Other-waters

‘Nuestra Señora de Atocha” was the most famous of a fleet of Spanish ships that sunk in 1622 off the Florida Keys while carrying copper, silver, gold, tobacco, and indigo from Spanish ports at Cartagena, Colombia, Porto Bello in New Granada and Havana bound for Spain.

The ‘Atocha’ was driven off course by a hurricane that scattered the fleet, then wrecked on September 6 on the coral reefs off the Keys. Only five of the 265 members of the crew and passengers survived.

After the surviving ships brought the news of the disaster back to Havana Spanish authorities dispatched another five ships to salvage the ‘Atocha’ and the ‘Santa Margarita’, which had run aground near where the ‘Atocha’ sank. The ‘Atocha’ had sunk in approximately 50 feet of water, making it difficult for divers to retrieve any of the cargo or guns from the ship. A second hurricane in October of that year made attempts at salvage even more difficult by burying or scattering the wreckage of the ship still further.

The loss of the 1622 fleet had an immediate impact on Spain, forcing it to borrow more to finance its role in the Thirty Years War and to sell several galleons to raise funds. While their efforts over the next ten years to salvage the ‘Santa Margarita’ were successful, the Spanish never relocated the ‘Atocha’.

An American treasure hunter, Mel Fisher, found the wrecked cargoes of the ‘Santa Margarita’ in 1980 and the ‘Atocha’ in 1985. Fisher had to go through more than a decade of litigation with both the United States government, which claimed title to the wreck, and the State of Florida, which had seized many of the items Fisher had retrieved from his earliest salvage expeditions, in order to realize any profit from his efforts.

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