The Most Spectacular Shipwreck Treasures Ever Found

The lure of sunken treasure has been part of human nature for as long as ships have plied the seas. Untold numbers of merchant ships have sunk over the millennia while sailing along their trade routes, taking many of their unfortunate crew with them. And of course, there have been innumerable tragedies at sea on passenger vessels, in which thousands have lost their lives.

But the ships that went down with gold, silver, and precious gems have always held an undeniable fascination for many. Hundreds of these sank while carrying great riches as they were on their way to market. After Spain began its almost incalculable exploitation of the New World during the first centuries of colonization, entire treasure fleets carried untold wealth across the Atlantic from the 1500s through the 1700s. Spanish experts recently estimated that 681 ships were lost to the depths over these centuries, as noted in the Guardian. 

While the vast majority of ships known to have carried such loot have still not been located or explored, keeping their secret treasures with them in the deep, some of these vessels have now been discovered, with their glittering hoards brought up from the depths of the oceans. Here are the most spectacular shipwreck treasures ever found.

Known as "The Black Swan Project," the spectacular discovery of the Nuestra Senora de Mercedes, a warship that was sunk by the British off Portugal in 1804 with a treasure hoard of $500 million, has been the subject of one of the greatest legal wrangles in wreck diving history, as related by History. The salvage company that finally located the shipwreck not only fought Spain — and lost — over the legal ownership of the loot it uncovered, but it also had to pay Spain $1 million for "bad faith and abusive litigation," as reported in the Tampa Bay Times. 

Ships from Odyssey Marine Explorations, a company from Tampa, recovered 17 tons of gold and silver in 2007. The U.S. federal court in Atlanta ruled that Spain was the legal owner of the loot, a decision that was held up by the U.S. Supreme Court; History relates that the treasure was finally returned to Spain in 2012, and coins from the hoard are now displayed throughout museums in Spain. 

The RMS Republic, a 581-foot ocean liner from the White Star Line — like the Titanic, which was to set sail and sink just three years later — sank off Nantucket, Rhode Island as the result of a collision in 1909. And down with her went a reputed cargo of 150,000 American Eagle gold coins – which experts believe would be worth $1 billion today, according to History.  

After raising $2.5 million to finance the expedition and finding the wreck in 1981– but exploring the wrong section of it back in 1987 — treasure diver Martin Bayerle plans to dive on it yet again with his son in an effort to finally locate the supposed hoard, the Vineyard Gazette states. The only items Bayerle recovered during the initial search were a toilet, wine bottles, and some crockery, the Gazette notes.    

But, as of 2016, Beyerle remained focused on retrieving what he believes is the treasure that lies with the wreck of the RMS Republic; the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts awarded his company, called the Martha's Vineyard Scuba Headquarters, or "MAVIS," exclusive salvage rights to the shipwreck in 2005, making him the sole owner of the RMS Republic and its massive treasure — if he can retrieve it.

The Whydah Gally had originally served in the infamous Triangular Trade, involving the transportation of enslaved people, molasses, and rum, before being captured by the pirate known as "Black Sam Bellamy" off Bermuda in 1717, according to the Whydah Pirate Museum, which recalls that the brigand and his 200-man pirate crew used the vessel as a base from which they raided scores of other ships all along the East Coast of the Americas, including those from England, Spain, the Netherlands, and France. 

Driven aground off Cape Cod during a nor-easter on April 26, 1717, the wreck of the Whydah still lies barely 2,000 feet from the shoreline; the unstable sand surrounding it keeps most of its secret hoard intact while further exploration and research are ongoing. The ship's loot has been partially salvaged thanks to Barry Clifford, who discovered the wreck in 1984. The Whydah is the only fully-authenticated shipwreck ever discovered from the "Golden Age of Piracy," (1650-1726).  As the Cape Cod Times relates, museum curator Chris Macort says each pirate had his own chest which stored his portion of the booty; he believes there may be 4.5 tons of looted treasure aboard the wreck of the Whydah, with much of it encased in concretions that have accumulated over the past 300 years. Macort and his team have uncovered many gold coins — and incredibly, even pirates' skeletons and clothing — from the ship.  

When she sank in 1942, the HMS Edinburgh had aboard her a cargo of 465 gold bars that would be worth a staggering $174,243,940 today. Meant to have reimbursed the United States for thousands of tons of war materiel as the Soviet Union fought off invading German troops, according to Dr. Michelle Blagg, a historian writing for London-based precious metals authority LBMA, the gold bars from the USSR never reached their destination after the U.S.-bound ship was hit by a torpedo from a German U-boat in the Arctic Ocean.

Despite being declared a war grave by the British government in 1957, the ship's riches were salvaged by Keith Jessop, who led two-man teams down in a pressurized Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) to remove the gold bars in May of 1981, as he related his book "Goldfinder." The Edinburgh was called "The Salvage of the Century" after the men brought up 459 of the bars from the bottom of the Barents Sea, where the ship had lain at a depth of 800 feet, Blagg notes.

According to "Goldfinder," Jessop and his team returned 159 gold ingots, equivalent to £40 million, to Russian officials on behalf of the British government on October 8, 1981. The rest of the hoard still lies under the Arctic. 

Loaded with an estimated $400,000 in gold and silver coins, worth a king's ransom today, the Republic went down during a hurricane southeast of Savannah, Georgia, in October of 1865, National Geographic relates. Discovered only in 2003, the wreck, lying in 1,700 feet of water, contains silver that is still in mint condition, a great rarity in shipwrecks, according to Odyssey Marine Exploration's excavations director Greg Stemm in an interview with National Geographic News. The precious cargo was meant to help rebuild the economy of the Deep South after the use of Confederate money was outlawed after the War. "The first coin appeared within an hour of the first excavation," Stem told the Geographic. "I would like to think that we were that good, but there is always an element of luck in this type of endeavor."

More than 51,000 gold and silver coins were taken up from the wreck of the SS Republic, Odyssey states on its virtual museum site, along with many thousands of artifacts representing the decorative arts in the mid-1800s, including Limoges porcelain and exquisite glass lamps. And experts believe there could still be untold riches in the wreck of the Republic, whose hoard would be valued between $120 — $180 million today, according to NBC News. 

The legendary wreck diver Mel Fisher's discovery of a hoard of gold and other treasure worth $400 million on July 20, 1985 — including 24 tons of silver bullion and 125 gold bars — is one of the most spectacular in the history of finding sunken treasure, according to Fisher's website. One of 27 ships that were part of a convoy laden with gold, silver, and emeralds from Central and South America, the Nuestra Senora de Atocha sank during a hurricane in the Summer of 1622, off what is now Key West, the Florida Museum notes. Part of the seemingly never-ending conveyor belt of ships that transported the staggering mineral wealth of the Americas back to Spain in those centuries, the Atocha stands alone as the vessel with the richest cargo that has been partially recovered, according to Maritime Executive, which states that 40 tons of gold and silver and 70 pounds of Colombian emeralds were in her hold.

A total of 380 sailors died in the hurricane that brought down the Atocha, and Fisher tragically lost his own son, a diver, during the discovery of the wreck, but in the end, they recovered the greatest hoard in history — thus far. Fisher's Key West museum now carries out state-of-the-art conservation work on the treasures that his team continues to bring up from the site as of 2022.