Word: atocha
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...Sept. 11 attacks united, for a brief moment, the U.S.'s two political parties in patriotic determination, the March 11 attacks had exactly the opposite effect in Spain. It's been five years since Madrid awoke to the horror of the Atocha train bombings, and 18 months since Spain's national court tried and found guilty 21 people for participating in or abetting the attacks. But the breach the attacks opened in Spanish politics lingers...
Despite all the high-tech tools, the ocean proved very reluctant to give up the Atocha's treasure. For 101 days in 1968, Fisher's divers combed an area near the Upper and Lower Matecumbe Keys for the ship, using as their guides a number of Spanish archival documents that referred to the lost galleon. Fisher's crew found lesser wrecks that yielded up sizable bounties, but the big one remained undiscovered...
...Eugene Lyon. He had been researching a doctoral thesis on the historical Spanish presence in Florida at the government archives in Seville, Spain, where Fisher was a frequent visitor. After poring over 50,000 pages of worm-eaten documents, Lyon turned up information that pointed the way to the Atocha: the original 17th century salvors' report indicated that the treasure ship could be found near the desolate Marquesas Keys, off Key West...
Fisher immediately sent his divers to the area, and instructed them to investigate a 3-sq.-mi. patch of underwater reef ten miles southwest of the Marquesas. He was relying on the supposition that the Atocha had probably split asunder on the reef. But a small find that at first seemed encouraging led him astray. In 1973 Fisher's boat, the Virgalona, hauled up his first Atocha finds, an anchor and three silver bars, some two miles or so from the site that Fisher had targeted. Says McHaley: "I wish we had never found them. It was a false lead...
...arrived in Key West in 1970 and began salvaging, Fisher became a fabled local character on an island where there is considerable competition for such distinction. For years he lived in an old houseboat and drove a $600 used Mercury. He has made millions from finds smaller than the Atocha, some of them wrecks of its sister ship, but he has spent millions looking for the Atocha. Now he wears an estimated $12,000 worth of gold around his neck, including a Spanish doubloon, and he drives a Cadillac...