![]() A long gold chain, a massive emerald, a gold chalice of unbelievable loveliness and delicacy, a reliquary pendant that had once held a devotional painting, long worn away by the sea, except for the gilt halo-all this and more went to a young man who pushed his sunglasses back on his head and bid hundreds of thousands while also talking on a cell phone. ![]() “Now you need to be at four thousand five hundred dollars,” the auctioneer gently advised a faltering bidder, who blinked and then kept silent. This evening, a piece of eight could be got for two hundred and fifty dollars, or for forty-two hundred and fifty dollars, or for something in between. In the adjoining room, Joanne Grant, an auctioneer with dark hair, dark-rimmed glasses, and bright-red lipstick, began the auction with the silver coins, including the “pieces of eight.” The amateur remembered a long-ago time when “pieces of eight” had been for him a term of untrammelled romance. People disappear, but gold shines forever.’ ” Then those people will be gone, too, but the treasures will remain. In the corner, wearing a lavalier microphone, Taffi Fisher-Abt, Mel Fisher’s daughter, said to a camera-toting interviewer, “My father always told me, ‘These treasures used to belong to somebody, and we are their custodians now, and someday they’ll belong to someone else. Beside them, like a best friend, stood a tall security guard. In a second-floor room with maps and watercolors on the walls, the treasures were radiating light from tall, shelved display cases. On a hot evening in August, 2015, more than a hundred and twenty-five items from the cargo of the Atocha and other Mel Fisher finds were put up for auction by Guernsey’s Auction House at a gallery on Madison Avenue-a “don’t miss” event, from the amateur’s point of view. The Atocha went down off the Marquesas in a hurricane on September 6, 1622. No treasure ship as rich had ever been found. In 1985, after sixteen and a half years of searching, Fisher’s crew found the wreck of the Spanish treasure galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha, and the discovery rocked Key West to its white coral foundations. In that island city of long shots, no shot as long as Fisher’s ever came in so spectacularly. Mel Fisher was the greatest treasure hunter of all time. Often he visited Mel Fisher’s Treasure Salvors museum, in Key West, when the amateur’s grandmother lived nearby. The sparkle of clear water on white sand in the Florida Keys and somewhere, remote and hidden within that sparkle, an even more thrilling sparkle: gold! As a boy, this amateur treasure hunter (unsuccessful, now retired) used to dream about the lost treasures of the Keys.
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