Led by archaeologist Carlos León, the team has so far logged 681 shipwrecks off Bermuda, Cuba, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the Bahamas, and the U.S. Recently it has been reported that a team of researchers at Spain’s Ministry of Culture have embarked on a major, multi-year project to chart the final resting places of all the ships which helped to create and sustain that country’s New World empire. In 1975, it came to light that the cross had been stolen and replaced with a plaster and plastic substitute when it was being moved from the Bermuda Aquarium, Museum & Zoo, where it had been on display, to the new Bermuda Maritime Museum. Part of a treasure fleet on a voyage from Cartagena, Colombia to Cadiz, the coral-encrusted remains of the ship’s structure were discovered by legendary Bermudian diver Teddy Tucker in 1951, who found his fabled emerald-studded gold cross and a fortune in other treasures at the wreck site. Visiting American journalist, politician and diplomat Clare Boothe Luce holds the Tucker Cross as she studies treasure recovered from the San Pedro with Bermudian diver Teddy Tucker: In fact, the oldest wreck yet discovered on Bermuda’s reefs, the 350-ton Spanish galleon San Pedro, dates from 1594. Many ships which strayed too close to the island’s reefs met with disaster during what has been termed the European Age of Discovery, a period lasting from the 15th through the 17th centuries. Beginning in the early 16th century, Spanish and Portuguese seafarers started using Bermuda as a mid-Atlantic navigational marker on their way to and from the Caribbean and South America.
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