Carl Allen sighs with frustration on our Zoom call. The wind is picking up and after nine days of scouring the sea floor of the Bahamas, he is being forced to retreat to a nearby island he owns called Walker’s Cay. Bad weather makes for difficult treasure-hunting, and this 58-year-old Texan is impatient to find the richest shipwreck in history. On another windy night in 1656, 366 years before our call, the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas collided with the flagship of the greatest treasure fleet assembled and sank in about 50ft of water, with the loss of 600 men, women and children.
The galleon was packed to the gunwales with plunder – gold, silver and precious gems loaded in Cartagena, Colombia – with an estimated value today of billions of dollars. Allen has been hunting the Maravillas’ mother lode for three years, and has assembled an impressive fleet for the mission. He bought his superyacht, the 50m Gigi, in 2016 after selling his family’s Heritage Bag Company for $300 million, and added a yacht support vessel, the 55m Axis, a few years later. On to this he has packed several “tools”, as he calls them: a Triton submarine, Icon seaplane, and smaller RIBs and jet skis. He is unique among superyacht owners for committing so much time and money to the hunt. “After I sold my company, my wife and I were still pretty young and we started almost amateurishly,” he says. “We found some stuff in Puerto Rico and took our kids down there and they’d say, ‘Geez Dad, what are we doing?’ and I’d reply, ‘Keep quiet and keep digging!’” He has spent tens of millions of dollars on his obsession.
He picked up the trail of the Maravillas in 2020 when he recovered the handle guard of a sword imprinted with the name of the treasure fleet’s commander. “With that we knew instantly that we were on the Maravillas,” he says. Another clue came in the form of a 70lb silver bar, which matched with another taken off the galleon. Final confirmation came with the simple fact that of the 4,000 silver coins he and his team have recovered in the search area since 2020, none was minted after 1655, the year before the ship went down. “We’ve found a lot of valuable stuff, but the stuff that actually connects us to the wreck, that’s what really gets me excited.”
He has since pulled up more than 14,000 objects from more than 8,000 holes dug into the deep sand of the Bahamas, including stunning gold chains, uncut gems and fine jewellery. But the centrepiece of the growing collection is a brooch, made with a flawless 21-carat cabochon emerald set in gold, surrounded by 12 roughly cut, two-carat emeralds. It sits in the Bahamas Maritime Museum in Freeport, Grand Bahama, which Allen established, because none of what he brings up will leave these islands. He doesn’t do this to get rich (mission previously accomplished), but instead to scratch an itch that set in after a meeting as a young man with the late Mel Fisher, who picked up the trail of the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha in 1973, eventually hauling up objects worth $450 million at the time.It took Fisher till 1985 to discover the Atocha’s mother lode, so Allen knows he needs to be patient. “Kim Fisher, Mel’s son, who I’m very good friends with, tells me, ‘Just keep following the trail’, even if it’s just a piece of pottery or a musket ball,” he says.
On this most recent trip, the team spent nine days diving and came up with nothing until the morning of our call, when seven silver coins were discovered. “We’re on the trail, but unfortunately Mother Nature is going to blow us out of here, and there’s a hurricane on the horizon. It takes a special kind of person to do this, because everything has to come together. I figured out that we’re only able to dive an average of one day in ten, so maybe one month a year we’re out here doing this. It’s just crazy.”
But he is not giving up. “There’s three million shipwrecks in the world,” he says. “If the Spanish [colonisers] lost one ship a year, there would be over 350 of them, and we know in some years they lost dozens. So there’s thousands of wrecks here. We’re interested in another ship called the Madama do Brasil. We’ve been down there and found some debris. That’s number two on my list.
“Number three is a ship called the Genovesa, which could be one of the oldest ships found in the western hemisphere. And I don’t want to let too much out of the bag, but I’ve also got my eye on a German submarine. There is so much in the world to look for.”
Instagram: @allen.exploration
