Nuestra Señora de Atocha

The Vessel

Nuestra Señora de Atocha was a Spanish galleon built at Havana in the early 1620s for the Carrera de Indias, the annual silver-convoy run between the Spanish American viceroyalties and the Royal Mint at Seville. She was 34 metres on the keel, approximately 550 tons burden, built of West Indian hardwood to a Portuguese-Spanish hybrid design that combined deep holds for bullion with a fighting platform capable of carrying twenty guns.

She sailed as the almiranta of the 1622 Tierra Firme fleet, the rear-guard command responsible for the safety of the squadron after the capitana (the fleet flagship) had peeled off to the eastern approaches. Her captain was Bartolomé García de Nodal, a veteran of the Strait of Magellan surveys and a senior officer in the colonial navy. Her cargo, loaded at Cartagena and Portobello between June and August 1622, included 24 tons of silver bullion, 180,000 silver pesos, 582 copper ingots, 125 gold bars and discs, 350 indigo chests, 525 bales of tobacco, and the private property of some 265 passengers, many returning to Spain after terms of colonial service.

The registered value of her cargo, declared to the Spanish Crown for the 20 per cent royal fifth, was 1 million pesos; the actual value, including smuggled contraband, has been estimated at twice that figure. Her crew and passengers numbered 265 on her final voyage. The Tierra Firme fleet of 1622 was the largest silver convoy Spain had yet dispatched, reflecting both the intensified colonial extraction of silver from the Potosí mine and the financial desperation of Philip IV's government, whose Thirty Years' War expenditures had bankrupted the Crown.

The Voyage

The fleet of 28 vessels departed Havana at dawn on 4 September 1622 bound for Cádiz via the Florida Straits, six weeks late in the hurricane season because of administrative delays at Cartagena. The delays had been known to the fleet's commander, the Marquis of Cadereyta, who sailed anyway under explicit orders from the Council of the Indies to deliver the silver by the end of the fiscal year.

On the evening of 5 September the fleet entered the Florida Straits between Cuba and the Florida Keys, running north-east in deepening weather. The hurricane that would sink the Atocha and her sister almiranta Santa Margarita made landfall overnight. By dawn on 6 September the fleet had been scattered across 100 kilometres of reef. Eight ships were lost: Atocha, Santa Margarita, Nuestra Señora del Rosario, and five smaller consorts.

Atocha struck the reef at Cayos del Marquez (Marquesas Keys) at approximately 06:00 on 6 September 1622. Her hull was torn open on the first impact; she slid into deeper water south of the reef in perhaps twenty minutes. Of her 265 aboard, five clung to the mizzenmast that remained projecting above the water: three sailors and two enslaved Africans. They were rescued by the merchant frigate Santa Cruz on 8 September. 260 men, women, and enslaved people drowned. The gold and silver of the Atocha went to the bottom with them.

The Disaster

The Spanish Crown's salvage response was immediate and proportional to the loss. The Marquis of Cadereyta, still afloat, sent a salvage party from Havana under Captain Francisco Núñez Melián within three weeks; the operation continued until the mid-1630s. Native Indian divers from the Bahama Channel settlements recovered the Santa Margarita's upper cargo at depths of six to twelve metres; they were unable to reach the Atocha, which lay in deeper water.

Melián located the Santa Margarita with a 680-kilo brass bell-lift apparatus and a diver on an umbilical in 1626. By the time he retired from the work in 1631 he had recovered approximately 350,000 pesos of silver from the Santa Margarita and had exhausted his credit with the Havana-based Casa de Contratación. Atocha herself he never found. The Spanish search was abandoned in 1635 when the Council of the Indies calculated that further salvage costs exceeded the expected recovery.

The wreck lay undisturbed for 341 years. Her general location was known from the surviving court testimony, but the Marquesas Keys in the seventeenth century had been a featureless low archipelago five nautical miles west-southwest of Key West, and the 1622 hurricane had reshaped the archipelago itself. No chart accurately preserved where Atocha had sunk.

The Legacy

The modern search was conducted by a Florida-based salvor, Mel Fisher, and his family and crew of Treasure Salvors, beginning in 1969. Fisher had been a professional treasure diver since 1963 and had already recovered the 1715 Spanish fleet. He based his search on the seventeenth-century Seville archives, reconstructed by the historian Eugene Lyon from the Spanish Crown's salvage documentation, which identified the 1622 wreck line as running from the modern coral bank called the Quicksands across a seven-mile arc of the Marquesas reef.

Fisher's search lasted sixteen years and cost him his son Dirk, his daughter-in-law Angel, and his diver Rick Gage, all killed in a capsize on 20 July 1975 while surveying the location that would prove, a decade later, to be the Atocha's ballast pile. On 20 July 1985, exactly ten years to the day after the 1975 tragedy, Fisher's son Kane Fisher radioed the surface from a 55-foot depth: "Put away the charts. We found the main pile."

The subsequent recovery produced, over the following three years, 40 tonnes of silver bullion, 180,000 silver pesos, 125 gold bars, 32 kilograms of Colombian emeralds, and hundreds of personal possessions of the 265 dead. The treasure was conserved at the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum in Key West, which remains the principal archival repository for the 1622 fleet. The Fisher estate and the State of Florida litigated ownership to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in 1982 that the wreck lay in federal admiralty jurisdiction and that title belonged to the salvor under maritime law.

She was, at her 1985 discovery, the most valuable shipwreck treasure ever recovered, displaced from that record only by the 2015 discovery of the San José off Colombia. The recovered silver and gold are dispersed among private collectors, the Mel Fisher Museum, and the Smithsonian. Her hull is largely gone, eaten by teredo navalis over three centuries, but her stone ballast remains in the mound at the site. The 260 dead are not memorialised.