Ssince the Colombian Navy discovered the final resting place of the Spanish galleon San José in 2015its location remained a state secret, the wreck – and its precious cargo – left deep beneath the waters of the Caribbean.
Efforts to preserve the ship and recover its precious cargo were caught in a complicated series of international legal disputeswith Colombia, Spain, Bolivian indigenous groups and an American salvage company laying claim to the wreck, and the gold, silver and emeralds on board believed to be worth as much as $17 billion.
When Colombia tried to auction off part of the favor to finance the colossal cost of recovering the ship, Unesco and the country’s high courts intervened.
But eight years after the discovery, officials now say they are pushing politics aside and could begin lifting artifacts from the “holy grail of shipwrecks” as soon as April.
“There was this persistent view of the galleon as a treasure chest. We want to turn the page on that,” said Alhena Caicedo, director of the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History. “We don’t think about treasures. We are thinking about how to access the historical and archaeological information on the site.”
The San José returned to Europe with treasure to help finance the war of the spanish succession when it was sunk by a British squadron in 1708, near the Caribbean port city of Cartagena.
Historians say the wreck can help reveal much about the Spanish empire at the height of its power — and the shared, overlapping histories of Europe and Latin America.
Eventually, Caicedo’s team hopes to raise the wreck itself and display it in a custom-made museum where visitors will be able to explore “all the secrets of the bottom of the ocean,” she said.
But as the expedition continues to explore the site, the scale and complexity of the challenge comes into focus.
Few ships like the San José have ever been recovered – and none have ever been rescued from warm tropical waters.
“It is a big challenge and it is not a project that has many precedents. In a way, we are pioneers,” Caicedo said.
The closest comparison would probably be to the Mary Rose, the flagship of Henry VIII’s fleet, which sank in 1545 while engaged in a battle with the French fleet off the coast of Portsmouth.
That 16th-century wreck was explored by hundreds of divers – many of them volunteers – for a decade before it was carefully raised in 1981. The surviving portion of the ship’s hull is now on display in a £35 million ($45 million) museum..
Colombia’s navy studied the Mary Rose and other such marine conservation projects to see how it can lift and preserve the 40 meter long ship and its contents without it all crumbling to dust.
“The San José is a very, very special ship. It is comparable to the Mary Rose in that it was in action at the height of Spanish technology and shipbuilding,” says Ann Coats, Associate Professor of Maritime Heritage at the University of Portsmouth.
“There are so many questions that the San José can help answer!”
The San José’s cargo includes articles of glass, porcelain and leather, and historians hope the transport can inform their understanding of global 18th-century trade networks, Spain’s complex colonial hierarchy and the lives of the 600 souls on board.
to newsletter promotion
But while the Mary Rose lay in icy coastal waters, the San José sank in deep, tropical waters that would likely have been brutal to the ship and could have made the recovery one of the most expensive and complex in history.
“The contents are very varied and we have no idea how the remains will react when they come into contact with oxygen. We don’t even know if it is possible to lift something out of the water,” Caicedo said.
The exact location of the wreck is a state secret to protect the site from looters, but Colombian authorities have revealed it is 600 meters (2,000 feet) below sea level – too far for divers to reach.
The country’s military is currently developing underwater robots that will first photograph, video and map the wreckage before carefully attempting any recovery.
Exactly how much can be salvaged from the wreck will depend on numerous factors: currents, sea temperature, the type of silt in which the wreck was submerged, how the ship’s 60 bronze cannons sunk to the seabed, and even what animals now live there, say the head of the Mary Rose’s research program, Alex Hildred.
“It was set on fire, too,” said Hildred. “Lifting the ship and creating a museum would be really difficult, very expensive and incredibly challenging… And then everyone wants a bit of it. It’s just a nightmare.”
The vessel’s international connections mean that historical research has until now been stalled by international litigation over who is its rightful owner.
Although the wreck was found in Colombian waters, Spain argued that the San José was part of the Spanish fleet and was returning from what was then part of the Spanish empire.
Meanwhile, Sea Search Armada (SSA), a US-based salvage company, is locked in a legal battle with Colombia, arguing that it is located in the area in which the San José sank in 1981. SSA argued that Colombia had agreed to any profits, but in 2011 a US court declared the galleon property of the Colombian state.
Indigenous communities in Bolivia have also staked a claim to any possible wealth, arguing that their ancestors are likely to have mined the silver and gold used in many of the treasures.
The Colombian Ministry of Culture says the government self-financed the first phase of exploration with $7.3 million and it will not sell any of the precious artefacts as Unesco advocated in 2018.
“Money has always driven the story of the San José. The British wanted to capture it to deny money to Spain, then the money on board drove the archaeological search for the wreck,” Coats said. “Then disputes got in the way of studying the ship. It would be nice if money didn’t drive things for once and a huge cultural collaboration could take place to study it properly.”
