By: John C Fine
“It was finders keepers in those days, the late Bob ‘Frogfoot’ Weller smiled.
He was sitting at his desk in what he called the treasure room looking at his accumulated gold and silver coins. The loot from a lifetime of diving for treasure. Bob hefted a 9.4 pound gold disk and passed it to Bert Kilbride. Bert ran Kilbride’s Underwater Tours in the British Virgin Islands and owned Saba Rock where he lived with his wife Gayla. “I know where it is now,” Bert said. The men were reunited after a long lapse of time. When they first met Bert had fielded a project on the Island of Anegada to look for a Spanish galleon that dashed upon the 13-mile long reef and sank. Frogfoot was vacationing in the British Virgins and came out to Anegada to snorkel over some of the reefs. The men met briefly. They hadn’t seen each other in thirty years. Bert came up to visit me and I took him to see Bob Weller to get reacquainted. Both men were legends in their own time. Both are gone now yet their inspiration lives on. Bert died a month short of his 94th birthday, Frogfoot was into his 80s when he went over the bar. Each sought elusive Spanish galleons laden with treasure until the day they died. Their legacy is the legend dreams are made of. Frogfoot knew where the “Richest treasure yet unfound, on
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land or sea,” is located off the harbor of Cartegena, Colombia. “The San Jose contains the richest treasure in the world. I know where it is,” Frogfoot said, not long before he died. “I know where to look for the galleon San Ignacio. We’ll get out there diving,” Bert told me the last time I saw him. Both men sought legendary lost treasure buried for centuries in the deep. Fortunes and aspirations sunk by war and storm during Spain’s conquest and exploitation of its American colonies. Many have sought sunken treasure with varying results. Some successfully work claims established by other treasure salvors like the late legendary Mel Fisher off Florida’s Atlantic Ocean coast between Ft. Pierce and St. Augustine. Mel joined Kip Wagner in the 50s and found the ocean floor was carpeted with gold coins, treasure from a Spanish fleet dashed upon reefs, shoals and shallows in a fierce hurricane in 1715. Those shipwrecks, and their scatter zones, continue to be worked, even today and extraordinary finds of jewelry, coins and artifacts made. Research has been the key to most successful underwater treasure discoveries. Mel Fisher only found the galleons Atocha and Santa Margarita when Spanish archive researcher Jack