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.Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the significance of the San Jose shipwreck?
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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.
I bet if you go along that coast of Columbia every four miles, there's a ship.
A sunken ship. This autonomous vehicle that Mike helped develop is like a little underwater drone. It would scan the bottom of the ocean and record whatever it came across. And one day, it came across a very, very big object.
Yeah, we see something in the sonar that is a possible yes.
A possible yes. Mike gets called in for all kinds of jobs like this. He was once asked to find Amelia Earhart's plane. No luck. Another time to locate this Air France plane that went down between Rio de Janeiro and Paris. That one they did find.
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Chapter 2: Who was involved in the search for the San Jose?
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.
To investigate, they sent the drone back down to take pictures. And when the images came back up, Mike and his team crowded around this one guy's desk to see what they'd found.
You know, we're down in this, you know, pretty old ship in this room that's a big, probably smaller than your closet. And he's at his desk here and we're just looking at it. And I'm behind him looking down at the pictures.
And as they look at these grainy black and white underwater images from a few meters off the seafloor, they start to make things out.
There is part of the hall, the wood hall, there's a hundred teacups sitting on the surface.
A hundred teacups just lying there nestled into the sand next to the fish and crabs.
Well, we saw cannons, we saw the anchor. We start taking the pictures and put them together like in a little bit of a mosaic. You can see an outline of the ship.
And they see, no joke, a bunch of gold coins.
I feel like my image of what a shipwreck looks like is literally that, like a chest with gold coins spilling out of it.
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Chapter 3: What did the underwater drone discover?
Maybe it turns out to be 20 billion. Maybe it's 5 billion. I don't know. But It seems to me that they're lining up to fight over who gets it. So who will make out in the end here? I'm not sure.
Are you in line?
Do you have a seat? All I want is a teacup.
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.
And because the laws that govern this stuff can overlap and the jurisdictions can be so murky, every single group kind of has a valid argument. Today on the show, the fight for the San Jose. What one 300-year-old shipwreck can teach us about just how hard it is to untangle the legacy of colonialism.
To Colombians, the ship that Mike Purcell found plays a huge role in the country's cultural imagination. To them, it was another El Dorado, the lost city of gold. The great Colombian author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, even wrote about the ship. In Love in the Time of Cholera, one of the characters wants to recover the San Jose so the woman he loves can bathe in gold.
I quite frankly thought it was a legend.
This is Juan Manuel Santos.
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