Every day Mel Fisher greeted crew members from his Florida Keys salvage boats with the same encouraging cry: "Today's the day!" But for 17 years Fisher, 64, was wrong. The day, the one on which he and his 73-member crew would find the cargo of the legendary Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha, never seemed to arrive. Still, Fisher's cheerful shout kept the crew going through the tough, fruitless years when other salvagers gave up the search for the famed and mysterious 17th century mass shipwreck in which eight or nine vessels were lost.
Two weeks ago, Fisher's persistence paid off. His divers, reconnoitering 54 ft. below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, 40 miles west of Key West, came upon what Bleth McHaley, vice president of Fisher's Treasure Salvors Inc., has since described as "a reef of silver bars with lobsters living in it." Many are now calling the find the largest ever recovered from a shipwreck. "They were jumping up and down and waving their hands at us in the water," says Kane Fisher, Mel's 26-year-old son, referring to the pair of divers who made the initial discovery. "At first we thought something was wrong. Then they started shouting, 'We found it! We found it!' " The silver, said Diver Taffi Quesada, 24, Fisher's daughter, "was stacked up like cordwood as far as the eye could see."
In the first two days, 40 divers brought up more than 200 silver ingots, weighing 7 tons. Each bar was 15 in. long and tipped the scales at about 70 lbs. Divers also found the archetypal treasures of a shipwreck: wooden chests spilling over with coins. According to McHaley, the Atocha's inventory includes more than 1,000 silver bars, which were bound for Spain from Cuba and other New World colonies in 1622, when the ship sank in a hurricane's high winds and raging seas. Estimates of the worth of the booty range as high as $400 million. Some local skeptics disagree with this giddy estimate, but, says one, "no one can say that this isn't the greatest hit of all time."
In conducting its long and meticulous search, Fisher's salvaging team used the most advanced underwater detection machinery available. Side-scanning sonar, similar to the type used in finding the black boxes of the Air-India crash, provided a detailed chart of the ocean floor. A high-speed magnetometer located the ferrous metals commonly found in old cannons, muskets and ship fittings. The crew also employed a method that Fisher devised for scouring the ocean bottom: huge pipes are placed at a salvage ship's stern near the propellers, which drive jets of water through the cylinders, helping to uncover buried objects under the sea's mantle.
Despite all the high-tech tools, the ocean proved very reluctant to give up the Atocha's treasure. For 101 days in 1968, Fisher's divers combed an area near the Upper and Lower Matecumbe Keys for the ship, using as their guides a number of Spanish archival documents that referred to the lost galleon. Fisher's crew found lesser wrecks that yielded up sizable bounties, but the big one remained undiscovered.