The fight for a legendary shipwreck's treasure

Planet Money

NPR

News, Business

4.6 • 30.5K Ratings

🗓️ 7 February 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

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Summary

The San Jose was a marvel of 17th century technology. The Spanish galleon weighed more than a thousand tons, was made of wood reinforced with iron, and featured three masts and 64 cannons. In its cargo were gold, silver, silk and porcelain. But in 1708, it sank after a battle with an English ship near what is now Colombia.

For centuries, the shipwreck was the stuff of legends, until 2015 when underwater investigators found what they believed to be the San Jose's wreckage. The treasure on board this ship could be worth billions of dollars. But who owns it? Today on the show, four groups stake their claims to the wreck of the San Jose. Those claims reveal a lot about who has a say over the bottom of the sea and how we can begin to untangle the complicated legacy of colonialism.

This episode of Planet Money was hosted by Erika Beras and Mary Childs. It was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler with reporting help from Willa Rubin and edited by Keith Romer. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Neil Rauch with help from Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:06.6	Ten years ago, Mike Purcell was on one of his missions, on a ship in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Columbia.
0:13.8	And for about a week, every night he had been sending out his autonomous underwater vehicle to search the sea floor.
0:21.5	I bet if you go along that coast of Columbia every four miles, there's a ship.
0:26.7	A sunken ship.
0:28.5	This autonomous vehicle that might help develop is like a little underwater drone.
0:33.5	It would scan the bottom of the ocean and record whatever it came across.
0:38.1	And one day, it came across a very, very big object.
0:43.1	Yeah, we see something in the sonar that is a possible, yes.
0:47.3	A possible yes.
0:49.5	Mike gets called in for all kinds of jobs like this.
0:52.5	He was once asked to find Amelia Earhart's plane.
0:56.3	No luck.
0:57.2	Another time to locate this Air France plane that went down between Rio de Janeiro and Paris.
1:02.9	That one, they did find.
1:05.0	This time, a private group and the Colombian government wanted his help finding a 300-year-old shipwreck that was the stuff of legend.
1:13.0	The Spanish galleon, the San Jose.
1:16.1	It was one of the most famous shipwrecks and maybe the most valuable one of all time.
1:22.8	To investigate, they sent the drone back down to take pictures.
1:26.4	And when the images came back up, Mike and his team crowded around this one guy's desk to see what they'd found.
1:33.4	You know, we're down in this, you know, pretty old ship in this room that's a big,
1:41.1	probably smaller than your closet.
	...

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