“São Francisco wreck,” sunk ca. 1650 off the Cape Verde Islands, west of Africa

The identity of this wreck is unknown, its nickname simply corresponding to the nearest land-area to the wreck (São Francisco) on the island of Santiago. The salvage firm Arqueonautas worked the wrecksite in the mid- to late 1990s but was not able to identify the vessel any further than a “Spanish ship with a Portuguese Captain with money to buy slaves.” The first finds from the “San Francisco wreck,” including an extremely rare silver-plated astrolabe dated 1645, were sold by Sotheby’s (London) in December 2000, buried in a clocks and watches auction that got little publicity in the shipwreck-collecting field. The relatively few coins from this wreck, all silver cobs from Mexico and Potosí in the mid- to late 1640s, are generally rare and appear to date just before the massive recall and melting in 1649 at Potosí that so significantly altered worldwide usage of Spanish colonial cobs.