{"id":154604,"date":"2026-01-29T07:02:02","date_gmt":"2026-01-29T07:02:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/154604\/"},"modified":"2026-01-29T07:02:02","modified_gmt":"2026-01-29T07:02:02","slug":"billion-dollar-shipwreck-at-the-center-of-an-international-legal-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/154604\/","title":{"rendered":"Billion-dollar shipwreck at the center of an international legal war"},"content":{"rendered":"

More than a decade after it was found, a centuries-old Spanish treasure ship worth billions remains nearly untouched<\/a> on the seafloor while Spain, Colombia, Indigenous groups, and American booty hunters wage a bitter international legal war.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On Thanksgiving Day of 2015, Roger Dooley, a maritime archaeologist from Miami, saw something he\u2019d been searching for for decades. <\/p>\n

Looking at the computer screen in his waterfront apartment in Cartagena, Colombia, his hands trembled. He was reviewing footage from a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution underwater robot that had spent seventeen hours scanning the Caribbean seabed. <\/p>\n

In 2015, archaeologists found the lost Spanish galleon the San Jos\u00e9 off the coast of Colombia. Colombian Presidency\/AFP via Get<\/p>\n

Clicking through grainy sonar images, Dooley and his colleague saw a sword hilt sticking out of the sand, and three bronze cannons lay in a bed of seashells \u2014 each bearing a small dolphin-shaped marking, a telltale signature that identified the wreck beyond doubt.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m still thinking I\u2019m dreaming,\u201d Dooley said.<\/p>\n

They\u2019d found the San Jos\u00e9, a Spanish galleon that had vanished in 1708\u00a0carrying gold, silver and emeralds plundered from Indigenous peoples across the Americas \u2014 a cargo\u00a0estimated\u00a0to now be worth $5 billion or more.<\/p>\n

\u201c[It\u2019s] the greatest sunken treasure in the history of humanity,\u201d Julian Sancton, author of a fascinating new account of the discovery, \u201cNeptune\u2019s Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire<\/a>,\u201d told The Post in an exclusive interview. \u201cIt has to contend with such famous gilded troves as Tutankhamen\u2019s tomb.\u201d<\/p>\n

The San Jose sank in 1708 with a treasure worth billions. <\/p>\n

But the glorious booty has yet to be recovered from the ocean floor. The Court of Permanent Arbitration in The Hague is expected to rule this year on competing claims, including whether one American salvage company deserves half the treasure, and whether Dooley\u2019s own backers \u2014 a British company called Maritime Archaeology Consultants (MAC) formed by hedge-fund titan Anthony Clarke \u2014 are entitled to a 45% share after Colombia declared the wreck \u201cobjects of cultural interest.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dooley\u2019s journey to finding the San Jos\u00e9 began on a sweltering July day in 1984, when he walked into Seville\u2019s General Archive of the Indies, a repository of Spanish colonial records, searching for clues to an entirely different shipwreck. The archive contained sixty million documents dating back to Columbus, but as Sancton writes, there was \u201cno comprehensive catalog, no index.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In \u201cNeptune\u2019s Fortune,\u201d journalist Julian Sancton takes readers on an epic treasure hunt. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not like there\u2019s a shipwreck section,\u201d Dooley\u00a0tells Sancton in the book. \u201cYou could spend twenty years there and not find what you\u2019re looking for.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the time, the history obsessive was working for Carisub, Fidel Castro\u2019s state-run treasure-hunting operation, a job that many archaeologists considered tantamount to piracy. He was searching for the Nuestra Se\u00f1ora de las Mercedes, a galleon that sank near Havana in 1698.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Midway through a file, he stumbled upon a packet of letters stitched together like a booklet that described three ships lost, a king\u2019s ransom gone, and \u201ceverybody drowned.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roger Dooley\u2019s search for the San Jos\u00e9 began in Seville in 1984. Roger Dooley collection<\/p>\n

They were not about the wreck Dooley had been searching for. They were about the San Jos\u00e9.<\/p>\n

The galleon had been the flagship of Spain\u2019s treasure fleet, carrying gold, silver, and emeralds extracted from across the Americas. On the evening of June 8, 1708, British commodore Charles Wager attacked the fleet off the coast of Cartagena. A fire broke out aboard the San Jos\u00e9, and Wager believed victory was imminent. In his journal, he wrote that the ship \u201cblew up,\u201d and that \u201cthe heat of the blast came very hot upon us and several splinters of plank and timber came aboard us afire.\u201d<\/p>\n

But when the smoke cleared, the San Jos\u00e9 had vanished. \u201cA floating city, gone in an instant,\u201d Sancton writes.<\/p>\n

Researching another ship at Seville\u2019s General Archive of the Indies, he stumbled upon a pack of letters about the San Jos\u00e9. <\/p>\n

Of the roughly six hundred people aboard, just over a dozen survived. The ship sank so quickly that anyone on or below the main deck would have been dragged under.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOne post-battle report at the time quotes a survivor saying they had no idea what happened,\u201d Sancton said, \u201conly that they were near the top of the mast one second, then in the water the next.\u201d<\/p>\n

The explosion\u2019s cause remains a mystery. Casa Alegre, the San Jos\u00e9\u2019s 71-year-old commander who went down with his vessel, might have \u201cfelt honor-bound to send the ship and its treasure to the seabed \u2014 and himself and his men to kingdom come \u2014 rather than face the humiliation of returning to Spain empty-handed, having lost a fortune that could tilt the war in England\u2019s favor,\u201d Sancton said.<\/p>\n

The Colombian government has removed a few things from the wreck, but most of it remains on the bottom of seafloor while Spain, Colombia, Indigenous groups, and American booty hunters wage a bitter international legal war.\u00a0 RICARDO MALDONADO ROZO\/EPA\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

After uncovering archival clues to the San Jos\u00e9\u2019s whereabouts, Dooley returned to Cuba and his day job with Carisub. Castro wanted the Mercedes stripped for gold and silver. Dooley wanted to excavate it properly and ultimately quit over the disagreement.<\/p>\n

He remained in Cuba for more than a decade, professionally stranded. In the late 1990s, he escaped without a cent to his name and eventually settled in the United States, where he spent years trying to convince investors to fund a search for the San Jos\u00e9.<\/p>\n

In 2013, he finally succeeded. Clarke formed Maritime Archaeology Consultants to back the hunt.\u00a0Two years later, in November 2015, Dooley narrowed the search to a 43-square-mile patch of seabed off Colombia. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution deployed its REMUS autonomous underwater vehicle,\u00a0a $3=million yellow torpedo that can dive to 6,000 meters and scan the seafloor with sonar while swimming autonomously for up to 24 hours.<\/p>\n

Coins like these are believed to be amongst the treasures. Sedwick Coins<\/p>\n

Dooley was 71 when he made the discovery,\u00a0the same age Casa Alegre had been when he went down with the ship.<\/p>\n

The huge finding immediately ignited an international dispute. Spain claims ownership over its lost naval vessels worldwide, invoking sovereign immunity. It\u2019s described the San Jos\u00e9 as a mass grave that should remain untouched. <\/p>\n

Colombia insists the wreck lies within or just beyond its territorial waters, at the edge of its twelve-mile limit, and in any case within its exclusive economic zone. The country has recovered a handful of less valuable items, such as coins and cannons, from the wreck.<\/p>\n

The treasure remains on the ocean floor until an international court makes a decision. EPA<\/p>\n

Indigenous groups argue that the treasure represents wealth extracted through forced labor and should be treated as a form of reparations.<\/p>\n

American treasure hunters have also staked claims. Sea Search Armada (SSA) says it located the wreck in 1980 and deserves half the treasure. A Colombian civil court ruled that SSA would be entitled to 50% of any qualifying treasure found at or near the coordinates it reported. But Sancton argues there is no trace of a ship at those coordinates, and that whatever SSA discovered was almost certainly not the San Jos\u00e9.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Author Julian Sancton says the shipwreck belongs to \u201chumanity itself.\u201d Jess Levine<\/p>\n

MAC, Dooley\u2019s backers, signed an agreement\u00a0with the Colombian government under then-president Juan Manuel Santos\u00a0entitling them to up to 45% of any recoverable treasure. But a subsequent Colombian administration declared the entire wreck and its contents \u201cobjects of cultural interest,\u201d nullifying MAC\u2019s share. The company is now suing the government. <\/p>\n

Dooley has proposed that Colombia keep the treasure, display it in a museum and reimburse Clarke for the costs of finding the wreck. <\/p>\n

Now 80, he still lives in Miami and remains deeply invested in the San Jos\u00e9\u2019s fate.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sancton is adamant that the wreck doesn\u2019t fall in the hands of private collectors. He believes it belongs either in a museum or at the bottom of the ocean floor.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Spanish treasure fleets were transporting the riches of an entire continent across oceans, laying the foundation of our globalized system of commerce and shaping the modern world,\u201d he said. \u201cThe rightful owner of the ship is humanity itself.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than a decade after it was found, a centuries-old Spanish treasure ship worth billions remains nearly untouched…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154605,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[8179,418,88,90,89,35720,35345,75920,75921,1880],"class_list":{"0":"post-154604","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-jose","8":"tag-colombia","9":"tag-history","10":"tag-san-jose","11":"tag-san-jose-headlines","12":"tag-san-jose-news","13":"tag-shipwrecks","14":"tag-spain","15":"tag-the-hague","16":"tag-treasure","17":"tag-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154604\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}