On July 24, 1715, a Spanish plate fleet, eleven Spanish vessels and a French escort, sailed from Havana for Spain. Philip V, the king of Spain, was in dire need of the cargo—two years of silver. A week later, all eleven Spanish vessels were caught in a hurricane and wrecked off the Florida coast. The total cargo was estimated to be 65,000,000 pieces of eight. The Spanish began salvage and set up storehouses near each wreck site.

The day after Christmas, 1715, Henry Jennings and John Wills, who had sailed from Port Royal, Jamaica, to the Florida storehouses, drove away the Spanish guards and made off with 350,000 pieces of eight.

Caribbean pirates were democratic and would divide plunder—one-third for the owners of their sloops and two-thirds for their captains and crew. A rough calculation shows that only eleven percent of the plunder was distributed to the captains and crew.

What happened to the remaining 64,000 pounds?

Our story takes us back to the beginning of the Tudor monarchy. Under male-primogeniture, succession to the throne would appear straightforward but the history of royal succession under the Tudors and Stuarts was not always so. Religion and politics often played a role and therefore it becomes important to the question of who becomes the monarch of England, Scotland and Ireland, if James Stuart, the Duke of York, was not available to succeed his brother Charles II in 1685.