There is buried treasure in cyberspace.
The San José was a 62-gun, three-masted galleon that was sunk by the British with 600 people on board during the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714). The British were at the time trying to prevent Spanish galleons from returning to Europe loaded with bullion and jewels that could be to fund the war. The San José was sailing from Portobelo, Panama as the flagship of a treasure fleet of 14 merchant vessels and three warships. It was tracked near Cartagena by the English Commodore Charles Wager and attacked on 8th June 1708. Wager intended to capture the ship and the loot, but the galleon’s gunpowder supplies blew up and it sank in deep water.
A few years ago the Colombian navy discovered the wreck, thanks in part to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), which used its REMUS 6000 autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to locate the remains at a depth of about 2,000 feet. They were not doing this purely out of curiosity, because the San José was carrying a couple of hundred tons of gold, silver, emeralds and such like that are worth an estimated $17 billion in today’s money. Yep, that’s not a misprint. It is the world’s richest shipwreck. Right now there are billions of dollars worth of 18th-century Latin American fungible tokens laying on the sea floor waiting to be picked up.
(Colombia estimates that it will cost about $70 million to salvage what it calls a “national treasure,” and it wants it put on display in a museum to be built in Cartagena but there’s an interesting dispute emerging around the wreck, which is in Colombian waters. Spain insists that the treasures are theirs, since they were aboard a Spanish ship, while Bolivia’s indigenous Qhara Qhara nation say the Spanish forced the community’s people to mine the precious metals, so the treasures should belong to them.)
I was thinking about the fate of this seabed fortune because I read a story of yet another crypto-chaos-mixup that occurred…
