GHOSTS
of the
FLORIDA KEYS
Treasure hunter Mel Fisher’s
obsession with a 1622 Spanish
shipwreck netted more than $400
million in gold, silver, and emeralds.
By Kurt Kortenhof
42 THE HISTORY CHANNEL MAGAZINE
July/August 2006
BETTMANN / CORBIS
A
t 10 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 28, 1622,
the bishop of Havana led a procession to the port city’s cathedral in
observance of St. Augustine’s Day.
In addition to Havana’s religious
leaders and civil authorities, royal officials,
admirals, captains, and infantry companies of a
treasure fleet took part in the parade. Clouded
in incense, the procession entered the cathedral
gates as bells began to chime and galleons fired
cannon salutes from the harbor. Upon completion of the Mass, the bishop blessed Don Lope
Díaz de Armendariz, Marquis of Cadereita, His
Majesty’s Captain General of the Guard Fleet,
and all other officers of the treasure fleet then
making preparations to depart for Spain.
The 28 vessels anchored in the harbor were
Treasure Salvors crewmembers hoist the first of
nine bronze cannon, imprinted with the royal
crest of Phillip III of Spain and dated 1607, from
the floor of the Gulf of Mexico in July 1975.
THE HISTORY CHANNEL MAGAZINE 43
July/August 2006
loaded with treasure and agricultural
products reaped from Spanish holdings in the New World. If all had gone
well, the treasure ships would have
sailed six weeks earlier. But in 1622
the fleet was late in sailing from Spain
and further delayed as it took on silver
and gold at Portobello on the eastern
side of the Isthmus of Panama. The
ships spent only eight days loading
more gold, tobacco, and emeralds at
Cartagena on the northern cost of
present-day Colombia before sailing
for Havana to take on additional
cargo—primarily raw copper and
indigo. Having been in Havana since
Aug. 22, the fleet would not sail for
Spain until Sunday, Sept. 4—six
weeks into the hurricane season.
Empire in peril
The ships waiting to depart Havana
were at the center of Spain’s imperial fleet and carried a cargo of vital
importance for the crown. While
New World treasures and territorial
expansion had made Spain the most
powerful empire in the world, by
1622 the monarchy was in a grave
financial crisis. Having ascended to
the throne a year earlier at the age of
16, Philip IV faced an expensive
effort to defend Catholicism during
the Thirty Years War and rebelling
Dutch provinces. With the overextended treasury further strained by
the royal court’s exorbitant spending,
the crown desperately needed the
expected treasure.
Anxious about the weather, pirates,
privateers, and foreign navies, the
Marquis of Cadereita finally gave the
order to set sail on the morning of
Sept. 4. With flags flying and cannon
on shore and aboard the galleons firing salutes, the 28 ships filed out of
the Havana’s port into calm seas and
favorable winds.
It took more than an hour for the
last ship in the convoy, the Nuestra
44 THE HISTORY CHANNEL MAGAZINE
July/August 2006
The late treasure hunter Mel Fisher displays some of the shipwreck bounty he recovered.
Señora de Atocha—“Our Lady of
Atocha”—to clear the protection of
the harbor. The Atocha was designated the Almiranta, the ship charged
with providing protection for the
fleet’s rear. Only two years old, the
550-ton Havana-built galleon showcased the might of the Spanish navy:
its sterncastle towered 35 feet above
the waterline; its three masts each
supported several sails; and the ship’s
20 bronze cannon provided formidable firepower.
The Atocha, badly overloaded with
cargo and passengers, carried a good
portion of the 1622 treasure. Its manifest listed 35 tons of silver coin and
ingots, and 161 pieces of gold.
Emeralds, jewelry, indigo, tobacco,
and other goods brought the reported
payload to a value of 1 million pesos.
The Atocha also carried 265 people—including 48 passengers, eight
slaves, and a company of infantry.
The gales of September
By dawn the following day the convoy reached the Gulf Stream and
turned east intending to sail through
the Straights of Florida and out into
the Atlantic. But the weather had
turned in the night, and the convoy
met a strong wind out of the northeast working against the current and
making progress difficult. As the day
wore on the storm turned more
severe; by mid-afternoon the fleet
faced what sailors feared more than
enemy ships—a hurricane.
As darkness fell, those few
crewmembers left struggling on the
deck of the Atocha watched helplessly as the much smaller Nuestra
Señora de la Consolacion capsized.
During the night the wind shifted
and began to blow from the south—
pushing the fleet toward the dreaded
Florida Keys. In the bowels of the
Atocha, four Augustinian friars and a
chaplain led seasick and terrified passengers, soldiers, and sailors in
prayer while a lantern illuminated the
image of Our Lady of Atocha—the
virgin of a Madrid shrine and namesake of the vessel.
By Tuesday morning the storm
had pushed most of the fleet west of
the Florida Keys into the safety of
the Gulf of Mexico. The Atocha, two
other galleons, and two smaller ves-
sels had not been so fortunate. At
daybreak the three most western
ships ran aground and were
destroyed by the sea. Further to the
east two galleons, the Atocha and
the Santa Margarita, continued their
struggle as the winds pushed them
toward the reefs.
By 7 a.m. the Atocha, having lost
its foremast, had been spun around as
the wind caught the sterncastle and
threw it backward toward the reef. In
desperation, the crew dropped oneton anchors into the face of the reef.
It was of no use—the sea picked up
the Atocha and brought it down
against the reef so hard that its main
mast snapped and toppled into the
ocean. With the hull ruptured, the
waves washed the helpless galleon
back out to sea as the weight of its
ballast and treasure pulled it under
the water. Later that morning the
Santa Margarita grounded on a sandbar and was battered into pieces by
the sea and the wind.
By afternoon the storm had passed
and the merchant ship Santa Cruz had
already rescued 68 survivors from the
wreck site of the Santa Margarita
when it reached the sunken Atocha.
The hull had settled on the bottom of
the sea with only its rear mast protruding above the water line. Of the
265 people aboard, the rescue party
found only two slaves and three crew
members clinging to the wreckage.
Spread over 50 miles in the lower
Florida Keys, 2 million pesos worth of
cargo lay on the sea floor.
Recovery efforts
The 20 remaining vessels returned to
Havana. On Sept. 12, 1622, the
Marquis of Cadereita decided the
fleet would attempt to salvage the
cargoes of the three sunken galleons
before returning to Spain. The
Marquis dispatched Gaspar de
Vargas with a five-ship salvage fleet
to locate and recover the treasure
aboard the Atocha, the Santa
Margarita, and the third lost
galleon—the Rosario.
De Vargas located the Atocha, but
found its hatches locked and the wreck
too deep for his divers to penetrate.
He decided to move on to the other
ships, intending to return to Almiranta
at a later date. Unable to locate the
Margarita, he moved on to the more
accessible Rosario and began recovering its cargo. By Oct. 5, de Vargas’
crew had nearly finished collecting
the treasure from the Rosario when a
second, even stronger hurricane
struck the Keys and delayed work.
When de Vargas
returned to the
Atocha site he
found that the
second hurricane had
ripped the
upper portion of the
ship from
its hidden
hull and
carried it
into the sea.
His men could
not locate the
sunken hull of the
Atocha—or its treasure.
While the Atocha continued to
elude Spain, Francisco Núñez
Melián, working a salvage contract
from the crown, located the Santa
Margarita in 1626. His crew
brought up 380 silver ingots,
67,000 coins, and eight bronze cannon—an impressive find but not
nearly all the treasure aboard the
Margarita. By 1676 the Spanish
Crown had given up the search.
Nearly three centuries passed
before treasure seekers returned to
the Florida Keys in search of the
lost galleons.
Finders Keepers?
During his quest for the galleons,
Mel Fisher waged battles over legal
title to the treasure he found. In the
late 1960s Florida declared jurisdiction over all shipwrecks in its
costal waters and required salvage
companies to obtain permits and to
turn over recovered treasure to the
state; typically, salvage companies
received a fee of 75 percent of the
value of the finds. The state also
extended its claim on territorial
waters beyond the traditional threemile limit to include the outer reefs.
Florida’s regulations touched off
a three-way struggle among the
state, the federal government
(which also claimed ownership of the wrecks),
and Treasure Salvors
Inc. over the Atocha
wreck. In 1982, the
U.S. Supreme
Court awarded
ownership of the
Atocha and its
treasure to Fisher’s
company based
on admiralty law
precedent.
The state and federal
move to take ownership of the
Atocha wreck was in part an
attempt to protect the archeological value of the find. The academic
community joined government
officials in opposing Fisher’s
salvage activities.
The discovery of the Margarita
and Atocha significantly furthered
our understanding of 17th-century
Spanish colonial trade.
Furthermore, Mel Fisher donated
more than $20 million in recovered treasure to establish the
Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage
Society—a nonprofit that operates
a museum hosting 200,000
visitors annually.—KK
THE HISTORY CHANNEL MAGAZINE 45
July/August 2006
Beginning with the recovery of an anchor
and a gold chain in 1971, by 1973 Treasure Salvors
had recovered about $6 million in treasure.
Mel Fisher, a World War II veteran and California chicken farmer,
had moved to Florida in the 1960s
to turn his treasure-hunting hobby
into a full-time job. In 1969 his
company, Treasure Salvors Inc.,
turned its attention to the Atocha
and Margarita.
Beginning with the recovery of an
anchor and a gold chain in 1971, by
1973 Treasure Salvors had recovered about $6 million in treasure
believed to be from the 1622
Almiranta, but the ship itself
remained a ghost. At odds with the
state of Florida over salvage contracts and with an academic community critical of his methods,
Fisher was also running out of
money. In order to narrow the scope
of the search, attract more investors
to fund his quest, and to add credibility to his enterprise, Fisher had
previously secured the services of a
professional researcher and a historian; in July 1973 he added an
archeologist to his payroll.
Although at the bottom of the
ocean for 31⁄ 2 centuries, the elusive
galleons continued to cause human
tragedy. In 1973 the son of a
National Geographic photographer
died in an accident while aboard one
of Fisher’s salvage boats. Two years
later, Fisher’s son Dirk, daughter-inlaw Angel, and diver Rick Gage
drowned when their salvage vessel
capsized. This second tragedy came
only a week after Dirk Fisher and
his crew had discovered nine bronze
cannon from the Atocha.
46 THE HISTORY CHANNEL MAGAZINE
July/August 2006
Dirk Fisher’s find did not immediately lead to what the company
had taken to calling the “mother
lode.” And, as the Atocha’s trail
cooled, Treasure Salvors aimed
some of its efforts at locating the
Santa Margarita.
Although unknown to most until
after Mel Fisher’s 1998 death, he
had, according to Jedwin Smith’s
2003 monograph, Fatal Treasure,
located the Santa Margarita in the
spring of 1971. Knowing that Spain
had salvaged the wreck during the
17th century and incorrectly believing little treasure still remained at the
site, Fisher decided not to salvage the
wreck in the early 1970s, but rather
continued to focus on the Atocha.
Nine years later, Fisher reversed
course and directed some of his
efforts at relocating and salvaging the
Margarita. Rediscovered in 1980, the
site yielded an estimated $40 million
in treasure.
Treasure in the deep
The search for the Atocha continued
for five more years until July 18,
1985, when Kane Fisher, Mel’s
youngest son and captain of the
Dauntless, discovered large quantities of silver coins and copper ingots.
Uncertain if the find was scatter from
the Margarita wreck or perhaps the
first hints of the Atocha’s mother
lode, divers worked the area feverishly filling five-gallon buckets with silver coins the following day.
Just after noon on Saturday, July
20, divers Andy Matroci and Greg
Wareham had been underwater for
just more than half an hour when
they burst above the surface yelling,
“It’s here, it’s all here. The mother
lode! It’s right down here!” The two
had found silver bars stacked four
feet high, 20 feet wide, and 75 feet
deep, surrounded by a sea of silver
coins and hull timbers.
Fisher’s company had spent 16
years and $8 million searching for
the Atocha, and eerily the discovery
of its main cargo hold came 10 years
to the day after his son and daughter-in-law had been lost.
More than $400 million worth of
treasure has since been recovered
from the Atocha wreck including
gold bars and chains, 27 tons of
silver, and approximately 5,000 emerView maps
of the Florida
alds. While divers
Keys and the
pulled the bulk of
Gulf of Mexico at
the treasure from
History.com/maps.
the wreck during
the mid-1980s, gold, silver, and jewelry continue to be salvaged from
the Atocha wreck site even today.
Currently, under the leadership
of Mel Fisher’s son Kim,
Atocha/Margarita Expedition continues to search the Florida Keys for
traces of the Atocha’s missing sterncastle and the 297 silver bars,
100,000 silver coins, 68 pounds of
emeralds, and 35 boxes of gold listed on the ship’s manifest and as of
yet undiscovered. H
Kurt Kortenhof writes “This Week
in History” for the magazine.