A top-secret sealed envelope is reported to have gone missing in Colombia – which would be unfortunate if true, because it contains the location of a Spanish galleon estimated to contain treasure worth around US $17 billion.
The 62-gun, three-masted San José was launched in 1698 and sank 10 years later off Cartagena in Colombia, after losing a fierce battle with British warships during the War of the Spanish Succession.
Also read: San José shipwreck’s treasure is contested…
The San José had been sailing from Panama as flagship of a treasure fleet of three warships and 14 merchant vessels. When her powder magazine exploded, she went down with all but 11 of the 600 people onboard.
Lost along with the ship were an estimated 11 million gold coins, silver, emeralds and jewellery.The “Holy Grail of Shipwrecks” is known to have been rediscovered eight years ago, but Colombia’s Oversight Committee for the Social Control of Submerged Cultural Heritage has just declared that its hard-won co-ordinates now appear to have been mislaid.
In an extraordinary statement, the committee expressed concern that the envelope containing the San José’s exact location could no longer be found in the National Archives, and called on the government to launch an urgent investigation.
How the San José was found
Using a Colombian Navy research vessel, the USA’s Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution located the shipwreck at a depth between 600 and 950m using side-scan sonar in November 2015.
Marine archaeologists positively identified the ship as the San José, helped by images of its distinctive dolphin-engraved bronze cannon captured by an AUV-mounted camera.
In 2017 the Colombian government, then led by president Juan Manuel Santos, announced that it would oversee a salvage operation to recover the lost treasure.
A museum and conservation laboratory would be built to preserve and display artefacts such as cannon and ceramics, and the San José’s location was classified as a state secret.
The government and its agency the Colombian Institute of Anthropology & History, constitutionally obliged to protect and preserve the ship and its contents, were charged with maintaining thorough records of the exploration process in the National Archives.
“It is absolutely unbelievable and infuriating that the co-ordinates for the location of the San José galleon, entrusted to the National Archives by the Juan Manuel Santos government, have been ‘misplaced’ since the beginning of the Duque administration,” stated the oversight committee.
Iván Duque took over from Santos as president in June 2018 and was himself replaced by Gustavo Petro last year. “What’s even more infuriating is that we are only learning about this now,” adds the committee.
According to City Paper Bogota, the last person known to have seen the billion-dollar envelope was Colombian Academy of History president Armando Martínez Garnica.
He stated under oath at an August hearing that he had returned the co-ordinates to the Ministry of Culture three months after Duque took over the presidency, having previously kept them in the security department of the National Archives, of which he had been director under Santos.
One of the last policy decisions made by Santos before leaving office in 2018 had been to suspend a partnership between the government and private contractors under which the two would split the cost of the San José salvage operation. It has been unclear since then what the strategy now is.
Last year Divernet reported that video footage showing gold coins and ingots, cannon, swords, jars and Chinese ceramics from the wreck-site had been released by the Colombian Navy.
At the same time wreck-researcher Nelson Freddy Padilla pointed out that questions remained about exactly when that footage had been recorded, and what the government intended to do about salvaging the San José and a number of other such wrecks.
“There is no serious scientific plan to remove them and put all that knowledge at the service of culture,” he claimed.
Also on Divernet: Pieces of eight and teacups on San José wreck, Want to dive a ‘million-coin’ wreck?
