If the recent success of Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean" films are any indicator, then it's probably safe to say that most of us enjoy the swashbuckling tales of fortunes lost and found.
While pirates were and are very real, far more treasure was lost at sea in the course of ordinary commerce than at the hands of those who sailed under the skull and crossed bones. Over the years, many have found tantalizing bits and pieces of those treasures – silver coins and pieces of gold – in the Caribbean, but few have gotten rich doing so. Most of the prized cargo eluded recovery – until Mel Fisher came along.
MEL FISHER'S TREASURESA Map depicting the lower hull structure of the Atocha wreck. When found, it was covered with fishing line. Fishermen had been hooking it for years. Over the course of 15 years, Fisher uncovered some of the most significant underwater finds ever recorded. His discoveries of silver, gold and emeralds crescendoed in 1985 with the discovery of the Spanish Galleon Atochia near Key West. The wreck yielded roughly $450 million in precious antiquities, and today continues to be a source of significant treasure.
Fisher died in 1998 at the age of 76, but his children and grandchildren have kept the Fisher treasure hunting enterprise alive.
WHO WAS MEL FISHER?
In 1962, Fisher, then a 40 year-old SCUBA diving entrepreneur, was returning from a Caribbean trip through the Florida Keys. There he met a treasure hunter, Kip Wagner, who was trying to find the treasure of 10 sunken ships of the 1715 Spanish "Plate Fleet" – so named because of its porcelain and ceramic cargoes intended for the Spanish royal houses. The vessels were sunk by a hurricane along the east coast of Florida, an area now known as the "Treasure Coast."
Wagner invited Fisher to join him in a 50-50 deal to recover the load, and it changed Fisher's career. Over the course of the next decade, Fisher discovered significant treasures, including piles of gold coins, using a device he invented and nicknamed "the mailbox." The mailbox was an L-shaped tube that was lowered from the stern of a boat with one end at the boat's propellers and the other extending below the surface. The mailbox used the thrust of the propellers – with the boat securely anchored – to create a powerful stream of clear water which divers used to dig "holes" in the sandy bottom where they thought treasure might lay.
After a decade of excavating the 1715 fleet, Fisher decided to turn his attention to a wreck in the Florida Keys: the wreck of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha. The circumstances of the sinking of the Atocha are well-known, preserved in various notes and testaments from the survivors aboard ships in the fleet. But the precise location of the wreck wasn't known and the miles and miles of sandy bottom throughout the keys would surely defeat a treasure hunter who couldn't narrow the possibilities.
THE SUMMER OF 1622
It's worth taking a look back at that summer, nearly 350 years before Mel Fisher began his search.
As the season was drawing to a close, the sailors would have been nervous. They should have been on the high seas for six weeks already and approaching their home port in Spain. Instead, they were cooling their heels in Havana, waiting for the various relay ships from around the New World coasts of Central and South America to bring this year's gold and jewel treasures to the fleet for return to Seville, where representatives of the King of Spain anxiously awaited.
