Thousands of pearls found in recovered treasure just off Key West!

This kind of stuff always makes me long for adventure. I am a big fan of adventure, a huge Atocha fanatic and obviously a Key West junkie. To hear that the Santa Margarita has given up some more of it's treasure just makes me tingle! If I was a younger man I'm sure I would join the expedition, instead I have resigned to read about it and listen endlessly to tales of finding buried treasure, lost seemingly forever on the Ocean's floor.

I just love talking to my friends in Key West that actually have dove the wreck of the Atocha. I could listen for days!  In fact when I was married in Key West, my Wife gave me a necklace with an 8 Reale coin on it, surrounded in a gold mount with 2 dolphins and an emerald on it. My friend Sherry (one of the original divers on the Atocha wreck, told me that it was considered a very rare emerald. She said" Emeralds are one of the hardest stones to uncover originally, mining them is quite difficult. This one is even more rare as it has been found twice!"

I hope the Salvors continue to find more of the lost secrets and treasures off the Santa Margarita.

Following is from The Associated Press

KEY WEST — Shipwreck salvors discovered thousands of pearls Friday after opening a small, lead box they said they found while searching for the wreckage of the 17th-century Spanish galleon Santa Margarita.

Divers from Blue Water Ventures of Key West said they found the sealed lead box, measuring 3.5 inches by 5.5 inches, along with a gold bar, eight gold chains and hundreds of other artifacts earlier this week. They were apparently buried beneath the ocean floor in approximately 18 feet of water about 40 miles west of Key West.

“There are several thousand pearls starting from an eighth of an inch to three-quarters of an inch,” said Duncan Mathewson, marine archaeologist and partner in Blue Water Ventures. “We have no idea exactly how many, because we haven’t counted them yet.”

James Sinclair, archaeologist and conservator consulting with Mel Fisher’s Treasures, Blue Water’s joint-venture partners, said the pearls are very rare because of their antiquity and condition.

“Pearls don’t normally survive in the ocean very well once they’ve lost the protection of the oyster that makes them,” Sinclair said. “In this instance, we had a lead box and the silt that had sifted into the box from the site of the Margarita, which preserved the pearls in a fairly pristine state.”

An initial cache of treasure and artifacts from the Santa Margarita was discovered in 1980 by pioneering shipwreck salvor Mel Fisher. The pearls will be conserved, documented and photographed in an archaeological laboratory above the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum in Key West.

“Until they’re properly cleaned and conserved we don’t know their value, but it would seem they would be worth upwards of a million dollars,” Mathewson said.

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I just love the feeling I get when thinking about finding coins that people used years ago to buy stuff, jewelry and gold that may have been gifts from loved ones. Plates that people ate off of years ago. Cannons used to protect the ship etc. While I love "The Pirates Of The Caribbean" franchise, it just doesn't do the real thing justice!

John Jaworski