GLENDALE : Treasure From Sunken Ship Up for Sale

Kim Fisher was just 9 when he found his first piece of sunken treasure, a silver Spanish piece of eight, while accompanying his treasure-hunting father on a dive off the Florida coast.

He was just a teen-ager in the late 1960s when his father, Mel, started searching for the mother lode, the sunken Nuestra Senora de Atocha, a Spanish galleon that sank off the Florida Keys in 1622. The family’s deep-sea obsession paid off when they located the ship in 1985, after 17 years of searching, and they became the most successful treasure divers ever.

“The Atocha carried 27 tons of gold and 47 tons of silver, 40 tons of which have been recovered so far,” said Fisher, now 39, who is displaying about $40 million worth of gold, silver and jewels recovered from the ship in a special exhibit at the Glendale Galleria through Sunday.

Fisher sells much of the gold and silver as well as the emeralds and other jewels retrieved from the Atocha and other shipwrecks through a traveling gallery like the one visiting Glendale.

Among the items up for sale are a gold chain whose links were once used as currency, valued at about $250,000; silver pieces of eight, which cost about $700, and a gold-adorned Bezoar stone, priced at $12 million, which is actually a goat’s gallstone that was worn around the neck by wealthy Spaniards and was dipped in drinks to detect poison.

The collection will be on display at the Ben Bridge jewelry store at the Galleria today and Sunday.

Mel Fisher, now 72 and still hunting for treasure, was the owner of an egg farm in Orange County back in the 1950s when he took an interest in scuba diving, eventually opening a diving shop in Redondo Beach.

He moved with his wife and three sons to Florida after reading a newspaper account of a man who discovered strange-looking skipping stones on the beach. They turned out to be valuable pieces of eight coated in 300 years of sediment.

The Fisher family spent the first three years of their search for the Atocha about 100 miles from where the ship was actually believed sunk. They moved their search only after an associate located documents about the ship in an archive in Seville, Spain.

The Atocha sank when the Spanish empire was at the peak of its power. The ship was one of many sent to the New World colonies to bring back gold, silver and other riches to support the country’s war efforts. The ship’s cargo included bar and coined silver and gold, emeralds, copper and tobacco. Of the 265 crew members, only five survived when the ship was blasted by a hurricane.

In 1973, the state of Florida and the federal government tried to seize a $20-million treasure haul that the family found seven miles offshore. The case eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court and the Fishers retained the riches. Then, in 1975, Fisher’s brother Dirk, his wife and a crew member drowned in a boating accident while searching for the Atocha.

Today, the Fishers operate a worldwide treasure-diving business with 50 boats and 250 divers. They hope to search for many of the more than 1,000 Spanish treasure galleons that still lie on the ocean floor, plus other ships that went down in the Far East.

“Right now we’re searching for a big wreck off the coast of Uruguay,” Fisher said. “We’ve got research on about 42 different wrecks down there so we’ll be spending a lot of time there.”