ON ARCHAEOLOGISTS AND TREASURE HUNTERS

Julian Sancton is the author of the forthcoming book "Neptune's Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire."

On the night of July 30, 1715, a dozen Spanish ships were sailing north along Florida's Atlantic coast, weighed down with gold and silver stripped from the mines of the New World. Before dawn, a hurricane swept across the fleet's path. It resulted in one of the deadliest maritime disasters in history, sinking 11 ships, killing more than 1,000 men and sending tons of gold and silver coins down to the ocean floor — worth an estimated $400 million today.

On Sept. 30, a team working for the Florida-based treasure- hunting company 1715 Fleet Queens Jewels, which has the exclusive rights to salvage the area and has been scouring it for decades, announced that it had recovered more than 1,000 tarnished silver coins from the fleet's wreckage, as well several gold escudos that gleamed as brightly as they day they were minted. It was the company's largest haul in years. Queens Jewels estimated its value at around $1 million. The coins will be catalogued before being dispersed, with many probably being sold into private collections.

Should such a treasure be for sale? Florida says yes, allowing treasure hunters to profit from the spoils of history as long as they give the state 20 percent of the booty and adhere to its relatively loose archaeological guidelines. Most archaeologists, however, say no. As even the notoriously unscrupulous Indiana Jones would say, "It belongs in a museum." Allowing the commercialization of historical artifacts, they argue, robs scholars of the chance to study them and the rest of us of the chance to see them — and encourages looting.

Yet archaeologists and treasure hunters exist in an uneasy symbiosis. The latter depend on the former to establish the context and provenance that makes findings valuable to collectors. Archaeologists, meanwhile, often lack the funding to explore shipwrecks themselves. If it weren't for the adventurism of treasure hunters, many of the most important wrecks of the Caribbean would not have been found.

Though their targets are often silver and gold, maritime treasure hunters are not primarily motivated by profit. Indeed, the pursuit of shipwrecked riches is so difficult, time consuming and legally tortuous that it is almost never profitable. They are driven largely by the romantic urge that Mark Twain identified in young Tom Sawyer: "There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure."

In 2001, in an effort to keep wreck plunderers at bay, UNESCO released its Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage. The document stipulates that the wrecks of war vessels (such as Spain's armed treasure ships) remain the property of the countries whose flag they flew, no matter how many centuries have passed since their sinking, and that their contents are ideally left untouched. Spain, unsurprisingly, ratified the convention. Among those countries that did not are two whose territorial waters are known to contain untold amounts of lost Spanish treasure: the United States and Colombia.

It was off Colombia's coast that the legendary Spanish galleon San José was discovered at a depth of 600 meters in 2015. Long described as the holy grail of shipwrecks, the San Jose and its vast treasure were sunk in a battle with the English on June 8, 1708. Estimates of its cargo's value have ranged as high as several billion dollars.

Dwarfing the value of the 1715 fleet's trove, the San José's wreckage set off a still-unresolved fight over ownership and the proper stewardship of history. Images of the sunken San José— reduced after three centuries to a flattened field of cannon and other artifacts — show gold coins glinting on the seabed, hinting at the riches that lie buried below. Yet they also show ceramic olive jars, Chinese porcelain cups, Spanish gin bottles, French medical instruments and other testaments to a rapidly globalizing world: a metaphorical gold mine for archaeologists.

To read the complete article, see:
Billions in treasure lie on the seafloor. Finders keepers? (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/30/treasure-hunter-shipwreck-treasure-san-jose/)

 

To read earlier E-Sylum articles, see:
SPANISH GALLEON SAN JOSE FOUND (https://www.coinbooks.org/v21/esylum_v21n22a38.html)
THE LEGENDARY SAN JOSE WRECK (https://www.coinbooks.org/v27/esylum_v27n28a23.html)

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