Key West Diary 10

Owing to the fact that the year 2015 marks the 30th anniversary of the finding of the Mother Load of the treasure laden Spanish Galleon that sunk off Key West in 1622 with an estimated 450 MILLION dollars worth of gold, silver and emeralds on board, the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum 
sponsored a multi week series of lectures on the fleet that we were lucky enough to attend.

   

The first lecture: Treasure and Tragedy; The 1622 Fleet, was given by Corey Malcom. Corey is the Director and head archeologist of the museum. He gave the history of the 28 ship fleet that left Havana, Cuba in late September of 1622 and of how eight of the ships were lost two days later by a tremendous hurricane. He also detailed the many salvage attempts by Spain over the years and how ultimately the 16 year search by Mel Fisher was successful in locating and recovering the riches of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha.

The following week, Don Kincaid presented a lecture entitled: Search for the Atocha in Pictures. Don was the primary photographer for the search for the Atocha from almost the very beginning of the 16 year search. He documented the expeditions many failures and ultimate successes, and was in fact the first person to actually find gold chains on the wreck site. Though he was an employee of Mel Fishers, the majority of the photographs used by National Geographic for their magazine and video coverage of the Atocha recovery are credited to Mr. Kincaid.

The last lecture that we attended, entitled Treasures and Coins of the 1622 Fleet, was given by Carol Tedesco. She is a world recognized numismatist on rare and new world coins and has traveled all over the world to investigate and catalog coins from many shipwreck sites. She not only described how each of the approximately 150,000 reales were individually hand struck but what mint they were made at and who the assayer was that made them. The reale is the equivalent of the Spanish Silver dollar and is what is commonly called the "pieces of eight". The Atocha manifest listed chests of coins totaling approximately 250,000 coins, but to date only an estimated 150,000 coins have been recovered and conserved.

Carol and Corey taking questions from the audience.