Episode 42: The San Jose Galleon

This episode is a deep dive into the so-called “Holy Grail of Shipwrecks”: the San Jose Galleon. Come for the Dutch gin bottles and hypothetical emeralds, stay in spite of the monster demon fish (dolphins) and my meltdown over dodgy research methodologies. Episode features track "Enigmatic and Alluring" by Universfield, sourced from Freesound.

Transcript

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Wait, am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. All right, let's bango.

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Hello and welcome to Stuff About Things, an Art History Podcast. I am your host, Lindsay. Hello, and I have my PhD in art history, which I use on my little corner of the interwebs to tell you stuff about all kinds of cool things. Thank you for joining me for episode 42, which is yet another full-length episode that started as a mini sode. It is amazing how often that happens. Then again, so many of you appreciated the longer episode last time, so I'm going to give the people what they want. Now the trade-off for that is it takes longer to make the episodes, though I will say when I looked back and saw I hadn't posted since mid-August, my flabbers were downright gasted. What is time and how is it moving so dang fast? But if you're looking for more bite-sized art history to keep you occupied between episodes, I have just the thing for you. That is an Instagram page run by my personal friend, an art historian extraordinaire, Dr. Julie James. Julie is the one woman mastermind and muscle behind the Adventuring Art Blog, which you can find on Instagram under the handle at AdventuringArtblog. Now I'm not plugging this Instagram because Julie is my dear friend, though she is. I'm plugging it because it's amazing and very high quality. The content she posts includes everything from scenic shots of arts and architecture to multi-part mini lectures based on her past and current work and classes. This summer, for instance, she posted all kinds of content from her introduction to Asian art class. And this semester, there's been a lot on Renaissance women, which I know is a topic that a lot of you out there are interested in. Julie also posts with remarkable consistency, which is something that takes a lot of work. So if that sounds like something you'd be into, go give Adventuring Art blog a follow, and you can tell Julie, who listens to this, hey Julie, that Lindsay sent you. But you're here now with me, about to embark on an adventure. This episode, episode 42, is kind of related to episode 41, in which I cover a shipwreck known as the Epistos. That wreck was the center of contemporary artist Damien Hurst's 2017 exhibition, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. But the epistos was truly unbelievable in every sense of the word. Not least of all, because it never happened, never existed. It was a complete conceit in the name of conceptual art. As I was researching and writing that episode, though, I was reading a ton about shipwrecks, real ones, and watching basically any shipwreck documentary I could find across the 57 streaming platforms that I currently pay for. As a result, I decided that I wanted to do an episode on an actual shipwreck, and there was only really ever one contender for what that would be. I also mentioned the topic to my mom. Hi mom. And she got really excited, so this one is for her. And you, but mostly for her. That is what brings us here to the part where I tell you stuff about the so-called holy grail of shipwrecks, one said to contain the greatest treasure ever lost at sea. The sailing, sinking, and salvaging of the Spanish galleon, the San Jose. Two minutes. It was all the man was asking for. Two minutes. All things considered, it was a rather strange request. This was not the place where one expected to be accosted, no sidewalk where clipboard-wielding volunteers called out to passers by. It was an embassy reception, one populated by well-dressed diplomats and civil servants. Even so, two minutes seems a relatively tame request of a stranger's time. But when that stranger is the president of a foreign nation, the ask becomes a little bit bolder. There is also the fact that the man wasn't asking per se. His exact words had been a command of sorts. In all fairness, it must have been hard for the man to contain himself. He had been waiting for this moment for over 38 years. The man had to take whatever chance he could get. Against his better judgment, the president was intrigued. Not least of all because the man was carrying something large and rectangular under his arm. Usually, when someone was carrying a strange, unidentified object, the president got a little worried. But this was an embassy event. The man would have been vetted. The man had brought with him a map, one that he had gone through the trouble of framing. The map was old, with all the hallmarks of the 18th century. It likely took the president a moment to get his bearings, or perhaps he recognized this slice of coastline right away. After all, it belonged to his own country, Colombia. The man with the map, however, was concerned only with a single detail. He pointed a long pale finger at the spot, momentarily obscuring the three words written there in a small practiced hand. The words said, Bajo del Almirante. Before he spoke, the man's blue eyes swept the area, checking the room for eavesdroppers before speaking in a ragged whisper. This map is not known to anyone. The site does not appear on any other map. It almost guarantees that I know where the galleon is. The president, of course, knew exactly what a galleon was. Long before his days of designer suits and carrying the weight of the nation on his shoulders, the president had been a sailor. The man with the map was also no stranger to the ocean. If you had asked him, he would have said that he was a marine archaeologist. If you had asked a marine archaeologist, they would have different words for what this man did. To them, he was little more than a well-trained treasure hunter. But a treasure hunter was exactly what this situation called for. This map was the key, the very thing both men had been waiting for for a very long time. This bit of map could only be referring to one admiral, and therefore to only one ship, one that had suffered a tragic fate some three centuries before, taking hundreds of lives with it as it sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The ship, however, was also said to be carrying something else: gold, silver, and other treasure, the location of which, the map, seemed to show. Years later, the president and the man would claim that the untold amount of gold and silver said to have gone down with this ship was of no never mind to them. It was instead the history, the heritage, the culture that interested them most. Despite these noble claims, the pull of gold is strong. It was infamous conquistador Hernán Cortes who said it best. What history has shown us, however, is that humanity has not yet realized that even when it comes to gold, the difference between medicine and poison is in the dose. On that night in December of 2014, for the president and the man with the map, the future must have felt golden. There was no way for either man to know just how difficult the next few years would be. Filled with excitement and adventure, yes, but also profound challenges. But like gold, the ocean too is a siren, a force of nature that has lured so many men to their deaths, pulling them down into depths so deep and dark that not even gold can glitter. That is, until someone brings it back to the surface, which is exactly what the president and the man with the map were intending to do. As I shared at the top of the episode, when I decided that I wanted to do an episode on a shipwreck, there was only really ever one option that came to mind: a ship so legendary that it's earned the popular nickname the Holy Grail of Shipwrecks. I mean, need I say more. In many ways, though, the San Jose is better than even the Holy Grail itself, that mythical chalice of Arthurian lore. Because the San Jose is definitely demonstrably, unequivocally real. You might be asking, Lindsay, what does a shipwreck have to do with art history? My very professional answer to you is it depends. What does it depend on? A lot of things. Including things like the historical context surrounding the ship, to how not specific you're willing to be when defining art. Even then though, I grant you that a shipwreck is not generally considered art, but it absolutely is material culture, which is to say an object or site that contributes to our understanding of how a society or culture functioned and developed. But to be perfectly honest, I don't really think about these things before I jump into an episode. I don't think, can this be art history? Can it be archaeology? Like, I just I don't think about it that way. The San Jose just caught my attention. I started reading about it, and things got out of control as they usually do. That is all to say. If you're here for art history, I hope you enjoy this episode all of the same. And if you're here just to hear about the San Jose, I hope that maybe I can get you interested in listening to a couple of other episodes. One of the reasons that I love doing sort of out-of-pocket topics on the podcast is just how much I learn over the course of researching and writing the episode. For example, one of my favorite facts that I learned while researching the San Jose was just how many shipwrecks there have been throughout history. Over three million, three million! In a way, I guess it makes sense because people have been sailing a lot longer than they've been driving. But still, it blew my mind. The vast majority of those three million wrecks will never ever be found. And for 307 years, the San Jose was among their ranks. But no more. Or, as they would say in Espanol, pero no más. Despite being the so-called holy grail of shipwrecks, though, the average person probably has not heard of the San Jose. And if they have, they likely learned about it in the past nine years. Because on December 4th, 2015, almost a year to the day that President of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos was approached by a strange man with a map at an embassy reception, that he released the following statement on the most presidential of platforms, Twitter. Great news, we found the galleon San Jose. The very next day, December 5th, President Santos held a press conference in Cartagena, a port town on Colombia's northern coast, the very place the galleon had been trying to reach at the time of its sinking. At that press conference, President Santos declared the discovery of the San Jose as quote, one of the greatest, if not the biggest, discoveries of submerged patrimony in the history of mankind. End quote. Now I think the Titanic might fight you on that one, but we'll go with it. In this episode, I'm gonna cover it all, from the ship's making to its sinking to its discovery. But first, before I dive any deeper into the story of the San Jose, I want to credit some sources. For all this talk about the San Jose being the holy grail of shipwrecks, there's really not a ton of scholarly or sort of substantiative journalistic work about it. So let's give credit where credit is due. The first source that I want to shout out is a book, The Treasure of the San Jose by Carla Ron Phillips. That book was published in 2007, well before the 2015 discovery of the wreck, and so it focuses almost exclusively on the historical background of the San Jose, its crew, its fleet, etc. It's very much an academic source. It doesn't really make for breezy reading, but it was super helpful, as were a few of the articles that Carla Ron Phillips has also written. So massive props to her. The second source that I relied on very heavily for writing this episode is an article by Julian Sancton that appeared in the February 2022 Vanity Fair magazine issue. That article is entitled What Lies Beneath, which I desperately hope is a reference to the Harrison Ford Michelle Pfeiffer movie of 2000, which is a movie I saw in the theater far too young, which probably explains my deep suspicion of bathtubs and potentially marriage. And that jazzy title of the article is only just a hint of what lies beneath, because Sancton's article is excellent. I'm also very excited to see that he has a book coming out in January of 2026 that seems to be an expanded version of it. That is 100% going on my reading list. A book that should also be on your reading list is The Underworld by Susan Casey, which contains a chapter dedicated to the San Jose. That is very much in the same vein as Sancton's article, so it's very easy to read, it's well researched, it's beautifully written, and if you enjoy that chapter, I am sure you'll enjoy all the others as well. The final source I want to celebrate at the start of the episode is the work of Spanish journalist Jesus Garcia Calero. I found Calero's articles to be incredibly helpful, and at times full of sass, which I enjoy. He's Spanish, so that makes a lot of sense. And no, I'm not making a blanket statement about Spaniards being spicy, but rather that Spain and the people in Spain who care about this stuff have very strong feelings about it, as they should. I have the very strong feeling that if not for Julian Sankton, Carla Bron Phillips, Susan Casey, and Jesus Garcia Calero, that this episode would be the length of President Santos's 2015 tweet. Shoutouts given, let's reward the San Jose. Except not really, because if you were aboard the San Jose, spoiler alert, there was like a 98% chance you'd be dead, which is tough stuff. First, let's address the mythical chalice in the room. How did the San Jose earn its popular moniker of the holy grail of shipwrecks? The answer is simple. The day the San Jose sank, it was carrying untold amounts of treasure. I go deep into the treasure talk uh in the second half of the episode. So if that's what you came for, don't worry. But if you wanted brevity, you came to the wrong place. The historical context is critical for understanding the why behind all of it. And so I am going to go back to the beginning, like the beginning beginning. A beginning that starts with death. In the year 1700, a man named Charles died a truly horrific death at the seemingly young age of 39. I say seemingly young age, because being 34, I am obligated by my own, you know, denial of mortality to call 39 young. But it's almost a miracle that Charles made it that far. Because I am, of course, talking about Charles II of Spain, who was the product of generations of inbreeding. In addition to dying slowly and horrifically, Charles died without a direct heir, which is a big no-no when you're a king, because it throws into question who inherits the crown. Now, Charles had been clear in his will that he wanted his great-nephew Philip to take over the throne. Philip was part of the Bourbon dynasty, aka he be French. Previous iterations of Charles's will, however, named a different heir, one belonging to the illustrious Habsburg family over in Austria, and who boy were the Habsburgs pissed when they found out a Bourbon of Frenchman was set to inherit the Spanish throne. The War of Spanish Succession ensued, with the French and the Spanish on one side, the Bourbon side, and the Holy Roman Empire, the English and the Dutch, on the other. For our purposes, all you really need to remember is this. One, there's a war happening, and two, the Spanish and the English are not amigos. They are in fact mortal enemies. One of the biggest things at stake in this war was maritime trade routes, especially those going to the Americas, which had been colonized in the previous centuries by European powers, much to the distress and devastation of the people already living there. Whoever won this war in Europe got to reap the massive economic benefits of those trade routes and the colonies at large. In order to do that, you need boats, ships, stuff that floats. And Spain's ships floated with the best of them. Without a doubt, the greatest ship type of the 1500 and 1600s was the galleon, which were huge multi-decked wooden ships. For my parts of the Caribbean fans out there, the Black Pearl was a galleon. That's the kind of ships we're talking about. At first, galleons were exclusively made to carry cargo. But as time went on, cargo ships, especially big ones, became major targets for pirates or other adversarial forces. Because of that, galleons started being outfitted for self-protection with things like cannons, also called guns. To be clear, not the kind that go pew, you know, the kind that go boom boom. So galleons became part cargo ship, part warship. At the heart of our episode today is one galleon in particular, the San Jose. The San Jose and its sister ship, the San Joaquin, were built at the tail end of the Great Age of the Spanish galleon. And it feels weird to say sister ship because they're both named after male saints, but you know, whatever. Their construction started in 1697, and by 1698, they were ready to go, which was impressive because these boats are freaking huge. The most characteristic thing about the San Jose, though, was its cannons. Some sources say there were 62, others say 64, but whatever the number. The important thing is that these cannons were made of bronze and they feature dolphin imagery. Remember that for later in the episode. Bronze cannons with dolphin imagery. The San Jose's sister ship, the San Joaquin, was almost identical to the San Jose. The two always sailed together, often if not always, with other smaller boats that altogether formed a fleet. The San Jose served as the head of the fleet, known as the Capitana or the Admiralship, while the San Joaquin was the vice admiral of the fleet. The San Jose, the San Joaquin, and a third, much smaller boat called the Santa Cruz, were drafted into the War of Spanish Succession around 1700. In the spring of 1706, which was about midway through the war, the fleet undertook a very important mission. They were to sail across the Atlantic Ocean to South America. In the six years since the war started, no ship had sailed that route. It was considered far too dangerous, given that the British had a very strong presence in the Caribbean. They were just waiting down there, ready to cause some trouble. By 1706, the risk was worth it, because the Spanish crown was getting desperate for money to fund the bourbon side of the war efforts. There was no better place to get money than the colonies, which the crown was wringing dry of their resources over in South America. And so the San Jose and its fleet set sail. The commander of the San Jose, and therefore the fleet, was a man by the name of Don Jose Fernandez de Santillán, also known as Count Casa Alegre. Now, Casa Alegre was a man who basically bought his way into this position by giving the Spanish royal family a lot of money over the course of his career. That's one way to get a promotion. Another way? And that is how people who probably shouldn't have been the captain of a fleet become the captain of a fleet. Casa Alegre was joined by over 600 others on board the San Jose. 600 people. The San Jose was big, but it wasn't 600 people kind of big. It would have been very tight quarters, and it sounds like one of my many versions of hell. Unfortunately, as is the way of history, we know very little about the vast majority of these 600 plus people. In fact, we probably know more about 10 or 15 of them than we know about all of the rest combined. What we do know is that about half of those 600 men were soldiers and artillerymen, so defense people, while about 200 were responsible for the daily tasks involved in maintaining and sailing the ship. As for the other 100-ish people on board, they would have included a couple of priests, traveling dignitaries, people moving back and forth between the crown and the colonies. I mean, they all had different reasons for being on board, and all of those reasons must have been pretty good because there wasn't a ton of space to spare. It took the fleets about five to six weeks to sail from Spain to Cartagena, the port town in present-day Colombia. I am saying present-day locations of all of these places just to give you a sense of where they are on the map. But know that at this time in the early 1700s, we are talking about a single colonial entity, one known by the fancy name of the Viceroyalty of Peru. This viceroyalty covered a big swath of the upper and western parts of the South American continent. So that's what we're working with here. When the fleet arrived in Cartagena in late April of 1706, it wasn't empty-handed or empty-hulled. In addition to the hundreds of people that would have been aboard all of the ships, the fleet was also carrying merchandise that was supposed to revive a fair or a trading market in present-day Panama. That fair was known as the Portobello Fair, that is where individuals from all over South American colonies would come together for the purposes of trade. And this fair was huge. It involved a lot of people coming from a lot of places to sell a lot of things. But in all of the hullabaloo of the war, no one in Cartagena had gotten word that the Spanish fleet was coming. So there had been absolutely zero preparations to prepare for the fair. To boot, a lot of these people and goods were coming from places like present-day Peru, which is on the western coast of South America. But in the early 1700s, the Panama Canal didn't exist, so anything coming from the west coast had to be boogied up to the northernmost port and then schlepped over land. That could take months to arrange. This already very complex and slow task of arranging the fair was slowed further by the fact that in the absence of a lot of Spanish oversight, traders, as in people who barter goods, traders in places like Peru had established nice little side gigs for themselves in a legal trade. There was very little incentive for them to speed things up because many of them were doing just fine. I mean, can you blame them? Who wants to move their goods across large swaths of land and sea when you can just stay home? None of this is helped by the fact that the viceroyalty of Peru was undergoing a transition of power. The new viceroy, the new guy in charge of the colony had arrived on the San Jose, and it took him forever to get between Cartagena and Lima. I think it took him something like a year. Only then did these merchants and traders finally start to scoot their boots. In all, it took over two years for this fair to take place. Two years. Now where was the San Jose and its fleet during this time? Hanging out in Cartagena, that's where. For two years, all in the name of a fair that when it did happen was over and done in a matter of weeks. Was it worth it? At the time, heck yeah. That said, despite my best efforts, and I have spent hours, literally hours, on this, probably days. Oh my gosh, I'm so sad. But anyway, I get very confused when it comes to just how much this fair made, because part of it would have been for the crown and part of it would have been made by individual merchants. In Carloron Phillips's book, she gives a very specific number for how much was due to the Crown of Spain in the aftermath of the fair. That number is 1,551,609 pesos and 7 reales. And that is infuriating because it's 8 reales to a peso. So if they would have scrounged up one extra reale, we would have an even number. Bah. However, oh my gosh. Okay, however, in an essay that she wrote just one year later, or that was published one year later, should I say, she suggested 1.5 million in profit was loaded on board the San Jose. So if that was half of the fair profits, the total profit would have been about 3 million pesos. Maybe she's including merchant profits in that, I don't know. I looked at these things for a really long time, and the longer I looked, the more confused that I got. But that just goes to show. Sometimes research kicks your butt. It is a lesson I have learned before and one that I shall learn again. By late May 1708, two years after the fleet had arrived, they were finally ready to head back to Spain. The route, however, would not be direct. The fleet first had to sail back from Portobello to Cartagena before scooting up to Havana, where a fleet of French ships would be waiting to provide additional security for the trip across the Atlantic. From Portobello to Cartagena to Havana, this fleet of about 16 ships was on its own, with the San Jose and the San Joaquin serving as both the primary treasure mules and the military muscle of this configuration. Those two ships alone had over 100 cannons on board. Plenty of guns to keep them and their cargo safe, at least for a time. One major problem was that the British also had a colony in the Caribbean, Jamaica, which was the perfect place for the British to hunker down and obsessively track the movements of the Spanish fleet. The man in charge was named Admiral Charles Wagner, and he had one very important task: intercept the ships carrying the treasure and give that treasure to the British and their allies. Wagner commanded a fleet of four ships that together had about the same number of cannons as the Spanish fleet. When they got word that the fair had ended, the British sailed south, putting themselves between the Spanish fleet and the ports at Cartagena. The captain of the San Jose, Casa Alegre, knew all of this, and he decided to sail anyway. His rationale for doing so is not totally clear, but from those interviewed after the fact, it seems like most of the people involved in this decision knew it was a really bad idea. But hey, I can't judge because we've all done crazy things to get home. And these guys had been away from Spain for over two years. Now, in retrospect, this decision was indeed a very bad one. One that would cost the captain and hundreds of others their lives. So it's not exactly the same as me, you know, like sleeping overnight in the airport. But still, they wanted to go home. And in doing that, they never made it home at all. The sailing time from Portobello to Cartagena was about 10 days. The San Jose and its fleet were about one day away from reaching Cartagena when British ships appeared on the horizon, which is no bueno. It was so no bueno, not good, that after a little jukin and jivin', the San Jose's captain realized that there would be no outrunning Admiral Wagner. Instead, the Spanish fleet was going to have to fight. On June 8, 1708, the fighting commenced just as the sun dipped under the horizon. The fighting was fierce and chaotic, all the more so as darkness hit. All we know for certain is that after about an hour and a half of near constant gunfire, something happened to the San Jose. One minute it was there in the fight of its life, and in the next it was gone. This was no Titanic-esque slow sink. By all accounts, the San Jose was basically swallowed up in the ocean in a matter of minutes. The British claimed that an explosion ripped through the hull of the ship, causing a blaze of heats and fiery debris to rain down from the dark sky. Oh my god, can you imagine? The prevailing theory, at least for a very long time, until like two weeks ago, was that the powder magazine of the San Jose exploded after being hit by enemy fire or potentially one of its own cannons misfiring. Whatever the cause, the San Jose sunk with remarkable swiftness, taking almost every one of the over 600 people aboard down with it. Only about 12 people survived, all of whom recalled being on board one second and in the water the next. This entire situation proved to be an absolute disaster for both the Spanish and the British. The British had managed to capture just the smallest of the Spanish ships, the Santa Cruz, which would have held a fraction of what had been loaded onto the San Jose and the San Joaquin. The San Joaquin, for its part, managed to outrun the British and reach Cartagena. The same could not be said of the San Jose, which came to rest at the bottom of the ocean, its treasure as lost to the world as the lives of those who went down with the ship. And the ship would remain lost for over 300 years. Bum bum bum. For something now known as the holy grail of shipwrecks, it's actually not all that surprising that the San Jose faded so quickly into the margins of history after its sinking in 1708. For one, it sank during a pretty upheavaless, which is not a word, but um an upheavaless time, with the War of Spanish Succession raging on, and two, it went down in the open ocean miles off the shore of Cartagena. So even if by some miracle someone knew exactly where it sank, which they didn't, there was no way of getting to it. The ship might as well have been wiped off the face of the earth, and it kind of was. But times change, as does technology, something that was absolutely essential, not just to the discovery of the San Jose, but of many other shipwrecks the world over. Let's talk about that discovery. As you heard at the top of the episode, the formal search for the San Jose was catalyzed by a 2014 meeting between a man and the president of Colombia. The president of Colombia was Juan Manuel Santos. The man with the map was Roger Dooley. During that encounter, Dooley presented President Santos with that old map that allegedly marked the very place where the San Jose sank. Now, how did Dooley come across this map? As the best, most unexpected adventures do, Dooley's hunt for the San Jose started while he was researching another Spanish galleon. While doing archival research in Seville about that different shipwreck, Dooley came across a cache of letters pertaining to the San Jose. That find started Dooley's almost 40-year obsession with finding the ship. In addition to things like historical logs about wind directions, you know, sound scintillating, one of Dooley's prized sources was a book written by a former pilot of the San Jose, one who knew the ship's final route really well, but was obviously not on board the ship when it sank, because he, you know, lived. But wind directions and pilots' logs weren't all dooley be doing. At the same time that he was raking through the archives in the early 2000s, he was also closely monitoring, and perhaps even lobbying for changes to Colombian laws regarding underwater heritage sites. In 2013, for example, Colombia passed a law that allowed private salvage companies that discovered or assisted with the salvage of shipwrecks to keep up to 50% of the value of things not considered cultural patrimony. So let's say a site had, I don't know, a couple hundred thousand of the same coin. Colombia would keep however many best examples of those coins, and the rest would be divvied up or potentially sold off, in which case the private company that helped find the shipwreck or the site would take home 50% of those things or the profits from them. Dooley, who had been working with such companies his whole career, was closely monitoring all of these developments, if not actively lobbying for them. He was also at the same time searching for an investor, one who could fund Dooley's search for the San Jose, which after decades of research had finally yielded promising leads. Dooley stumbled upon his greatest lead, or what he claims is his greatest lead, sometime in 2014, when he was studying maps at the Library of Congress. It was there when consulting an old map that probably looked like all of the other old maps, that he saw the words Bajo del Almirante, Shoals of the Admiral. Shoals referring to a kind of sandbar or shallow area. Shoals of the Admiral. The map in question was dated to 1729, just 21 years after the galleon sank off the coast of Cartagena. Around the same time that Dooley found this map, he also found an investor. For a long time we knew absolutely nothing about this man except he was a finance guy in London, one Dooley simply referred to as the originator, which for whatever reason makes me feel uncomfortable. In 2023, years after the fact, this mystery man was revealed to be Anthony Clake, who works at one of the biggest hedge funds in the world. Now, interestingly, investing in deep-sea treasure hunting missions is not uncommon among the rich. The idea is that investors would sink money into maritime explorations, and if nothing was found, which was the most likely scenario, they could write off that investment and save money on their taxes. Now, to a normal person like me and probably you, that sounds straight up ridiculous. But I think we're just too middle class to understand rich people crime schemes. And this was indeed a crime, or at least it became one. It turns out that the engineers behind this plot had somehow managed to get investors tax breaks that were sometimes double the amount of the original investment. So let's say you invested $75,000. Somehow, I don't know how, somehow they made it so that you could claim a tax break that would save you $150,000 in your taxes. Like you would get that money back. And if something was found, oh my god, you could earn back that investment and exponentially more. It was a win-win situation. That is, until investigators came a call-in, which they did. In 2012, the British government did a massive crackdown on these illegal shenanigans. And so these days, shipwreck hunting has become less of a safe investment than it had been before. And yet, Anthony Claik invests on. How brave. Using the tax haven of Switzerland as a home base, Claik and Dooley founded a company called Maritime Archaeology Consultants, or Mac for short. The company had one mission: find and recover the San Jose. Map? Czech. Ridiculously wealthy and ethically dubious investor, also Czech. All that Dooley had to do was get Colombia on board. Now you'd think that'd be difficult, or at least I thought that would be difficult, but it turns out the hardest part was just getting in touch with the president, which to be fair did take some time. In December of 2014, however, Dooley managed to snag a plus one to an embassy reception that President Santos was set to attend. But it was during that reception that Dooley asked for two minutes of the president's time, and during that two plus minutes, presented him with the framed copy of the 1729 map. It's all something out of national treasure. Within days of that early December 2014 meeting, Dooley was on the phone with Columbia's Minister of Culture, who eventually greenlit the project. The thing is, Mac, Dooley and Claykes Venture, Mac was just a consulting firm. They didn't really have. The manpower or the technology to undertake a massive search for the holy grail of shipwrecks. In order to carry out the search, Mac partnered with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Oceanographic is a really hard word to say, and I'm like 75% sure that uh 100% sure that I'm not saying it right. But Woodshole, does that name ring a bell? No, maybe. If you have heard of Woods Hole before, in all likelihood it's because this company, Woods Hole, found the shipwreck to end all shipwrecks. The Titanic. Woods Hole helped find that in the 80s, in large part due to the expertise of Robert Ballard, who worked for Woods Hole for a few decades. Thirty years after finding the Titanic, Woods Hole was helping to search for another shipwreck to end all shipwrecks, the San Jose. With both the blessing and the involvement of the Colombian government and Navy, Dooley and the team at Woods Hole took to the waters of the Caribbean aboard the ship ARC Malpalo. For their search, the crew used an autonomous underwater vehicle by the name of Ramos 6000. The Ramos 6000 looks a bit like a yellow torpedo, but the only thing this missile of science is seeking are things already at the bottom of the ocean. The vehicle operates without any kind of cord, and it's positively packed with scientific instruments like cameras, sensors, and multiple systems of sonar. This is the ultimate in underwater shipwreck search and technology. That said, the Ramus 6000 finds more than just shipwrecks. Just three years before being deployed to hunt for the San Jose, a small fleet of Ramus 6000s had solved one of the greatest mysteries of the 21st century, the fate of Air France Flight 447. The plane had disappeared in 2009, taking with it the lives of 228 passengers and crew members. The Ramus fleet found the remnants of Air France at a depth of over 13,000 feet. And while there is something incredibly haunting about a shipwreck, that veers into nightmare territory when one sees the mangled remains of what was clearly an airplane on the ocean floor. If the San Jose was going to be found, the Ramus 6000 was the tool to make that happen. The vehicle moved back and forth over a search area a little bit like a lawnmower. As it did so, it sent out sonar signals that were then stored on an internal hard drive. Sonar works by translating sound waves into images. The Ramus 6000 pew pew pews out some sound waves, the echoes of those waves return, and that data gets translated into an image by assigning different color tones depending on the distance traveled by the waves. With the Ramus 6000, though, there's no real-time monitoring of the sonar feed. The Remus does its thing, the sonar waves get like the data, you know, gets gathered on the internal hard drive. The Remus surfaces, the data on the internal hard drive is transferred to an external hard drive, and that hard drive is then packed into a waterproof suitcase. Rather delightfully, it is yellow, the exact same color as the Remus, so they're twin-in. It was then delivered to professional Canadian sonar expert Gary Kozick, who had his own little impromptu office in an apartment in Cartagena, where he would sometimes, if not often, be joined by Roger Dooley. But after weeks, if not months, of searching and millions and millions of dollars invested in said search, the Ramus had found nothing. Now Dooley, Ever the spin artist, claimed this in itself was a success. After all, half the battle when searching for a shipwreck is apparently knowing where it's not. At least that's what he said. For all of his confidence about finding the wreck, and he was very confident, even proclaiming, quote, if I don't find it, I will cut my head off. End quote. Homefry was very confident. But by the time they concluded that first search, even Dooley, with all of his head cutting off confidence, must have been getting a little sweaty, a little nervous. But hey, the San Jose had been waiting for 300 years. It could wait for a few more months. And it would have to, because the ARC Malpelo, the ship they were using to do the search, was scheduled to be elsewhere, forcing the search efforts for the San Jose into a several month hiatus. The second expedition commenced in November of 2015. This expedition went a little differently than the first one, because after just one week, our boy Gary Kozick saw something in the data, an anomaly on the seafloor, one that Kozick described as, quote, a cluster of bright raised bumps that stood out like braille against the seabed. End quote. Those bumps formed what's called a signature, a shape on the ocean floor that did not get there by natural means. Kozick knew immediately that they had found something. He would later recall, quote, I have been analyzing sonar data for 45 years, and when I saw that signature, I knew that it was almost certainly the remains of an old wreck. End quote. The same exact day, the Ramus was sent out again, this time to take pictures. The wait must have been as excruciating as it was exciting, but nothing, like nothing, could have prepared the team for what they would see when Kozick plugged in the Ramus' drive to his computer. The first picture was disappointing. It was like normal sea debris. The second picture sent an absolutely electric charge through the room. And not because the computer was on the fritz. In that photo, as clear as anything, were three cannons, several of which bore the exact thing that the search team was desperate to see. Dolphins. Yes. Dolphins. Cannons from this time period, so like the late 1600s, early 1700s, maybe others, I'm not a cannon expert, but cannons from this period were often outfitted with handles that helped transport these very heavy objects. In the 17th and 18th centuries, it was common for those handles to have a kind of decorative quality. And a popular motif to feature on a maritime cannon was a dolphin. Keep in mind, back in the day, artists really struggled with dolphins. Uh, animals in general, really. I personally think the most accomplished dolphin artist to date has been Lisa Frank. My millennial kids will know what's up. But 17th and 18th century depictions of dolphins were whack because most artists had never seen one and just kept producing the same demonic-looking monster fish. But they are indeed dolphins, and that got everyone freaking hyped as hell because the San Jose was known for having dozens of bronze cannons with dolphin imagery. The Ramus 6000 ended up taking hundreds and hundreds of pictures of the wreck. In their efforts to analyze those photographs, the team identified at least 22 cannons, accounting for over one-third of the cannon said to be on board the San Jose. The team also identified other artifacts strewn across the ocean floor, including pots, glass bottles, porcelain cups, and even drumroll please, brrrrr, coins and bullion, aka silver, and gold. Dooley could let out a sigh of relief. There would be no need to cut his head off, because he and his team had found the holy grail of shipwrecks. They had found the San Jose. As if this wasn't exciting enough, the shipwreck looked like it was in a remarkable state of preservation. Mind you, preservation in this context is a relative term. From the perspective of a non-expert, uh, the nicest thing that I can say about it is that it looks more like a ship than anything else. So, you know, temper your expectations. The San Jose's hull had become submerged in mud in an area where currents weren't very strong, two things that have ensured its preservation. And while a lot of what was above the mud zone, as we'll call it, has since been worn away, given just how much of the hull is embedded in this mud in this very low current y zone of the ocean, there is still a good chance that a lot of the cargo thought to be on board the San Jose is still there at the bottom of the ocean. And if what is visible on the seabed is any indication, whatever is still inside the wreck is going to blow our minds. That brings me to the thing that convinced me to do the San Jose as a podcast topic. The treasure said to be aboard the ship. But, but, my interest in treasure is not a sickness of the heart, Ala Cortez and his conquistadors. It's not like I'm immune to the pull of the lore. Of course, the concept of untold treasure excites the wannabe adventure girly inside of me. After all, my greatest desire in life is to solve a historical mystery with Brendan Fraser. So sue me. But in this situation, it was not the concept of the treasure that fascinated me. In fact, it wasn't fascination at all. It was pure unadulterated frustration. Frustration? Because every article I read about the San Jose went on at length about billions of dollars of treasure aboard this ship. And then they don't tell you anything else, or goodness forbid, explain how they got the numbers that they did. To boot, the numbers themselves are all over the damn place, and they just keep getting bigger. Articles from 2015, when the galleon was first discovered, estimated its treasure to be about 1 billion dollars. Yeah, billion with the B. Nothing to sneeze at. But as time went on, that number ballooned. 5 billion, 10 billion, 20 billion dollars. In 2024, the most common number I see thrown around is 17. 17 billion dollars of treasure. One number you don't see mentioned very often is 600, the number of people who went down with the ship. But hey, why spoil Taca treasure with death? Bleh. Before anyone gets on me about Lindsay, the treasure of the wreck goes beyond the money. Yes, of course it does. I will get to that. But let's be real, if it weren't for this legendary treasure, very few people outside of the world of maritime archaeology would give a fig about the San Jose. The ship is legendary because of its promise of gold and things like glitter. $17 billion of it, apparently. After months, yes, months, of research, I am still not super satisfied with the information that I found about the ship and its cargo. The too long didn't listen version of the next 15 minutes is that it's impossible to know exactly what is at the site, much less determine its present-day monetary value. Because of that, treasure hunters and the media who be hunting for clicks can basically throw increasingly wild numbers out there and no one can prove them wrong. The few academics who have tackled this issue, though, caution that all this talk of $10, $15, $20 billion is completely unhinged. With that little summary given, let's go over what we do know, in large part thanks to the scholarship of Carla Ron Phillips. The only thing that we know for sure is that the San Jose was likely carrying half of the profits made at the Portobello Fair, with the other half being loaded on the San Joaquin. Everything else is guesswork. One of the most important documents that we have to make educated guesses about the San Jose's cargo is the inventory that was made when the San Joaquin docked in Spain. Carla Ron Phillips provides a translation of that inventory in her book, which I'm going to link on the podcast's website. If I am reading that inventory correctly, the San Joaquin was carrying over 600,000 pesos in addition to its half of the fare profits. That amount, the 600,000 pesos, includes things like taxes, rent from lodging houses, donations or gifts of money, the money of deceased individuals who died without heirs, don't do that, no no no. Have we not learned from Charles II? The amounts also included things like fines paid by merchants, and a recurring item simply called the royal treasure, intriguing, which I assume, from context clues, is like a tax to the crown. In addition to all of that, there were also line items that lacked a specific monetary value, such as items like, quote, tribute of gold and pearls, end quote. That would have likely been what's known as the Royal Fifth, which is basically a tax on luxury goods produced in the colonies. The crown got one-fifth of whatever they'd be doing. This inventory for the San Joaquin is by far the greatest hint as to what might have been aboard the San Jose, because the two ships would have been carrying about the same amount of goods at any given time. However, however, however, it is unclear when some of the inventoried items were loaded onto the San Joaquin. Remember, the San Joaquin made it to Cartagena after the battle. That was always the plan, to go back to Cartagena. And while I don't know a whole lot about ships and stuff, I would guess that a lot of the inventoried items, specifically related to things like taxes and lodging houses, that kind of stuff, were loaded onto the San Joaquin then rather than before it left for Portobello. But that's only my head trying to be rational. There's really no way of knowing one way or the other. To make matters even more confusing, the vast majority of treasure on board these ships was neither declared nor inventoried. There were lots of people on board who were carrying their own private fortunes of gold, silver, and gems that they stashed away in chests, pouches, pockets, and other receptacles. For example, merchants on board the ship did not have to declare these goods. And those who did have to declare those goods did everything they could to hide things so as to avoid taxation. Classic. Tax schemes, something that unites us across centuries. The fact that so much of the wealth on board the ship was private and undeclared has left the door open for these increasingly hopeful and even delusional claims for just how much the ship might have been carrying when it sank. As the ship and its treasure have become more mythic in proportion, these numbers have only grown. Enter stage left, Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his 1985 book Love in the Time of Cholera. Bet you weren't expecting that reference. But Marquez is an excellent example of how, one, our imaginations often run away with us, and two, literary embellishment. In that book, when writing about Cartagena, Marquez brings up a famous yet undiscovered shipwreck that sank off the coast of the city, the San Jose. I am going to read the English translation of the paragraph in question. It's beautiful, some are read it in full. Quote: On Friday, June 8th, 1708, at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, the galleon San Jose set sail for Cidiz, with a cargo of precious stones and metals valued at 500 billion pesos in the currency of the day. It was sunk by an English squadron at the entrance of the port, and two centuries later it had not been salvaged. That treasure lying in its bed of coral, and the corpse of the commander floating sideways on the bridge, were evoked by historians as an emblem of the city drowned in memories. Yep, you heard that right. 500 billion pesos. What in the cholera loving hell is Marquez talking about? It turns out that this is all just a big misunderstanding. More specifically, a mistranslation of the Spanish. Marquez actually wrote million, not billion. The person translating it to English just really screwed that up. Even so, I have no idea how Marquez chose 500 million as his number, but he's an author likely exercising some literary license, not a historian. There's also the fact that if the San Jose was indeed carrying 500 million pesos, it wouldn't have needed any help sinking. It would have been at the freaking bottom of the port at Portobello. Straight to the bottom. Compared to an author like Marquez, historians have a very different view of the likely cargo on board the ship when it sank. Even better are the views of the people directly involved in the event. Apart from the inventory taken of the San Joaquin, the other best piece of evidence we have regarding the cargo of the San Jose, or that we can use to make educated guesses about that cargo, that comes from the testimony given by the captain of the San Joaquin after the San Jose sank. In that testimony, the captain of the San Joaquin, a man by the name of Villanueva, estimated the amount of treasure aboard his ship at the time to be about 8 to 9 million pesos, with an additional 3 million waiting to be retrieved in Cartagena. Based on how Spanish ships operated and were supposed to operate, the San Jose should have been carrying almost exactly the same amount as the San Joaquin. 8 to 9 million. For her part, when Carla Ron Phillips gives her best guess as to the value of the San Jose's cargo at the time of its sinking, she also gives a similar estimate of about 10 million pesos. That includes fair profits, private fortunes by the people on board, gold and silver objects, all of it worth about ballpark 10 million pesos. As for what this treasure would be worth today, it is literally impossible to say. And don't get on me about trying to slither out of giving you a number. As I will demonstrate later, I am very critical of attempts to do this kind of hypothetical math. So I'm not gonna do it. And if that's not enough of me ruining the treasure party, I also have to say that the thought of the treasure being 10, 15, 20 billion dollars is straight up laughed at by people like Carl Lavron Phillips. Of course, value isn't just monetary. As any archaeologist or historian will tell you, the quote unquote real value. Is the knowledge, the history, and the heritage present at the site? And presumably, you know, the friends you meet along the way. Sarcasm aside, my main bugaboo with the whole it's not about the treasure take on things largely stems from my profound skepticism as to whether the people saying it actually believe it. Especially if it's coming from a government official or someone working for a commercial salvage company. Not about the treasure. Yeah, right. I wasn't born yesterday, I was born almost 35 years ago. You can't fool me. I mean you can, but not about this. The only people I believe who say this about, you know, the value being the culture and the heritage are archaeologists and art historians who know better than to think they'll ever receive a single peso from the ship. No, for archaeologists and academics, the San Jose wreck site is an absolute dream, because it is essentially an untouched historical record. At the bottom of the ocean, yes. But that just means everything aboard the ship is allegedly still intact, or at least as intact as one can hope for. In her book The Underworld, Susan Casey describes the ship's excavation as opening a portal directly into the 17th and early 18th centuries. And it is absolutely just that. Remember, the San Jose wasn't just carrying treasure. It was also outfitted with everything it needed to sustain 600 plus people for weeks at a time. That included things like plates and cookware, items for the chapel aboard the ship, fighting supplies, food storage, enema syringes. Yes, enema syringes. And then there's your essentials like alcohol and more alcohol. I will pass on the enema syringe, but I will take the Dutch gin bottles, please and thank you. Though I should say that after five weeks at sea, I reserve the right to change my mind. The photographs taken by the Ramus 6000 of the wreck make it clear that there is so much more to be found at the site, some of which glitters and some that doesn't. This leads to another question: Who owns the San Jose and all of its contents at the bottom of the ocean? Second only to the amount of treasure on board this ship, the concept of ownership haunts every conversation about the San Jose. I say ownership, I'm doing air quotes around the microphone, which you can't see, but you know, whatever. Ownership, because it boggles my mind that a 300-year-old wreck on the ocean floor can have a rightful owner. But when that wreck allegedly contains billions of dollars of treasure, it makes slightly more sense. So who owns it? The answer to that is it depends. Which is to say, there's a lot of different opinions on this matter, many of which are in direct opposition to one another. It's very, very messy. But I love a bit of a mess, so let's get into it. Based on everything that I've read, and I've read a lot, including a ton of court documents, which are very boring, there are two strong contenders for the concept of ownership. Those two strong contenders are joined by an honorable mention and a previously credible contender that has since lost a lot of that credibility. I'm going to start with the honorable mention. That goes to several indigenous and Afro-Caribbean communities in South America, whose ancestors were enslaved to mine the gold and silver that everyone is in such a kerfluffle about. The silver likely came from mines in Bolivia, Peru, and the surrounding area, while the gold probably originated from New Granada, which is a region that spans the northwestern parts of the South American continent. All of that work, the mining of the gold and the silver, was unquestionably the product of slave labor. Because of that, the indigenous communities whose ancestors did that work strongly believe that the treasure aboard the San Jose should be returned to the people whose slave labor produced it. Or, you know, given that it's 300 years later, their direct descendants. The Spanish lawyer José Maria Lancho is working on behalf of those groups as a collective to stake their claim on what they believe is rightfully theirs. Writing on behalf of his clients, Lancho called for these indigenous groups to be consulted in any matters relating to the San Jose, especially any kind of excavation attempts. He went so far as to state that not consulting them would constitute, quote, an act of plunder and neocolonialism, end quote. In a 2024 interview with BBC, so quite recently, a representative for one of those indigenous groups, Samuel Flores, added, quote, this cargo belongs to our people, the silver, the gold, and we think it should be raised from the seabed to stop treasure hunters looting it. How many years have gone by? 300? They owe us that debt. End quote. Now you might be thinking, Lindsay, why are you calling this an honorable mention? Fair enough. I am calling this an honorable mention because the argument here is ethical rather than legal. And those are very different things. For those of you who have listened to the pod before, specifically the Benning Bronzes episodes, you'll know I am openly very jaded when it comes to situations like these. That is because I have seen similar arguments fail far more times than they have succeeded. That is not to say that these groups and their supporters shouldn't make the argument, because that's part of how you drive awareness that the gold and the silver that everyone's so excited about is the product of slave labor and the horrific events of colonial expansion into the Americas. As for arguments about how we today should deal with that 300 years after the fact, that tends to inspire a lot of polarized argumentation. But if you think the Colombian government is going to hand over gold and silver on this shipwreck, you bonkers. And if it does, I will cut my own head off. And before you get concerned, maybe you didn't listen to that part of the episode, I'm referencing what Roger Dooley said, not actually making a threat. I'd be left with nothing. Another reason that I am so doubtful that anything will come from these ethical arguments is because when it comes to the San Jose, it's not just that ethical and legal are two different things, depending on who you ask. Legal and legal are two different things, depending on who you ask. Case in point, the Spanish government, the government of Spain, has made a very strong argument for their ownership over the wreck and its contents. It was a Spanish ship carrying goods from Spanish-ruled colonies destined for Spain, on which 600 Spaniards died. Spain, Spain, Spain. This claim by Spain aligns with international law recognized by UNESCO, which is the cultural arm of the United Nations. Long story short, in 2001, a bunch of UN countries came together for a convention that resulted in a document recognizing best practices for the protection of underwater heritage, stuff like shipwrecks. These documents are treaties, not laws, but they do hold a lot of weights in the international community. The 2001 convention document recognizes something called sovereign immunity when it comes to shipwrecks, which is to say that any government ship being operated for non-commercial purposes remains the property of that country. That applies to shipwrecks, so in this case, the San Jose would be owned still by Spain. You'd think that makes it super obvious that Spain has first dibs, right? Not so fast, amigo. The thing is, Colombia never signed that 2001 treaty, a decision they likely made based on the hope that they would eventually find the San Jose someday. And while you might think, Lindsay, that's crazy, it's not. Because at that point, Colombia already thought they had found the San Jose, we'll get to that in a few minutes, and there are a bunch of other colonial era shipwrecks in Colombian waters. Of course, Colombia doesn't want to sign away its rights to historically and monetarily valuable fines. Is it shady? Maybe. But we can't clutch our pearls because a country is acting in its own self-interest. That's kind of what they do. Spain, for its part, is pissed off about all of this, of course they are, because obviously it wants rights to the wreck. And despite publicly claiming that their relationship to Colombia is very good, the Spanish government has also put out quite a few passive aggressive statements about defending their right to the ship. You can't see this, but I'm rolling my eyes so hard. Because, like, what are you gonna do, Spain? You gonna fight? What are you gonna do? The strongest claim over the wreck is almost certainly Colombia, the Colombian government, because the ship is in Colombian waters. For me, that is the most basic, cut and dry explanation of the ship's ownership. Now, Colombia complicates this a bit when they rhapsodize, when they talk at lengths about how the San Jose is a critical part of Colombian heritage and history. That's the part where I start to go, I don't know about this. The ship probably has a lot to tell us about colonial trade, in which what we now call present-day Colombia, specifically a city like Cartagena, participated in quite significantly. But I find this whole, you know, this is one of the most important pieces of Colombian history argument to be a little questionable. You can't help but wonder how much the Colombian government would care about this ship and its quote-unquote cultural value if it weren't for the billions of dollars of treasure said to be on board. I think I'm also just deeply suspicious of governments. I know they're like helpful and, you know, important to society. Whatever, but come on. I will say though, that a recent interview with Algena Caicedo, the general director of the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History, did a smidge to change my mind. She lured me into the gray area. Caiseo made an argument that Colombia's history, especially its time as a Spanish colony, is always told from the perception of the winners from history, which is to say the US, Spain, Europe, your usual suspects. Caicedo is instead encouraging, quote, other perspectives, another point of view. End quote. Perhaps Colombia's investigation into and study of the San Jose is one of the first windows into that new perspective. But for that, we'll have to wait and see. That brings us to our fourth contender that's actually not really a contender. But the story is pretty interesting. So, in addition to Spain, there's one other institution that has major beef with Colombia over the San Jose. A company called C Search Armada. Buckle up, because if you thought things were messy before, you ain't seen nothing yet. In 1979, a little my voice just cracked like a like a teenage voice. In 1979, two guys named Jim, Jim Maloney, and Jim Bannigan, formed a company called Glacomora, which later became CSearch Armada. That's what I'm going to call it, just for ease. The two gyms founded C Search Armada with the explicit mission of finding and salvaging the San Jose. To me, that seems a little overly specific for a company, but hey. Companies have been formed for stranger reasons, I'm sure. In the early 1980s, SeaSearch Armada gets permission from the Colombian government to do a search for the San Jose off the coast of Cartagena. And the two gyms sink a lot of money into that effort. We're talking millions of dollars. At one point, they almost made themselves a wreck. A financial wreck, that is. But after several years and expeditions, the team finally found something. Something they identified as a shipwreck, one they claim is the approximate size of the San Jose. In addition to piles of wood, of which there are photographs, the crew attests to also seeing cannons in this wreckage. Rather conveniently, a hunk of wood got stuck in the propeller of the ship they were using, which the team then tested. Those tests determined that this little hunk of wood was the same type and age of what one might expect to see on a Spanish galleon. With all of that in mind, the gyms and their team confidently proclaimed that finally, at last, the San Jose had been found. This is in 1982, a full 33 years before President Santos tweeted the same thing in 2015. Being the good two little gyms they were, the gyms reported their find to the Colombian government along with the coordinates of the supposed shipwreck. They then stuck their hands out and said, money please, and for good reason. According to Colombian law at the time in 1982, whoever found a shipwreck was entitled to a 50% finders fee. But when it came time to sign off on this deal, the Colombian government pulled a quick one and offered CSearch Armada only a 25% finders fee for whatever they found at this site. CSearch Armada refused, and the battle began. And it got ugly really fast. To the point where when the C Search Armada team went back to the wreck to quote unquote recover equipment they had lost during the initial dive, not sure I believe that one, they were intercepted by the Colombian Navy and either arrested or threatened with arrest. It's not clear how far that went, but it was all very scary. Then in 1984, two years later, the Colombian government passed a new law that reduced finders' fees from 50% to 5%. And that law could be applied retroactively. To me, that's sketchy as hell. And it means that even though C Search Armada found this alleged wreck when the law was 50%, any finders fee they could hope to get would amount to just 5%. This all kicked off a 40-year legal battle that continues to this day. When I first read this whole thing, the story of C Search Armada, I was very much on the side of C Search Armada. I thought the Colombian government was being sketchy as hell, which to be fair, they kind of were. Now, however, I am very dubious of C Search Armada's claims for a variety of reasons, while still acknowledging that the Colombian government has not handled this situation well at all. I say that because for years and years, decades even, the Colombian government did indeed believe that C Search Armada had found the San Jose. The wreck, however, was never positively identified as the San Jose because the Colombian government suspended C Search Armada's work. The company thought they found something, they reported it immediately, and then they were pulled from the search before they could definitively prove what they had found. But every story has two sides, and the Colombian government's side of the story is a bit different. They claim that the C Search Armada's search permit was about to expire, and they did not have hopes that it would be renewed. Because of that, when they found something, and they did, they found something, they piled all of their hopes and dreams on that being the San Jose despite no positive identification. Again, the Colombian government was not allowing that. There's also the very sticky fact that the coordinates reported in 1982 were not terribly accurate, which isn't unusual. 1980s technology was very, very different from current GPS technology. There was a much higher margin of error back in the 80s. And that's important because in the early 2000s, C Search Armada took the Colombian government to court, and the case ended up before the Supreme Court of Colombia, the highest court in the land of Colombia. That court ruled in favor of CSearch Armada. They said yes, the Colombian government's being sketchy as hell, and you are entitled to 50% of whatever is found at the coordinates reported. But now, it becomes a question of how much margin of error should be applied to those coordinates. A technicality that the Colombian government has clung to. The way they see it, yes, C Search Armada might be entitled to 50% of something. But if that something isn't at the coordinates provided to the court, then that's a C Search Armada problem, not a Colombian government problem. Imagine the surprise of the C Search Armada team when in 2015 President Santos gets up and proclaims that the San Jose has been discovered. Huh? How can you discover something that's already been found? The irony here is, of course, that Colombia is named after Christopher Columbus, a man famous for discovering something that was there the whole time. That's not Columbia's fault, but it does feel like a metaphor. Needless to say, SeaSearch Armada doth protest. They claim that the Colombian government used their hard work and discoveries from the 1980s to find the exact coordinates of the ship, which is allegedly just a few miles away from the coordinates established by SeaSearch Armada. Now I'm not exactly sure whether a few nautical miles is considered within the margin of error or not, but the Colombian government is adamant that the wreck they found in 2015 is completely different to whatever Seaseearch Armada found in 1982. But you'll have to take the government's word for it because the GPS coordinates are a state secret. Which I understand because you don't want to announce to people where this treasure chest is, even if it's under the sea. But also it makes it pretty convenient that SeaSearch Armada can't compare their data with the Colombian governments. As if all of that wasn't already one big mess. In 2015, when the new discovery of the San Jose was announced, the Colombian government did not release the names of those involved in the discovery of the ship. That included the identity of Roger Dooley, who Santos at the time simply described as a man with a white beard who looked like Hemingway. He literally just calls him Hemingway when he talks about him. When Dooley's involvement was finally disclosed in 2018, C Search Armada went apoplectic. They went bonkers. Because from 2000 to 2003, Dooley worked for a company closely related to C Search Armada, which somehow, I don't really understand the overlap, but somehow gave Dooley access to C Search Armada's digital archives. That's right. C Search Armada believes that Dooley stole their coordinates. Dooley, for his part, denies all of this, which, you know, of course he would. I think you can see from this story why I was initially on the side of C Search Armada. But it does seem from everything that I've read that the site C Search Armada found in 1982 is not the same one that Dooley helped discover in 2015. The one from 1982 was estimated to be about 200 meters deep, whereas the site found in 2015 is around 600 meters deep. So clearly, if that information is correct, they are not the same site. And these days, that is the general consensus. Among the scholarly community. They are two different sites. In her book The Underworld, Susan Casey even reduces this whole shebang into a single footnote, in which she essentially says, I'm not gonna talk about this because it's ridiculous. For their part, C Search Armada obviously does not agree with any of this and has claimed that there is an ongoing international conspiracy to rob C Search Armada of its rightful finders fee. To be fair, after four decades of litigation and a government acting real shady, I would probably think there was a conspiracy afoot as well. Do I get their frustration and desperation? Yes. Do I think they are entitled to the San Jose as found in 2015? No. One woman's opinion. As of June 2024, so pretty recently, CSearch Armada is still battling the government of Colombia for the rights to the San Jose. Most recently, they filed a claim with the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. That is an entity I don't fully understand, uh, but that seems responsible for helping moderate international disagreements. This particular disagreement at the level of The Hague has been ongoing for about two years. For the most recent filing, SeaSearch Armada hired both a historian and an evaluator to determine just how much the company had lost out on by not getting dibs to the ship. The historian went through and determined what he thought could be on the ship, while the evaluator determined how much those items would sell for in the present day. Allow me to say this methodology, the way that they went about doing this, is absolutely insane. You've got a historian drawing up a hypothetical inventory of what might be on board the ship. There's a table, the sort of data kind, that lists out half of the suspected cargo, including 100,008 escudo gold coins, I think that's a peso, and even something as specific as 26,974. Like, what? How did you come up with those numbers? The list also includes things like 4,000 pieces of Chinese porcelain, 15,000 emeralds, and three swivel guns, amongst other stuff. This is all nuttier than a pet squirrel. And that's not necessarily me ragging on this historian who did it. Home Fry was just doing a job. I don't have to agree with that job, but it's more about the principal than it is about the person. But if I had tried to do this in grad school, if I had presented a table of what I thought was on a ship, including a line item that says 15,000 emeralds, my department would have laughed in my face and probably reported me to the police for crimes against research. And I would have gone to research jail. Jail, listeners, jail. I am not jail material. Who knows? Maybe, I don't know, maybe I'm the one that's being unreasonable. It won't be the first time. But the production of a hypothetical inventory is one thing. The use of that hypothetical inventory as part of a court document, I do not have the words. I need to save those because it gets more bananas. Yeah, more bananas. Because then you get the evaluator who states, oh yes, each of these 15,000 emeralds would go for between 20,000 and $150,000 each. He then beep boop bops the total, which for the emeralds alone, he estimated to be between $300 million and $2 billion. $2 billion. For hypothetical emeralds. I uh I cannot. I'm going to feel really bad if someone from C Search Armada listens to this because I don't make it a point to trash talk people or you know companies on the internet. Believe me, I get why they're mad and digging their heels in. Even if I don't think that they're right. But good on them for trying. Using this highly questionable methodology, C Search Armada determined that their half, their half of the ship, the 50% finders fee, would amount to between 3.6 and 9.3 billion dollars. Meaning the overall ship would be worth something like 7 to 18.5 billion dollars. Which is just ugh. In the end, though, all of this kind of doesn't matter. Because Colombia will not be giving C Search Armada a single freaking peso. Mostly because they don't want to, but also because of how the government's attitude towards the San Jose has changed over the years, often as the result of changing political tides, but also due to controversies that have placed pressure on the government. Yes, listener, there are more controversies. It turns out that finding the shipwreck is the easy part. Because once you find it, you need to figure out what, if anything, you plan to do with it. And just as important, how you're going to pay for that. With these kinds of expeditions, whether it's the finding or the safeguarding or the excavation process, collaboration is absolutely essential. You need various branches of government support, you need archaeologists, you need contractors, you need technology, you need investors with money, and a lot of it, and of course, public support. In other words, it's a complete and total bureaucratic nightmare. That is why almost nine years after the ship's discovery, we don't know all that much more about it than we did in 2015. Alright, that's probably an exaggeration on my part. We do know more, but not nine years worth of more. At one point, President Santos even promised to build a state-of-the-art museum in Cartagena dedicated to the wreck, and he claimed he wanted excavations to begin by the time he left the presidency in 2018. Instead, on the day that he was supposed to announce the details of how the excavation would commence, back in 2018, he instead announced that he was suspending the project. Uh, excuse me? While a lot of people were shocked, it also wasn't all that shocking. I know that that's like a catch-22, but you can feel two things at once. People contain multitudes. Since confirming the discovery of the wreck in 2015, there has been significant controversy and a real lack of faith in the Colombian government's ability to conduct this matter with integrity. And that's me putting it nicely. While some critics thought that his administration was just, you know, benignly incompetent, others thought it was straight up corrupt. For example, there have been serious claims that Santos' administration had engaged in undisclosed excavation efforts, and or that the site had been targeted by looters, which the most vocal of critics strongly suggested was sanctioned by the government. While both Santos and his Minister for Culture denied those accusations, his decision to call off or, you know, suspend the project in 2018 was undoubtedly due to those mounting criticisms on behalf of both the public and professional community. One person who has been very critical about Colombia's handling of all of this is journalist Jesus Garcia Calero, the current director of the culture section of the Spanish newspaper ABC. As Calero wrote in a 2018 article, quote, The day the discovery of the San Jose Galleon was announced in Colombia in December 2015, transparency ended. There was no more verifiable data, no academic debate, no explanations, which are the basis of a scientific project. End quote. A quote, unrelenting failure, end quote. This is my kind of guy. Mad and sassy as hell. Calero is Spanish and part of the cultural sector, many of whom believe that the San Jose is the rightful property of Spain. So there's an added layer of nuance, I suppose you could say, to this rightful and righteous anger. Anger that Calero has harnessed into exposing what he clearly thinks is a corrupt and incompetent process. Calero and many others were especially critical of the private-public partnership between the Colombian government and the likes of Roger Dooley and his company, Mac. For his part, Dooley professes to be a maritime archaeologist. His employment track record, however, suggests that he may have put that training to use in ways that the average maritime archaeologist would find uh problematic. According to Colero, Dooley studied maritime archaeology in Cuba before training with a shadowy company in Canada called Visa Gold Explorations Incorporated. Dooley then returned to Cuba in the 80s to work for Cotisoup, a government-funded salvage company during the Castro regime. That quote-unquote company seems to have existed primarily for the Cuban government to mine wealth from the ocean, whether that was pulling up precious materials like coral to make jewelry, or finding and salvaging objects from shipwrecks, which seems to have been the primary aim of things. Needless to say, Dooley's work history was seen as some as a massive red flag. At one point, Mack did include one, count it, one, credentialed marine archaeologist, Dr. Menson Bound. He too has a history of working with commercial companies that aim to profit from archaeological excavations rather than pursuing them first and foremost for scholarly and cultural purposes, which doesn't necessarily mean that they're not interested in the cultural value of things. Culture and profit are not necessarily mutually exclusive. However, usually one takes precedence over the other, and if it's a commercial salvage company, that's probably going to be profit. There has been plenty of accusations about that in Dr. Bound's career. But to give Dr. Bound his due, there is no way that you get to his level of professional accomplishment without causing a fair bit of controversy. There's also the fact that he has appeared frequently on sort of national geographic, discover channel-y type shows, and sometimes the whole archaeology for entertainment thing can also bring extra critique. I mean, for Pete's sake, the Discovery Channel called him the Indiana Jones of Maritime Archaeology, by which I think they meant he does exciting and high-profile projects. But one could and probably should argue that Indiana Jones is not exactly your shining beacon of ethically and scientifically sound archaeology. I mean, my God. But that is a story for a different day. The fact remains that Dr. Bound is a legitimate marine archaeologist who no matter what his critics might say, seems quite good at his job. Case in point, in 2022, Dr. Bound achieved what many thought was impossible, when after many years of searching, he and his team found the ship The Endurance, which was part of the infamous Shackleton expedition to Antarctica. And that discovery was a huge deal in the world of maritime archaeology. Someone who is not having any of this is Jesus Garcia Calero. In another article he wrote for ABC, Calero methodically walks through everyone involved in the San Jose expedition and its promised excavation. And he reads them for absolute filth. To give you a sense of just how critical he becomes, take this sentence that Calero wrote to introduce Dooley's entry into the article. Quote, as you descend on the ladder of the Mac company, everything gets worse. End quote. In the end, Mac and Dooley and their investors and Dr. Bound and everyone got played as much as anyone else. Because under new president Ivan Duque, Colombia began to change its tune, emphasizing archaeological efforts at the San Jose site over actively excavating it. Basically, that amounts to let's look, not touch. The newest and current president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, has taken more of a middle road than Duque or Santos. Unlike in Duque's presidency, conversations about salvaging and excavating the sites, touching, are back on the table. However, Petro's Minister for Culture, Juan Correa, insists that the focus of all of their efforts is first and foremost on archaeology, and the Colombian Institute for Anthropology and History has gone so far as to designate the site as a protected archaeological area. That means that everything on site is now considered cultural heritage and it cannot be sold for profit. I don't think it can be sold or given away at all. That means companies like Mac will receive absolutely nothing for their efforts to date, including no government contracts for excavation or salvage. Something that Dooley had thought was all but in the bag during President Santos's administration. Whether the wreck should be salvaged is another major controversy. Do you salvage it? Do you leave it be? Do you look but not touch? What are we gonna do? For a hot second there, President Santos had been talking as if he wanted to bring the entire galleon to the surface. And while that might sound like science fiction, it's happened before. See the Mary Rose or the Vasa, two ships that were salvaged from the ocean floor that now enjoy their very own museums. But more often than not, it takes hundreds of millions of dollars and years and years and years to carry out. Even then, such projects are more likely to end in disaster than a fully functioning museum raking in lots of money. Most professionals think that doing any kind of archaeological excavation at the site, much less bringing the ship to the surface, would result in absolute disaster and irrevocably damage the cultural value of the site. It would be like contaminating a crime scene. And once you start messing with the site, you can't go back. To boot, in 20, 30, 40 years, we might have different technological and scientific resources than we do now. I mean, we undoubtedly will. Just look at the difference in archaeology between the original search for the San Jose in 1982 and the technology they're using today. It's completely different. So why not just wait until we have the resources to do a better job? And then you get to the really big question: who is paying for all of this? Where is the money coming from? Because you're gonna need a lot of money to do basically anything at the site, whether that's looking, whether that's touching, you need money. Money, money, money. It is entirely possible and even probably likely, that this kind of project will cost upwards of a hundred million dollars to undertake. And that is money that Columbia does not have. At least it doesn't have it to spare. Most of my listeners are in the United States, I know that, but just imagine if right now, when people are super concerned with the price of groceries and gas and things like that, if the US government announced that it was going to sink upwards of a hundred million dollars into the salvaging of a shipwreck, people would probably be really upset. This question of where the money's coming from creates a bit of a catch-22 situation. Colombia has stayed mum on the coordinates of the San Jose, and it claims that there's constant surveillance at the site. But there's only so long before bad actors figure out where it is and start efforts to plunder the remains if they haven't already. It's not clear if the Colombian Navy is monitoring the site itself, aka like the underwater stuff, technical term, or just the surface, which would be a lot like patrolling the roof of a skyscraper while thieves sneak in through the front door. Unfortunately, recent history indicates that this grim, thief-ridden option is much more likely than the successful excavation of the ship. In the Spanish-language newspaper El País, reporter Camilo Sanchez noted that of the 55 17th-century Iberian shipwrecks discovered out in the world, only seven, less than one-fifth, were ever successfully salvaged. The remaining ooh, quick math, uh, the remaining 48? 48? The remaining 48 were either looted and or destroyed by ill-informed salvage efforts. And so now Colombia faces a decision. Do you wait for more sophisticated technology to develop before moving on to the more complex stages of the archaeological process? Or do you use what's available now, knowing that the longer you wait, the more likely it is that the site will be compromised in one way or another? For years, it wasn't clear which direction Colombia would go. Then in May 2024, just six months ago, or I don't know, six months from when I wrote that sentence, the answer came loud and clear when the government launched phase one of a multiphase project titled Asia El Corazón del Galeón San Jose, which translated means towards the hearts of the San Jose galleon. The first phase in this multi-year multiphase project is said to be entirely non-intrusive. Less than a month ago, on November 22, 2024, the government of Colombia released an update on what they found in the first phase of that project, which took place over the course of two weeks in late May. The team working on that project have identified over 6,700 artifacts in the current archaeological area, which is the size of about 40 football fields. Most of those artifacts are close to the remains of the ship and in fairly logical groupings, such as porcelain cups being all together and in the vicinity of things like glass bottles or food vessels. The arrangement of artifacts in that way has led to some very interesting speculation that the ship didn't actually blow up during its fight with Admiral Wagner. If the ship had blown up, you'd assume that all of this stuff would be sort of all over the ocean floor, broken, you know, whatever. Instead, it's been hypothesized that perhaps there was instead some kind of structural failure that caused the hull to collapse. The team also released some super cool 3D scans of the seabed that I think are from 2024, but they might be from preliminary work in 2022, but in any case, they are fascinating. This is just the first of a multi-phase project, one that will take years and years to complete. I've read some competing information about whether the government hopes to raise part of the wreck. Some say it's just not under consideration at the moment, fake news, while others have uh claimed the direct opposite, which is that the Colombian president has allegedly expressed a desire to pull up part of the wreck by 2026. Just knowing the way that these things often go, there's no way in hell that that's happening by 2026. Remember when President Santos said he wanted to have the wreck extracted by 2018? Yeah. The same thing is probably going to happen here. In the shorter term, though, the current Minister for Culture, Juan Correa, has expressed interest in bringing select items to the surface in order to understand how realistic it would be to salvage items that have been on the ocean. Floor for well over 300 years. We do not need any King Tuts tomb disintegrating sandals happening with the San Jose. That's how I feel leaving my apartment after a weekend shut in. The first signs of human contact, and I disintegrate. Whatever happens in the future, one thing is for certain. The San Jose has captured the imaginations of almost everyone who has ever heard its sad and sordid tale. It has certainly captured mine. But for all its monetary and historical value, the San Jose has been a cautionary tale as long as it has been a shipwreck. It serves as a testament to the impatience and the greed of men, one reflected still today in the scintillating prospect of untold amounts of gold waiting to be found in the ocean deep. But gold is not the cure that Hernan Cortez promised it to be. If anything, its glint and its glitter muddies the waters, so to speak, until the waters are as thick as the mud that embraces the San Jose 600 meters down. In the midst of increasingly ludicrous estimates of the ship's present-day value, $5 billion, $10 billion, $20 billion, I want to bring you back to the number that often gets lost in the excitement of these things. 600. On the morning of June 8th, 1708, over 600 men faced the day, not knowing that this day would be their last. Some were lucky, if one can call it that, to meet their ends quickly. A potential boom, a blink, then nothing. Others, maybe even most, were not so lucky, subject instead to drowning and whatever other fates awaited them in the water. It is a much needed reminder that a shipwreck like the San Jose is more than a legendary treasure bearer. It is also an open grave, the final resting spot of hundreds of souls, many whose names history does not remember. But perhaps they too might earn some kind of resurrection, their stories coming to the surface as academic interest in the San Jose mounts alongside ongoing efforts to study the wreck. Archival research may not be able to bring someone back to life, though that sounds like a neat premise for a novel. But it can help recover their memory, just as it helped determine the probable location of the San Jose. In many ways, shipwrecks like the San Jose are indeed portals into the past, with their broken and scattered remains providing valuable information about the way the world once was. But these shipwrecks, especially those believed to be bearing treasure, also tell us about ourselves and the world in which we live. One that has changed in innumerable ways since the San Jose set sail in May of 1708, never to reach shore again. One thing, however, seems to unite us across time and space. The singular pull of treasure on the human imagination. All the better if it glitters. But as they say, all that glitters is not gold. Though in the case of the San Jose, it probably is. And if what glitters is not gold, uh it's probably silver, and if not silver, it's probably emeralds, and if not emeralds, maybe it's pearls. And if not pearls, well, you get the idea. As for just how much treasure is there in the deep, only time will tell. In the meantime, go ahead. Relish in the delusion of unfathomable wealth, but take care not to let it become a sickness. Better men have died for less. Women, however, but no. We'll save that one for another day. That is all I have for you on the holy grail of shipwrecks, the San Jose Galleon. I hope that you enjoyed that venture into the deep, and arguably outside the direct realm of art history. The next episode will be a more traditional art history topic. Probably. As always, I want to close the episode by acknowledging my sources, at least some of them, because ho boy did I read so many sources for this episode. I will include as many as I can remember on the podcast's website, stuff about thingspodcast.com. But I want to once again give a massive shout out to Carla Ron Phillips, Julian Sancton, Susan Casey, and Jesus Garcia Calero. I particularly recommend uh Sancton's article in Vanity Fair, which if you enjoy it, I was excited to see that Julian Sancton is publishing a book about the San Jose in January of 2026. I would say that's a long wait, but it'll probably be here before we know it. That book will be called Neptune's Ransom: The Billion Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire. Ooh. I, for one, am super excited about that. I will also link some information published by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute about the discovery, as well as a 2019 article by Gary Kozick, our Canadian sonographer, who gave additional insights into that process. Highly recommend. If you are looking for a real good time, you can pour over some court documents from the 40-year back and forth between CSearch Armada and the Colombian government. They are actually quite interesting, and you can develop your own opinion on whether CSearch Armada has any legs to stand on in its quest to get its finders fee. I am also happy to report that Colombia's Ministry of Culture recently, as in the past month, if if that, launched a five-episode limited podcast that shares the name of the current maritime project, Hacia El Corazón del Galeón San Jose. Now I can't comprehend spoken Spanish as much as I used to 15 years ago, but I would love to know what you think about it. So let me know. I will have all of those and many other sources posted on the podcast's website, which once again is stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. If you made it this far into the podcast, I would really appreciate it if you took two minutes to leave me a rating or a review if your current listening platform allows for it. I see and appreciate every single one of those. If you want to reach out directly, you can find me at stuffaboutthingspodcast at gmail.com or contact me through the podcast website, stuffaboutthingspodcast.com, where you will find a contact me tab along with a recommend a thing tab if there's any topics you'd like to hear about in the future. If you are a new listener or a casual listener and you don't want a total vibe shift, I would recommend turning off the podcast now if you can. Those of you in, you know, the shower or otherwise unable to do so, you're stuck with me. This is the parts of the episode called Gus Corner, where I dedicate a minute or so to talking about my dog Gus, who you see in all of the podcast graphics. Since the last episode, Gus did something extraordinary. He crossed the Rainbow Bridge, which is a comforting euphemism for a pet passing away. I am very sad about that, um, despite what I'm trying to make it sound like. But, but, but. Gus was 11 and a half years old. He lived his absolute best life, and I cannot think of a happier, more loved dog than Gus. I may or may not talk a little bit more about Gus when I'm not on the verge of ugly crying, which I've been for about a month now, but um, for right now, I just wanted to say thank you to all of the people who sent such kind messages and comments after I posted about this on the podcast's Instagram. It is by far the most popular post I've ever made. Um, you know, nothing like a beloved pet's death to drive engagement, but it is entirely fitting because Gus was the superstar of this operation, and he deserves every last like and comment because he was truly the best. As for me, corner, um, this is a pretty sad corner. I'm good, I'm fine, but I do have a lot of extra love in my heart right now with nowhere to go. And so if you have a pet or an animal in your life that brings you joy, whether it's your own or someone else's, I ask that you give that pet a little extra love the next time you see them. And you can tell them it's from me. I'm going to end things there. Uh the usual thanks go out to hook sounds.com and freemusicarchive.org for the royalty free music that you hear in the episode. The first song that you hear is a version of Box Brandenburg Concerto number four by Kevin McLeod. And the second tune that you hear is called Success Dreams. I also want to thank you. Yeah, you, the one hearing this right now, the listener who stays until the very end. I thank you for taking the time to listen to this today. I know it was not a short one, and I hope that you have a very happy holidays if I don't talk to you before then, and of course, that you take the time to look at something beautiful today. And you know, hopefully pet a dog if you can. A la próxima amici. My flavors were down. I gassed it.