The World's Richest Shipwreck 'Is Still Sitting There'

Cartagena's most famous relic is arguably a 300-year-old ship sitting two-thirds of a mile underwater—and at the center of a modern geopolitical brawl. The Spanish galleon San José, blown apart by the British off Colombia in 1708 while hauling gold, silver, and gems meant to bankroll a European war, became known as the "Holy Grail" of shipwrecks. In his new book Neptune's Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire, author Julian Sancton recounts what Smithsonian magazine calls "a tale worthy of Indiana Jones himself."

Sancton traces how Cuban-American archaeologist Roger Dooley spent decades chasing archival crumbs, from letters from 1708 he stumbled on in Spain in 1984 to a 1729 map he found almost two decades later in the Library of Congress that bore four x's and the words "Shoals of the Admiral"—the ship that took down the San José. He ultimately led an international team that conclusively discovered the location of the wreck in 2015. Dooley hoped to then conduct "the deepest underwater archaeological excavation ever."

Instead, the billion-dollar trove has been locked in disputes involving Spain (as the ship's original owner), Indigenous Bolivian communities (whose ancestors mined the silver the ship carried), US salvors (who claimed they beat Dooley to the find), and Colombia (which has branded the ship's artifacts "assets of cultural interest" and currently officially holds claim to the ship's bounty). "It's been 10 years, and this thing is still sitting there," Sancton tells Smithsonian, and he'd like to see that change. "You're not benefiting anybody by leaving the San José where it is. I would like to see these artifacts, and I think humanity would, too." Read the fascinating full story here.