Short Stuff: Did a shipwreck double the size of the United States?

Stuff You Should Know

This episode of 'Short Stuff' explores how a shipwreck in 1784—when the Spanish vessel El Cazador sank with 19 tons of silver coins destined

Key takeaways

The loss of the El Cazador shipwreck prevented Spain from stabilizing its economy in Louisiana by delivering hard currency, weakening Spanish control over the region.

Main topics

El Cazador shipwreck
Spanish control of Louisiana

Notable quotes

"Had that shipwreck never happened, Spain would have been able to deliver their silver. Right. And maybe would have stayed in the Louisiana business."

Conclusion

The sinking of a Spanish ship carrying silver coins in 1784 set off a chain of

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files. Every week, I'm with survivors who lived through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If Speaker 3 (0:36) your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Yeah, Speaker 1 (0:58) I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. Listen Speaker 3 (1:00) to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 2 (1:10) Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. Josh, Chuck, Jerry, Dave, let's go back in time. Speaker 1 (1:17) Do you know who else is in the room with us? Speaker 2 (1:20) Jerry Murphy? Speaker 1 (1:21) No. Do you know who wrote this article? Speaker 2 (1:24) No. Speaker 1 (1:25) Not you. Speaker 2 (1:26) Okay, yeah. Because I was going to say, I didn't even know about some of this stuff. Speaker 1 (1:31) Yeah, this, maybe the densest three pages I've ever seen written. Yeah. was written by our old colleague, Kristen Conger. Speaker 2 (1:41) Conger. That's right. This Speaker 1 (1:42) is Speaker 2 (1:42) seriously incredibly well written. She did a great job. It is. Speaker 1 (1:46) Kong's did a great job. And Kristen is thankfully still around in the podcasting biz. She has her great show, Unladylike, that she used to co-host with Caroline. But eventually Caroline left and Conger kept doing it by herself. And it's still great. Still around. She has an Unladylike book. And we think the world of Conger. So still support her, please. Speaker 2 (2:10) Way to go, Conger. And way to go for this article, because it really is incredibly well done, especially for something she probably wrote in a day, maybe a day and a half, Speaker 1 (2:19) you know? We used to crank these out. Speaker 2 (2:21) Yeah, we did. So the whole story starts in 1993. That's where Conger put it. And I think that was the right place, the right way to go. Out on the Gulf of Mexico, there's a guy named Jerry Murphy who was a fisherman there, and he was trawling in the Gulf of Mexico. And when he brought the net up, there was some debris in it. He just assumed were rocks at first, but I guess he took a closer look and were like, those are silver coins that are fused together because they've been underwater for so long. Hot damn. Speaker 1 (2:54) That's right. So he did what anyone would do. He got in touch with an attorney. He said, can I keep this stuff? And then he contacted history experts and said, where did these things come from? Speaker 5 (3:07) And Speaker 1 (3:07) then about a year after that, they finally said, hey, dude, do you know what this is? This is from the ruins of the El Cazador or the Hunter. And this is a ship that disappeared in 1784 after it set out from Veracruz, Mexico, with 19 tons of Spanish currency, which was silver reels at the time. Speaker 2 (3:30) Yeah, they were newly minted even. There