Sunken Treasure: We Found It! We Found It!

Every day Mel Fisher greeted crew members from his Florida Keys salvage boats with the same encouraging cry: “Today’s the day!” But for 17 years Fisher, 64, was wrong. The day, the one on which he and his 73-member crew would find the cargo of the legendary Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha, never seemed to arrive. Still, Fisher’s cheerful shout kept the crew going through the tough, fruitless years when other salvagers gave up the search for the famed and mysterious 17th century mass shipwreck in which eight or nine vessels were lost.

Two weeks ago, Fisher’s persistence paid off. His divers, reconnoitering 54 ft. below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, 40 miles west of Key West, came upon what Bleth McHaley, vice president of Fisher’s Treasure Salvors Inc., has since described as “a reef of silver bars with lobsters living in it.” Many are now calling the find the largest ever recovered from a shipwreck. “They were jumping up and down and waving their hands at us in the water,” says Kane Fisher, Mel’s 26-year-old son, referring to the pair of divers who made the initial discovery. “At first we thought something was wrong. Then they started shouting, ‘We found it! We found it!’ ” The silver, said Diver Taffi Quesada, 24, Fisher’s daughter, “was stacked up like cordwood as far as the eye could see.”

In the first two days, 40 divers brought up more than 200 silver ingots, weighing 7 tons. Each bar was 15 in. long and tipped the scales at about 70 lbs. Divers also found the archetypal treasures of a shipwreck: wooden chests spilling over with coins. According to McHaley, the Atocha’s inventory includes more than 1,000 silver bars, which were bound for Spain from Cuba and other New World colonies in 1622, when the ship sank in a hurricane’s high winds and raging seas. Estimates of the worth of the booty range as high as $400 million. Some local skeptics disagree with this giddy estimate, but, says one, “no one can say that this isn’t the greatest hit of all time.”

In conducting its long and meticulous search, Fisher’s salvaging team used the most advanced underwater detection machinery available. Side-scanning sonar, similar to the type used in finding the black boxes of the Air-India crash, provided a detailed chart of the ocean floor. A high-speed magnetometer located the ferrous metals commonly found in old cannons, muskets and ship fittings. The crew also employed a method that Fisher devised for scouring the ocean bottom: huge pipes are placed at a salvage ship’s stern near the propellers, which drive jets of water through the cylinders, helping to uncover buried objects under the sea’s mantle.

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.

A year later Fisher called on the services of 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 that cost us years.” The random wreckage from the lost ship had been scattered by a second hurricane centuries before. In the end, the main lode was found very near the reef where Fisher thought it would be.

“Two weeks ago, I couldn’t make the payroll,” says Fisher. A onetime Hobart, Ind., poultry farmer, Fisher went to Florida specifically to hunt for underwater fortune. Underwater exploration has been his obsession almost from the age of eleven, when, back in Indiana, he made a homespun diving helmet out of a 5-gal. paint can and nearly drowned trying it out. After he 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.

Ever since Fisher began his Florida-coast searches, his business has been a family operation. His wife Dolores still dives, and was once a world endurance champion. Along with Taffi and Kane, another son Kim, 29, helped recover the treasure. But the mom-and-pop hunt has had its dark side. Ten years to the day before last month’s discovery, the Fishers’ eldest son Dirk, 21, Dirk’s wife and another diver were drowned when their salvage ship, the Northwind, capsized at night during a squall.

“Notwithstanding the deaths,” says Fisher philosophically, “it was worth it.” Notwithstanding, in addition, a decade-long legal tug-of-war with the state of Florida and the Federal Government over the ownership of the Atocha ‘s treasure. In 1982 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Fisher’s claim to the Atocha’s riches. The high court’s decision means that the more than 80 backers of Treasure Salvors Inc. (among them Chicken King Frank Perdue), who have invested millions in the search over the years, will split the value of the find with the Fishers and the crew. The crew members will come away with an average of a tenth of 1%, anywhere from $100,000 to $300,000, depending on the final take. To make sure that only his people are fishing up the Atochacargo from the open sea, Fisher has hired armed diver-guards and installed underwater video surveillance. A ring of seven salvage ships stands watch over the site.

One of Fisher’s archaeologists argues that the well-preserved pieces of the hull and the cargo of the Atocha may be “as important as Pompeii or even King Tut’s tomb.” Some scientists aboard the salvage ships concur. Says Staff Archaeologist Jim Sinclair: “We’re coming upon stuff that we’ve always dreamed of seeing on this site. I can just imagine how Howard Carter felt when he peeked through the door at King Tut’s tomb and said, ‘Gold, gold, nothing but gold. That’s all I see.’ ” All those riches will soon transform a company that has known many lean years. Exults McHaley: “This means I’ll get my pay check next week.” Already divers are being fed sirloin steak. And Fisher is drinking champagne. –By Amy Wilentz. Reported by Martin Casey/Key West