Keys’ treasure hunters find silver bar from 400-year-old shipwreck

MONROE COUNTY, Fla. — A discovery not seen in nearly 30 years came to shore in the Florida Keys on Thursday: 22-pound silver bar from the famed Atocha shipwreck.

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“It was our last dive of the day – it was almost 7 o’clock,” recalled lead diver Blake Baker.

Baker said the captain of the salvage vessel DARE, Drake Nicholas, was the one underwater with a crew. They are part of Mel Fisher’s Shipwreck Expeditions.

“We were in area with a lot of metal detector hits,” Nicholas said. “This one was deeper.”

After hitting the object with a knife and examining the surface, Nicholas said he saw telltale markings that were consistent with a silver bar.

“I didn’t believe it at the moment,” he said.

The silver bar is covered in more than 400 years of marine encrustations and will be taken to a lab for examination.

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Sean Browne, with Mel Fisher’s Shipwreck Expeditions, said the bar is worth an estimated $100,000. It will likely be kept intact as a historical object.

Discovered treasures like the bar are divided among investors and then the Fisher family, Browne said.

The Atocha was a ship packed with treasures and bound for Spain in 1622, but a powerful hurricane that fall sunk it between Key West and the dry Tortugas.

It was never seen again, until more than 300 years later when explorer Mel Fisher started finding its sunken treasure in the 1970s.

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