Nuestra Señora de Atocha

1622

Spanish galleon, Marquesas Keys, forty tonnes of silver Location: off Marquesas Keys, Florida · Coordinates: 24.52°N 82.02°W · Casualties: 260 · Survivors: 5 · Depth: 17 m · Cause: hurricane — Caught by a hurricane off the Florida Keys on 6 September 1622, the day after she departed Havana with the Tierra Firme treasure fleet. Driven onto the reef of Cayos del Marques. Sank in fifty-five feet of water with her cargo of silver, gold, and Colombian emeralds. · Fate: recovered 1985 · Mel Fisher · Type: galleon · Tierra Firme Fleet · Tonnage: 550 tons · Crew: 265 · Flag: Spanish Empire · Launched: 1620 Spanish treasure galleon, outbound from Havana with silver and emeralds for the crown. Caught by a hurricane off the Florida Keys on 6 September 1622 and driven onto the reef. 260 dead, five survivors found clinging to the mizzenmast. Mel Fisher located her in 1985 after a sixteen-year search, recovering what was then the most valuable shipwreck treasure ever raised: forty tonnes of silver, 125 gold bars, and 32 kilograms of Colombian emeralds. 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 extra 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.