Kip Wagner and the Real Eight — Sebastian, Florida

The modern recovery of the 1715 Fleet began with Kip Wagner, a building contractor who lived in Wabasso, a few miles south of Sebastian, and with the salvage company he helped organize, the Real Eight Company. According to the 1715 Fleet Society archive, Wagner was born in Miamisburg, Ohio, and after World War II he moved his family to Wabasso, Florida on a permanent basis. The Society's 2022 tribute adds that he was hired to build the Penn-Wood Motel in Wabasso and settled into a small house nearby.

Others had looked before him. NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory records that amateur archeologist Charles Higgs discovered evidence of the salvage camps in the dunes near the Sebastian Inlet in the early 1940s, and that a passing hurricane in 1955 washed away some of the dunes around the camps, revealing artifacts and silver coins. That storm, NOAA writes, touched off renewed salvage efforts by local builder Kip Wagner and his Real 8 Company. The 1715 Fleet Society credits the company, from its start to the mid 1970s, with recovering the lion's share of the treasure the Spanish did not salvage after 1715.

Wagner's first clue came from the beach. Walking the shore between Wabasso and Sebastian Inlet for driftwood, he picked up worn Spanish coins, and the 1715 Fleet Society notes that none of his coins were dated after 1715. That pointed to a single disaster rather than scattered losses. He then teamed up with Dr. Kip Kelso, a Sebastian physician whose 1958 correspondence was addressed to a Sebastian post office box, and the two began working through Spanish shipwreck records.

The breakthrough was a map. Dr. Kelso traveled to Washington D.C. in the summer of 1959 and found at the Library of Congress a copy of Bernard Romans' A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida, published in 1775. Its map carried the note: Opposite this River, perished, the Admiral, commanding the Plate Fleet 1715. The river was the Sebastian River, and the spot matched where Wagner had been finding coins. The two men also wrote to the archives in Seville, Spain, and one document they received indicated that a salvage camp had been established near the Sebastian Inlet after the fleet was lost.

Wagner went looking for that camp on the beach south of Sebastian Inlet. Equipped with a $15.00 war surplus military mine detector and an old hound dog, he found the campsite, leased the land from the state and excavated with a shovel and screen. Swimming the reefs opposite the camp, he found cannons and an anchor. He then obtained from the state's Internal Improvement Fund a nonexclusive salvage lease agreement for a 50-mile area from Sebastian Inlet to Stuart. The Florida Park Service reports that the lease provided that Wagner would give the state 25 percent of what he found.

Wagner had the sites and the lease but not the divers. CoinWeek reports that Wagner was friends with a number of Air Force and NASA officers who were divers and closet treasure hunters. The 1715 Fleet Society archive describes how the Sebastian group came together during the winter of 1959 to 1960: one recruit worked at the Air Force Missile Test Range at Cape Canaveral, another ran a shop at Patrick Air Force Base, and an Air Force colonel, Dan Thompson, joined as an expert diver. Lisbon Futch, a boatman, knew the channels and waterways of the Sebastian area, and Dr. Kelso contributed Spanish history and archaeology.

The first season, 1960, was lean. Working from a 40 foot launch called the Sampan, the team found cannonballs, pottery and nails until August, when they found eight silver wedges that, when placed together, formed a perfect silver pie. Then, on January 8, 1961, working a site south of Sebastian Inlet, they recovered between 3,500 and 4,000 silver coins, most of them fused into two large clumps, one weighing an estimated 77 pounds and containing approximately 1,500 to 2,000 coins.

The finds pushed the partners to incorporate in 1961. When the question of a name came up, Wagner suggested Real Eight, after the Spanish silver piece of eight. The company originally issued 1,000 shares among its incorporators, and at an April 17, 1961 meeting Wagner was elected president. A November 7, 1961 contract with the Trustees of the Internal Improvement Fund extended the Real Eight lease on the 1715 Fleet sites for six years.

The January 1961 clumps came from the site later known as the Cabin Wreck, near Sebastian. The 1715 Fleet Society reports that the coins lay in three fathoms, about 18 feet, of water, and that the clumps were the remains of coins once packed in cloth bags inside a small wooden box. Most clumps were broken apart for their coins. The survivor, the largest aggregate known from the 1715 Fleet at 55.6 pounds, is held in the State of Florida collection in Tallahassee, managed by the Bureau of Archaeological Research.

The Cabin Wreck kept producing. On July 24, 1965, according to the 1715 Fleet Society, Real Eight divers found a nearly intact treasure chest at the Cabin Wreck site near Sebastian, the first of its kind found on any 1715 Fleet wreck site; a second chest came up nearby in June 1967. The company also worked the southern end of its 1715 lease. By 1964, the Florida Park Service reports, Wagner's company had teamed up with Mel Fisher's Treasure Salvors, and by the end of that year the partners had reportedly recovered more than $3 million of gold, silver, jewelry and artifacts.

The State of Florida kept watch on its share. In 1964 auditors appointed by the state inventoried Real Eight findings to ascertain the state's 25 percent, producing a ten-page inventory dated July 21, 1964. Wagner's lease thus made the State of Florida a partner in every Sebastian area find.

Wagner was also the company's public face. The 1715 Fleet Society glossary calls him the prime mover in arranging the first public auction of 1715 Fleet coins in October 1964. In January 1965 the Real Eight story was featured in National Geographic, in Wagner's own article, Drowned Galleons Yield Spanish Gold, which NOAA lists as a primary account. A companion exhibit at the magazine's Explorers Hall in Washington opened in December 1964, and after two months it was moved intact to the Florida State Museum in Gainesville.

The company then opened its own museum. On May 1, 1965 a museum opened next to the First National Bank of Satellite Beach, about 35 miles north of Sebastian, and in its first half year more than 25,000 people visited. Its cases held 1715 Fleet gold and silver coins, Chinese porcelain and a solid gold ingot weighing seven pounds. In July 1968 Real Eight moved the collection to a larger Museum of Sunken Treasure at Cape Canaveral, which a former member recalled closing in 1974. Wagner's 1966 book about the Sebastian discoveries, Pieces of Eight, written with L.B. Taylor Jr., is described by the 1715 Fleet Society as a classic in the shipwreck community.

Wagner stepped back as the company diversified. The Real Eight 1970 annual report records that Wagner, its founder and chairman, reached retirement age and officially retired at the end of the fiscal year, and that the company had begun making underwater vehicles and cameras. According to the 1715 Fleet Society, he died on February 26, 1972 at the age of 66, and the Real Eight Company was dissolved in 1984.

The physical legacy sits a short drive from Sebastian. NOAA states that the discovery led to the establishment of a state park and museum and to the area being dubbed the Treasure Coast. The McLarty Treasure Museum in Sebastian Inlet State Park stands on the 1715 survivors and salvage camp that Higgs first described and Wagner later located with his mine detector.