The Atocha Shipwreck: Discovering a Lost Spanish Treasure After 363 Years

The wreck of the Spanish galleon Atocha took place on September 6 or 7, 1622, in the Florida Keys, the 120-mile archipelago of low-lying islands stretching west-southwest from southern Florida. Known more formally as Nuestra Senora de Atocha (“Our Lady of Atocha”), the heavily laden Spanish ship foundered in a hurricane and sank, resulting in the death of almost all its crew and passengers as well as the loss of its immensely valuable cargo. The exact location of the wreck was determined only in 1985.

Built in 1620, the 112-foot Atocha had already been delayed in taking on its cargo of nearly 50 tons of copper, gold, silver, and jewels in Porto Bello (in what is now Panama) and Cartagena (in Colombia). There were further delays in Havana, Cuba, where the 1622 Tierra Firme (“Mainland”) treasure fleet assembled for its return trip to Spain, and it was only on September 4—a month behind schedule and near the peak of the hurricane season—that the fleet was able to depart. The Atocha carried twenty bronze cannons and took the position of almiranta, meaning that it sailed as a guard ship at the rear of the 28-vessel convoy.

The ships made for the Gulf Stream, which would have helped carry them northward from Cuba, but were overtaken by a hurricane and scattered. Five were swept into the Florida Keys, including two of the most heavily laden galleons—the Atocha, which was thrown onto a reef, and the Santa Margarita. The next day, sailors from another fleet ship were able to rescue three crewmen and two slaves who had clung to the stump of the Atocha’s mizzenmast, the only part of the vessel remaining above water.

The ships that had weathered the hurricane returned to Havana, where the losses— which would be a substantial blow to imperial Spain’s finances—were reported. Within a short time, a passing ship’s captain named Bartolome Lopez, who had spotted the wreckage of the Atocha near what he called the Last Key of Matecumbe, was dispatched to the location with salvor (salvager) Gaspar de Vargas and several divers. However, the divers were unable to open the ship’s tightly fastened holds, and in early October another hurricane struck, washing away the wreck. Over time a few silver ingots were found, but the Atocha itself had disappeared. In 1626 divers working for Spanish salvor Nunez Melian and using a copper diving bell located the wreckage of the Santa Margarita and brought much of its cargo to the surface. However, the Atocha would remain lost for more than three centuries.

In the 1960s, several treasure hunters formed a group named Real 8 to search Spanish shipwrecks off the coasts of Florida and persuaded fellow treasure hunter Mel Fisher (1922-98) of California to join in the effort. Fisher established his own corporation, Treasure Salvors, and in time both groups turned their attention to the Santa Margarita and the Atocha.

Despite using fluxgate magnetometers designed to register the presence of iron, neither Fisher nor his competitors could locate the ships in the Matecumbe Keys—a designation applied today to a pair of islands in the Upper Florida Keys. But thanks to Dr. Eugene Lyon, a Treasure Salvors consultant who searched the General Archive of the Indies in Seville, Spain, it became clear that the Spanish had once referred to all of the

Florida Keys by the name “Matecumbe” and that the ships had apparently wrecked near the lower end of the archipelago.

Unsinkable Sam. Unsinkable Sam was a ship cat that became famous in the British Royal Navy during the Second World War because of his uncanny ability to survive at sea. He was first known as Oskar, a nickname provided by the HMS Cossack when he was discovered among the wreckage of the German battleship, the Bismarck, which was defeated on its first and last mission. He was later given the nickname Unsinkable Sam after he survived the destruction of yet another ship, this time the HMS Cossack, which was nearly sunk by a German submarine. His final naval service was on the HMS Ark Royal, which also fell victim to German torpedoes, yet Unsinkable Sam survived once again and was brought to the shores of Gibraltar, where he was retired from service and sent to live out the rest of his remaining lives in Belfast at a “Home for Sailors” until his passing in 1955. Laura G. Buschmann.

Relying on this new information, Fisher’s team recovered material from the Santa Margarita in 1980, but it was only in July 1985 that Fisher’s son, Kane Fisher, located the widely scattered wreckage of the Atocha itself between the Marquesas Keys and the Dry Tortugas. The value of the treasure carried by the Atocha has been estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars, but in the early twenty-first century the ship’s sterncastle, which is potentially its most valuable section, has yet to be recovered. GroveKoger.

FURTHER READING:Lyon, Eugene. 1979. The Search for the Atocha. New York: Harper & Row.

Mathewson, R. Duncan. 1986. Treasure of the Atocha. New York: Pisces Books.

Smith, Jedwin. 2003. Fatal Treasure: Greed and Death, Emeralds and Gold, and the Obsessive Search for the Legendary Ghost Galleon Atocha. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Stall, Sam. 1986. “Treasures of the Atocha.” Saturday Evening Post 258 (8): 50-55, 100.