A crew searching the wreck of a 17th-century Spanish galleon off the Florida Keys has pulled up a 55-pound copper ingot worth an estimated $18,000 to $25,000, the latest recovery from a shipwreck that has been yielding treasure for four decades.
Divers with Mel Fisher’s Shipwreck Expeditions found the ingot at the site of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, roughly 35 miles west of Key West in Monroe County. The Atocha sank in a 1622 hurricane while sailing back to Spain loaded with silver, gold and emeralds.
Mel Fisher began the search for the Atocha in 1969 and spent years recovering artifacts before winning a lengthy legal battle over rights to the treasure in 1982. His team located the wreck’s main cargo deposit, known as the “Mother Lode,” in 1985. Decades later, the site is still producing finds.
Captain Drake Nicholas was retracing a stretch of the wreck site from the salvage vessel DARE, following what he described as a “tight trail of coins,” when his metal detector picked up a faint signal.
“Faint hits are always the most exciting because they lead to, you know, stuff very deep in the mud,” Nicholas said. “And I got that very faint hit. I dug down like I always do … and it got louder, and that’s, you know, when the excitement really kicks in.”
Nicholas said the object’s rounded shape and bronze-copper coloring initially made him think he’d found a cannon.
“I was so excited,” he said. “I thought it was a cannon, but it ended up being a copper ingot, which was also very exciting.”
Copper was tightly controlled in the 1600s, according to Nicholas, largely because of its role in casting the bronze cannons the Spanish Empire depended on.
“I believe that only certain people could actually own copper because it was making such strong cannons,” he said. “It wasn’t something [that] an everyday guy could have a stockpile of — it was more for the king and queen to make cannons.”
Nicholas explained that metalworkers of the era made the ingots crudely, by pouring molten copper into holes dug in the sand.
“They were very crude, not many markings on them, a lot of impurities in them, but it was copper being sent over to Spain for bronze cannons,” he said.
Nicholas believes the recent finds point toward a larger concentration of treasure still buried at the site, aided by newer equipment capable of detecting targets deeper beneath the thick mud that covers the wreck.
“We’ve never really [gotten] to penetrate that mud with a metal detector to get down and find, you know, the rest of the silver bars, copper ingots and coins,” he said. “Right now I have 19 targets that are very interesting, very high-value targets that I’m going out after next.”
The copper ingot follows another discovery from earlier this summer, when Nicholas and his crew recovered a 22.5-pound silver bar from the Atocha site that had survived largely intact despite centuries of marine growth.
