Has Colombia really mislaid the “Holy Grail of Shipwrecks”? Divernet asked in early October, when a state heritage body reported that a “top-secret sealed envelope” containing the co-ordinates of a Spanish galleon containing treasure worth up to US $17 billion had gone missing.
Now it seems that the Colombian government has either remembered where it put the envelope or never lost it in the first place, because the country’s president Gustavo Petro has just announced that recovering the San José is to be a priority of his administration before his term ends in 2026.
Also read: San José shipwreck’s treasure is contested…
The former guerrilla fighter, who came to power last year, has ordered officials to “pick up the pace” in either setting up a public-private partnership or working with a private company to salvage the treasure, according to Bloomberg.
Launched in 1698, the 62-gun, three-masted San José was sunk 10 years later off Cartagena by British warships. Sailing from Panama as flagship of a treasure fleet of three warships and 14 merchant vessels, she went down with the loss of all but 11 of the 600 people onboard.
Also lost were an estimated 11 million gold coins, 116 silver chests full of emeralds, seven million pesos and jewellery – reckoned to be the most valuable cargo ever dispatched from the New World.
State secret
The wreck was discovered at a depth between 600 and 950m by the USA’s Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scanning from a Colombian Navy ship in 2015.
After archaeologists had positively identified the ship, Colombia declared that it would be salvaged but that the co-ordinates must be kept a state secret, protected by state agency the Colombian Institute of Anthropology & History.
It was Colombia’s Oversight Committee for the Social Control of Submerged Cultural Heritage that declared that the co-ordinates had gone missing from the National Archives, sparking a blame game among departments – and ongoing legal battles indicate why identifying the exact co-ordinates should be such a sensitive issue.
Colombia claims the treasure as its own national heritage, but the salvage rights are disputed by Spain, which claims the San José as its own naval ship; by Bolivia’s Qhara Qhara people, whose ancestors were enslaved to mine the ship’s cargo in Colombia and Peru; and by US salvage consortium Sea Search Armada (SSA, previously Glocca Morra), which claims to have discovered the wreck 34 years before Woods Hole did.
SSA, which is suing Colombia for US $10 billlion (half the value it claims for the treasure) says that after locating the San José in 1981 it handed the co-ordinates over to the government on the understanding that it would receive half of the treasure.
The government claims that the San José found in 2015 was at a different location, and has maintained since 1994 that no shipwreck was found at the position handed over by SSA. It also insists that the salvor had not specified finding the San José in 1981, reporting only that a large shipwreck had been discovered.
Last year, the Colombian Navy released undated video footage showing gold coins and ingots, cannon, swords, jars and Chinese ceramics from what it stated was the wreck-site.
The legal action between the state and SSA is likely to come back to court early next year, when questions surrounding the respective co-ordinates of the 1981 and 2015 shipwreck discoveries seem certain to play their part.
Also on Divernet: Has Colombia really mislaid ‘Holy Grail of Shipwrecks’? , Pieces of eight and teacups on San José wreck, Want to dive a ‘million-coin’ wreck?
