Mel Fisher was known as “The World’s Greatest Treasure Hunter.” Today this legend lives on in his son Kim Fisher. For the past 25 years Kim and his wife Lee continue the quest for treasure through their family business Mel Fisher’s Treasures. Here is a fascinating look inside the business and personal lives of the most famous treasure hunting family of all times.
Mel Fisher’s discovery of the Spanish treasure galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha off the Florida Keys made Mel and his family worldwide celebrities. Through National Geographic DVD exclusive Atocha: Quest for Treasure, and National Geographic Explorer: “Quest for the Atocha” Season 2, Episode 16 (TV), a spot on The Johnny Carson Show, six books, a feature film, and intensive ongoing press coverage, the Atocha’s fame has been established over the past three decades spanning multiple generations. Even today the search for the Atocha sterncastle continues. The find of a single chest of Muzo emeralds purported to be contents of the Atocha sterncastle alone would raise her bounty into the billions. Is it any wonder why 30 years later the search continues? As a leader in the field of oceanic survey technology, confidence is high that Mel Fisher’s Treasures will continue the tradition of discovering untold riches from beneath the sea.
Treasure hunters have a different genome than most of their fellow human beings. They are programmed to “go where no one has gone before.” They possess an indomitable drive to explore and to solve mysteries. They are risk takers extraordinaire. For Love and Treasure is about such individuals who lead a legendary treasure salvage company into the ocean depths of the next great discovery. Meeting these unique characters on the page is a kind of treasure, too.
REVIEW
A riveting investigation into the nature of humans to seek, to search, and to understand by discovery.
Biographer Monty Joynes has crafted a compelling biography of an amazing family, the Fishers, combining technical content and personal anecdotes, against a larger historical and geographical backdrop. If you’ve ever wanted to hunt for treasure, or you wish to vicariously embark on a daring adventure beneath the surface of the sea, For Love and Treasure: The Life and Times of the World’s Most Successful Treasure Hunting Family awaits.
Joynes, a veteran author, provides an intimate glimpse into the lives of people like Kim and Lee Fisher who defied a conventional life in favor of uncertainty, but guaranteed adventure. With plentiful captioned photos, it is almost like reading a personal narrative and family album simultaneously. The notion of significant simultaneous events is a phenomenon that Joynes identifies as synchronicity, an unbreakable thread connecting the members of the Fisher family and those drawn into their circle. He does this by isolating specific periods of time and devoting singular chapters to each character so that he can show what the one was doing at the same time as another, often miles away, before the two had even met. The result is an omniscient understanding of how actions, decisions, and lives ultimately intertwine, no matter where they started.
Another theme that pulses through the life of this adventure is the idea introduced early on in a quote from the Fisher family: “Shipwrecks of antiquity rightly belong to those who find them, work them, and bring back their treasures in whatever form to the mainstream of human awareness. And there is no awareness without discovery.”
Yes, indeed, this is a story of discovery—the discovery of fabled wreckage, like the Fishers’ 1985 headline-grabbing success in securing treasure from the 1622 wreckage of the Spanish Nuestra Senora de Atocha. But it is also a story of self-discovery, and the awareness needed to understand one’s own self and to live the life one has imagined, which is itself a treasure. Amanda Silva, FOREWORD REVIEWS
Monty Joynes 