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Flotato gloves12/17/2023 ![]() One day Wagner went out with a metal detector, determined to find at least one piece of eight, until at last his stubbornness was rewarded. The next spring and summer the old fascination returned. To their dismay, they realized they had spent all their money, $12,000. It was good practice, but their methods were crude and they didn’t find anything. ![]() With some companions, Wagner spent the summer investigating this wreck. The same partner who had introduced him to the subject of castaway coins now took him further by suggesting that they investigate a wreck that had become visible off the beach: Wagner learned to call it a “wreck site.” ![]() Though he didn’t yet realize it, he was captivated, hooked, by the thought of treasure seeking. So that’s what they looked like! Wagner realized that he had probably seen them before many times but had dismissed them as worthless fragments because the sulfated silver was black, not bright and glittering as one would expect. Wagner saw his first genuine piece of eight when a drunken assistant took him to the beach and showed where he had accumulated a cache of seven of the things, black and roughly rectangular. It must have been gold, the legend went, or at least silver. One man, it was said, had built into his fireplace an extremely heavy brick he found near the sea, and the brick melted the first time he built a fire. He talked to friends and neighbors and heard a number of mouth-watering stories, learning that lucky people might even find gold coins among the silver. Naturally they were so irregular that no two pieces were alike.įascinated, Wagner began looking on his own for these coins whenever he had a chance to stroll on the beach. Their strange shape was due to the way they were made: not minted piece by piece, but cut off a silver bar and then stamped. They were, in fact, the legendary “pieces of eight” mentioned so often in Treasure Island and got their name from the fact that they had been worth eight reals (a Spanish monetary unit) apiece. Every so often after a storm, he said, the sea cast up on the beach strangely shaped pieces of metal that were, in spite of their dark appearance, made of genuine silver and came from old Spanish wrecks. “What coins?” asked Wagner, and the other man, hardly able to credit such ignorance, explained. They were taking shelter after a brief but busy storm, during which breakers had pounded the beach. One of Wagner’s temporary partners on a job mentioned one day in 1949 that it would be a good time to go out looking for coins on the sand. He and his family lived in a hamlet called Wabasso, about 120 miles north of Miami, near a larger town called Sebastian on the Sebastian Inlet and not far from Cape Canaveral, or Cape Kennedy, depending on your preference: Cape Whichever not much later was to be the home of the space experiments. Not a metallurgist, not an adventurer, not a geologist, but a building contractor from Ohio who moved to Florida because he liked it. On a shallow sea bottom like that one never knows, and nothing stays the same under the water, though I always thought it did until I read Kip Wagner’s book, Pieces of Eight. It was not easy to believe that this dull, peaceful surface covered, possibly, any number of decaying broken spars, old bones, and silver and gold coins. Here and there a family party sat on the sand and ate, but the place was by no means crowded, if you didn’t count the seagulls, and nobody seemed eager to go into the water. That day the sea was remarkably peaceful though not very blue: it reflected a gunmetal sky. But then one sandspit is very like another, except for the temperature surrounding it. The stretch of sand that runs along for miles at the margin of Cape Canaveral was irresistibly reminiscent, I thought, of Cape Cod.
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