Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Museum
The name Mel Fisher ring any bells? In 1985, after 16 years of trying, a team led by this chicken-farmer-turned-dive-operator-turned-treasure hunter bagged one of the biggest prizes in treasure-hunting history: the wreck of the Spanish galleon Our Lady of Atocha, which sank off the Keys in a 1622 hurricane. Fisher’s crew brought up a batch of the boodle that went down with the ship—nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of silver and gold bars, coins, jewels, and artifacts. Though he died in 1998, the for-profit salvage operation continues. An interesting part of this museum, established in 1992 in a historic firehouse, is a shop; here you’ll find replicas, but can also drop anywhere from a few hundred bucks to six figures on various items of treasure from the Atocha. Displays do a nice job of telling the story of both ship and salvage operation, including a good representative cross-section of the loot and historic artifacts. On its second floor, the museum—the only fully accredited museum in the Florida Keys—covers a more sober story: that of a 1700 English merchant slave ship, the only tangible evidence of the transatlantic slave trade. A gripping exhibition telling the story of more than 1,400 African slaves captured in Cuban waters and brought to Key West for sanctuary. The museum is also a nationally recognized research and archaeology institution, so if you geek out for those things, you can do a lab tour ($30).
The name Mel Fisher ring any bells? In 1985, after 16 years of trying, a team led by this chicken-farmer-turned-dive-operator-turned-treasure hunter bagged one of the biggest prizes in treasure-hunting history: the wreck of the Spanish galleon Our Lady of Atocha, which sank off the Keys in a 1622 hurricane. Fisher’s crew brought up a batch of the boodle that went down with the ship—nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of silver and gold bars, coins, jewels, and artifacts. Though he died in 1998, the for-profit salvage operation continues. An interesting part of this museum, established in 1992 in a historic firehouse, is a shop; here you’ll find replicas, but can also drop anywhere from a few hundred bucks to six figures on various items of treasure from the Atocha. Displays do a nice job of telling the story of both ship and salvage operation, including a good representative cross-section of the loot and historic artifacts. On its second floor, the museum—the only fully accredited museum in the Florida Keys—covers a more sober story: that of a 1700 English merchant slave ship, the only tangible evidence of the transatlantic slave trade. A gripping exhibition telling the story of more than 1,400 African slaves captured in Cuban waters and brought to Key West for sanctuary. The museum is also a nationally recognized research and archaeology institution, so if you geek out for those things, you can do a lab tour ($30).
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