Word: atocha
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Fortune Hunter Mel Fisher might argue about that appraisal. Some 30 miles out from Key West in the Gulf of Mexico, his four salvage tugs lay at anchor last week 60 ft. above the remains of the Spanish galleon Atocha. The square-rigged vessel sank in a hurricane in 1622, carrying 260 crew members and passengers, and a priceless cargo, to the bottom. From the tugs, divers employed by Fisher's Treasure Salvors, Inc., have brought to the surface a fortune in emeralds, gold and silver bars, coins, bags of gold dust and lengths of golden chains...
Fisher, 64, has earned his reward the hard way. He first read about the wrecked Spanish treasure galleons Nuestra Senora de Atocha and her sister ship Santa Margarita in 1960 in the Treasure Hunter's Guide, which included references to the two ships sinking off the "Keys of Matecumbe" in a 1622 hurricane. Several years later Fisher met Eugene Lyon, who was beginning research for a doctoral dissertation on the history of the Spanish conquest of Florida. Lyon was about to leave for Seville to study Spanish archives, and Fisher enlisted his aid in the search for the galleons...
...linear miles of ocean with magnetometers, devices that detect irregularities in the earth's magnetic field--anomalies caused by, among other things, iron cannons, armor or anchors. They used side-scan and sub-bottom sonar and even commissioned an aerial survey, but the search did not yield a verifiable Atocha remnant. Says Fay Feild, an engineer and consultant to Treasure Salvors, who designed a special magnetometer for Fisher: "With a magnetometer, even in a limited area, only one in 100 'hits' has anything to do with a wreck. With a side- scanner, it's one in a million...
Fisher's team found the first certifiable remains of the Atocha in 1973, matching the identifying number on a recovered silver bar with one listed in the ship's manifest in the Seville archives. But because the cargo was scattered over nine linear miles, it took Fisher until 1985--and a total of 6,500 magnetometer hits--to identify what he calls the "mother lode," the ; main body of the ship's cargo. Even then, retrieving the treasure was difficult. The deeper waters off the Florida Keys are murky, the bottom heavily silted. Again, technology provided the solution. Several years...
Treasure Salvors has already brought up at least $27 million worth of gold, precious gems and artifacts from the wrecks of the Spanish galleons Santa Margarita and Atocha, which sank in 1622. The company found the sister ships in waters about 50 ft. deep off the Florida Keys. During the continuing quest to trace the path of debris scattered as the ships broke apart, Treasure Salvors has videotaped the search area from the air; the shallowness and clarity of the water enable detection of such important visual clues as scars on underwater reefs...