Sunken Treasure Is Buried in an Ocean of Legal Claims
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CARTAGENA, Colombia — For nearly 300 years, the wreck of the Spanish galleon San Jose has tantalized archaeologists and salvagers alike. When it sunk in 800-foot deep water off this fortified Spanish colonial city, it was carrying gold, silver, and precious jewels that a group of treasure hunters believe are now worth $2 billion. But one-quarter century after the American group that originally included a now-deceased a Hollywood actor, a professional golfer, and a convicted Watergate felon staked its claim, exploration and retrieval of the wreck seems as distant as the sinking sun at dusk over this historic walled city.
The stalemate over the claim by Seattle-based Sea Search Armada is partly the result of sweeping changes in international marine law and judicial interpretations during the last two decades that have made business more difficult for shipwreck salvagers. Colombia is loath to give a private, foreign group access to a valuable historical site, although exploration permits it issued nearly 30 years ago seemed to do just that.
Legal experts say the new rules are a reaction to the access that salvagers of the Titanic and 17th-century Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha got in the 1970s and 1980s, which earned them tens of millions of dollars. They include a 2001 international UNESCO pact signed by 10 countries — not including America or Colombia — that converted shipwrecks into a new class of protected historical landmarks, giving archaeological and historical preservation precedence over profit-driven salvagers. The evolving standards apply to the hundreds of doomed ships carrying billions in booty that sank in the Caribbean and Atlantic during the centuries of colonial plunder when Spanish galleons, British frigates, and Portuguese slavers plied the waters between Europe and the New World. “The San Jose case is probably the best example of how the world has changed around salvagers,” an attorney with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington, D.C., Ole Varmer, said. “And it looks like the Colombian government changed its mind.”
The richest of all colonial-era wrecks might well have been the San Jose. It was stocked to the hatches with bullion and coins from Peru as it sailed in a convoy toward the fortified city of Cartagena in May 1708. Before it reached port, a fleet of British navy ships intercepted the Spanish ships, and an explosion sank the San Jose, sending its treasures and 600 crew members to the ocean floor.
The ship was known to have had a rich cargo because the convoy was the first in 10 years sent by the Spanish crown to bring home colonial booty, Carla Rahn Phillips, a historian at the University of Minnesota, said. Ship traffic previously had been halted during the War of the Spanish Succession.
It was not until the past couple of decades that technological advances gave explorers adequate tools to search for treasure at such a depth. Robotic instruments now can distinguish precious metals from iron at great depths and reach once impossibly deep sites. But such technology is expensive and Colombian officials such as Armando Lopez, special legal counsel to President Uribe, say that the Colombian government can’t afford to explore the shipwreck on its own. “There are too many other priorities, such as housing, health and welfare of Colombians,” Mr. Lopez said in an interview last week.
Formed in 1982, the Sea Search Armada partnership originally included an actor, Michael Landon, a pro golfer, Cary Middlecoff, and a one-time Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman. All are deceased.
All along, Sea Search Armada has proposed financing the venture, possibly in cooperation with scientific and academic institutions, if the Colombians will allow it to proceed. Investor attorney Danilo Devis of Barranquilla said the original investor group, which later sold its interest to SSA, got its permit in 1979 from the government to explore the shipwreck site and split whatever it found 50-50 with the Colombian state. But a years-long legal wrangle has ensued.