MEDIA
WALKER'S CAY
MEDIA
WALKER'S CAY
MARINA
WALKER'S CAY
ALLEN XPRESS NEWSLETTER
AllenXPress Newsletter 1
JUNE 2024
As I sit here, I’m itching to get out there. The seas are behaving. We have high hopes for a big year. 2023 was a frustrating wash out, the worst weather season (except for hurricanes) since I started exploring the northern Bahamas for the Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas and who knows what else is out there. Our fleet has been on standby every day. We’re always watching the weather. When the window opens, it’s all systems go. For as long as the Big Blue lets us.
AllenXPress Newsletter 2
JULY 2024
As June 2024 comes to an end, Poseidon is behaving, unlike in 2023. This is the first spell of calm conditions we’ve enjoyed off the western Little Bahama Bank this year. To get even two decent dive days in a row at any location is rare. Now we’re expecting a week of still seas. It’s very good news and we’re focusing on the Maravillas while the Big Blue lets us.
AllenXPress Newsletter 3
AUGUST 2024
In the last month down the western flank of the Little Bahama Bank, AllenX has been on the trail of the Maravillas’ missing sterncastle and bow. When Captain Gaspar de los Reyes, the galleon’s assistant pilot who survived the sinking, returned to the scene of nature’s crime in June 1656, he found the quarterdeck in the stern gone. Read more updates from the past month!
AllenXPress Newsletter 4
SEPTEMBER 2024
Allen Exploration is on the trail of two major targets right now. The first is the scatter trail left behind when the Maravillas’ sterncastle broke up and blew away. This narrow area of south-running finds is still giving up iron ship’s hull spikes, silver coins and a small silver ingot. The lighter
finds have been scattered to the four
winds by the howling winds and waves out here.
AllenXPress Newsletter 5
OCTOBER 2024
So far, so good. In one trench alone the team from the Axis research ship has recorded 24 silver Spanish coins, a Chinese porcelain sherd, four musket balls and five pieces of split shot. Elsewhere, two escudos gold coins, part of a large silver plate and several tobacco pipe stems have turned up. And there lies a mystery. The Spanish supposedly preferred cigars to pipes. Could these have been smoked by the Maravillas’ crew after all?