A violent hurricane tore through the Straits of Florida, scattering and sinking vessels of the Spanish plate fleet carrying silver and goods from the Americas to Spain. Such storms, unpredictable and often catastrophic, repeatedly reshaped the fortunes of empires that depended on transatlantic shipping. Centuries before satellite tracking, hurricanes like this one were recorded only through the wreckage, logbooks, and the grim tallies of ships lost at sea.
Long before meteorologists could see storms forming over the open Atlantic, Caribbean hurricanes announced themselves suddenly and violently to sailors who had no warning beyond a falling barometer, if they even carried one, and an ominous swell. The Spanish treasure fleets, which carried the silver of Potosí and the gold of Mexico back to Seville, were essentially at the mercy of the season, and September was, and remains, the peak month for Atlantic hurricanes.
The 1687 storm was one of many that picked off galleons over the two centuries of Spanish transatlantic shipping, sending coins, cannon, and crews to the seafloor off the Florida Keys and the Bahamas. These wrecks would, centuries later, become legendary targets for treasure hunters; wrecks from the era have yielded millions of dollars in silver pieces of eight and artifacts, some still being located and excavated into the 21st century.
The economic damage from lost fleets sometimes forced the Spanish crown to default on loans, rippling through European banking houses in Genoa and Amsterdam. The hurricanes were, in a very real sense, a recurring geopolitical actor in the Atlantic world, invisible until they struck.