After that time, she went back to her normal duties on the north atlantic. In 1985 she became the most decorated ship in the country. , they decided after 52 years of service, they retired her in 1988. The unique thing is, since it was one of the last ships of seven, most of the stuff was left on. Guys its cigarette packs are still there guys cigarette packs are there. It is a time capsule from the time. Announcer the last stop on todays cspan cities tour, we visit the salvage wreckage of a ship that sank off the coast of key west in 1622. It was carrying silver from peru, gold from columbia, and pearls from venezuela. We are in the Maritime Museum in key west lord up. Key west, florida. Our museum was founded in 1982 by mr. Mel fisher. He was the worlds greatest treasure hunter and he went out to look for sunken spanish galleons around here and is quite famous for having wrecks of the Santa Margarita and a spanish galleons that wrecked in 1622 about 25 miles west of key west. Back in the colonial time, spain had set up a worldwide trade network, and a lot of it sailed right past here following the gulfstream back to spain. What they did was the spanish had colonies in south america, Central America and they were , doing a lot of mining. They were generating a lot of precious metals, especially silver from these mines. A whole network was set up of trade fleet sailing from spain to the new world, bringing european goods to the colonists in the americas. But then on the return voyage, carrying lots of silver back to spain. In 1622, one of the treasure which had gone to south america, in this case, went to colombia and panama. This fleet took europeans to the colonies and it picked up people who wanted to go back to spain and picked up cargoes primarily of silver coins and ingots that had come up from south america. They went to havana, and met with some other ships and organized a convoy to return to spain. In early september, 1622, these ships left havana. They knew it was Hurricane Season when they left, but they had to get this treasure back to spain. It was imperative it be delivered as quickly as possible. And one day out from havana, a hurricane struck. When that happened, there were 28 ships in the fleet. By the end of it, seven ships were sunk. The other fleet was scattered. Some of them made it back to havana, but with the seven ships that sank, there was a massive loss of life and a massive loss of treasure. It was a real blow to spain and her economy. The loss of the treasure galleon from 1622 was never really forgotten. The spanish searched for many years for these ships. The stories persisted in various documents through time. In the 1960s, a man named mel fisher who was working on the east coast of florida, looking for a shipwreck that had sunk in 1750, he heard about this rack that had gone down somewhere in the florida keys back in 1622. He decided he was going to look for it. His whole family was involved in this venture, his wife and children, and he had a crew as well. They all moved down here to the florida keys. First they began the search in the upper keys because they thought the historic documents pointed to it being there. But after a year or two of work, they found it was actually somewhere in the lower keys, so they moved their operations to key west and began a search that is almost unbelievable. It took 16 years of searching. They sacrificed so much. It was a huge expense. They had legal battles the entire way. Mel and his wife lost their oldest son and daughterinlaw, two divers who were killed during the search. It was a very, very hard fought search. But at the end, and july of 1985, the cargo hold was found. With that came 30 tons of silver bars, over 100,000 silver coins, and one of the most brilliant peeks into what life was like on board a spanish treasure ship in the early 17th century. One of the great threats to spanish galleons at the time these ships sailed was piracy. Everybody wanted to capture a spanish treasure galleon because of you did, you would be set for life. Lleons had ships sailing with them that were heavily armed. We see here a bronze cannon from the center margarita. This is a massive. It weighs over two tons. It was designed to protect the ship. There would have been 20 of these on each ship. Very well armed. Both ships carried soldiers. One had almost 70 soldiers on board. We can see some of the muskets that they carried, the shots that they fired from his muskets. It was virtually impossible to take one of these ships, they were so heavily defended. We know of a couple of instances through almost 250 years where leons were captured but otherwise, it just did not happen. Here, we have some remarkable examples of the preservation that can be found on these shipwrecks. Pe seedse great gra and hazelnut shells. We have the anchors and the canons and these big metal pieces, but these Little Details are also preserved and if we just look for them while we are working underwater and we are able to recover them, this tells us a lot about what people were eating on board the ship at that time. We see next to this seeds, a rat bone. So they had to share their food, pretty obviously, with the vermin. We have a fish spear, we have cow bones, pig bones, sheep bones. Interestingly, the jaw from the cal tells us there was a live animal on board. There were no refrigerators back then, so if you wanted fresh meat in the middle of the ocean, the only way you got it was to take a live animal with you, and when you wanted to eat it you , butchered it at sea. Olive jarsll of and they are made of an earthenware clay. A very basic design and material. These there were literally hundreds of these on board the ship. Unfortunately, most of them broke, but we do have some intact examples. These were used to carry wine, to carry oil, to carry perhaps foodstuff. But they are a hallmark of a Spanish Colonial ship. When you see a lot of these you know its probably from a spanish ship. We are always looking for Little Things on the seafloor, here we were able to find the needle in the haystack. These are literally needles and bronze straight pins from the shipwrecks. It is remarkable they are there to sew clothes and make those repairs. It was an essential. These steel needles were found as a clump, all fused together in a mass. Mp had to be clu taken apart in the laboratory so each needle was separated from the others and then conserved and stabilized. We are in the treasure gallery of the museum. This is where we display and explain a lot of the rich things from the wreck, the jewelry the , bullion. Theres a really wide variety of these things found on the galleon. In this case, we are looking at a gold and emerald cross and a matching golden emerald ring. These pieces were found in the early 1980s. They were both in this little pewter box. We really dont know anything about them other than they were there. We dont know the story. Obviously somebody very wealthy carrying these things. We do see the initials on top of the canister abl. Matt is a clue, but it does not really help because there was nobody abl on board the ship. So that is more detective work to come on these things. And some of the stories just keep going on. We have never quite figured them out. What we have in this case are a variety of pieces of jewelry, but most spectacularly in the center, we see a belt. This was a gold, perl, diamond arl, diamond and ruby belt. Each link with a separate these all joined together. These went around the waist of a very wealthy woman. We do have some portraits from the time that show virtually these same pieces being worn by some of the highest spanish nobility. Here, we see princess katarina, the daughter of king philip the second, wearing the same sort of thing around her waist and that. Neck. We are looking at a golden chalice here. This is a solid gold cup. This is one of the more interesting pieces drum the ship from the ship wreck. This is what we call a poison cup. This gold chalice has a mount on the inside and that was designed to hold one of these stones. Bizorstones are called stones. These are gallstones from a llama board goat or a deer or some sort of animal like that. The belief was at the time, if you mounted one of these stones in your cup and poured your wine into it, and someone was out to get you, and had poisoned your wine, the stone would absorb the poison and render the wine safe , to drink. So this was sort of an antidote to the poison and whats crazy about it is when you start looking at the structure of the stones, they are mostly hair and calcium. It actually worked against some arsenic compounds, so whoever discovered that was a brave person to try it out. Apparently, it did work to some degree. This is the central feature of the ship. Here, we see a group of silver ingots recovered from the rack. From the wreck. There were over 1000 of these loaded on board, each one averaging around 75 pounds. A very heavy cargo stowed in the lost part of the ship, used as ballast. What is really wonderful about these silver ingots is that they are so richly marked. We see on the surface the shippers marks. We have receivers mark, a person who was to pick it up in spain when it arrived. A serial number, telling us when it was made. We have karat marks, dates, assayers mark, and this corresponds to a written manifest, so we know who exactly to. E marks correspond we know who are shipping, why, and who was to pick it up. It was tremendous history about the economics of the time. The artifacts that we have from s, we have a little bit of everything that was on these ships, from amazing treasures that we know were on there, but also the dishes, the medical gear, weaponry, the tools, all these other things that were required to keep a community functioning in the middle of the ocean