It was just a pair of scissors, tiny and worn. It looked like my old beat-up nail scissors, sitting incongruously in a display case in the middle of a treasure exhibit. It was far too humble an object to change someone’s life — yet it changed mine in ways that still resonate more than four decades later.
The year was 1982 and the exhibit was at Fort East Martello, Key West’s Civil War-era fortress turned museum. It showcased the gold and silver bars, coins, treasures and historic artifacts that Mel Fisher and his crew had salvaged during their search for the Spanish galleons Nuestra Señora de Atocha and Santa Margarita, shipwrecked in 1622 near the Marquesas Keys.
We all knew Fisher, like we knew the other dreamers and adventurers who whiled away their evenings at bars like the Two Friends, Chart Room, Full Moon Saloon, Captain Tony’s and the Bull. He drank rum and Coke, spun tales of priceless treasure, and sometimes stirred his drinks with a small gold bar recovered during the shipwreck search.
Mel was simply part of our landscape. We never imagined he would become world-famous for finding the motherlode of the Atocha — at that time, the greatest discovery of Spanish colonial sunken treasure in the world.
Yet in 1982, long before the motherlode, something about that pair of scissors caught at my heart and wouldn’t let go. I stood in front of the display case for at least five minutes, staring at the tiny implement lying next to the coral-and-sand encrustation that had grown around it during its 350 years on the ocean floor.
The gold and silver in the exhibit were fantastic, glittering and exotic. But to me, a waitress who made $50 in tips on a good night, it seemed oddly unreal. The tiny pair of scissors, though, was so much like mine that I felt an elemental kinship with its unknown owner — the female passenger who used it to clip her fingernails or sewing threads, who uttered terrified prayers as the galleons sank in a ferocious hurricane, whose bones still lay in the lonely waters some 40 miles off Key West.
Three years after the exhibit, on July 20, 1985, Andy Matroci and Greg Wareham dove down from the search boat Dauntless to investigate a promising area of the ocean floor, and discovered the long-sought motherlode of the Atocha.
Almost immediately, the world’s media descended on Key West to cover the find that was dubbed “the shipwreck of the century.” After a grueling 16-year search, Mel became a national hero — the embodiment of the American dream.
By then I was writing for several magazines and, thanks to a dear friend, was given full access to interview the archaeologists who assembled to help excavate the fabled shipwreck.
That’s how I wound up, a few weeks after the discovery, on one of the search boats floating above the motherlode. Clutching my trusty tape recorder, I attempted to conduct coherent interviews while absorbing the jubilation and frenetic activity around me.
Late-night television host Johnny Carson and his film crew were on the boat that day too, shooting a segment about Johnny diving on the motherlode and adding to the general chaos.
That afternoon, still out at sea, I perched on the step leading to the wheelhouse to jot down some impressions of the day. My mind flashed back to the pair of scissors, the tiny reminder of a woman who died when the galleons sank. Her bones might be lost, but her story was part of the Atocha saga now — a saga that scores of journalists, including me, were unconditionally committed to chronicle.
In some mysterious way, I’d like to think she knew.
