1922-1998

American Treasure Hunter

Famed treasure hunter Mel Fisher caught the fever as a young boy when he read Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. His dreams of gold and other underwater riches led him to pursue a diving business and ultimately a career in historic underwater salvage. In 1985, his team made the discovery of a lifetime when they located the treasure cargo of the lost Spanish galleon Atocha.

On August 21, 1922, Mel Fisher was born in Hobart, Indiana, where, as a young boy, he dreamed of pirates and treasure after reading Treasure Island. At the time, news stories chronicled the adventures of deep-sea diving pioneers such as Dr. William Beebe (1877-1962) who were exploring the depths of the ocean using "hard hat" suits and bathyspheres. Inspired, eleven-year-old Mel invented his own dive helmet using a bucket, some hose, and a bicycle pump so, in the...