Antipyretics for children are prescribed by a pediatrician. But there are emergency situations with fever when the child needs to be given medicine immediately. Then the parents take responsibility and use antipyretic drugs. What is allowed to be given to infants? How can you lower the temperature in older children? What medications are the safest?
Most people believe that sunken ships full of treasures in the depths of the sea, as well as the brave seekers of these treasures, are nothing more than a beautiful fiction, which belongs exclusively in books and films. Meanwhile, both the huge treasures hidden on numerous ships buried at the bottom of the ocean, and those people thirsting for adventure and wealth who spend years of their lives searching for them, this is a very real part of life. That life in which there is, for example, the fascinating history of the galleon “Nuestra Señora de Atocha”.
The sea as a financial risk factor
The history of the Spanish galleon "Nuestra Señora de Atocha" is quite common for the colonial era of the 16th-18th centuries. In those days, gold from the New World was the main and almost the only source of income for the Spanish crown. On the way from America to Spain, the “golden ships” faced many dangers, the main of which were the treacherous sea with its severe storms and pirates greedy for other people’s goods. The Spaniards could not do anything with the sea, but they developed tactics against the pirates, sending gold not in single ships, but in convoys of dozens of ships, many of which performed a security rather than a transport function.
The galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha became a major member of one such convoy, tasked with delivering gold from Cuba to Spain in 1622. Several factors turned out to be fatal for the galleon, since a convoy of 28 ships left the port of Havana at the wrong time and in the wrong direction.
The fact is that at the beginning of September in the Caribbean there are not the best climatic conditions for starting sailing to Europe: strong winds that change its direction, the danger of storms, and so on. Therefore, usually Spanish ships with gold sailed to ports on the continental coast, from where, after some time, after waiting out the dangerous period, they went to Spain. But in 1622, everything turned out differently: there were reports of a large Dutch fleet appearing nearby, and the authorities in Spain were in a hurry to deliver the gold they needed to fight the Thirty Years' War. Therefore, on September 4, a convoy led by the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, on which the bulk of the gold and silver was loaded, left Havana. The ships were caught in a strong storm and were carried north to the coast of Florida. As a result, eight ships sank (in different places), the galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha sank off some coral reef with almost the entire crew (only five people survived).
He who seeks will almost always find
Due to the fact that the wreck of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha was observed from other ships, and the selected crew members gave detailed testimony, the location of the treasure-filled ship was initially well known. The Spaniards even tried to raise gold from the bottom for several years. However, the depth, significant for diving work of that time, did not allow this to be done, and soon tropical storms moved the galleon from its place and it could no longer be detected. So the treasure had to wait more than four hundred years. Right up until the very moment when the most famous seeker of sunken “golden ships”, American Mel Fisher, became interested in him.
Having put the search for sunken Spanish ships on a professional basis, Fisher actively worked in the Spanish archives, where he searched for documents about sunken galleons with gold. In the mid-sixties, he found such a document about the Nuestra Señora de Atocha and for four years unsuccessfully searched for a galleon off the coast of Florida. But in 1970, with the help of a Spanish scientist, he found out that the original document contained erroneous coordinates once entered by archive employees. Having received the true information, Fisher began a search that lasted fifteen years. To do this, he used the most advanced technologies and methods, ordered satellite images of the search area, used the most sensitive location equipment, and designed powerful mechanisms for clearing sand from the bottom. The search was difficult, sometimes tragic - in their course, in particular, one of Fischer’s sons died along with his wife. However, the search was supported by the fact that the expedition gradually found things and valuables from other sunken galleons that were part of the same convoy with the Nuestra Señora de Atocha - and this meant that the treasured ship itself had to be somewhere nearby. Since 1975, Fischer began to find objects from the Atocha, but treasures were still not visible.
Treasures worth a billion dollars
Finally, in the summer of 1985, the first truly valuable find was discovered - a metal lump, which turned out to be a pile of silver ingots “fused” together. From that moment, the still unfinished operation to search, clean and lift the precious cargo of the galleon “Nuestra Señora de Atocha” began. Mel Fisher, who died in 1998, did not live to see its completion, but the business was continued by his family treasure hunting company, one of the leaders of which is his son Sean.
In total, over more than 25 years of work on lifting the treasures of the Spanish galleon, more than three thousand emeralds, one hundred and fifty thousand silver coins and approximately forty tons of silver bars were recovered - all this is estimated at 450 million dollars (20% of the value of the found treasures goes to the state). At the same time, according to expert estimates, the value of the jewelry remaining under a thick layer of sand is at least $500 million, because the searchers have not yet recovered all the emeralds and have not yet reached the gold of Nuestra Señora de Atocha. However, judging by the discovery in 2011, a unique gold ring with a 10-carat emerald, it won’t be long to dig for gold...
Alexander Babitsky
Among the searchers for treasure ships, American explorer Burt Webber is called the most persistent and the luckiest. For many years, Burt Webber studied ancient manuscripts and documents, and then went to sea and found the world's largest underwater treasure from a Spanish galleon that transported Inca treasures to Europe.
spanish galleon
This is what one of the largest and most powerful ships of the Spanish Royal Navy looks like - “ " It was a military transport double-decker sailing ship with a displacement of 600 tons and 36 guns on board. In the history of Spain " Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion" entered as the unluckiest ship.
Galleon « Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion"was launched in 1620 in Havana. Subsequently, the ship guarded Spanish ships in the New World. The hull length was 42 m, the crew was 250 sailors and soldiers. By that time, there was a tendency in the Spanish fleet to reduce the height of the poop, so this galleon can be cited as an example of the last stage of development. After 1850, Spain began to build French and Dutch-style ships. The new ones were battleships with low superstructures and heavy onboard guns. Galleon « Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion" continued to serve off the coast of Mexico until she departed from the South American coast on September 13, 1641. On board the sailing ship was a year's supply of gold from the Spanish colonies: gold and silver from Mexico, precious stones from Colombia, pearls from Venezuela. These treasures were intended for the Spanish king Philip IV, but the ship never reached Spain. She broke down several times along the way and sank on November 30, 1641 off the coast of Haiti. For 350 years galleon tried to find sea treasure hunters to lift the gold, but this was only done in 1980 by the American treasure hunter Bert Webber, who spent his whole life searching for the legendary.
Modern researchers are confident that it sank not because of the weather. There was so much cargo on board the sailing ship that it did not fit in the hold, and a significant amount of it had to be placed directly on the deck. Overloaded with Treasures galleon I didn't listen well to the steering wheel. The loopholes sank to the water level, so much so that with a slight disturbance a catastrophe could occur.
Death for the Spanish treasury galleon turned out to be the largest loss at sea in the 17th century. King Philip IV of Spain was beside himself with rage. He sent several expeditions to search for the sunken ship, but it was not found. For almost 350 years, hundreds of treasure hunters have tried to find and recover treasures from the seabed. Among them were the famous English racing driver Malcolm Campbell and archaeologist Edwin Link, and even the king of the deep sea and traveler Jacques Yves Cousteau himself. But luck smiled on only one person - American Burt Webber, an unknown seabed explorer.
Bert Webber
Since childhood, Bert read books about underwater treasures and dreamed of finding a golden ship. At age 16, instead of going to college, Webber enrolled in a diving school and soon went to Florida to look for treasure as part of a naval expedition. However, the search was unsuccessful. Only in 1977 did Bert Webber realize that he needed to focus his efforts on finding one ship - the legendary galleon « Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion" It took the treasure hunter almost 4 years to study the archives of the Royal Spanish Navy. At the same time, the treasure hunter convinced a Chicago banker, and after borrowing half a million dollars, he organized his own search expedition. From the government of the Dominican Republic treasure hunter won the exclusive right to search for the Spanish galleon in exchange for half the treasure if it was found. But most importantly, Bert managed to get a new portable magnetometer, which recorded the presence of metal even under a three-meter layer of sand and petrified corals. After a week of exploring the underwater bottom, the treasure hunter was lucky.
"Nuestra Señora de Atocha" (Spanish: Nuestra Señora de Atocha) is a Spanish galleon that sank on September 6, 1622 off the coast of Florida as a result of a storm. The galleon transported significant valuables to Spain, including gold and silver bars, silver coins weighing more than 40 tons, as well as tobacco, copper, weapons and jewelry. The exact location of the galleon's wreck was discovered after years of searching on July 20, 1985 by treasure hunter Mel Fisher. Valuables totaling $450 million were recovered from the bottom.
Shipwreck
The galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha, along with 27 other ships, was part of the Royal Spanish Navy, carrying out the annual transportation of cargo of precious metals and valuables from the American colonies of Spain to the metropolis as part of convoys. The ship was named after one of the chapels of the Catholic Cathedral in Madrid. The ship's crew consisted of 133 people, in addition there were eighty-two soldiers and 48 civilians on board, as well as slaves, for a total of more than 260 people.
The convoy left the gathering place of the fleet, the port of Havana in Cuba, on September 4, 1622, but by the evening of September 5, the weather had deteriorated greatly and a strong wind rose, blowing the ships north to the Florida coast. The galleons, overloaded with gold and silver ingots, lost control and were blown onto the coral reefs off the coast of Florida. Of the 28 galleons, 8 sank, including the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, Santa Margarita, and Nuestra Señora de Consolación. Only five survived from the galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha - three sailors and two slaves. In total, 550 people died on 8 ships, and more than 2 million pesos worth of valuables sank. This angered the King of Spain, who was in dire need of funds to wage the Thirty Years' War. For several years, Spain found itself in an extremely difficult financial situation. The king gave orders to retrieve the convoy's treasure from the bottom at any cost.
In search of treasure
The wreck of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha was located approximately 56 kilometers west of the Key West Islands. Due to the fact that the depth at the place where the galleon sank was only 16 meters, in the first days after the crash the place was easy to identify by the fragments of the mizzen mast sticking out of the water. However, in October, when Captain Gaspar de Vargas, at the head of a team of slave divers and Indian pearl fishers, arrived at the wreck site and the Spaniards made their first attempt to raise valuables from the bottom, storms scattered the remains of the masts and it was no longer possible to find the exact site of the wreck. They were only able to determine the site of the crash of the second treasure galleon, the Santa Margarita. After several months of grueling work, only a few pieces of the Atocha's plating were found and nothing more. Divers could only work for short periods of time at shallow depths, and Vargas did not have the ability to move huge quantities of shifting sand from place to place.
In 1625, the Spaniards made a second attempt to raise the Nuestra Señora de Atocha and Santa Margarita treasures from the bottom. A search party led by Captain Francisco Nunez Melian arrived at the crash site. Over the next 4 years, a team of swimmers, armed with an air bell (Melian's invention), managed to extract a total of 380 silver bars and 67 thousand silver coins from the Santa Margarita from the water, but no traces of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha were found. Subsequent search work was carried out until 1641, but did not bring success. The search for the site of the sinking of the treasure galleons was stopped for many centuries, and information about the disaster remained only in the Spanish royal archives.
By the time the search for the galleon began, Mel Fisher had already had several major successes in the search for treasures of Spanish galleons off the coast of Florida. To search for Nuestra Señora de Atocha, Fisher organized the company Treasures Salvors Incorporated and attracted investors. Historian Eugene Lyons came to his aid, who did a tremendous amount of work in Spanish archives to find out at least the approximate area of the search, which began in 1970.
But extracting treasures from the seabed, scattered over a large area and, moreover, covered with a thick layer of bottom sediments, turned out to be far from easy. By the summer of 1971, the size of the surveyed area was 120 thousand square miles, and all to no avail. For many months, the treasure hunters' extraction was limited to only rusty cans, barrels and scraps of metal gear.
In order to find the sunken galleon, Fisher used a number of technically innovative solutions, for example, he used the “mailboxes” he invented - curved cylinders that were attached under the propellers of the boat and directed a stream of water vertically downwards. With the help of such a water cannon, in ten minutes a hole thirty feet wide and ten feet deep was washed out in the sand.
With the onset of 1975, fate seemed to finally turn to face Mel Fisher. For him, this was already the sixth season of searching for “Atocha”. This time, the “golden galleon” gave the scuba divers many 8-real coins and three gold bars and five bronze cannons from the galleon “Nuestra Señora de Atocha”. Thirty meters from the first find, four more bronze cannons were discovered.
On July 19, 1975, Dirk Fischer (son of Mel Fischer) was tragically killed when one of the tugboats used for the search sank. His wife Angel died along with Dirk.
In the summer of 1980, scuba divers picked up a promising trail a few miles east of the supposed site of the Atocha's sinking. A strong splash from the magnetometer showed the presence of large metal objects at the bottom. They turned out to be another anchor and a copper boiler. A pile of ballast stones, as well as pottery and a scattering of coins were then discovered nearby.
On the morning of July 20, 1985, the magnetometer of the search boat registered the presence of a significant mass of metal underwater. The scuba divers on duty that day, Andy Matroski and Greg Wareham, immediately went under the water. What appeared to be a piece of rock was in fact a pile of sintered silver ingots. There was no doubt: here, forty miles from Key West and ten from the Marquesas Keys archipelago, lay the main part of the cargo of the galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha. The result of the treasure hunt was 3,200 emeralds, one hundred and fifty thousand silver coins and over a thousand silver bars weighing on average about forty kilograms each.
On July 4, 2011, a new discovery became known. We are talking about a 10-karat gold ring with an emerald, which was valued at 500 thousand dollars. In addition to the ancient jewelry, two silver spoons and two silver artifacts were also found. They were discovered 56 km west of Key West, part of the Florida Keys archipelago in the southeastern United States. According to Sean Fisher, co-CEO of Mel Fisher's Treasures, who was present when the ring was discovered, it is one of the most important artifacts found in the shipwreck area. The ring most likely belonged to one of the aristocrats who sailed on the Atocha, Fisher added.
As a result of many years of work, Fisher's expedition recovered $450 million worth of jewelry from the seabed. The approximate amount of the Atocha treasures still remaining under water is estimated at no less than $500 million
This day in history: (many letters)
Probably, if you add up in your mind all the legendary treasures supposedly hidden in the ocean abysses, then their total weight will far exceed the weight of gold mined on Earth in the entire history of mankind. But, despite the fantastic nature of many evidence of underwater treasures, they continue to be searched for. And they find it. Probably the most famous discovery of the 20th century was the treasure of the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha, which sank in 1622 off the coast of Florida.
One day, Mel Fisher, the most famous American treasure hunter who received the title of “King of Treasure Hunters,” was incredibly lucky. In 1963, at the head of a group of submariners from Treasures Salvors Inc., he found valuables from a Spanish ship that sank near the Florida Peninsula. The values raised from the day of the sea amounted to several million dollars. But the treasure hunters did not calm down. Mel Fisher's attention was drawn to the fate of another Spanish galleon, the Nuestra Señora de Atocha.
The Atocha's last voyage ended tragically on September 6, 1622. A huge ship crashed on reefs off the coast of Florida, taking 264 lives. Only five managed to escape. 47 tons of gold and silver coins and bars spilled out of the galleon's torn belly. They dotted the seabed for more than 50 miles...
Strange coincidence: Mel Fisher was also born on September 6th. Only almost 300 years after the death of Atocha. Later they will talk about some kind of mystical connection that connected the legendary diver and an equally legendary ship. Be that as it may, Mel Fisher was obsessed with the dream of finding the treasures of the “golden galleon” for almost two decades. All his previous dives, searches, successes and failures served only as stages on the way to his cherished goal. He turned all his finds, including the treasures of Santa Margherita, into capital and invested this capital in his dream...
On the way to his goal, not only painful failures awaited him, but also real tragedies. The biggest blow for Mel Fisher was the death of his son Dirk. Dirk's wife and another team member died along with him. This happened on July 20, 1975, during search operations at the site of the sinking of the Atocha.
Perhaps someone in Fischer's place would have given up. But the tireless seeker stubbornly continued to believe in his star. In essence, there was nothing else left for him: all the bridges were burned, and either the tragic fate of Dirk or... “Atocha” awaited him!
The famous Archives General of India in Seville is a real treasure trove (for those who understand, of course). Forty thousand bundles of ancient documents, a million storage units tell in great detail the history of the discovery and development of the New World by the Spaniards, about their 400-year colonial rule of vast territories overseas. In this sea of information, every grain of which has its own value, Mel Fisher had to find one single tiny drop: documents telling about the last voyage of the galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha...
That summer of 1622 everything was the same as always. The Spanish fleet safely crossed the ocean and was divided into several detachments. Seven galleons guarding the convoy, including the Santa Margarita, remained in Porto Domingo (Haiti). Another detachment, led by the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, went to the Isthmus of Panama and dropped anchor in Portobello harbor on May 24. Sixteen smaller ships dispersed to embark at various Caribbean ports, while a third group of galleons moved towards Cartagena (Colombia). Here the ships took on board a large cargo of gold and silver and on July 21 met with the second detachment in Portobello. On July 27, the galleons raised anchor and headed for Cuba. By August 22, the entire flotilla had gathered in the port of Havana. The so-called “fleet of New Spain” came here from the coast of Mexico, delivering a cargo of Mexican silver to Havana.
The Spanish admirals were alarmed: rumors reached Havana that a large Dutch fleet had appeared in the waters of the Caribbean Sea. The commander of the “fleet of New Spain” turned to the main commander, Marquis Carderite, with a request to allow him to immediately go to Spain. The Marquis gave this permission, but on the condition that most of the bars and coins would remain in Havana: they would be loaded onto galleons, and thus the treasures would be under more reliable protection.
The "Fleet of New Spain" left, and the Marquis of Cardereita remained in Havana, waiting for the arrival of the last ships. Soon the entire flotilla was present, and on the morning of September 4, 28 heavily laden ships lined up in the Havana roadstead, preparing to set off on a long and dangerous voyage. The Marquis of Cardereita raised his flag on the leading ship, the galleon of the captain of the Nuestra Señora Candelaria. The bulk of the Mexican silver and gold was loaded onto the galleons Santa Margarita and Nuestra Señora de Atocha. Armed with 20 huge bronze cannons, the Atocha sailed as a trailing galleon, trailing behind the slow merchant ships.
The next day, September 5, the weather noticeably deteriorated, the sky was covered with low clouds. By the middle of the day a real storm broke out. Huge waves rolled across the sea, and through the veil of rain they could hardly see the ships ahead. The waves tossed the clumsy galleons from side to side like splinters. In front of the entire crew and passengers of the Atocha, the Nuestra Señora de Consolacion, which was in front, unexpectedly capsized and disappeared into the depths of the sea...
At night, the wind changed direction and carried the Spanish fleet north, to the shores of Florida. Before dawn, the Candelaria and 20 other ships in the convoy passed the western coast of the Dry Torgugas Islands. Four ships that were separated from the main group, including the Atocha and the Santa Margarita, were driven east by the storm to the Florida Keys island chain. Dawn found them at some low coral atoll overgrown with mangrove trees. Huge waves 5 meters high threw the Santa Margarita over a coral reef like a toy. From aboard the Margarita, Captain Don Bernardino Lugo watched with helpless despair as the Atocha crew fought to save the ship.
The sailors dropped anchor, hoping to catch on to the reef, but a huge wave suddenly lifted the ship and threw it straight onto the reef. There was a terrifying crash and the mainmast collapsed. At the same moment, another wave easily lifted the half-broken ship from the reef and carried it to the depths. Water poured into the huge holes, and the Atocha sank in the blink of an eye. From aboard the Margarita, one could see how three Spanish sailors and two black slaves, frantically clinging to a fragment of the mainmast dangling on the waves, were trying to escape from the embrace of death... They were picked up only the next morning by the Santa Cruz ship.
The hurricane that scattered the Spanish fleet caused a lot of trouble: 8 of the 28 ships of the transatlantic convoy sank, 550 people died, and priceless cargo worth more than two million pesos was lost. For comparison, we note that for the entire period 1503-1660, Spain exported precious metals from America in the amount of 448 million pesos, that is, about 2.8 million pesos per year. Thus, we were talking about the loss of almost the entire annual income of the kingdom!
The surviving ships hurried to return to Havana. When the seas calmed down, the Marquis of Cardereita sent Captain Gaspar Vargas with five ships to rescue the Atocha and Santa Margarita. The Atocha was found quickly: the galleon sank in 55 feet of water, with her mizzen mast still sticking out of the water. The Spaniards managed to remove only two small iron cannons that stood on the upper deck from the sunken ship. The mighty bronze guns remained on the battery deck. The gun ports were closed, and the guns themselves were firmly secured in anticipation of a storm... There were no traces of the Santa Margarita at all. However, a small group of sailors managed to escape from this ship - Vargas picked them up on the shore of Loggerhead Bay. The storm-damaged galleon Nuestra Señora de Rosario also stood here. Having removed the cargo from it, Vargas ordered the useless ship to be burned.
In early October, Vargas returned to Florida Bay in hopes of salvaging the Atocha's treasure. However, this time the Spaniards could not even find the place where the ship was lost - apparently, another hurricane that swept through shortly before finally buried the ship at the bottom of the sea. Vargas and his men searched the bottom in vain with hooks...
In February of the following year, the Marquis of Cardereita himself joined the search for “Atocha” and “Margarita”. He was well aware of the fury that the news of the loss of the entire annual production of the Mexican silver mines would cause in Madrid and what awaited him in this regard. At the cost of great effort, several silver ingots were raised from the bottom, but where the hulls of both dead ships disappeared remained a mystery. In August, the fruitless search was stopped. Cardereita and Vargas returned to Spain. Before their departure, geographer Nicholas Cardona drew a detailed map of the area where the ships were lost.
The death of the “golden galleons” in 1622 was a real disaster for the royal treasury. In order to finance the ongoing war effort, Spain was forced to increase foreign borrowing. Several war galleons were sold to compensate for at least part of the losses, but this was not enough. The king ordered: the treasures of “Margarita” and “Atocha” must be found at all costs!
In 1624, a search party led by Captain Francisco Nunez Melian arrived at the site of the wreck of the “golden galleons.” For two years, using a 680-pound copper diving bell, she tried to find the missing treasure. Luck smiled on the searchers only in June 1626: a diver, a slave named Juan Banyon, first lifted a silver ingot from the bottom from the Santa Margarita.
The search program was continually updated by hurricanes and raids by English and Dutch pirates. Nevertheless, over the next four years, Nunez Melian’s team managed to recover 380 silver bars, 67 thousand silver coins and 8 bronze cannons from the Santa Margarita from the depths of the sea. But no traces of Atocha were ever found.
For his services, Melian was appointed governor of Venezuela. Further work to find underwater treasures was carried out sporadically until 1641, but they did not bring any significant results. The events of subsequent years marked the decline of Spain's former power. The Dutch, British, and French gradually ousted it from its leading position in Europe and took control of a number of Spain's former Caribbean possessions. In 1817, Florida was purchased by the United States of America. The mystery of the missing treasures of the Atocha and many other “golden galleons” was forgotten for many years. Only the tireless seeker Mel Fisher returned to this exciting mystery.
“I turned out to have more patience, method and... luck,” Fischer later said. - When I hear about all sorts of secrets for which simpletons are charged crazy amounts of money, I feel sorry for these naive people to tears. I want to warn everyone who dreams of getting rich quickly by going scuba diving in the warm seas. The life of a treasure hunter has nothing to do with the aura of mystery, romance and other nonsense. Take me for example. In total, I spent more than one month underwater. The hours there drag on endlessly, the work is monotonous and boring, and the thirty-five divers are always dissatisfied with the meager wages and my endless promises. After many months of fruitless searches, at best, you are convinced that gold does not glow with a seductive witchcraft fire at the bottom of the sea. The treasure rolled out and scattered for miles. If a recorder traced the life of an underwater treasure hunter on a tape, the result would be an endless, slightly wavy line with occasional splashes. Well, the high peaks on it can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
The future “king of treasure hunters” was born in the Midwest, graduated from a technical college and settled in California, where he opened a school for scuba divers and a diving equipment store. But this business, although profitable, could not satisfy Mel's romantic nature, which thirsted for adventure. To begin with, he took part in an underwater expedition that went to the coast of Central America in search of treasures. This expedition, although not particularly successful, determined Fisher’s future fate: he decided to devote himself to searching for underwater treasures.
In 1963, Fisher sold his California property and moved to the East Coast with his wife Dolores and four sons. With the proceeds, he founded Treasures Salvors Inc., headquartered in the city of Key West on the southern tip of the Florida Keys archipelago. His companion was Kip Wagner, a romantic obsessed with the passion for treasure hunting, just like Fisher. They agreed that he would work for free for a year or until the treasure was found.
Alas, this turned out to be much more difficult than they expected. The main obstacle was sand. A flat bottom covered with it would be ideal if it were a question of searching for the remains of sunken galleons. But over the centuries, storms and storms scattered their debris without a trace. Therefore, the divers decided to bet on the valuables that were on the Spanish ships. And then an unpleasant surprise awaited them: it was almost impossible to get to the hard bottom, where heavy objects could lie. During the night, a thick layer of shifting sand filled up the trenches dug during the day.
Fisher's technical savvy helped out. He came up with an original device, which he called a “mailbox,” which made it relatively easy to conduct underwater excavations over a large area. It was a curved cylinder that was attached under the boat's propellers and directed a stream of water vertically downward. With the help of such a water cannon, a hole thirty feet wide and ten feet deep was washed out in ten minutes. Where the layer of sand was thinner, the “mailbox,” like a giant broom, swept it away from the selected area of the bottom. After examining him, the boat moved a little further, and the operation was repeated.
The first year of searching was already coming to an end when Fischer’s persistence finally yielded results. In May 1964, at another “swept” site near Fort Pierce, a veritable carpet of jewelry was discovered. Gold and silver coins littered the bottom. In two days, Fischer raised 1,933 gold doubloons. In total, this season the rescuers collected 2,500 doubloons, which cost a fortune. Treasures Salvors has been working near Fort Pierce for more than a year. When the flow of coins coming from the bottom turned into a miserable trickle, the rescuers left their happy place, not without regret.
Now Fisher decided to start searching for the legendary galleons “Nuestra Señora de Atocha” and “Santa Margarita”. The historian Eugene Lyons came to his aid, having done enormous work at the General Archives of India in Switzerland. He found reports on the subsequent voyage of the Atocha, on the underwater work of Francisco Nunez Melian and on the treasures he saved from sunken galleons, and studied many ancient maps of the Florida Keys dating back to the 16th century. However, these searches by no means solved all the problems. Chief among them is how to comb hundreds of thousands of square miles of seabed? Although the Treasurers Salvors staff included 35 scuba divers, even for such a large team this was unrealistic. The only way out is to use boats towing magnetometers on a cable. But the galleons sank in the open sea, where there are no fixed landmarks. This means that it is possible that during the search some areas may remain unexplored. To prevent this from happening, Fisher proposed an original method: placing two navigation towers in the sea at a distance of three miles from one another. Rising 10-15 feet above the water, they sent microwave signals by which the boats accurately determined their location. In this way, it was possible to ensure that every inch of the seabed was covered.
Fisher even risked making additional, very significant expenses, ordering photographs of the search area from space, equipment for molecular analysis of water samples, and even thought about purchasing dolphins to train them to find gold and silver objects at the bottom. Upon completion of all preparatory work in 1970, Mel Fisher and his team arrived at the site of the crash of the Atocha and San-ga-Margarita. Alas, despite the excellent equipment, for many months the treasure hunters’ extraction was limited to only rusty cans, barrels and scraps of metal gear. But Mel Fisher continued to firmly believe in success: “The more area we plow in vain, the closer our hour!”
By the summer of 1971, the size of the surveyed area was 120 thousand square miles. And at this time the first finds appeared. It started with the magnetometer on one of the search boats registering a weak splash. After hesitating a little, the scuba diver on duty returned to this place and jumped into the water. Visibility at a depth of six meters was excellent, and he immediately saw the barrel of an ancient musket lying on the sand. A little further - a boarding saber and a second musket. Having placed a buoy above this place, the diver decided to inspect the neighboring sections of the bottom, and, as it turned out, it was not in vain: about thirty meters away a large anchor was sticking out of the sand.
Returning to the boat, the scuba diver fired a flare. Photographer Don Kinkaid immediately rushed from the Fearless, the expedition's headquarters ship, and was tasked with photographing all the finds. Having captured the saber and muskets on film, he sank to the bottom to choose the best angle to photograph the anchor. And... out of surprise, he almost dropped the box with the camera: right in front of him on the sand, several rings of a massive gold chain were clearly visible... Still not believing in luck, Kinkaid pulled the entire chain by the sand end. What a chain - two and a half meters long!
In the following weeks, Fisher's team discovered many silver coins, inlaid spoons and plates, a boatswain's whistle, a working bronze astrolabe, and a dozen small gold bars. There was no doubt that they were on the trail of a Spanish ship. But which one? Fischer was at a loss. None of the finds could shed any light on this. The crudely cast ingots bore neither the stamp of the Spanish tax office nor numbers indicating their weight. In addition, ingots of this kind were not listed in the cargo manifest of any of the sunken galleons. Consequently, it was contraband, which could equally well have been on board the Atocha or on board the Santa Margarita. However, Fischer believed that, in the end, it did not make much difference which traces of the galleon they found. What is more important is that it is now possible to restore the overall picture of the shipwreck.
The ship apparently hit a reef, near which Fisher and his comrades found an anchor. Moreover, having damaged the hull, it did not sink immediately, but drifted with the wind for some time, gradually falling apart and losing its cargo over an area of several square miles. Consequently, the main wreckage of the vessel is located further to the southeast at greater depth.
The 1972 season brought nothing new. With the arrival of next spring, scuba divers resumed their search. “At first, silver coins flowed in a thin trickle, then this trickle turned into a stream, and finally, the divers discovered entire deposits of silver. There were so many coins that search engines jokingly dubbed this place the “Spanish Bank.”
On July 4, Fischer’s youngest son, 14-year-old Kane, saw a strange object at the bottom that, in his words, looked like a “loaf of bread.” When the “loaf” was taken out, it turned out to be a silver bar with the numbers 569 on it. The historian Eugene Lyons, who accompanied the expedition, took up copies of documents from the Seville archive: the Atocha’s cargo manifest actually contained an bar with that number! His weight was also indicated there - 28 kilograms. This is exactly what the find weighed. So, everything fell into place: “Atocha” was found!
But extracting treasures from the bottom of the sea, scattered over a large area and, moreover, covered with a thick layer of bottom sediments, turned out to be far from easy. In the end, Fischer came to the conclusion: it was necessary to make large “mailboxes” that would deliver strong jets to erode the soil. For this purpose, he purchased two powerful tugboats with huge propellers (They were called “North Wind” and “South Wind”). Using these tugs' advanced "mailboxes" that not only moved tons of sand but also greatly improved visibility underwater, rescuers followed a trail of finds southeast of where the galleon's anchor was found. At first they came across shells, sabers, and lead cannonballs overgrown with shells. Then came the placers. silver coins.
One day, Dirk Fischer surfaced next to the South Wind, clutching a round object in his hands. It was a navigator's astrolabe, which had lain at the bottom for several centuries. Nevertheless, it was preserved so well that it could still be used today. Subsequent research showed that the astrolabe was made in Lessbon by a certain Lopu Omen around 1560. The next day, scuba divers recovered two gold bars and a gold disc weighing four and a half pounds. And on July 4, diver Bluff McHailey, who was exploring the edges of the Spanish Bank, came across small rosary beads made of coral and gold.
The search for the Atocha treasure was fraught with considerable difficulties: financial problems, dangers inevitable in underwater hunting, a huge search area... One day, while the South Wind was clearing the bottom, an uninvited guest suddenly appeared in the sea from the stern. The ten-year-old boy fell under the propellers before anyone could stop him. He was rushed by helicopter to Key West, but died at the hospital.
The found treasures were the main source of funds for current expenses: Atocha had already produced a rich harvest. From the bottom of the sea, 11 gold and 6240 silver coins, ten gold chains, two rings, several gold bars and disks, a golden washing bowl and a rare beautiful silver jug were raised. In addition, scuba divers collected a whole museum of antiques: tin plates and navigational instruments, muskets, arquebuses, sabers, daggers. Archaeologist Duncan Mathewson recorded the location where each item was found. This shed new light on the circumstances of the shipwreck. Based on the collected facts, Mathewson put forward a new hypothesis about where the main cargo of the “golden galleon” lies.
With the advent of 1975, it seemed that fate had finally turned to face Mel Fisher. For him, this was already the sixth season of searching for “Atocha”. This time, the “golden galleon” gave the scuba divers a lot of 8-real coins and three gold bars. Then Dirk Fischer, guided by Mathewson’s assumptions, took the “North Wind” to the depths - behind the island of Quicksands. On July 13, 1975, he swam alone underwater, examining the rocky ocean floor. Suddenly, a fantastic picture appeared before Dirk - a pile of green, log-like objects lying openly at the bottom, as if someone had previously cleared them of sediment. These were... five bronze cannons from the galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha!
“He flew to the surface with what seemed to us a desperate scream that we thought: he had been attacked by a shark,” Dirk Fischer’s wife Angel later recalled. - Then we heard the word “guns!” and they also screamed in unison with joy.
Thirty meters from the first find, four more bronze cannons were discovered. Everyone was immensely happy: the treasures of the “golden” galleon were somewhere nearby. But instead of triumph, the most sorrowful of losses awaited them...
On July 19, Dirk Fischer took the North Wind back to Marquesas Keys, to the site of the shipwreck. They anchored for the night southwest of the islands. Just before dawn, the tug suddenly developed a leak, tilted and suddenly capsized. Eight crew members were thrown into the sea, but three - Dirk and Angel Fischer, scuba diver Rick Gage - remained in the below-deck compartment and died. The cause of the tragedy could not be determined...
This terrible blow did not break Mel Fisher. First of all, he ordered the protection of the cannons that his son had retrieved from the depths of centuries. “Dirk really wanted them to go to museums,” he later explained to reporters. Fisher then prepared an even more powerful vessel: a 180-foot tender, which immediately proved its effectiveness. Thanks to its propellers, which were not much inferior to airplane propellers, clearing the bottom went much faster.
Only the onset of winter storms forced Mel Fisher to announce another break in his search. This has already become a familiar schedule: three to four months of winter rest, and with the arrival of spring, the resumption of work on lifting the Atocha’s precious cargo. However, there were weeks and even months when the magnetometer needles showed no signs of life, and the divers returned empty-handed. And if not for Fisher's persistence, Treasures Salvors would probably have shut down its operations. Moreover, the company entered another period of financial difficulties. The millions that Fisher raised from the bottom of the sea went to repay loans and pay taxes. Sometimes he didn’t even have money to buy fuel for the search fleet.
The long-awaited event occurred in the summer of 1980, when scuba divers struck a promising trail a few miles east of the supposed site of the Atocha's sinking. A strong splash from the magnetometer showed the presence of large metal objects at the bottom. They turned out to be another anchor and a copper boiler. A pile of ballast stones was then discovered nearby, as well as pottery and a scattering of coins. And then... Then a simply fantastic sight opened before the divers: a strip of the seabed four thousand feet long was literally covered with gold and silver. But - what an irony of fate - judging by the numbers on the ingots, it was not a cargo from the Atocha, but... from another galleon that died that day, the Santa Margarita. The treasures of Atocha were yet to be found...
The value of the found treasures was about 20 million dollars, and this allowed Fisher to return to the search for the Atocha the next year. Archaeologist Mathewson, who recorded in his notes every, even the smallest find, counted the trophies raised from the bottom of the sea and compared them with the cargo manifest of the Atocha, came to the unequivocal conclusion that the bulk of the valuables had not yet been discovered.
Another five years have passed. And finally, in the spring of 1985, divers lifted 414 silver doubloons, 16 brooches with emeralds and several gold bars from the bottom of the sea. There was no limit to delight. But over the next month and a half, no discovery was made at all! Mel Fisher was lost in doubt: maybe they are looking in the wrong place again? Maybe the Atocha's drift line looked completely different and they veered away from it?
On the morning of July 20, the magnetometer of the search boat registered the presence of a significant mass of metal underwater. The scuba divers on duty that day, Andy Matroski and Greg Wareham, immediately went under the water. At a depth of eighteen meters, Andy noticed dull light spots on the sand. Nearby stood a block overgrown with algae - like an underwater rock in miniature. “Where did it come from on the flat bottom?” - Sailor was surprised. He beckoned to a friend who had a hand-held metal detector. As soon as Wareham brought the probe to the mysterious block, a piercing howl was heard in the headphones. From the expression on his face, Matroski guessed that the mysterious object was fraught with some kind of surprise. Just in case, he carefully scraped the “stone” with a knife. A narrow silver stripe glittered against a brown-green background. What seemed like a piece of rock was actually a pile of sintered silver ingots...
Out of delight, Sailor and Wareham embraced each other right under the water. “We attacked the root vein!” - they shouted in one voice, emerging at the side of the “South Wind”. This news had the effect of a bomb exploding. Everyone who was on the ship grabbed masks and scuba gear and fell into the water.
This time there was no doubt: here, forty miles from Key West and ten from the archipelago of small coral islands of Marquesas Keys, lay the main part of the cargo of the galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha. Moreover, fate decreed that he would be found exactly ten years later - to the day - after the tragic death of Dirk Fischer...
No one else went underwater that day. We once again prayed for the people close to us all who gave their lives to bring this success closer. Well, then the usual routine work began,” recalls Mel Fisher. - From morning to evening we raised silver bars. There were so many of them that we had to use wire baskets borrowed from one of the Key West department stores. When later, already at the headquarters of our company, Treasurers Salvors, we calculated the “catch,” we ourselves could hardly believe the results: 3,200 emeralds, one hundred and fifty thousand silver coins and over a thousand silver bars weighing on average about forty kilograms each.
As a result of many years of work, Fisher's expedition recovered $250 million worth of jewelry from the seabed. The approximate amount of the Atocha treasures still remaining under water is estimated at no less than $100 million.
In 1622, eight Spanish galleons loaded with silver and gold ingots sank off the coast of Florida. This was the annual transport of cargo from the Spanish colonies, but this time the Spanish crown suffered a severe economic blow. The loss of eight of the twenty-eight ships meant great financial problems over the following years, which was extremely painful for Spain in the context of the Thirty Years' War.
Among the sunken ships, the galleon “literally overloaded with jewelry” stood out. Actually, it was the overload, according to experts, that became the cause of such a large-scale crash: the overloaded ships could not withstand the oncoming storm, which first deprived them of control and then threw them onto the reefs. A total of 550 people died in this disaster, of which Nuestra Señora de Atocha accounted for 260 people. It is difficult to say why this particular ship was destined for fate.
Almost immediately after the crash of the squadron, the Spanish king sent an expedition to raise the sunken treasures, the value of which was estimated at that time at two million pesos. This is a very large amount, which today is equivalent to billions of dollars. Considering that the ships sank at a depth of no more than 16 meters, there was a chance to recover the jewelry, especially since the masts were even visible at first. However, the waves soon broke them, and it became extremely difficult to determine the exact location of the sunken ships.
For the first time, with the help of divers, they managed to find the second galleon "Santa Margarita", which was also carrying treasures. In subsequent years, a diving bell was used for searches - the latest invention of those years, but the success was only partial: 380 bars and 67 thousand silver coins were recovered from the water, but “Nuestra Señora de Atocha” remained out of reach. For centuries, the search for sunken galleons was abandoned.
Work on this issue was resumed only in 1970. They were led by the famous specialist in the search for sunken ships, Mel Fisher. He created a special company, Treasurers Salvors Incorporated, which devoted its activities to the search for Nuestra Señora de Atocha. Investors and historian Eugene Lyons were attracted, who did a titanic job of searching for archives of that time. A gigantic amount of time and effort was spent, and fate turned out to be favorable to the researchers. In 1985, they discovered an elusive galleon that had been buried under a layer of sand for centuries. The treasures recovered from the board were estimated at 450 million dollars, but the remaining treasures are still awaiting future seekers, because less than half of them were recovered to the surface...
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