Secrets of a Spanish Galleon : A Thousand Empty Holes Pay Off in Treasure Hunt

An undersea trail of silver and gold led to the treasure. It had been cradled below since 1622, when a hurricane swamped a Spanish galleon on the frontier waters of the New World.

For 3 1/2 centuries, the sea and the sand have clutched each clue as gifts from the wind and held them tight. But this week, Mel Fisher, a one-time Southern California chicken farmer, has begun to recapture a mother lode from the bottom of the Florida Straits.

“Well, I guess we’ve looked in a thousand empty holes so it’s about time,” said Fisher, 62, who has led a troubled, sometimes tragic 16-year search for the bounty of the three-masted Nuestra Senora de Atocha.

Silver Keeps Coming

Tuesday, divers from Treasure Salvors Inc., the company built from Fisher’s dreams and moxie, patiently lifted free 96 bars of silver. Monday, they had retrieved another 31 bars. Sunday, 25.

If the site holds all the riches logged in the storm-wrecked ship’s manifest, the total would be 1,028 silver bars, 7,175 ounces of gold and 230,000 silver doubloons. It is a treasure worth, by Fisher’s offhand guess, $400 million.

“Some of the crew are going to be multimillionaires and everyone, at least, is a thousandaire,” said Fisher, who for four wonderful days has walked about in a groggy rapture, his mood constantly fueled by rum and Coke.

It was six weeks ago that Fisher’s treasure hunters began to believe they were a hairbreadth away. They had hauled up emeralds, gold bars, a braided chain and pieces of eight from a spot 48 miles west of Key West--closer to Havana than to Miami.

But then the trail headed east seven miles, teasing them with iron spikes and barrel hoops and an occasional coin.

Finally, last Saturday morning, when the treasure again seemed as elusive as quicksilver, the shipboard gadgets that detect undersea metal began to jump.

Divers plunged 55 feet, and found the riches of the capsized galleon lying neatly about, guarded only by spiny lobsters and concealed under a thin mask of sand and sponge.

A mound of stacked silver bars stood eyeball high. The corners of treasure chests peeked from the soft bottom. Silver coins were scattered along the sand.

“This is the largest treasure recovered from an ancient shipwreck anywhere in the world,” said R. Duncan Mathewson III, the team’s chief archeologist. “But more than anything, it’s a unique time capsule of artifacts. It’s like opening a King Tut tomb or Pompeii.”

Recovery Will Take Years

The treasure is being painstakingly excavated, Mathewson said. Complete recovery is expected to take 2 1/2 years. Then, proper preservation and cataloguing of the find will require two more years.

“We’re reviving history, and that’s what’s important,” Fisher said.

In these giddy times, the treasure hunters alternate boasts about their new wealth with self-congratulations for unlocking the past.

“Paper money” is what Fisher disdainfully calls cash. “What we’ve got is real money, money that keeps its value across the ages,” he says.

The quest for the Atocha’s treasure is partly a story of an odd collection of dreamers, divers, map makers, archeologists, electronics experts and investors.

“Sometimes we had to trade treasure for groceries,” said Delores Fisher, Mel’s wife. “Then we were up against all the people who thought we were plain crazy.”

But the story is mostly that of Mel Fisher himself.

Amid a muscular, well-built crew, he is the one who is stoop-shouldered and pot-bellied. He looks like a nicely tanned, kind-faced uncle. He always sounds as if he has just risen from sleep. His sentences come out honey-slow, many of them punctuated with a countryfied heh-heh-heh.

“Cunning is what Mel is,” said Don Kincaid, an underwater photographer who has been on the team 14 years. “The easy-going way wins with people. Mel knows how to handle people.”

Bored With Most Jobs

Raised not far from the steel mills of Gary, Ind., Fisher is one of those men too possessed with adventure to stick to anything conventional.

He never finished college at Purdue. Nor did he stay long with work as a carpenter or a contractor. He was bored helping his father raise chickens near Torrance.

In the late 1940s, he became an early devotee of scuba diving, and he turned the profits from lobster-fishing and chicken-farming into a dive shop in Redondo Beach.

Although the business was a success, he sold it all in 1962 to finance a year of treasure-hunting off Florida’s celebrated Treasure Coast. He longed for the excitement of a search, and he made his first find nearly a year later--Spanish coins sunken since 1715.

But if Fisher was then hooked on treasure hunting, he also was in dispute with the government. Florida claimed sovereign rights to the riches, and legal battles have pestered him as constantly as rough seas.

Fisher has consistently won his days in court. Still, he is worried. In each of the past two years, legislation has been proposed in Congress that would allow state control of all treasure salvaging.

“They can just pass any act they want to,” Fisher said. “One guy writes down a few words and everybody else agrees. They don’t want to leave room for free enterprise.”

Archives From Spain

For years, Fisher was just one of several treasure hunters peeping into the sea hit and miss. Like many others, he devoted some of his time to the great Tierra Firme fleets, lost in 1622 and believed spread amid the Matecumbes near the upper middle of the Florida Keys.

Two of the fleet’s escort galleons were the Atocha and the Santa Margarita. Both were loaded with royal and private treasure, and both perished in a hurricane two days after they sailed from Havana.

In 1970, Gene Lyon, a friend of Fisher’s and a doctoral candidate in history, reviewed the Archives of the Indies, kept in Seville, Spain.

He found a worm-eaten receipt for a salvaging effort to find the bedeviled fleet. The treasure ships lay, he learned, not in the Matecumbes but in the Marquesas, 100 miles southwest of where everyone was looking.

“Evidently, the sunken ships were intact after the first hurricane,” said Fisher, all his theories now confirmed. “According to documents, on the equinox of the moon precisely 30 days later, a second hurricane hit, and it was more powerful than the first.

“The stern (of the Atocha) came loose and was like a gigantic ball 50 feet in diameter. The hull was tumbling and flowing for miles, spewing out silver and ballast stones. Then it finally hit a rise and nine cannons fell off--which we found nine years ago.

“Then the hull righted itself and it started zig-zagging across the ocean. It hung up again on a sandbar, which we call the Quicksands, and it pounded there a while, dumping out treasure.”

This was the trail Fisher followed: Strewn clues of ballast stone, cannon, doubloons and debris.

Tragedy During Search

Like the storm-tossed Atocha itself, Fisher criss-crossed the Florida Straits, lugging with him the metal detectors and sonar devices to try to outsmart the depths.

The task always was complicated because the U.S. Navy had once used these waters for target practice. Bomb fragments are scattered in the treasure field. So are discarded refrigerators and at least one rusted-out Volkswagen.

“It’s a big, big ocean,” Fisher said. “Things are hard to find.”

Mel Fisher has lost as well as found.

In 1975, the 60-foot salvage ship Northwind capsized in the pitch-blackness when a fuel valve malfunctioned and 3,000 gallons of diesel fuel suddenly shifted in the hull.

Three people aboard were trapped in their cabins. Among the dead were Fisher’s oldest son, Dirk, and Angela, Dirk’s wife.

There have been long periods without money. Costs for the search--sometimes exceeding $1 million a year--have frequently outstripped profits.

Treasure Salvors Inc. sometimes employed 200, but the payroll occasionally dwindled to little more than the Fishers and their four children.

“We’d have hard-luck parties and go diving for lobsters,” said Kincaid, the photographer.

During the years, almost everyone involved in the search has been paid partially in shares. Fisher owns 5% of the stock, but the rest is divided among his employees and the many investors coaxed aboard along the way. The corporation has marketed itself as a tax shelter.

Payoffs now will be made in treasure, and this carries its own problems.

“The trouble with treasure is it’s more valuable to somebody who doesn’t need money--rich people who can donate it to a museum and take it all off their income tax,” said Fay Feild, the company’s electronics whiz.

Marketing, Tax Problems

“What we’ve got to do now is learn how to market silver bars and how to handle the IRS.”

Once the antiquity of the treasure is verified, its worth should be far greater than its ounce value as silver or gold. The difficulty is finding someone who wants to buy the artifacts.

“Even if you’re the worst pirate in the world, you wouldn’t want to melt down any of the beautiful doubloons,” Fisher said.

So far, several of the the 75-pound silver bars have been placed near the entrance of the Treasure Salvors Museum, Fisher’s tourist attraction in this tourist town. Visitors rub their fingers across the silver treasure, still crusted with black from oxidation. Some buy limited partnerships for $1,000 in the company’s other treasure ventures.

“I think it’s pretty neat to let some of the little people in,” Fisher said, countersigning some of the contracts with eager new partners.

These splendid days, optimism is abundant. Treasure appears to burst from the depths. Riches seem available to anyone willing to look hard and think big.

And maybe it is so.

Familiar objects were found amid the bars and baubles and doubloons.

The artificial reef of silver was covered with monofilament line and sinkers.

Fishermen, it turns out, had sat above the treasure for years, with their poles rigged for grouper.