In 1621 the Dutch established the Dutch West India Company, a chartered company of Dutch merchants formed partly to develop the country’s claims in the Americas. One of the major successes of the Company was the 1628 attack led by Dutch naval officer Pieter Pietersen Heyn (1577–1629) on a Spanish fleet loaded with silver from the American colonies. The battle took place in the Bay of Matanzas, on the northern coast of Cuba, and the Dutch took a total of 90 tons of gold and silver from the Spanish vessels. The Spanish hold on the New World was further weakened in 1634, when the Dutch took possession of Curaçao, a strategically important island in the southern Caribbean Sea, off the Venezuelan coast. The English were another colonial rival, and in 1655 invaded and captured the Caribbean island of Jamaica from Spain. Two years later, on April 20, 1657, a British fleet under Admiral Robert Blake (1598–1657) attacked and destroyed a fleet of 16 Spanish treasure ships in Santa Cruz Bay, Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. In the late 1650s the French began colonizing the major Caribbean island of Hispaniola and in 1664 established the colony of Saint-Domingue. Despite the occasional losses, however, it was rare for a Treasure Fleet to be destroyed or captured by enemy vessels.
By the 1650s the average number of ships in a Treasure Fleet had fallen to 25, and by 1700 Spain’s power in the New World was lessening. Factors that contributed to this were the crippling cost of incessant wars with colonial rivals England, Holland, and France, and the decline in silver production at colonial mines such as Potosi. At the Battle of Vigo Bay, in Galicia, northwest Spain, in October 1702, the Treasure Fleet was attacked by an Anglo-Dutch fleet commanded by Admiral Sir George Rooke (1650–1709). The Treasure Fleet was destroyed, and the English and Dutch recovered about £14,000 worth of silver, though the majority of the cargo had already been unloaded by the Spanish and taken away before the battle. The Battle of Vigo Bay was fought at the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), a war caused by the disputed succession to the Spanish throne. Another confrontation that was part of this war took place on the small island of Pequeña Barú, (modern Isla El Rosario), 30 miles away from Cartagena. This battle, known as Wager’s Action (after British Admiral Sir Charles Wager; 1666–1743), resulted in the loss of three Spanish ships from the Treasure Fleet. One of the vessels lost was the San José, which sank to the bottom of Caribbean, taking with it 589 crew and passengers, and a treasure of gold and silver estimated to be worth between $150 and $450 million today.
In 1778, King Charles III established the “Decree of Free Trade,” which allowed Spanish colonies to trade directly with each other and with some ports in Spain, such as Barcelona and Alicante. After this decree the monopoly of the treasure ships on colonial trade was practically ended, and the Treasure Fleet convoys sailed the Atlantic no more.
But what remains today, if anything, of these once great galleons that crisscrossed the Atlantic three or four hundred years ago? Perhaps the most dangerous threat to the treasure ship convoys were hurricanes, and one of the worst areas on the convoy’s route for such storms was off the Florida coast. The most famous of the Spanish Treasure Fleets devastated by hurricanes in this area were those of 1622 and 1715.
On September 4, 1622, the Nuestra Señora de Atocha (Our Lady of Atocha) sailed from Havana as part of a Treasure Fleet of 28 galleons that was departing weeks behind schedule. The Atocha carried an incredibly rich cargo, which included 24 tons of silver bullion, 180,00 pesos of silver coins, 582 copper ingots, 125 gold bars and discs, 350 chests of indigo, 525 bales of tobacco, 20 bronze cannon, 1,200 pounds of worked silverware, and 70 pounds of emeralds. On September 6th, the Atocha and seven other ships in the convoy encountered severe hurricanes off the Florida Coast and were driven onto the coral reefs near the Dry Tortugas, a small group of islands located at the end of the Florida Keys. The vessels were smashed to pieces on the rocks and quickly sank to the ocean floor, leaving only five survivors from the Atocha—three sailors and two slaves who had clung on to part of the mizzenmast (the third mast of a three-masted ship), the only part of the ship that remained on the surface of the ocean. The Atocha eventually came to rest about 55 feet below the surface, making a retrieval operation extremely difficult. A further hurricane in October of the same year inflicted more damage, scattering pieces of the wreck all over the ocean floor and making salvage practically impossible.
The loss of the Atocha came at a bad time for Spain. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) was still raging, and the country had borrowed heavily from foreign moneylenders to finance its role in the hostilities. But although the Spanish were able to locate almost half of the contents from another ship from the convoy, the Santa Margarita, they were never able to find any trace of the wreck of the Atocha.
On July 31, 1715, seven days after a long-delayed departure from Havana, the Spanish Tierra Firme Fleet of 11 ships, under the command of Captain-General Don Antonio de Escheverz y Zubiza and including the vessels the Capitana, the Almiranta, and the Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion, ran into a terrific hurricane near present-day Vero Beach, on the east coast of Florida. The colossal force of the hurricane smashed the ships to pieces on the jagged reefs just to the south of Cape Canaveral, sending the entire Treasure Fleet to the bottom of the ocean. Although there were some survivors, about 700 sailors were drowned, and lost with them was the Fleet’s cargo, which included gold and silver bars and coins, jewelry, emeralds, pearls, and Chinese porcelain. The hurricane had scattered the wrecks of the Fleet over several miles, making salvage particularly difficult, though the Spanish did eventually manage to recover about half of the treasure. News of the disaster quickly spread and brought a host of privateers, pirates, and looters to the wreck site. One of these was British privateer Henry Jennings (died 1745), whose fleet attacked and looted the Spanish salvage camp at Palmar de Ayes (near modern Sebastian, Florida), and escaped with 120,000 pieces of eight (Spanish silver coins) and various other valuables including two bronze cannons.
Despite numerous salvage attempts, which continued with varying success until 1718, a large amount of the Treasure Fleet’s cargo still remained at the bottom of the ocean. Gradually the disaster was forgotten, and it was not until well into the 20th century, with the development of the scuba in the 1950s and stories of silver coins from the Treasure Fleet being washed up on Florida beaches, that any attempt was made to hunt for the wrecked flotilla. In the 1950s a building contractor named Kip Wagner became interested in the wreck of the 1715 Fleet after finding coins belonging to the treasure ships on the beaches around the city of Sebastian. Wagner went on to form a treasure hunting and salvage group called the Real Eight Company. Early in 1961 Real Eight Company divers located a number of cannons from the 1715 Fleet and thousands of 1715 mint-marked Spanish coins. In 1963 Wagner was joined by a former chicken farmer named Mel Fisher, who had formed his own treasure hunting company called Treasure Salvors Inc. Together the two companies uncovered huge amount of treasure from the 1715 Fleet, including gold coins, jewelry, silver coins and bullion, Chinese porcelain, and numerous other artifacts. By the end of the 1960s the 1715 treasure ships had earned the two salvage companies more than $20 million, and Kip Wagner became a treasure hunting millionaire.
Locating the 1715 Fleet gave Mel Fisher treasure hunting fever, and he became fascinated at the possibility of locating the fabulous treasure carried by the Nuestra Seora de Atocha, lost off the Florida coast three and a half centuries earlier. His search of the area around Key West began in 1969, but it was not until 1980 that Fisher and Treasure Salvors Inc. recovered the remains of the Santa Margarita, the Atocha’s sister ship. Finally, in July 1985, the wreck of the fabled Atocha, along with its vast cargo of treasure from the New World, was discovered in the Lower Florida Keys and excavations under Duncan Mathewson, Fisher’s chief archaeologist, got underway. But matters had not been so straightforward. Before the discovery of the Atocha, the State of Florida had made its own claims on the wreck site and eight years of litigation followed over the question of ow
nership of the Atocha’s treasure. Eventually, in 1982, after going all the way to the Supreme Court, Fisher agreed to a contract where 25 percent of the treasure went to the state of Florida.1 Today the incredible artifacts from the ships of the 1622 Treasure Fleet, including an exquisite emerald and gold ring discovered from the wreck site as recently as 2011, are displayed as part of Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society Museum’s collection in Key West.
Despite the excitement of the discoveries of the 1622 and 1715 wrecks, treasure hunters such as Mel Fisher and Kip Wagner are disapproved of by professional underwater archaeologists, due to their rudimentary salvage and recording techniques, and their habit of selling off the most valuable items from shipwrecks before they can be properly examined by museums. Although numerous Spanish wrecks have been salvaged in recent decades, and millions of dollars’ worth of treasure uncovered and sold at auction, our knowledge of the size, weight, and design of the galleons of the Treasure Fleet has advanced little. Indeed, some of these wrecks have been practically destroyed by overzealous treasure hunters desperate to get at the wealth contained inside them. Archaeologists stress that the important difference between underwater archaeology and treasure hunting is that in the latter case the ultimate aim is to sell the recovered objects for personal gain, thus adding nothing to our knowledge of the artifacts in question and the culture that made and used them. But perhaps the establishment of museums like Mel Fishers Maritime Museum may show how salvage companies and archaeologists can work together to investigate and record important underwater shipwrecks like those of the Spanish Treasure Fleets, and thus further our understanding of the people that built and sailed these magnificent vessels.
CHAPTER 16
The Amber Room
The legendary Amber Room, an ornately decorated chamber made of amber panels backed with gold leaf, has been described by some as the Eighth Wonder of the World due to its exquisite craftsmanship. Created in the early 18th century by German and Russian artisans, the Amber Room was given as a gift to the Russian czar, Peter the Great, who had it installed in the Catherine Palace of Tsarskoye Selo near St. Petersburg, where it was to remain for the next 200 years. But in 1941, a few months after the Germans invaded Russia, Nazi soldiers looted the palace, packed up the Amber Room in crates, and shipped it to the German city of Königsberg, where it was put on display at the castle. After the city was bombed by the Royal Air Force in 1945, the Amber Room disappeared and entered into the realms of legend and hearsay. Some researchers believe the priceless treasure to have been destroyed in the bombing of Königsberg; others believe that it survives intact in a hidden bunker in the modern Russian city of Kaliningrad (previously the site of Königsberg), or was somehow spirited away to Berlin, Lithuania, or even America. The discovery of one of the panels of the Amber Room by German police in 1997 has persuaded many of the hundreds of treasure hunters on the trail of the great relic that stories of its demise during WWII have been greatly exaggerated, and that the fabulous wealth of the Amber Room (reputed to be around $150 million today) is still waiting to be discovered.
Located in Tsarskoye Selo (“Czar’s Village”), a royal suburban estate now part of the town of Pushkin, 12 miles southeast of St. Petersburg, the Catherine Palace was the summer residence of the Russian czars. The first stone palace on the site was commissioned by Peter the Great for his wife, Catherine I (1684–1727), and built in 1717 as a two-story residence in late Baroque style by German architect Johann Friedrich Braunstein. The palace was substantially enlarged and modernized during the reign of Empress Elizabeth, the daughter of Peter the Great and Catherine I. Elizabeth engaged the court architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli to rebuild the palace in a highly ornate Rococo style. Her intention was that the scale of the Palace should rival Versailles, and by 1756 it had grown to more than half a mile in circumference. More than 220 pounds of gold were used to gild the stucco facade of the building and the numerous statues on its roof. Such opulent decoration and expenditure was not to everyone’s taste, however.
Catherine II (1729–1796), better known as Catherine the Great, who became empress in 1762, regarded the decoration of the palace old fashioned and the financial outlay extravagant. Catherine made extensive changes to the palace in line with her Classical tastes; gilded parts were painted yellow, for example, and some of the interiors remodeled in Classical style. After Catherine’s death in 1796, the throne passed to her son Paul I (reigned 1796–1801), with whom she had had a particularly bad relationship. On becoming the new czar, Paul closed the Catherine Palace and moved the royal residence to the palace at Pavlovsk, a couple of miles away. Future Russian monarchs resided in nearby Alexander Palace, which had been commissioned by Catherine the Great for her grandson, Alexander, who became emperor in 1801 after Paul I’s assassination. The Alexander Palace was to be the summer residence of Russia’s last ruling family, the Romanovs, and where they were placed under house arrest in 1917, before their execution in Yekaterinburg a year later.
Due to its golden color and its rarity, amber was extremely popular in the 18th century, and was often valued more highly than gold. Amber is a hard translucent fossilized resin produced by ancient trees that has been mined in the Baltic Sea region of northern Europe since prehistoric times. More than six tons of Baltic amber was used in the creation of the Amber Room. The Room was initially commissioned by the first king of Prussia (a historical region and former kingdom of north-central Europe, which included modern-day northern Germany and Poland), Frederick I (reigned 1701–1713), as a huge wall cover for a gallery at the Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin. The room was designed by German baroque sculptor Andreas Schlüter (1664–1714) and crafted by Danish master craftsman Gottfried Wolfram, with assistance from Gdansk amber masters Ernst Schacht and Gottfried Turau. Work began in 1701 on what was to become 592.015 square feet of etched and mosaic amber panels backed with gold leaf and silver. Construction of the vast room is said to have taken 10 years, and we know that in 1716 Frederick William I, the son of Frederick I, who had died in 1713, gave the Amber Room as a gift to Czar Peter the Great, a diplomatic move that helped secure a Prussian-Russian alliance against Sweden, who had gained control of a large part of the Baltic region during the 17th and early 18th centuries.
But Peter the Great never got around to having the Amber Room reassembled, and the panels were kept in storage until his daughter Empress Elizabeth had it installed in the audience hall at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. In 1755 Elizabeth ordered the panels of the Amber Room be moved to Tsarskoje Selo, where she commissioned Italian-born Russian architect Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli to design a new Amber Room for the Catherine Palace. The Amber Room became Elizabeth’s meditation room, the third of the chambers along the palace’s exquisite Golden Corridor, although the room was not finally completed until 1770. French writer Théophile Gautier described the Amber Room in his Voyage en Russie (1866):
The room is rather large, with…walls wholly adorned with amber mosaic from top to bottom, including a frieze. The eye…is amazed and is blinded by the wealth and warmth of tints, representing all colours of the spectrum of yellow—from smoky topaz up to a light lemon.1
16.1. The reconstruction of the Amber Room. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
The Amber Room was restored and enlarged by Catherine the Great, who made it a meeting room for her intimate circle, and later Alexander II (1818–1881) used the room as a trophy room for his amber collection. Under Catherine the elaborate and entrancing room became the symbol of Imperial Russia and the monarch herself, the possessor of absolute power and limitless wealth. But there were practical problems. Due to the heat given off by the 565 candles that were lit to illuminate the exquisite room, the fragile wax binding used in its construction expanded and loosened over time. Consequently a caretaker was employed to maintain and repair the panels, and major restoration had to be carried out periodically during the 19th century. Nevertheless, for almost 200 years the Amber Room continued to be displayed in the Catherine P
alace, and even in the mid-20th century remained one of the most famous rooms in Europe. But it was to be this fame that was ultimately to decide its fate.
On June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, and one of the largest military operations in history in terms of both manpower and casualties. More than three million German troops and 3,400 tanks advanced into the Soviet Union in three groups, the north group heading for St. Petersburg (renamed Leningrad at the time), the center forces for Moscow, and the southern group into the Ukraine. Knowing what lay in store as the Nazis advanced on St. Petersburg, the curators at the Catherine Palace, which had been converted by Stalin into a state museum, made a desperate attempt to pack up as many valuable artifacts as possible and get them out of reach of the invaders. The Amber Room, however, proved more of a problem. When the officials responsible for removing the art treasures attempted to dismantle and remove the room, the fragile amber started to crumble in their hands. The amber had dried out and become brittle over the years, so it was almost impossible to move without destroying it. With no time to ponder alternatives, curator Anatoly Mikhailovich Kuchumov ordered that the amber panels be quickly covered in ordinary wallpaper in the hope that the German forces would not notice.
But when the Nazis arrived in Tsarskoye Selo in October 1941 armed with information given to them by their special team of art advisers known as the “Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce” (named after Nazi intellectual Alfred Ernst Rosenberg), they knew exactly what they were looking for and where to find it. Items of Germanic origin such as the Amber Room were at the head of the Nazis’ list, prepared before the invasion of the Soviet Union had even begun, and they were not going to leave without it. Within 36 hours the Amber Room was located, disassembled, and packed into 27 crates, and on October 27, 1941, Rittmeister Graf Solms-Laubach sent the cargo by train to Königsberg castle, on the Baltic Sea in East Prussia, the area from which it had originally come two centuries earlier. The issue of the newspaper Königsberger Allgemeine Zeitung for November 13, 1941, reported details of a display of part of the “Bernsteinzimmer” (Amber Room) in Königsberg castle. The Amber Room subsequently became an immensely popular exhibition at the castle museum and fell under the care of the museum’s director Dr. Alfred Rohde, an amber connoisseur himself and the author of a treatise entitled “Amber, a German Material.”
Ancient Treasures Page 17