shipped from the Manila galleon trade; and the coarse utility wares of shipboard life. For a buyer they are three different markets, and the rule that governs all three is the same one that governs the coins: the paper is the asset.

I. The fleet, and why clay sailed on it

Everyone knows the 1715 Fleet for its coins. But every one of those ships was, first, a floating warehouse — and warehouses run on packaging. The packaging of the Spanish empire was fired clay.

In the last week of July 1715, the combined treasure fleet — General Juan Esteban de Ubilla's New Spain flota out of Veracruz and Captain-General Antonio de Echeverz's Tierra Firme squadron out of Cartagena, sailing together from Havana with the French Grifón in company — was caught by a hurricane off the east coast of Florida. Eleven Spanish ships were lost along roughly fifty miles of coast between present-day Sebastian and Fort Pierce; the Grifón alone escaped. Spain salvaged the shallow sites for about four years, recovering a large share of the registered cargo, and the disaster then slept until Kip Wagner's beachcombing and the Real Eight Company reopened the sites in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Three kinds of ceramic were aboard, and all three have come off the sites: the Spanish olive jar (botija), the shipping container of the entire colonial system; K'ang Hsi Chinese export porcelain, trans-shipped from the Manila galleon trade and riding home as high-value cargo; and the coarse utility wares of shipboard life — cookpots, basins, tablewares. For a dealer, these three behave like three different markets, and this report treats them that way.

Why pottery matters to a coin dealer: pottery is the cheapest documented entry point into the 1715 Fleet — a papered olive jar shard costs less than lunch — and it is the display object that sells the story around the coins. On a shelf or in a reel, a jar neck or a blue-and-white shard says "shipwreck" faster than any slabbed real. The same rule applies as with coins: the paper is the asset.

II. The olive jar (botija)

The olive jar is the single most common ceramic on virtually every Spanish colonial wreck, the 1715 sites included. Despite the name, the jars carried far more than olives: wine, water, olive oil, vinegar, honey, tar, shot — anything that poured or packed. The 1715 Fleet Society calls them "the Mason Jars of that era," and notes that they were occasionally used to conceal silver coins, hidden in the jar and covered with pitch.

The reference study is John M. Goggin's The Spanish Olive Jar: An Introductory Study (Yale University Publications in Anthropology No. 62, 1960). Goggin divided production into three periods — Early, Middle, and Late — and the Middle Style (c. 1580–1780) is the one a 1715 Fleet jar falls into. Within it he described three basic shapes: Shape A, the large elongated carrier; Shape B, the globular jar divers call a "beehive" — the most common form in southern waters; and Shape C, the slender carrot-shaped jar. George Avery's 1997 dissertation Pots as Packaging refined the rim typology, and Mitchell Marken's Pottery from Spanish Shipwrecks 1500–1800 — already on the Dark Tide reference shelf — ties the whole sequence to dated wrecks.

What the 1715 sites give up

Shards are the standard find — the Fleet Society notes olive jar fragments are commonly found on Treasure Coast beaches to this day, and a beach-walker picking one up after a storm is a rite of passage in the hobby. Intact jars are genuinely rare. A representative intact example: a 10-inch "beehive" jar recovered from the Douglass Beach site south of Fort Pierce, coral-encrusted and complete, featured by the 1715 Fleet Society in 2023.

Hand identification, at the counter: coarse buff-to-pink earthenware paste; wheel-thrown with rilling (finger ridges) inside; a thick rolled "donut" rim; some jars carry a green lead glaze on the interior, and some rims carry incised (sgraffito) maker's marks. Weight is substantial — big Shape A carriers run to twenty pounds empty.

III. K'ang Hsi porcelain — China on a Spanish galleon

The fleet's porcelain was made at Jingdezhen under the K'ang Hsi (Kangxi) emperor, second of the Qing, who reigned 1662–1722 and opened Chinese porcelain production to the export trade. It reached the 1715 Fleet by the longest supply chain on Earth: Manila galleon across the Pacific to Acapulco, mule train overland through Mexico, then aboard Ubilla's New Spain flota at Veracruz. Sedwick's own fleet histories list "Kangxi china from the Manila trade route" among the registered riches alongside the coin, jewelry, and gemstones.

The first documented recovery of intact K'ang Hsi porcelain from the fleet came in the Real Eight Company's 1963 season on the Cabin Wreck site near Sebastian (believed to be Nuestra Señora de la Regla). Divers hit an area of gray mud that turned out to be the packing clay the cases of china had been shipped in — and inside it, whole cups. Photographs went to Kamer Aga-Oglu at the University of Michigan, a leading authority, who identified the pieces as K'ang Hsi period. The clay packing is why intact porcelain survives at all on a hurricane-wrecked site; it is also a detail worth retelling, because it was known even earlier — Charles Higgs noted blue-and-white fragments identified as K'ang Hsi china opposite the Cabin Wreck site in a 1942 Florida Historical Quarterly article, two decades before Real Eight proved it with intact pieces.

Recovered forms run to small tablewares: teacups, saucers, spoons, small bowls and lidded containers — hard white porcelain painted in underglaze cobalt blue, florals and panel designs, on a raised foot ring. Some bases carry painted marks; a 1715-site shard documented by the Gotheborg reference was marked with one of the Eight Precious Things, consistent with Jingdezhen work of c. 1700. Divers continue to recover porcelain from fleet sites — Vero Beach diver Mike Blanchard's finds, including cups recovered after Hurricane Jeanne in 2004, anchor the porcelain display at the McLarty Treasure Museum, built on the fleet's survivors' camp.

The authentication tell: genuine K'ang Hsi blue-and-white is hand-painted under the glaze — look for brush variation, pooled cobalt, and strokes that pass under a glassy surface. Mechanical uniformity, dot-pattern printing, or decoration sitting on top of the glaze belongs to later transfer-printed wares and is an immediate red flag on anything sold as 1715 Fleet. Dark Tide has already handled a shard group in which one piece showed a manufacturing technique impossible for the period — attribution fails piece by piece, not lot by lot.

IV. The rest of the clay

Beyond jars and china, fleet-era ships carried coarse cooking and storage pottery and glazed tablewares. Spanish-colonial majolica (tin-glazed earthenware — the Puebla blue-on-white family, made in Mexico into the 1720s) is exactly period-correct for 1715 and is well documented on other plate-fleet wrecks; the Florida Museum of Natural History's Historical Archaeology Type Collection is the open, photographed reference for every named type. For the 1715 sites specifically, this desk has not yet verified a published majolica recovery — so a "1715 Fleet majolica" offer should be treated as an attribution to prove, not a label to accept.

The buying rule is unchanged: period-plausible is not site-proven.

V. Reading a piece — the desk checklist

Five checks before money moves:

VI. The tape — what the market pays

Pottery trades thin — a handful of Sedwick lots per cycle, a steady trickle on eBay — which is exactly why documented pieces hold price. Anchor comps on the record:

The working ladder — Market Snapshot, October 2026

VII. The Dark Tide theses

Why pottery, and why now:

VIII. Fact vs. record — grading this report's own claims

Per house practice, the load-bearing claims above, graded by the strength of the record behind them.

Corrections invited. If you hold a documented 1715 Fleet ceramic, a published majolica recovery, or primary paperwork this desk has not seen, write us — the record outranks the report. We trace the history before we sell the coin.

Glossary

Frequently asked questions

Sources