National Geographic Video: Atocha: Quest for Treasure (1986)

[Music] [Music] what kind of man pursues a dream against tremendous odds for over 16 years what kind of dream is powerful enough to hold someone in its grasp for all those years [Music] Mel Fisher has been called a hero and a huckster a visionary and a schemer and inspiration and a conman first impressions are very important when you first meet a person I shook hands and was something about him his eyes or whatever it was that being together I'd say he's definitely going to be a winner it's wonderful every once in a while that in this area where hucksterism is shall we say fairly rampant that a man like that can come out and prove that there's still a reason to have faith in human nature that guy is a real McCoy everybody thought he was a real dreamer and will wacko and and a lot of people were really down he's a Horatio Alger hero here's a man in his lifetime completed his dream Key West Florida is Fisher's base of operations the kind of town that understands a man like Mel Fisher his friend Tony tortoise Eno is a local saloon keeper sometime political candidate and rock owned - extraordinaire we're living on a little island that's like three miles by two-and-a-half it God took this piece of dirt Truitt Dodger hey that's Key West somehow or other Key West has something it's a place where if you look at video possible it could happen but if you're looking for just your and everything that people live and die by forget it don't even bother taking a plane down [Music] geographically and spiritually Key West is the end of the line for Wanderers and dreamers it is the last refuge for those who have fled not only from the mainland but also from the mainstream for a town that specializes in the impossible a lost galleon and the search for sunken treasure on made-to-order it is early September 1622 in the harbor of Havana Cuba a Spanish fleet is being loaded for the trip home among the cargo is a staggering 40 tons of gold and silver from new world mines to be carried by the rearguard ship the nuestra senora de Atocha the amount of emeralds and other valuables that will be smuggled on board is impossible to estimate on the bustling dark passengers waiting patiently to embark there are noblemen and servants merchants and their families soldiers and slaves priests and officials 265 people are to sail on the Atocha on the morning of September 4th the fleet sets out for Spain and the skies are clear as the ships head due north but less than 48 hours into the voyage a powerful hurricane batters the fleet the mighty galleons are helpless pushed by the winds toward the dreaded Florida reefs by Dawn the Atocha and her sister ship the Santa Margarita are badly crippled within hours the sea had claimed hundreds of terrified souls and a glittering cache of the richest Empire in the world for her own as the centuries passed the once famous story of the Atocha became obscured by time modern-day treasure hunters searched feud early for the galleon struggling to piece together the ancient mystery but in seville spain in 1970 the course of the Atocha legend was about to be changed forever dr. Eugene Lyon is an expert in Spanish colonial history while researching in the archives of Seville he chanced upon a remarkable document I was looking through an index for some material relating to Spanish Florida and ran across an audit of the accounts of the salvage of a ship on the coast of Florida I felt immediately it was from the 1622 ships the first page that I saw was almost completely riddled with wormholes it's almost as much air to the page as there is paper remaining and on this last page it used the words that I saw for the first time Caillou still locked case today Casa Del Mar case is known as the Marquesas Keys a tiny cluster of islands 22 miles from Key West it was in this area that Lyon believed the Atocha sank he immediately contacted his associate treasure hunter Mel Fisher who had also become fascinated by the Atocha legend a former chicken farmer and dive shop owner Fisher had spent two years searching for the galleon 100 miles east of the Marquesas he sees as lions new information takes his wife and four children and heads west to find treasure estimates of the atrocious value range from 100 million to as high as 400 million dollars well I'd figured it'd take about six months to go out searching find it and bring it in and here's been 16 or 17 years no I never dreamed it would take that long there's something very striking about Mel unless you're a man of the sea unless you spent a lot of time at sea you can't appreciate a relationship with a person that depends on a sea for a living knowing she can always beat you from the start the see was determined to defeat Fischer the same kind of angry storms that sank the Atocha still prowl the area attacking suddenly and violently searching could be halted by bad weather for weeks at a time when Fischer could search he faced an ocean floor blanketed with useless wreckage that sent him on a thousand false leads [Music] and there were other problems treasure hunting is an expensive business in 1970 the operation was already costing him close to $500 a day treasure hunting like everything else has been an escalating cost business whereas in the 60s they could operate relatively inexpensively one boat three or four guys when we move down here and had to start providing vessels that could stay at sea all of a sudden the cost started spiraling bless McKay Lee has been with Fisher through 14 years of tenuous finances she is now a vice president of his company Treasure salvors I can remember 16 weeks 20 weeks even longer without pay and we'd all eat together live collectively that kind of holds you together another close associate who shared both the spirit of determination and the frustrations of the search is Don Kincaid vice president and photographer for the organization it is a huge huge huge area of ocean it is far greater an area than anybody has ever searched before looking for a single item it is vast they searched 120,000 linear miles before they find the first item from the wreck site [Music] it was June 1971 when that first item finally appeared in an area of shallow water known as the quicksands fissures divers uncover a huge anchor the right size and shape for the 1622 ships on a hunch Fisher feels it is from the air torture but many of his colleagues believed it to be from her sister ship the Santa Margherita there is no way to be sure and without proof Fisher's many critics and rivals scoff at his claim no other significant funds are uncovered for the next two years the tedium is outweighed only by the drudgery for the divers the work is back-breaking day after day nothing nothing nothing month after month and you know just sticking with that and three five people on the boat yep and you're very tired at night to the point where sometimes you don't even want to eat dinner because you just want to lie down and go to sleep that was what no one sees to help with the digging Fisher had developed an ingenious piece of equipment known as a mailbox which forces water downward from the ship's propellers blowing a hole in the ocean floor but the divers must still search through up to 20 feet of shifting sands to thoroughly cover an area the ocean floor begins to resemble a battlefield strewn with hundreds of empty craters it seems the treasure hunters face an impossible task but in the spring of 1973 blackened chunks of metal begin to appear in the sands they are coins Spanish silver coins and nun bare mint marks later than 1621 on May 20th the divers find 1500 of them this part of the quicksands is promptly dubbed the Bank of Spain it was a memorable day for Fisher's wife deal it was to become one of many we were always on a trail and trails just kept providing us with a little bit here and a little bit there and just saying come on come on you know keep keep going it's something that it was just kind of like a tease I'm out here you can find me [Music] in June one month after the coins had been found Fisher's son Dirk uncovers what remains one of the hunts most remarkable finds [Music] it is an astrolabe an ancient and rare piece of navigational equipment it could easily have belonged to the pilot aboard the Atocha but there is still no proof Father's Day 1973 Kim Fischer strikes gold [Applause] father and son share the moment of discovery then a breakthrough 1973 we find three silver bars in the middle of the quicksand the bars weigh close to 70 pounds each making it nearly impossible to carry them to the surface [Music] but these dull gray objects covered with centuries of n crustacean are the focus of great interest Eugene Lyons expertise is called upon once again and they're in this tub where these three blackened items the first thing gets I'd seen in for years and years but they look beautiful lion is able to match the serial number on one of the bars with the manifest or cargo list of the Autopia at last here is proof that the treasure hunters have found material from the Lost galleon but consciously they decide to do one more test onboard the search boat if it confirms the identity of the silver ingot perhaps Fisher will find the support he is looking for the weight for the bar listed on the manifest is 63 and 6/10 pounds the one on board should be the same the future of the enterprise may well hang in the balance as the bar is lowered onto a preset scale [Music] the weights match five years after the search for the Utopia began it appears to be nearing its goal I cannot tell you what a mistake that was and what a lure it was and there it was treasure up in the quicksands if we hadn't found those three silver bars in 1973 these false trail we probably would have found the Atocha many years before we did but at the time the bars seemed a major triumph they also seemed to mark Mel Fisher as a fraud in the eyes of some competitors interviewed in 1976 McKay lien Fischer recalled the beginning of battles with the authorities that will haunt them for years SEC investigation begins all because we had found what we said we were going to find and I think they expected to that come down and find that we have taken little old ladies sugar bowl money and typical of a con we'd have a little rowboat out there and go around the island once or twice looking for treasure and abscond with people's money the newspapers you know they like a controversy it sells papers and so they they would print both sides of the story and I can't blame them you know and they would quote my competitors saying that that I was salting the wrecker and all the stuff from somewhere else out to the Atoll chair or whatever and trying to fight that and stay alive at the same time it was almost impossible Fisher is embroiled in bitter controversy by the time Florida State officials make a dramatic visit to take charge of the treasurer two hundred silver coins number one nine five five after a year and a half of tense negotiations the Florida authorities retained 25% of the treasure say the numbers loud enough pleased that these people down here can hear all the people that are keeping up with but the controversy is far from over Fischer seems surrounded by conflict on every side soon other officials will intervene the federal government will claim ownership of the Atocha attorney David Paul Heron has represented Fischer in these cases since the mid 70s in 1975 the federal government state of Florida decided that the federal government would come into the litigation that the federal government would then win it and they went so far as to determine how they were going to split the proceeds once they had won it is a grim period but Fischer is determined not to let the search for the Atocha languish he turns to marine archeologist Duncan Mathewson together with the Mathewson as a scientist the very antithesis of a man like Fischer who follows his hunches Matthewson begins to develop a theory based on hard evidence and reasoning during the summers of 73 74 75 we were able to piece together the bits and pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that led us to believe that the major part of the ship was not in the shallow quick stands but instead out in the deeper water in the middle of hawk channel matthewsons deep water theory proposed that the atoll chia sank at a depth of over 50 feet a second storm one month later had broken up the ship and carried portions of it to the shallow quick sends scattering its contents along the way but theories were easy to come by Edie little is Fisher's cartographer and of course the bottom line is how he where was the Atocha how many theories of where it is we had something like go maybe 50 divers 40 divers and at any one time there were at least 100 theories where the Atocha would lie some people thought it went up into the quicksands further some thought it was still way out in the deep water to the south of a thought it was to the west there's a conflicting evidence in the research one guy and the research says that the Atocha sank to the east of margarita another guy said that it sank to the west of margarita so we all had different theories I had about half a dozen um and could argue with myself when the wind blows and you can't be out on the sea everybody sits around the office and discusses theories these opinions relied basically on assumptions on guesses rather than on facts and one of the most difficult periods of my being with Treasure salvors was trying to get them to separate fact from fiction Fisher's son Dirk becomes a believer in matthewsons deep water theory his instincts pay off on July 13 1975 when his search and nearly 40 feet of water discloses an almost miraculous sight [Music] ancient bronze cannons lie on top of the seabed scattered over an area the divers must have passed close by countless times I've chased down about a thousand bronze cannon stories and they all fiddled out I'm beginning to think they never made it since the controversy over the silver bars the team has yearned for evidence like this the one and a half ton cannons are impossible to fake so that is positive identification that this cannon [Applause] it is a sweet moment for family and crew a victory provided for Fischer by his eldest son Dirk but within a week the sea will strike back in the cruelest way imaginable dirt Fisher and his wife angel lead a crew back to the Canon site only a few days later that evening their ship the north wind is anchored on a calm untroubled sea but sometime during the night an undetected leak develops the boat lists further and further to one side and then within minutes it capsizes most of the people on board escape but three are trapped inside dirk fisher his wife angel and crewmember rick gage are dead the sea in a savagely unfair exchange has traded nine bronze cannons for three young lives we all have sort of a rededication of going out to find that main part of the wreck we all fell and it was there now the Dirk had found the cannons it was very important for us all myself and Jane the crew everybody I know Mellon deal wanted to carry through Dirk and Angel were both very close to all our hearts then and we felt that we should really continue to work in that deep area as consistently as we possibly could for mel fisher it has been a time of anguish and grave doubts [Music] for the next three long frustrating years Fischer finds a little too clean to virtually no new clues are discovered the hunt has now stretched on for over a decade when the bronze cannons were found it seemed the main body of the wreck must be only a hair's breadth away how we doing [Music] but the bulk of the Itachi's treasure what the crew is termed the mother lode still eludes them they have only tantalizing bits and pieces of an ancient puzzle this is a pistol shot this is a musket shot for an arc of Michonne and this is a musket shot here 4,000 tin you to rely on his instincts no matter how slim the evidence I couldn't believe that Mel Fisher thought that the Atocha could have gone this far Nancy and I said there's nothing here to even indicate a trail and then Mel comes up to me and says we'll see this musket ball we found a musket ball here he says that's from the Atocha and I said now there are Spaniards been in that area for 20 years salvaging the margarita they're away from their homes Saturday night there's nothing to do this shoot the muskets with the pelicans and Mel says no that's from the Atocha he feels that the Atocha is there somewhere but where for the time being Fisher's hunches seemed to be leading him nowhere at that time I felt it must be right in that immediate vicinity and the deeper water and we looked and looked and looked and could not believe it wasn't there there's so many things that have tried to defeat us that you have to be strong together and just take each problem as comes and overcome it I think if we had you know given up on the project someplace along the way that it would we would have been defeated the rest of our lives by 1979 the search has hit areas of deep mud digging is virtually halted by the densely packed seafloor the hunt seems blocked at every turn it has gone on for 12 years and cost nearly six million dollars Fisher needs treasure he decides to go back to a site he had marked some years before although he doesn't believe it is the Atocha he feels it may be her sister ship the Santa Margarita the team begins to explore an area that had yielded strong readings on a device called a magnetometer okay a sort of technological divining rod it signals the presence of iron objects underwater chip Clemens is captain of one of fishers boats the bookmaker the aggravating thing is with our work especially with the magnetometer which is our primary piece of equipment we never know what we're reading we hardly ever do because there's so many bombs out here maybe use this as a dumping ground for bombs of course the mag reads those and so we're getting all kind of signatures the metal all over the ocean floor most of them turn out to be bombs in the winter of 1980 among the thousands of bomb fragments littering the ocean floor the divers discover extremely old anchors and ballast stones [Music] the stones were loaded in the holes of 17th century ships for stability large amounts of ballast may well mark the location of an ancient shipwreck by that spring it is clear that fortunes are changing I thought down the anchor line got about halfway to the anchor and I saw this group of fish off to the right took the closer look and as I got closer I could tell I saw the outline of the cannon this man my old ships just great Fisher has indeed found the wreck of the margarita [Music] though it is not the vessel he seeks it is an impressive discovery the crew has uncovered the Timbers that were once the massive and powerful stern of a proud Spanish galleon but the see in the centuries have made them as fragile as the bones of an old man no one is untouched by the magnitude of what they have found it's a wonderful wonderful thrill because you're gone from the deck of the boat which is the 20th century and you're in 20th century armor all the diving gear and you go down to the bottom and then you're in the 17th century and I'm walking on the deck that's 350 years old you can see the marks on the wood where the guys packed the wood the end of the shape that it is to me become a ribbon the ship you can see where the nails were driven in you can see in some of the areas where there's something I can too putty or materia like that you can see some guys fingerprint in there that freighter produced 350 years old so you're shaking hands with history long gold chains like these were commonly worn by wealthy passengers traveling from the new world they often hid them by wrapping them closely around their bodies but for the voyagers on the ill-fated margarita their goal became an instrument of destruction hastening their descent to the bottom of the sea [Music] and saying their prayers that cross and a bag of silver the artifacts of the Marguerita begin to form a rare portrait of the past almost every day brings new discoveries poignant relics of 17th century life the divers are related by the finds including Fisher's youngest son Caine by 1982 the margarita has presented Fischer with over 20 million dollars worth of treasure but battles over ownership of recovered treasure are still being fought Fisher has no idea if any of the riches he has given so much for will ever belong to him on July 2nd 1982 after 7 years and millions of dollars in legal costs the US Supreme Court hands down a precedent-setting 5-4 ruling on the issue the decision in 1982 primarily meant that we were not only the finder but because it had been abandoned for so long we were also the owner of that vessel and we had the right to continued protection of the federal district court for our salvage activities until such time as Salvage was no longer possible on the wreck it is a major turning point in Mel Fisher's quest armed with more money for badly needed equipment and with the court cases behind him he returns to the search for the Atocha or as dazzling as the margaritas treasure is he has not forgotten what he is really after neither has anyone else there was a growing impatience within the company everybody kept remembering and thinking about the mother lode everybody wanted to get back now in particular of course was always very very impatient and so always kept the boats on the Atocha side as much as he could the faintest of clues along the ocean bottom began to hint at a path the whole theory of a shipwreck leaving a trail across the ocean floor like an animal or something we leave a trail in the woods you know broken twig and when I moved off here or something like that that was the basic idea that we followed and then after 82 we started following the trail the trail came to be known as Caine's trail Fisher's youngest son is emerging as a full-fledged treasure hunter you have to remember that Mel couldn't be out there seven days a week it took a big team to get out there dive on there not knowing there's sharks or what's there Old Navy bombs that could have blew up laughter all to be out there two or three weeks of his heat beating tossing the food tastes the same day after day somehow or other Kane tightens the whole thing up and this was a very very big part of success of the operation I'm just dedicating my father's work in I love it and I love what I'm doing I love the ocean I was born by the sea probably diving see I'm just glad to make his quest come true it's tough to be the son of a king but he has developed into a treasure hunter who is as dogged and is as persistent as his father Cain Fisher comes by his occupation naturally perhaps inevitably but for the other divers there are other reasons I'd known about Noah Fisher for a long time and I gave him a call on the phone and told him who I was and he says well I could use another diver I says well how much do you pay he said $50 a week and I says you got to be kidding me he says no that's all I can afford I says okay I'll be down in three days so I came down and I thought I'd give it a try and see what happened and well I'm still here seven and a half years later it's a chance to work with a legend you know someone that most of us probably have known about for at least 10 12 15 years this was probably a lot of people that would work for nothing just getting the opportunity to be trained by some of these people in itself is real special there's no group like it anywhere in planet that I know but in 1982 the divers were following a trail that often seemed to be an illusion still Kane Fisher spends three more years moving his boat down a line at a deeper and deeper water past the bronze cannons found by his brother Dirk the lion kept getting longer and longer and longer and ballast on here and then a couple hundred empty holes and then when we're ballast on another hundred empty holes and when they land finally it just petered out and there's nothing there the sea is still not ready to give up the Atocha in the spring of 1985 Mel Fisher once again decides to play a hunch about two months ago I decided to have all the boats to work with me and all the men and women stopped everything they're doing and I'll concentrate on the end of Kane's trailer and that's what we were doing was running back and forth across this trail with all our gear trying to pick up signs of it and the farther east we came I thought now I can't be out here that's just too far but on May 27th Memorial Day the rusty iron nails in barrel hoops the crew have been finding give way to something much more spectacular [Music] thirteen solid gold bars and sixteen emeralds and magnificent gold settings it's the only time in my life I ever hung up on Mel Fisher and he said we found gold bars and I said great hung up the phone and dashed down to the office and sat with him and listened to the radio couldn't believe it but then five weeks went by and that boats were just dogged lis out there ran out of the trail came back up the trail all during the month of June nothing [Music] the summer of 85 is wearing on Friday July 19th begins like so many other days a handful of boats searching a vast ocean for a single ship that sank 363 years before but late Friday afternoon there was no one here but Ed Leland I had came to me that said would you like to see the Atocha yeah yeah he brought me a side scan sonar reading and there it is just laying there exactly as a shipwreck should look on a side scan sonar and I said em you know where is that khane Fisher's boat may actually be anchored directly over the coach's mother lode but the treasure hunters must wait one more agonizing night before they will know for sure Saturday morning July 20th at the office a crowd is gathered the whole staff was here just kind of pacing around Edie little keepsake it's the my little own it's the my little own I know it I know it you know it was that sort of morning then in mid-afternoon divers Greg Wareham and Andy Metro C go below I swam out to have a look around with the metal detector swam maybe 60 70 feet and saw like a small reef arise on the bottom took the metal detector and waved it over the top and got a big scream all the way across the top of it took a closer look and looked like silver bars and ballast stones all over so I went back and got an Andy as fast as I could edie little came flying out of the chart room grabbed the radio [Applause] Gregg came flying out of the water about ten feet out of the water with Andy right behind him screaming choking this is it there's silver bars everywhere we can you find Mel we checked all his local hunts I mean every place that Mel Fisher's ever been known to be we couldn't find it absolutely couldn't find it we put it out over the local radio station Mel Fisher go to your office you've just found the mother lode [Music] and when he came walking back up the sidewalk he had a bag in his hand and I said where have you been the world's greatest treasure hunter was out buying diving gear when he found the mother lode Mel you want to talk to Kane on the radio and every report that came in over the radio it got death quiet in there and everybody just stopped to listen to every word they said and when the radio transmission would end everybody would start cheering again and pouring more champagne and that night neither we nor the people out on the boats celebrated I mean there was that intense moment of celebration but we all sort of went our separate ways that was just how you needed to contemplate it you needed to reflect on the immensity of what had happened was just beginning to sink in I think we were all intellectually prepared for the Atocha but certainly not emotionally prepared for it [Music] 10 years to the day after his son's death and over 16 years after his search began Mel Fisher is victorious for him and the people who believed in him the discovery of the Atocha ends almost two decades of hardship and personal tragedy the immensity of the atrocious treasure is staggering what was only a name a dream a legend has in an instant become an undeniable reality it is as if a piece of the past had been torn off and sent drifting into the present [Music] every time a ship sinks time stands still all those artifacts are frozen together then it means that by studying those artifacts together we can learn how people lived centuries of God some of the attaches cargo was the fruit of harsh labor by the Peruvian Indians [Music] other items were personal possessions treasured by homesick voyagers who never saw home again [Music] there were the Jews of the pious and the wealthy whatever their beginnings all these objects shared a tragic destiny [Music] [Music] Duncan Matheson's theory about what had happened to the Atocha was essentially correct the Atocha had sunk here in deep water and parts of it were scattered by a second storm some ten and a half miles northwest to the shallow quicksands so we're doing archeology and we're doing Salvage one helps us to do the other we can't do one without the other they go hand in hand in this operation and as we come more effective archaeologists we become more effective salvers [Applause] [Music] Matthewson must now begin to guide the team on a long-awaited mission the exact locations of hundreds of items must be mapped and recorded the ocean floor begins to resemble a lunar construction site every inch of the wreck must be photographed the whole timbers are exposed and carefully sketched perhaps the drawings will reveal more about how the Atocha was built and how she sank the live sand and silt are gently vacuumed up by a device called an air lift revealing fragments of a 363 year old tragedy you sense the loss of life there the wood that's present is something that the people walked on lived in that was their home for the long journey or they planned long journey that never came to a successful end baskets begin to fill with black and silver bars and blocks of coins which have fused together over the years [Applause] [Music] after three and a half centuries the otoko's treasurer can be brought to the surface it is a job that would take years to complete some of the blocks retain the shape of the chests that held them others still have remnants of the woods surrounding them there it is what little kids think of an adult I guess a real treasure chest soon the divers have brought up hundreds of silver bars and many thousands of coins as they are unloaded details of the attaches cargo begin to emerge a lot of the artifacts should have come up have really inspired a lot of imagination even in those that at first would have decided to just dig it up it's really incredible some of the artifacts they're more beautiful than the bars themselves the silver bars after three days the Dauntless has become so heavy with silver that she must return to dock security is very much in evidence as millions of dollars worth of treasure arrived at Fisher's exhibit in less than a week following the discovery of the mother lode over 15,000 visitors have come to see the display the main attraction is the huge pile of silver bars after all these years Fisher is still as fascinated by the sight of treasure as a young grandson I sometimes feel like I don't even holdin these gold bars and gold chains and things that I get I just get to show them to people for a little while don't know when I'm dead and drying those those things will just keep on going and people to keep marveling at them and being thrilled by it forever you know [Music] behind-the-scenes of the exhibit the conservation work goes on ancient pottery shards are analyzed to determine their composition and origin the thousands of coins carried by the Atocha undergo a transformation they soak in a special solution while a current is passed through them the black silver sulphide coating is loosened in the process as the coins are tumbled in a container filled with stainless steel shot the residue is gently rubbed away a final rinse and polish and they gleam once more sorting the hand struck coins according to the mint an assayer marks completes the immediate procedure nowhere Sarah on this one I got a full complete date look at that 16:19 directing the cleaning and preservation process for each artifact is the museum's head conservator Jim Sinclair we don't want to leave it out too long because the iron has a tendency to deteriorate quite rapidly once it hits the air many of these pieces cannot be saved over 300 years of submersion and saltwater has eaten the metal of this sword away all that's left is a shell [Music] in August the recovery work on the site is continuing in full swing the excavation of tons of silver has become almost routine [Music] but today August 16th the routine is dramatically broken two divers are searching an area about 50 yards from the mother lode when something glimmers in the sand it is gold untarnished untouched by the years [Applause] there seems to be no end to the wealth that is scattered in the sands this is the stuff of a treasure hunters fantasy I never dreamt about treasure before I came here I didn't know a full-time job existed anywhere in the world you wake up every day and you go look for a Spanish galleon my first week out at sea I realized what I was doing then I started dreaming about it and then after you find gold this dream about gold every night playing our song by the end of that day 76 gold bars and disks had been found weighing over 200 pounds some are covered in lengths and lengths of gold chain there is an almost mystical quality about gold like a warm fire it draws the men closer and closer on August 21st Mel Fisher turns 63 years old a once-in-a-lifetime event in more than one way two weeks before he found the Atocha a Fisher could barely make payroll today he stands surrounded by millions of dollars in Spanish gold well mark the sea having decided to give up the Atocha to those who searched so long and paid so dearly for her is now showering them with wealth beyond their imagination Columbian emeralds are being found in stunning numbers five months after the discovery of the mother lode there are over 300 of them worth some 60 million dollars most of the treasure will eventually rest in private hands spread among fishers investors employees and others who supported the search but this plan raises questions from Fisher's critics Peter Neal is the president of New York South Street Seaport Museum and it's my view that these artifacts are a part of this nation's heritage and that they should be shared and they should not be used for the exclusive enjoyment or gain of any individual or group of investors but the people who bet their money on Mel Fisher feel differently about the treasure some of them will almost certainly become millionaires but most were caught by something more intangible than the potential return on a very chancy investment well see I like history it's the excitement of knowing that you've got something that's real old and it's been hidden really hidden all those years I mean to hold that in your hand and really know that a human being at one other time can heal that coin that's the excitement the money really doesn't mean that much the history is what's really exciting figured jeez will you be there when history is being made get some things that are all that you can hang on to that nobody in the world would have Jim Vonderhaar known to one and all as Cincinnati Jim has become a member of Fisher's extended family over ten years ago he invested almost everything he had in the hunt this is a poem I wrote to commemorate our find the day started out calm right and clear one of the better days of the entire year the first hole of barrel hill then a coin or two then a copper ingot and then there were two more copper ingots the mother lode was near then Kane broke water with a thunderous cheer call the office let them know the pile of the Atocha lies below tell Mel it's over twelve years of sweat this is a day history cannot forget disappointments heartaches sorrows and tears just part of the price that Mel paid through the years now we can raise a more to dark let the inscription read we have finished your work and I kind of wrote that as a memorial more to dark than anything it just kind of gets to me whenever I think of him the quest for the Atocha is a story of struggle controversy and tremendous risk the point is that there is a lot of adventure left on this planet you don't have to go to the moon or across the American desert in a Conestoga wagon or you know find a new continent in order to have adventure in your life there are a lot of things out there for people to do if they will simply get off the get out of the rocking chair and go do if this is a great adventure story a kind of modern-day Indiana Jones we must remember what happened at the end of Indiana's last adventure he recovered the booty he overcame all the frustrations and then he gave the artifacts back to the people Mel Fisher seems an unlikely figure to have led such a quest does he share the new world spirit of adventure or the hunger for gold of the conquistadors what is undeniable is his quality of persistence of drive and most of all his ability to believe in a vision as romantic as sunken treasure it is a quality almost as rare as treasure itself I think that perseverance has paid that's one of the main things just hang in there and do your thing and people try to tear you down or get jealous just let it go in one ear and out the other and keep on going [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] National Geographic video undeniably collectible and affordably priced only from best drawn video [Music]

Channel: Windows OS

Views: 68,342

Rating: 4.8032789 out of 5

Keywords: National Geographic, Nat Geo, National Geographic Video, Nat Geo Video, LaserDisc, LaserVision, Laser Video Disc, LaserVideoDisc, Laser Videodisc, Animals, Vestron, Vestron Video, Mel Fisher, Atocha, Nuestra Señora de Atocha, Our Lady of Atocha, Shipwreck, Treasure Hunting, Wreck, Underwater, Marine, Maritime, archaeology, Maritime archaeology, Underwater archaeology

Id: g7jey7YKYp0

Length: 57min 27sec (3447 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 18 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/AGMartinez777]

ATOCHA GOLD BUTTPLUGS.