Discoveries Underwater

Treasure is Trouble (1x1)

Air date: Mar 06, 1988

Treasure Is Trouble Narrated by Tim Pigott-Smith In 1622 a Spanish galleon, the Nuestra Senora de Atocha, sank in a hurricane off the coast of Florida. She was carrying a cargo worth an estimated 400 million dollars. The wreck was found 350 years later by a treasure hunter and former chicken farmer, Mel Fisher , whose dedicated quest to find the Atocha is now legendary. For years the main treasure eluded him but in 1985 he at last discovered the so-called 'motherlode'. The adventure stories of the search for the Atocha and of the salvage of a British East Indiaman sunk on the Goodwin Sands are told in tonight's film. But should historic shipwrecks provide an excavation free-for-all for private profit or should they be preserved by the state for posterity?