The Atocha

The Nuestra Señora de Atocha went down in a 1622 hurricane off the Marquesas with a king’s ransom aboard. The treasure hunter Mel Fisher searched for it sixteen years, losing his own son to the sea in the hunt, until in 1985 his divers found the mother lode: forty tons of silver and gold and a hoard of Colombian emeralds, worth around half a billion dollars. The richest shipwreck ever recovered, and pieces of it still turn up. The finds fill his museum on the Key West waterfront.