AMERICANALMANAC (Alex Tanzer) - Treasure hunters pull 55-pound copper ingot from legendary Atocha wreck, eye 19 more targets
A salvage crew following a faint metal-detector signal through deep mud off the Florida Keys hauled up a 55-pound copper ingot from the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, a 400-year-old Spanish shipwreck that keeps giving up its secrets. Captain Drake Nicholas was working from the deck of the salvage vessel DARE, roughly 35 miles west of […] The post Treasure hunters pull 55-pound copper ingot from legendary Atocha wreck, eye 19 more targets appeared first on American Almanac .
A salvage crew following a faint metal-detector signal through deep mud off the Florida Keys hauled up a 55-pound copper ingot from the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, a 400-year-old Spanish shipwreck that keeps giving up its secrets. Captain Drake Nicholas was working from the deck of the salvage vessel DARE, roughly 35 miles west of Key West, when his detector registered a barely-there hit. He dug. The signal grew louder. What he pulled from the seafloor was not the cannon he expected but a crude block of copper that had sat in the mud since 1622. The ingot is worth an estimated $18,000 to $25,000, according to an August press release from Mel Fisher's Shipwreck Expeditions , the company that has spent decades recovering treasure from the…Open
