Intended to be part of the Spanish South Seas Fleet of 1681, which left Lima’s port of Callao in April, the Consolación apparently was delayed and ended up traveling alone. At the Gulf of Guayaquil, off modern-day Ecuador, English pirates led by Bartholomew Sharpe gave chase to the Consolación, which forced the Spanish galleon to sink on a reef off Santa Clara Island (nicknamed “Isla El Muerto,” or Dead Man Island, due to the fact that its profile resembles a corpse in repose). The Spanish crew set fire to the ship and escaped to the nearby island. All attempts to recover the treasure soon after were fruitless, so the treasure of the Consolasción undisturbed until our time.
When vast amounts of silver coins were found in the area starting in the 1990s, eventually under agreement between local entrepreneurs Roberto Aguirre and Carlos Saavedra and the government of Ecuador in 1997, 8,000 of the coins (all Potosí silver cobs) were subsequently sold at auction by Spink New York in December, 2001, as simply “Treasures from the ‘Isla de Muerto’”. Most of the coins offered were of low quality and poorly preserved but came with individually numbered photo-certificates. Later, after the provenance had been properly researched, and utilizing better conservation methods, a Florida syndicate arranged to have ongoing finds from this wreck permanently encapsulated in hard-plastic holders by the authentication and grading firm ANACS, with the wreck provenance clearly stated inside the “slab”; more recent offerings have bypassed this encapsulation.