Mike Purcell
speaker
41 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Mike Purcell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Ten years ago, Mike Purcell was on one of his missions on a ship in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Colombia. And for about a week, every night, he had been sending out his autonomous underwater vehicle to search the seafloor.
This time, a private group and the Colombian government wanted his help finding a 300-year-old shipwreck that was the stuff of legend. The Spanish galleon, the San Jose. It was one of the most famous shipwrecks and maybe the most valuable one of all time.
And they see, no joke, a bunch of gold coins.
The San Jose was a Spanish galleon that sank in 1708 with billions of dollars worth of gold and silver and teacups aboard.
Are you in line?
Just a teacup. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Erika Barris. And I'm Mary Childs. So the San Jose shipwreck was found, but it is not clear who it actually belongs to. Turns out shipwrecks with billions of dollars worth of stuff on them can get pretty confusing and contentious.
Colombia, Spain, American financiers, South American indigenous groups, everyone wants a say in what should happen to the San Jose.
This is Juan Manuel Santos.
He was the president of Colombia from 2010 to 2018, the one who shook Mike Purcell's hand after they found the San Jose in 2015.
He could see the legal fights coming. But President Juan, he was pretty confident that Colombia would win those fights. Because for years, people had been beating down his door trying to work with the government to search Colombia's waters for the San Jose. Finally, one group got through, the group that Mike Purcell was working with. And they made a deal to work together and find it.
And then they could figure out what to do with whatever profits.
Okay. So you're already doing all these machinations in your head.
And finders keepers is a legitimate legal argument. It's called the law of fines. If someone finds a shipwreck or cargo, they have the rights to it.
Now, the law of finds mostly applies to ships found in international waters. This ship was in Colombia's territorial waters. And according to the UN's Convention on the Law of the Sea, countries have some jurisdiction over a certain area off their shores and over the removal of archaeological and historical objects found in there.
President Juan is no longer the president, but he says the nation wants to salvage the San Jose and to build a museum. That's the plan.
It weighed more than a thousand tons. It was built of wood that could withstand the salty seas and was reinforced with iron. It had three masts and 64 brass cannons, which were etched with dolphins. Ricardo says the San Jose was a state-of-the-art ship.
including the English. England and Spain were at war over trade and colonies. And in June of 1708, the San Jose was going from what is now Panama to the coast of Cartagena before starting its journey to Spain. An English ship showed up to seize what was on board. They shot a cannonball into the San Jose, but that ball hit the ship's powder reserves.
So, boom, the ship sank, along with nearly 600 men. Which makes this shipwreck site a Spanish war grave. This ship was never abandoned, Spain says. It's theirs. And that is why they also have a claim to the San Jose.
So our expert Ricardo, who does not work for the Spanish government, says the San Jose does not belong to Colombia. It belongs to Spain.
And Spain has successfully made this argument before. Ricardo says about 20 years ago, different Americans found a different Spanish boat sunk by the English. Apparently that happened a lot. They recovered more than 500,000 silver and gold coins. And a U.S. court said... The Spanish boat had sovereign immunity, so Spain ended up getting the coins.
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