Colombia finds what may be world's largest sunken treasure by PEDRO MENDOZA
and JOSHUA GOODMAN | December 5, 2015 8:28 PM
CARTAGENA, Colombia (AP)
— President Juan Manual Santos on Saturday hailed the discovery
of a Spanish galleon that went down off the South American
nation's coast more than 300 years ago with what may be
the world's largest sunken treasure.
At a news conference in
this colonial port city, Santos said the exact location
of the galleon San Jose, and how it was discovered with
the help of an international team of experts, was a state
secret that he'd personally safeguard. The ship sank somewhere
in the wide area off Colombia's Baru peninsula, south of
Cartagena.
While no humans have yet to reach the wreckage
site, autonomous underwater vehicles had gone there and
brought back photos of dolphin-stamped bronze cannons in
a well-preserved state that leave no doubt to the ship's
identity, the government said.
The discovery is the latest chapter in a
saga that began three centuries ago, on June 8, 1708, when
the galleon ship with 600 people aboard sank as it was trying
to outrun a fleet of British warships. It is believed to
have been carrying 11 million gold coins and jewels from
then Spanish-controlled colonies that could be worth billions
of dollars if ever recovered.
The ship, which maritime experts consider
the holy grail of Spanish colonial shipwrecks, has also
been the subject of a legal battle in the U.S., Colombia
and Spain over who owns the rights to the sunken treasure.
In 1982, Sea Search Armada, a salvage company
owned by U.S. investors including the late actor Michael
Landon and convicted Nixon White House adviser John Ehrlichman,
announced it had found the San Jose's resting place 700
feet below the water's surface.
Two years later, Colombia's government overturned
well-established maritime law that gives 50 percent to whoever
locates a shipwreck, slashing Sea Search's take to a 5 percent
"finder's fee."
A lawsuit by the American investors in a
federal court in Washington was dismissed in 2011 and the
ruling was affirmed on appeal two years later. Colombia's
Supreme Court has ordered the ship to be recovered before
the international dispute over the fortune can be settled.
Santos didn't mention any salvage company's
claim during his presentation, but the government said the
ship had been found Nov. 27 in a never-before referenced
location through the use of new meteorological and underwater
mapping studies.
Danilo Devis, who has represented Sea Search
in Colombia for decades, expressed optimism that the sunken
treasure, whose haul could easily be worth more than $10
billion, would finally be recovered.
But he bristled at the suggestion that experts
located the underwater grave anywhere different from the
area adjacent to the coordinates Sea Search gave authorities
three decades ago.
"The government may have been the one
to find it but this really just reconfirms what we told
them in 1982," he told The Associated Press from his
home in Barranquilla, Colombia.
The president said any recovery effort would
take years but would be guided by a desire to protect the
national patrimony.
During his presentation, Santos showed an
underwater video that appears to show jewels and the cannons.
In the footage, English-speaking crew members aboard a Colombian
naval ship can be seen launching the underwater vehicle
into the ocean.