Cache of jewels, coins and gems recovered from 17th century Spanish shipwreck

A team of explorers has been able to unearth a treasure trove of jewels, gold coins and gems from the wreckage of a Spanish galleon.

The 891-ton vessel, known as Nuestra Senora de las Maravillas (Our Lady of Wonders), sank on January 4, 1656 while on its way to Seville from Cuba. It went down off the Little Bahama Bank in the northern Bahamas.

The ship was carrying thousands of silver and gold coins, artefacts, emeralds, and cannons when it first collided with one of its fleet vessels and then hit a reef. It was also carrying gold and silver salvaged from a vessel that had sunk on a reef off Ecuador the same year.

"When I pulled up the first valuable item, I lost my breath. I couldn't breathe," said Carl Allen, whose firm Allen Exploration has been granted permission by the Bahamian government to explore the wreck.

According to Smithsonian Magazine, only 45 people out of the 650 passengers who were onboard the ship are thought to have survived the accident.

The sinking of the ship was also a massive blow to the Spanish empire since it was struggling financially. The empire, stretching from South America to the Philippines, managed to salvage much of the treasure.

However, efforts to find remaining pieces scattered for miles in the ocean continued between 1656 and the early 1990s. Allen Exploration managed to find thousands of pieces of the lost treasure with the help of modern technology such as GPS, and metal detecting high-resolution magnetometers.

They found shards of Spanish olive jars, Chinese porcelain, glass wine bottles, sword handles, silver coins, tobacco pipes, and jewellery, among several other things.

But the most important discovery was a pendant linked to the Sacred Order of Santiago, a religious band of knights active in the Spanish maritime trade in the 17th century. The knights were responsible for the security of pilgrims en route to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela.

The artefacts and gems recovered from the wreckage of Maravillas have now been put on display in the Bahamas Maritime Museum in Freeport, per a report in The Mirror.