Treasure

TREASURE is the harrowing story of Mel Fisher's quest for the 600-ton galleon Nuestra Sehora de Atocha, vice-flagship of King Philip IV of Spain, which sank off Key West in 1622, taking with it to the bottom 250,000 silver coins, 901-plus silver ingots, 161 pieces of gold bullion, emeralds and other jewels--47 tons of treasure in all, worth $600 million today, Fisher claimed. If he could find it. Trusting to incredible persistence, raw courage and luck, Fisher and his divers searched the reefs and seas for clues. They fought off storms and sharks. Salvage vessels sank under them. Four crewmen were killed. Years were spent making futile dives and arranging desperate deals for financial backing; divers never knew when or if they would be paid--whether they would live to see the end of the adventure at all. Mel Fisher, the incredible optimist who never gave up, cheered his crew each morning with his slogan, "Today's the day!" Revised and updated: the complete story.

"Adventure in the grand tradition...wonderful" ----The New York Times
"An ever-buoyant story of modern treasure-hunting" ---Publishers Weekly
"Stirring escapist reading . . ." --Newsday
"Daley is an exceptional writer . . . TREASURE can be placed beside The Treasure of the Sierra Madre . . . masterful . . . journalism at its best." --Baltimore Sun

I published the original version of TREASURE in hardcover in 1977, and in paperback the following year. It was a tremendously exciting story up to that point, though not yet complete. It had no ending. I published it anyway, partly because I had lost faith that there would ever be a better ending than I had already, and partly because, after so many months of living with the story and the divers, tossed about on the open sea, sleeping on the salvage boats or on one of the uninhabited islands in the Marquesas group, I had to do something with the material. I was a professional writer. I had to make a living. Ten years passed, and suddenly the ending was there. I went back down to Key West, talked to my old friends, and many others, and I wrote 100 additional pages, the complete story at last. This is the version that was published by Pocket Books in paperback in 1987, and on Kindle now.