Toll Free 800-650-9030 International 239-437-1052
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Toll Free 800-650-9030 International 239-437-1052
Order By Fax 239-437-2455
© 2007 Atocha Treasure Company LLC All Rights Reserved
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“There’s a lot of treasure left down there, and we’re
going to find it.” — Treasure
hunter Dave Hostie, aboard the
salvage vessel JR Magruder, October 2001 Hunting KEYS
WATERS FOR Sunken riches By KEVIN LOLLAR klollar@news-press.com
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MARQUESAS KEYS---It’s down there. Everybody knows it’s down there somewhere under tons of sand, 30 feet beneath the wrinkling blue water 35 miles west of Key West. The divers, the archaeologists, the historians, the spirit of legendary treasure hunter Mel Fisher — they all know that hundreds of millions of dollars in gold, silver and emeralds from the Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha are down there, waiting, aching to be pulled up. And with every dawn, Fisher company divers know, as fisher always said, “Today’s the day.” “It’s out here,” diver Dave Hollis says, leaning over a deck rail on the 90-foot salvage vessel 113. Magruder. “It’s just a matter of time.’’
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Silver and muskets Like a ghost drifting across the centuries, diver Richard “Smitty” Schmitt, 52, rises through the clear water and latches onto the dive ladder. He hands his metal detector to first mate Jeff Dickinson and clambers aboard the Magruder I was disappointed the seashells were Scarce on this dive,” Schmitt says. “But I’m glad tile treasure wasn’t.” Schmitt pulls the red glove from his left hand, revealing three dark half-dollar sized objects — eight reales Silver coins Commonly known as pieces of eight, blackened by seawater and encrusted with marine organisms. Treasure from the Atocha, which sank during a 1622 hurricane. Treasure -- the very word is like a bell that awakens the imagination and evokes dreams of adventure and discovery. “It’s not the money,” diver Dave Hostie, 41, says. “It’s finding something from the past, holding it in your hand, a sword or a musket, thinking about one of those guys flailing away with it or shooting with it. “It’s a quest. Every time you jump off the boat, you think it’s going to happen today. I’m like a kid. It’s treasure hunting, and I’m living it,”
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The sterncastle Divers on the Magruder and the salvage vessel Dauntless are on a very specific quest, the Atocha’s main structure, including its treasure-packed sterncastle. Its a quest that might coax from the sea treasure even more valuable than the $400 million in gold, silver, emeralds, copper and other artifacts that Fisher and his divers have already salvaged from the Atocha and Santa Margarita. Most of that treasure was recovered from the Atocha’s Mother Lode, a section of the lower hull 55 feet deep southwest of the Marquesas. Granted, $400 million is a lot of treasure, but that’s not all the Atocha carried. A month after the galleon went down, a Second hurricane tore the ship’s upper structure away from the lower hull. The upper structure floated northwest into an area now called the Quicksand’s, dropping treasure in what salvors call a “scatter trail.’’ According to church records and the Atocha’s manifest, 30 boxes of church gold, 300 silver bars and 100,000 silver coins are still on the bottom. Official records, however, don’t tell the whole story: The Atocha’s rich passengers would have been quartered in the sterncastle, and they would have carried plenty of private wealth in the form of coins, jewelry, gold chain and smuggled silver bars, Also unaccounted for are 60 pounds of contraband uncut Colombian emeralds worth as much as $1 billion. Now Fisher’s divers doggedly search for what they hope is a second Mother Lode.
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A day in the lift Treasure hunting isn’t a simple matter of jumping into the water and finding heaps of gold scattered across the seafloor; it’s hard work that begins at first light and ends well after the sun has set, at a cost of $700 a day. Hollis, who has worked for Fisher’s company for a month, sits on deck and watches predawn paint thin clouds the colors of bing cherries and pumpkins. “I wasn’t expecting much, but I’m getting more than I expected,” the 42-year-old former mental health technician says. ”It’s long hour’s, 12-hour days, in and out of the water. There’s no time to rest your mind on the boat. So I like to meditate, watching the sun rise, to relax and reflect on the day.” Aboard the Magruder are the vessel’s regular crew, Capt. Gary Randolph, 36; Dickinson, 43; Hostie and Schmitt, as well as two dauntless divers. Hollis and Joe Markovic. Because the treasure is buried under as much as 15 feet of sand, the day’s first task is to dig a hole. In the 1960s, Fisher invented an elbow-shaped tube called a mailbox that fits over a boat’s propeller and directs a powerful rush of water to the seafloor. The blast blows away tons of sand to expose the bedrock and any heavy object that has worked its way through the sand.
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With the Magruder secured by a how anchor and two stern anchors, the engines rumble, the deck vibrates, and the boat’s twin mailboxes blast away for 30 minutes. Stopping the engines, Randolph says over the loudspeaker: “All clear. Good luck.” Three divers hit the water and drop 30 feet into a 35-foot-wide crater. On the bottom, each diver has a specific task. Two sweep the area, including the sand on the crater’s walls, with metal detectors; the third makes a visual search, fanning sand from and manually probing the thousands of small holes in the pockmarked bedrock If little or nothing is in a hole, a dive can end in 20 minutes; if divers get a lot of metal-detector hits, they stay as long as they need to clean out the hole. After each dive, divers loosen one stern-anchor line and tighten the other to swing the stern 15 feet. When they were looking for the Mother Lode in the 1970s and 80’s, Fisher’s crews leapfrogged around the quicksands, digging a few holes on one area then moving on. That left a lot of gaps — and a lot of treasure between
holes. These days, the
Dauntless and Magruder are filling in the gaps by blowing overlapping
holes In the past Couple of years, treasure hunting has moved into the computer age. “Every piece we find gets a tag and gets logged into the daily log sheet, and we log the GPS coordinates, and all that goes into the computer so we can have a picture of how the ship broke apart,” Randolph said. “This is how ‘we preserve the history. It’s a Snapshot of the wreck site. “We also develop our plans based on the patterns of the artifacts. The heaviest artifacts tell us where the main section ot the ship went When heavy stuff tails out — ballast stones or gold bars— they go straight down and don’t move When we find those thin~, we know we’re on the trail, and we can predict where we should go, if we do good record beeping. And IL we record where we\e been, we don’t have to dig there again.”
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Low pay, high hopes To boost morale during the 16— year search for the Mother lode, Fisher’s daily proclamation was ‘Today’s the day.” Although Fisher died in 1998,that spirit still infects Fisher company divers. “It’s the belief,” Dickinson says. “A lot of people come and go. They think they’re going to just stumble into a pile of treasure, They say, ‘Yippie, I’m a diver for Mel Fisher.’ Those guys don’t last. “But I’m going to go
until we find the rest of the bloody treasure. I want to see where the
Atocha ended up. It’s like Easter: There’s a lot of eggs out there that I’ve got to find. If you don’t find what you’re looking for today, then tomorrow’s the day.” Between dives, as the engine’s rumble and the deck vibrates divers relax by reading, doing crossword puzzles or dozing. When necessary, they repair dive gear and metal detectors or take care of any mechanical problems on the Magruder. Breakfast and lunch are hit-or-miss — crew members grab a sandwich or plate of leftovers when they can — and as time to get back in the water draws near, they eagerly gear up and wait for Randolph’s “all clear.”
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So it goes all day, the treasure hunters making as many dives as sunlight allows — up to 12 during the summer. The one constant is Ralph, a 5-foot barracuda that shows up in each hole as soon as the engines stop. For their efforts, divers make $300 a week, but they can live on the boat, even in port, and their food is free. Those who stick with the company for a year receive one-half of 1 percent of the year’s treasure. “The pay’s not great, and it’s hard work,” Dickinson said. “You can spend two weeks at sea on a 90-foot island. But what’s rich? I’m rich right now. How many people live in Key West and hunt treasure and get paid for it?” At the end of the day, as the sunsets behind a blanket of featureless, gray clouds, Randolph digs one more hole before the crew pulls the mailboxes out of the water. Divers share cooking duties, and at 7:30 p.m., cook of the day Hollis serves dinner — baked chicken, green beans, rice, applesauce and green salad. Before the crew digs in, Dickinson says an impromptu grace: “Lord, thank you for this wonderful meal, and please let us find a lot of treasure tomorrow.” But today isn’t done for Dickinson. Still chewing his last mouthful of chicken, the first mate straps on his gear, grabs his metal detector and goes overboard. He emerges 40 minutes later with a silver coin. “My first year, I found gold on a night dive, part of a pendant,” says Dickinson, who has also found a 1O-foot-2-inch gold chain and a gold bar. “You know, finding gold is the silliest thing in the world, you get a lump in your throat. You look at it and say, ‘It can’t be, me? Finding gold? Nah.’ and you giggle. You look around to make sure you’re not on Candid Camera because you’re giggling like an idiot.”
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Topside, the exhausted crew sits in front of a VCR, watching — what else? — A movie about diving. What they don’t do is drink: Fisher company vessels are dry vessels. “People always ask, what do you do out there at night, drink beer and rum?” Dickinson said. “The answer is no. It just takes one guy being Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and then you’re stuck on a 90-foot island with him” After the movie, the weary divers troop to their bunks, and the quiet Magruder rolls gently on a dark sea that still hides undiscovered fortunes.
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Heading home Fisher’s divers are held together by a single passion —treasure—and although days can be tough, none wants to return prematurely to shore. But on the Magruder’s fourth day at sea, a broken generator and a forecast of 20- to 25-knot winds forces a decision: One more day on the water, then hack to port at Stock Island. Six dives on the last day produce one silver coin bringing the trip’s total to 19, worth an estimated $10,000. No church gold, no silver bars, no gold chains, no emeralds — no second Mother Lode. Slowly, the Magruder makes the 3lA~hour trip home; lights shimmer on the horizon as Fantasy Fest rocks Key West; lightning explodes in meteorological warfare over the lower Keys. But out here, the only sounds are the rumbling engines and the sea whispering against the Magruder’s blue how. Leaning back in the pilot’s chair, Randolph casually drives the big boat with his feet. “Not had for a short trip — 19 coins in five days,’’ lie says. ‘‘Not bad at all. It more than pays for the trip. That’s the key. It allows us to hunt treasure another day.” And the next day might be the day. Alter all, everybody knows it’s I down there.
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ATOCHA
VIGNETTES LEAVING ‘BIG WORLD’
Treasure hunters are a mixed bag of people who come from all over
the country and all over the world, and they have extremely diverse
backgrounds.
Gary Randolph, now captain of the salvage vessel Magruder, went to
work as a diver for Mel Fisher in 1995, after a career as an operations
manager for a computer company in New Jersey.
His wife, Linda, stated as a diver and now manages the Mel Fisher
Maritime Museum gift shop.
“My wife and I decided we wanted a major change,” Randolph
said. “We decided that life
in the big world was too high-stress.
We met Mel in the gift shop. I
told Jim I could run boats and weld, and he said ‘You’re hired.’
This is better than a suit-and-tie job.”
But with a salary of $300 a week and the possibility of taking home
the value of one-half of 1 percent of the year’s treasure, treasure
hunting isn’t for everybody.
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VIDEOGRAPHER HOPES TO FILM BIG FIND
National Geographic has covered the quest for the Spanish treasure
galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha for more than 20 years, producing
numerous magazine articles and documentaries.
With treasure hunters hot on the trail of the Atocha’s
treasure-laden sterncastle, National Geographic has assigned videographer
Adrian Danciu, a 29-year-old Romanian living in Minneapolis, to document
the search.
“I’m just a small piece of a giant mechanism,” said Danciu,
who has been working on the story for six weeks.
“This is the third part of the story, the finale, when they find
the sterncastle. It’s one of those stories.
It’s and adventure that most people can connect to.”
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DIVING’S IN HIS BLOOD, LUNGS
Some people just can’t stay away from the hunt.
Oregon native Richard Schmitt, 52, was looking for work as a
commercial diver in 1977 when he herd about some kind of dive operation in
the Keys, so he packed up and headed to Florida.
“I had an address, and it was Mel Fisher’s office,” Schmitt
said. “I didn’t know who
Mel was so I went into the gift shop and said, ‘I heard you’re looking
for divers.’ The girl said,
‘Wait here,’ and went to get Mel.
“He took me into his office and started pointing to his chart.
For 15 minutes, he said ‘I found this here, and I found that
there.’ Finally, he said,
‘So, what did you want to see me about?’”
Schmitt said he was a diver and an underwater welder, and fisher
offered him a contract for $600 a month.
“Then he said, ‘If you sign that contract, I don’t know when
you’ll get paid. I don’t
have $600, but when I get it you’ll get it.’” Schmitt said.
“I’d never been in the Keys.
I’d never been in warm water.
It dazzled me, so I said ‘Sure why not?’”
After two years, Schmitt got homesick for the mountains and
returned to Oregon, where he became an instructor at the Divers Institute
of Technology. Then he came back to work for Fisher in 1982 for three
months, then back to Oregon, then back to the keys for three months in
1986.
He missed treasure hunting while he was away, but he started a
family and strayed in the Northwest to raise his children.
Now that his kids are older, he’s back.
“It’s the fun and adventure and the warm water,” Schmitt
said. “And as soon as my
son graduates from high school, he wants to come down and be a treasure
hunter, too.”
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PICK ON THE NEW GUY
Every treasure hunter is the new guy at some point, and new guys
can become the objects of practical jokes.
Dave Hostie, a former commercial diver, had been with the company
for three weeks and had recently found his first silver coin without a
metal detector—it was just lying on the bedrock.
But most treasure is found with metal detectors, so to see whether
he could actually use a metal detector, another diver hid a quarter in the
sand near where Hostie was working.
“I got this big hit, and I really thought I had something,” Hostie
said. “I was running out of air but I didn’t want to leave. I kept
digging, and I was thinking, ‘I’ve got to find it, I’ve got to find
it. I took it to my last gulp of air. That was probably pretty dumb.”
With his air gauge showing empty Hostie handed his metal detector
to diver Jeff Dickinson and headed for the surface 30 feet above.
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From The Archives Of
The Search For The Atocha |
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