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Imperial and Blue Water Ventures strike marketing Agreement
W. Keith Webb and Guy Zajonc met with Imperial to discuss the possibilities of having Imperial market their discovery four hundred year old natural pearls that Blue Water Ventures has just finished cleaning and preparing for the last 18 months. Imperial has agreed to explore all possible venues to promote , market, and sell this unique find. Not in modern history has this quantity of natural pearls come onto the market combined with the fact that they come from a 400 year old shipwreck. The intriguing story behind the pearls is fascinating. Did they belong to a jeweler as there was unfinished jewelry found with the pearls? There is a documentary in the works to be aired on the Discovery Channel. If anyone would like more information please contact Peter Bazar at 800-556-7738.
The Santa Margarita (1622)
On September 4, 1622 the Tierra Firme flota of twenty-eight ships left Havana
bound for Spain carrying the wealth of an empire; silver from Peru and Mexico,
gold and emeralds from Colombia, and pearls from Venezuela. The following day,
the fleet found itself being overtaken by a hurricane as it entered the Florida
straits. By the morning of September 6th, 1622 eight of these vessels (three
major and five smaller) lay broken on the ocean floor, scattered from the
Marquesas Keys to the Dry Tortugas. (For details see Treasure of the Atocha by
R. Duncan Mathewson III, 1986 E. P. Dutton) The 1622 combined Guard and Tierra
Firme fleets carried 11,157,549 pesos' of cargo for private persons, and
1,659,855 pesos for the Spanish Crown and a variety of other Royal and Church
revenues. The three larger galleons were Santa Margarita, Nuestra Senora de
Atocha, and Nuestra Senora del Rosario. Two small ships sank west of Atocha,
while one struck a reef east of
her. Two others were never found. Rosario, stranded on the last key of the
Tortugas, was almost completely salvaged. Atocha and Margarita, which were lost
with some 1,500,000 pesos in cargo, was the subject of many Spanish and Dutch
expeditions from the time of their loss until 1679. Captains Gaspar de Vargas
and Nicolas de Cardona worked the wrecks in 1622-1623, and Francisco de la Luz
attempted salvage in 1625 (he and his small ship, also named Rosario, were lost
at sea and never returned to Havana). The most successful of these ventures were
sponsored by Francisco Nunez Melian from Havana, during the years 1626-1642. In
1678, Isidro Mayorga searched fruitlessly for Atocha under the contract of Diego
de Florencia.
Pearls are ready to be sold!
The most significant find of natural pearls are now ready to be marketed. 16,184 rare and extremely valuable natural pearls. These pearls have spent the last 400 years entombed in a lead box submerged in waters off the Florida Keys. Pearl Perspectives first reported on this discovery June 2007 including a video clip of the opening of the box and the first sighting of the pearls in 400 years.
Judge Adjudicates Santa Margarita Shipwreck Treasures!
Key West, Florida Keys -- Gasps of wonder erupted in a Key
West courtroom last week, as spectators surrounded a six foot long table laid
out with a fortune in gleaming gold chains, bars and ornaments, ancient silver
coins and thousands of pearls. Judge James Lawrence King, senior Federal Judge
in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, was presiding
over the adjudication of artifacts recovered by the historic shipwreck search
and recovery group, Blue Water Ventures Key West. The riches on display were
recently discovered treasures from the 1622 Fleet Spanish galleon Santa
Margarita.
This combination of technology, experience, knowledge and persistence seems to be the charm, as this was the season that the Santa Margarita gave up a new and totally unexpected treasure -- over 16,000 natural pearls contained in a single, simple oval leaden box. The largest, at over 52 carats, is one of the largest known natural pearls in the world
A little clip about what goes into treasure salvage
History of Pearls from the Americas
Animation of the sinking of the Santa Margarita
Around the year 1500, discoveries by Spanish explorers of sources of pearls, gold, and spices in the New World were a powerful stimulus for Spain to expand into the Americas. Samples of these resources, which Christopher Columbus and later crews brought back to Spain, so aroused public enthusiasm in Spain that navigators, explorers, and adventurers began to organize expeditions to seek the treasures of lands beyond the "Western Ocean." Columbus first saw the pearls in the Gulf of Paria, Venezuela, on his third voyage, where local Indians bad brought them from the Caribbean coast of Venezuela located to the northwest (Mosk, 1934, quoted by Galtsoff, 1950b; Morison, 1942; Hanson, 1967; Wagner, 1992).
The Spanish subsequently organized harvesting programs for pearl oysters in Venezuela and Colombia and began to ship huge quantities of pearls to Spain and other European countries for ladies adornment. The first Spanish town in the New World was established in 1528 on the Venezuelan island of Cubagua to serve as a center for harvesting pearl oysters and collecting pearls. The pearls from Venezuela, whose northeast shores became known as the "Pearl Coast," were relatively small, weighing 2-5 carats, but they were harvested in the largest quantities of any location in the New World. Within a decade or two following the discovery of the Venezuelan pearls, the Spanish found pearls and developed programs to harvest them on beds around islands off the Pacific Coast of Panama (Galtsoff, 1950a; MacKenzie, 1999) and in the Gulf of California, Mexico (Townsend, 1892; Kunz and Stevenson, 1908). They also searched for pearls in what is now the United States, but found none in its marine environments (Kunz and Stevenson, 1908).
By the late 1500's, the pearl oysters in Venezuela and Colombia had become much scarcer as a result of intensive fishing by hundreds of divers (Landman et al., 2001). Documentations of the pearl production may be the first records of resource declines in any of the world's marine fisheries that were brought about by intensive harvesting stimulated by strong market demand. In this case, large beds of natural pearl oysters that had been scarcely harvested beforehand were harvested intensely, albeit by primitive hand methods, and the beds were slowly depleted.
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