Mel Fisher: The Treasure Hunting King of Key West

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Now, onto today’s video. There’s something about buried treasure that captivates the mind. It’s the plot of almost every good adventure story—the hunt for a lost fortune. Every kid and many adults dream of following a treasure map to find a chest of gold, silver, and jewels left by a pirate or an unfortunate adventurer. For one man, the dream of hunting treasure became a reality. Mel Fisher left a comfortable life in California to come to the Florida Keys in search of sunken treasure. Alongside family and friends, he spent years chasing his white whale—a Spanish galleon that sank 400 years ago with an unimaginable amount of wealth on board. The quest to find the treasure would be dangerous, expensive, monotonous, and frustrating, with Mel having to battle Mother Nature, the limits of technological innovation, and the government of the State of Florida, along with the many threats that lurk beneath the ocean’s surface. This is a story of a man who chased a dream despite it almost costing him everything, and in the end, he made history.

Melvin Lewis Fisher was born on August 21, 1922, in Hobart, Indiana, a residential town located not far from the coastline of Lake Michigan. He had a comfortable childhood; his father, Earl, was a successful carpenter, and his mother, Grace, was a dance instructor. Mel grew up to be tall, skinny, and always ready for adventure. He especially liked swimming and boating in the area’s many lakes and rivers. He also enjoyed tinkering with things; as a teenager, he built a homemade diving helmet out of a paint can. He attended Purdue University after high school, studying engineering. One of the most famous guest lecturers during his time at school was Albert Einstein, whom Fisher greatly admired.

Before Mel could complete his studies, World War II intervened, and he ended up in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, sent to Europe as part of the support infrastructure for the Allied infantry assault against the Nazis. He was never in direct combat but was bombed during the Battle of the Bulge, escaping unhurt. Mostly, he built things like latrines—lots of latrines. After the war, Fisher returned to the United States and entered the booming post-war construction business. One day, while fishing on a bridge in Florida, he encountered a man spear fishing underwater, diving down to shoot large fish that Mel had never seen before. He asked the man to show him how, and a lifelong obsession with the underwater world was born.

With World War II over, Frenchman Jacques Cousteau began exporting his new invention, the Aqualung—the first commercially available self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. Cousteau would go on to gain renown as a famous underwater explorer and filmmaker. Back in the United States, Mel bought one of the first Aqualungs for sale in the country and immediately saw the appeal. No longer would a dive be limited to how long he could hold his breath; instead of minutes, he could spend hours underwater.

Fisher was in California at the time, trying to make a go of being a chicken farmer, but he spent as much time as he could diving. He tinkered with breathing regulators, dive suits, and spear guns until he eventually decided to sell his farm and open a dive shop in Los Angeles. Not only did his shop sell diving equipment, but it also offered scuba diving lessons and organized dive trips to many of the beautiful underwater sites off the California coast. He also filmed television shows for local stations, educating the public about the exciting adventures of scuba diving. This, in turn, provided plenty of traffic to his business. Life was good for Mel Fisher; he had met and married the love of his life, Dolores, known to everyone as Dio, and together they had four children: Dirk, Kane, Kim, and Taffy. Dio loved diving as much as Mel did, and the whole family got into the business, which was both commercially successful and earned Mel many friends along the way.

One of the most popular destinations for divers was shipwrecks. Most ships are sunk in shallow water, easily accessible for scuba divers. Mel was always on the lookout for shipwrecks while diving; he liked to explore them and sometimes salvaged items like a ship’s propeller or a cannon. The idea of sunken treasure began to fascinate him, and the more time he spent diving on wrecks, the more he believed he could become a treasure hunter, just like he dreamed about as a boy reading books about pirates.

In 1964, Mel Fisher surprised everyone when he abruptly sold all of his business interests in California and moved the family to Southern Florida. The Fisher family was making a go of being professional treasure hunters. Mel’s new home base was Vero Beach, right in the middle of Florida’s Treasure Coast. This area is called the Treasure Coast because in 1715, an entire fleet of Spanish galleons carrying treasure back to Europe was wrecked in a hurricane, sending their valuable cargo to the bottom. Many salvage expeditions have been undertaken over the years to recover portions of the treasure, and the Fishers decided to make another attempt.

The modern treasure hunter’s approach is much more methodical and, well, pretty boring compared to the exciting adventures depicted in fictional tales. There are no treasure maps, no puzzles or clues to solve, and even if you know exactly where the shipwreck is, that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s where the treasure is, since centuries of ocean currents can drag things far away. There are many steps involved, but basically, Fisher’s ship would tow a floating magnetic meter behind it, searching for magnetic anomalies on the ocean floor. A hit would indicate that some kind of ferrous metal was down there, like iron, which could indicate a shipwreck. Scuba divers would investigate the site to see if they could figure out what it was using a device Fisher invented called a mailbox, which forced clear water from the surface down onto the ocean floor, blowing away the sand and debris. The divers would inspect the ocean floor, usually by sweeping their hands back and forth through the murky sand, searching for objects. If the object was buried in the sand, they would have to dig to locate it. After all that time-consuming work, the odds were that whatever they found wasn’t what they were looking for. Fisher’s team found wrecks of airplanes and dummy practice bombs dropped during training by World War II-era pilots, as well as a lot of trash and scrap metal illegally dumped into the ocean. It might be a shipwreck, but from the wrong era—Civil War vintage or early 1900s instead of an 18th-century sailing ship.

Fisher spent almost an entire year at sea looking for treasure and finding nothing of value at all. Just when he was about to quit, one of his mailboxes uncovered a seabed completely covered in gold coins. Unlike other metals, when submerged for extended periods, gold doesn’t oxidize or lose its luster. The Spanish gold was just as shiny as it had been in 1715 when it first entered the water. Mel Fisher was now firmly in the treasure hunting business.

In 1969, after five years of working the Treasure Coast, Mel and his family took a vacation down to Key West, which back in those days was a small town full of people who wanted to be beach bums, as opposed to the tourist destination it is today. During a party attended by other professional hunters, Fisher first heard about the richest prize yet to be plucked from the sea—the Nuestra Señora de Atocha. Way back in 1622, the Atocha was a Spanish galleon that left Havana laden with a mind-boggling $400 million worth of gold, silver, and gemstones. There was so much treasure on board that it took two months to catalog and store it on the ship. Then, only two days after setting sail, disaster struck. The fleet sailed into a hurricane, and the Atocha, along with seven other ships, was lost. Spanish authorities made efforts to salvage what they could find from the wrecked ships, but no trace of the Atocha had been found in the 350 years since it sank. The Atocha was a treasure hunter’s dream; anyone who could find it would not only be rich but famous as well. Mel Fisher decided to try and find it. Optimistically, he thought it would take six weeks to locate it using his modern methods. It ended up taking 16 years.

Fisher’s company, Treasure Salvors, Inc., sold their rights to the Treasure Coast wrecks and moved their operations to Key West, looking for the Atocha as well as anything else they could find in the area. Once again, it was monotonous, time-consuming, back-breaking work with little to nothing to show for it. Still, Fisher was eternally optimistic that he would succeed. His catchphrase, said every day before his team started work, was “Today’s the day.”

The first breakthrough came in 1971 when one of Fisher’s friends, an expert in document analysis, discovered that the location the Spanish government believed the Atocha sank was totally different from where Fisher thought it was. They had been looking in the wrong place. Once they corrected their course, they started finding bits and pieces of treasure—silver bars, artifacts, pieces of pottery, and a cannon. Fisher believed they were from the ship, but they hadn’t yet found what he called the “big pile”—the main body of wreckage where most of the lost treasure was located.

Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, they continued to search, investing millions of dollars into the effort. Wreck diving is a dangerous business; there are all sorts of risks inherent to scuba diving, like the failure of your gear, which could cause you to drown, or surfacing too quickly to avoid drowning, which puts you at risk of decompression sickness—a dangerous buildup of nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream, known as “the bends.” There are also countless sea creatures that could harm you—sharks, barracuda, stingrays, jellyfish, and Portuguese man o’ war. But the biggest threat to the operation came from the ever-changing whims of Mother Nature. More than once, their boat was struck by lightning, shorting out all of their electrical systems. The worst danger came from tropical storms, like the hurricane that sank the Atocha in the first place.

After skirting these hazards for years, it finally caught up to the Fisher family in 1975. One of their boats capsized and sank while the crew on board slept. Three people, including Mel’s 21-year-old son Dirk and Dirk’s wife Angel, drowned.

Mel Fisher had lived in Key West for 16 years. In that time, he had become one of the town’s most celebrated citizens. He had many friends, and his treasure hunting museum was one of the island’s top tourist spots. He had been looking for the main wreckage of the Atocha ever since it sank, and though he had found and salvaged other treasures, including $20 million worth of gold from the Atocha’s sister ship, the Santa Margarita, he hadn’t yet struck the mother lode.

Then, on July 20th, his son Kane told Mel over the radio, “Put the charts away, Dad. We found it.” Mel rushed out to the scene and beheld the astonishing sight of his team stacking hundreds of 75-pound silver bars on the deck of their boat—so many that they started to worry about the weight sinking the ship. Fifty-five feet down on the seabed, there were more gold bars, jewelry, coins, and stacks of silver pieces of eight that had fused together while the wooden chest they were stored in had rotted away. Clusters of emeralds and pearls kept appearing. They even found a solid gold implement shaped like a syringe that was used to administer gunpowder and alcohol enemas—a popular 17th-century health cure.

It was the culmination of an entire life’s work—a treasure valued between $400 and $500 million. One can only imagine how he felt. Many people ventured out to the wreck site to congratulate him, including celebrated musician and Key West native Jimmy Buffett, who brought his guitar and sang a couple of songs while the crew celebrated. A week later, Mel was invited to appear on Johnny Carson’s late-night show. The veteran host was fascinated by the treasure Fisher brought with him, and a week later, he invited Carson out to the wreck site to dive down and get some treasure for himself.

Mel used the platform provided by Carson’s show to talk about an issue he had been dealing with for over a decade—what he called piracy. Ever since traces of the Atocha had been found in 1972, the Florida state government had attempted to claim the treasure, stating that according to Florida law, any and all shipwrecks located within Florida waters are the property of the government. They forced Treasure Salvors into a contract that gave the government 25% of the treasure, threatening Fisher with arrest and confiscation if he didn’t agree.

Three years later, after oil companies filed a lawsuit, the Supreme Court fixed the coastal boundary of Florida further landward than before, which placed the wreck in international waters. The Fishers filed a lawsuit of their own, claiming the treasure seizure had been illegal since it was never Florida’s to begin with. After a lengthy court case that ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1982, the judges ruled in Mel’s favor—the Atocha was his, and all the sea treasure needed to be returned to him.

Even so, Fisher claimed that he faced continued harassment and red tape from Florida officials, complaining about government interference in what he believed was a free and private enterprise. Answering concerns about the historical value of the shipwrecks, Fisher argued that his company was doing a better job of preserving the artifacts than the government was, leaving them down in the ocean to rot.

The last decade of his life was a good one for Mel Fisher. He succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations, becoming one of the world’s most famous treasure hunters. Contrary to popular belief, however, he didn’t keep the entire vast fortune gained from the wreck of the Atocha and retire to the Caribbean with it. A lot of treasure was distributed to his investors and friends who had given him money to fund his treasure hunting expeditions at times when it seemed like he had very little chance of finding anything. Several new millionaires were minted that way. More treasure ended up in public museums and at universities, including his own treasure museum in Key West, where he would also sell coins and jewels to tourists, sending middle-class suburbanites home with bits of treasure as souvenirs.

His treasure hunting expeditions continued, branching out from the Keys to sites all over the world, as Treasure Salvors was now seen as one of the premier maritime salvage companies in the industry. He continued to have run-ins with government officials, though; his company was fined more than half a million dollars in 1997 for destroying parts of the Key West National Maritime Sanctuary while looking for sunken treasure. Five years earlier, Florida officials indicted one of his business associates for selling counterfeit coins, though Fisher himself wasn’t implicated in any wrongdoing. He remained immensely popular in Key West, and given his troubles with the government, it seemed fitting that he was elected King of the Conch Republic four times—a tongue-in-cheek effort by locals to secede from the United States and form their own nation. Florida’s ceremonial title came with a crown and scepter, which he proudly added to his treasure horde.

On December 19, 1998, Mel Fisher died at the age of 76 following a long battle with cancer. His remains were cremated and scattered at sea, primarily over the site of the Atocha wreck, but a small portion was encased in resin and left at the site of the most famous shipwreck of all time—the Titanic—during a subsequent expedition by one of his friends.

Today, the Fisher family continues to hunt for sunken treasure at the Atocha site and at other wrecks around the world, as well as operating two stores to sell treasure to the public in Key West and on the Florida mainland. Treasure hunting as an occupation has only gotten more controversial over the last 25 years, with many arguing it is tantamount to the tomb robbing committed by European treasure seekers in Egypt and other places during the 19th century. A particular concern are operations conducted by large American or European companies in third-world countries, where treasure hunters exploit local regulations to profit off the cultural treasures of native peoples.

One famous recent case involved the salvage company Odyssey Marine Exploration, which in 2007 brought up almost 15 tons of gold and silver coins and other treasures from the wreck of a Spanish frigate destroyed off the coast of Portugal in 1804. Despite attempting to keep it a secret, the Spanish government found out and began legal action against what it called illegal looting. After a protracted court battle, Odyssey Marine was ordered to return the treasure to the Spanish government in 2012, and it has since gone on display in a museum. UNESCO has started to advocate for the preservation of underwater wrecks as having cultural and historic value. Most treasure hunting expeditions are now legally required to employ marine archaeologists who help investigate the wrecks and make judgments on whether it is possible to safely remove artifacts without damaging the remainder or whether it might be better to leave the wreckage undisturbed.

This is part of a wider debate about antiquities from all over the world—who they belong to and whether they should be treated as commodities that can be bought and sold by private individuals. This likely would have angered Mel Fisher, who lived by the motto “Finders Keepers.” After all, he and his team put in the effort to find the treasure in the first place, spending the money and time to search the ocean floor, risking their lives in some instances. So why shouldn’t they get to