The quest to claim an $18bn shipwreck.
Sunk by the British in 1708, the Spanish galleon San José became the ‘holy grail’ of shipwrecks — how much do we really know about its treasure?
The San José was no ordinary galleon. When the Spanish ship was sunk by the British off the coast of Colombia in 1708, it was carrying one of the richest cargos ever assembled in the Americas. Its loss set in motion a three-century hunt for the “holy grail” of shipwrecks.
It returned to global attention this week after the Colombian government announced it had retrieved the first artefacts from a vessel experts say could be worth $18 billion (£13.6 billion).
Gold coins, porcelain cups and a cannon were brought to the surface: tantalising hints of what may still lie on the sea bed.
What follows is a guide to the San José and its extraordinary legend: how it came to carry such immense wealth, how it was found and how its fate continues to be contested.
How much could the ‘holy grail’ of shipwrecks be worth?
The eye-watering valuations come from court documents filed by Sea Search-Armada (SSA), a US salvage firm that claims it discovered the wreck and is entitled to half its value. Its historians trawled 18th-century records, including testimony from Rear Admiral Conde de Vega Florida, a commander of the fleet of which the San José was flagship. They believe it carried cargo valued at between seven and nine million pesos in 1708.
On that basis, SSA’s experts reconstruct a haul of roughly 300,000 gold coins, 1.7 million silver reales, 54,000 ounces of gold bullion, further silver bullion worth tens of millions of dollars, 30,000 emeralds, 4,000 pieces of Chinese porcelain and 64 bronze cannon.
Using modern auction prices they estimate the gold coins and bullion alone could fetch between $6.2 billion and $13.4 billion, with the emeralds adding up to a potential $4.5 billion.
Taken together, SSA claims the value of the San José cargo lies between about $7 billion and $18 billion.
According to Ann Coats, a professor of maritime history at the University of Portsmouth who has no financial interest in the wreck, the historical evidence points to vast riches. “It’s perfectly feasible that the bulk of the cargo remains in the hull,” she said.
Others are more sceptical. Simon Spooner, an archaeologist who has excavated Caribbean shipwrecks, says $18 billion is plausible for the original cargo. How much is recoverable is another matter. The explosion thought to have sunk the ship may have scattered currency, ingots and gemstones across a wide debris field. Some could be buried. How much of the porcelain survived the blast is unknown. At the top end, SSA’s calculations assume virtually all of the treasure is accessible, with coins fetching large premiums over the value of the raw metal. That may prove optimistic, but even a fraction of its estimate would amount to a fortune.
Where did the treasure come from?
The story begins in the great mining districts of what are now Peru and Bolivia. Silver flowed from Potosi, a city in the high Andes dominated by the Cerro Rico, known as the “Rich Mountain”, the vast deposits of which bankrolled Spain’s empire for generations. Gold was drawn from the Puno region near Lake Titicaca and from Huamanga (modern-day Ayacucho) in the central highlands.
Extraction relied on brutal systems of forced labour, a reason modern indigenous groups argue they are entitled to a share of any recovered wealth.
From these remote mines, treasure was carried to Lima, the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru and home to a Spanish Royal Mint, where bullion was struck into coins bearing the king’s seal. Emeralds were gathered from across the Andes. The riches were transported overland until they were piled high in the warehouses and counting rooms of Portobelo, awaiting the Spanish treasure fleet.
Why was there so much treasure on board?
For two centuries Spain operated a tightly controlled system known as the Flotas y Galeones (Fleets and Galleons), under which convoys sailed to and from the Americas each year. Two crossed the Atlantic annually: the Flota de Nueva España, which ran between Spain and Veracruz in Mexico, and the Galeones de Tierra Firme, which served Cartagena and Portobelo in modern Colombia and Panama. They carried European textiles, wine, tools and luxury goods out to the colonies and returned with the New World’s gold, silver, emeralds, dyes and, crucially, the Crown’s taxes. Each convoy included two heavily armed treasure galleons to protect the bullion. But this system broke down during the War of the Spanish Succession, fought between 1701 and 1714, during which Spain and France faced an alliance led by Britain and the Holy Roman Empire.
After the Tierra Firme fleet reached Spain in 1702 it did not set out again until 1708, leaving six years’ worth of royal revenues and private wealth to stack up. No cargo manifest has been found but when the San José finally sailed it is believed to have been carrying that swollen backlog.
How did it sink?
The treasure fleet first sailed from Portobello to Cartagena de Indias, in modern Colombia, the final provisioning point before the risky voyage across the Atlantic to Cadiz, Spain. Off the coast of Cartagena on June 8, 1708, it met a British squadron.
The Spanish fleet convoy consisted of 17 ships, mostly smaller merchant vessels. The key treasure ships and military escort galleons were the San José (64 guns), the San Joaquín (64 guns) and the Santa Cruz (44 guns). They knew the British were hunting them.
The British squadron consisted of four ships, led by Commodore Charles Wager: HMS Expedition (Wager’s flagship, carrying 70 guns), HMS Kingston (60 guns), HMS Portland (50 or 54 guns) and HMS Vulture (a smaller fireship, sometimes described as carrying 28 guns). Wager’s primary objective was to attack the largest Spanish ships, the San José and the San Joaquín, to stop the wealth on board reaching Europe.
The San José engaged HMS Expedition. Reports suggest the galleon’s powder magazine, which would have been below the waterline, exploded, sinking the vessel in a matter of minutes. Of a crew of more than 600, only a handful survived. Its treasure vanished into the deep. The encounter is known as Wager’s Action or the Battle of Barú.
The treasure hunt — who really found it?
The first hint of a breakthrough came in 1981, when SSA said it had located the wreck. That triggered a legal dispute with the Colombian government, which has not yet been settled. As well as SSA, the Spanish government (which views the wreck as sovereign property) and indigenous groups from Peru and Bolivia have staked claims.
Colombia says the San José was actually found only on November 27, 2015, when its navy, using underwater drones, discovered it at a different, and still secret, location. SSA strongly disputes that claim, arguing the “new” site is the one they found in the 1980s. Colombia suggests the wreck is part of its own cultural heritage.
Is it really the San José?
The identification this year of a cluster of gold coins appeared to be a major step in confirming the wreck’s identity. The rough, hand-struck “cobs” remained on the sea bed. But high-resolution photographs allowed researchers to create 3D models of them.
They were identified from a characteristic “pillars and waves” design as having been minted in Lima. They bear the heraldic symbols of Castile and Leon, which signified the authority of the Spanish Crown. There is a clear mint date of 1707, so they were created only months before the San José sank.
The presence of Chinese porcelain from the Kangxi period (1662–1722) and inscriptions on the cannon dating to 1665, also match a wreck from the early 18th century.
“The finding of cobs created in 1707 at the Lima mint points to a vessel navigating the Tierra Firme route in the early 18th century,” said Daniela Vargas Ariza, of Colombia’s Naval Cadet School and the National Institute of Anthropology and History, in June this year. “The San José galleon is the only ship that matches these characteristics.”
Colombia has said it will recover the treasure of the San José for archaeological research, with the ultimate goal of putting artefacts in a museum. Whether that’s the only aim, we’ll see. As Spooner notes, there are plenty of other wrecks in the region. “All they’re missing is the shiny stuff — the gold, the silver, the emeralds.” Times.
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