“Dry Tortugas wreck,” sunk ca. 1622 off the Dry Tortugas, west of Key West, Florida

Presumably a sister-ship to the Atocha and Santa Margarita of the 1622 Fleet (above), discovered in 1989 and reworked in 1991 by Seahawk Deep Ocean Technology, among whose finds were numerous gold bars (but no silver bars) and about 1,200 heavily eroded silver cobs (similar in composition to the Atocha finds), all picked from the ocean floor by a robot. Cannons and other artifacts expected on a typical galleon, however, were suspiciously absent. The bulk of the treasure was eventually sold to a store/museum in Key West that later went bankrupt. Years later, by order of a bankruptcy court, it all turned up at auction, where nearly all of the treasure was re-purchased by some of the former principals of Seahawk for a new museum.

 

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