New Discoveries Inc.

The Dispatch

Issue No. 2 · 29 August 2026 · Fort Pierce, Florida

Havana, 29 August 1626. From the Haskins archive.

Friends,

A short one, because the date demands it.

On 29 August 1626, in Havana, Tomás de Larraspuru, Captain General of the fleet that guarded the Indies, was told that a man named Francisco Núñez Melián had found the galleon Margarita in the Cayos de Matecumbe, where four years earlier the silver galleons of the Marqués de Cadereyta had gone down in a hurricane. Melián had already pulled up silver bars, reales, copper plates, wrought silver, and some artillery. Larraspuru ordered every piece of it surrendered to the Crown, without delay, and an account rendered.

The Margarita sank alongside the Atocha. This is the paper trail of the first salvage, and the moment the Crown moved to control what came up.

That order is four hundred years old today. It is also the first document we have published from the Jack Haskins archive. Haskins photocopied it in Seville, wrote MAIN HOUSE across the top in his own hand, and filed it with the research that later pointed divers to wrecks. You can now read it the way he read it: the scan, the original Spanish, an English translation, and his notes, kept separate from the original.

One honest note. The transcription and translation were produced with AI assistance and are marked “under review” until a paleographer signs off. We publish the uncertainty on purpose. A marked gap is honest; a confident guess is a corruption of the record.

The Archive

One page down, a hundred thousand to go

The Haskins archive runs to more than 100,000 pages, most of them in the handwriting of colonial scribes. We are transcribing and translating it page by page, and gifts at the Explorer level and above go to the expert review that makes each page citable. If you want to help finish the next one, that is where it goes.

Also this week: Candid, the nonprofit database foundations check before they fund anyone, awarded New Discoveries its Platinum Seal of Transparency, its highest level. Our documents and disclosures are on the Accountability page.

Michael Bomhoff
Executive Director, New Discoveries Inc.

New Discoveries Inc. · 100 Avenue A, Suite 2B, Fort Pierce, FL 34950
A 501(c)(3) public charity, IRS Tax ID 99-1824697. Donations are tax deductible.

You are receiving The Dispatch as a member of the Treasure Experience community or because you signed up at new-discoveries.org. To unsubscribe, reply with the word unsubscribe and we will remove you the same day.