There Is $20 Billion Worth Of Real Life Treasure At The Bottom Of The Caribbean Sea And Colombia Has Called Dibs

Daily Mail - The 'Holy Grail of shipwrecks' containing up to 200 tons of gold, silver and emeralds could be floating on the Caribbean within months after Colombia declared a national mission to recover the treasure. 

The Spanish galleon San Jose sank off the Colombian port of Cartagena after its powder magazines detonated during a skirmish with the British in 1708. On board were treasures worth up to $20 billion in today's money along with 600 sailors, all but 11 of whom went down with the ship.

In 2015, the Colombian government announced that a team of navy divers had discovered the legendary ship lying in nearly 3,100 feet of water. Last year, another team brought back jaw-dropping images of its perfectly preserved cargo. 

Now, the Colombian government has said it will be raised before President Gustavo Petro ends his term of office in 2026. 

This is one of those stories that resurfaces about once a year. There's been treasure at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea for hundreds of years, and once a year the story resurfaces when someone tries to call dibs. Colombia is once again calling dibs. The thing about treasure is that everyone thinks they have a claim to it. There's a whole mess of people who believe the San Jose ship treasure should belong to them.

American research company, Glocca Morra, claims it found the San Jose in 1981 and turned the coordinates over to the Colombians on the condition it would receive half the fortune once the vessel was recovered. 

But this was countered in 2015 by Colombia's then-President Juan Manuel Santos who said the Navy had found the boat at a different location on the sea bed.

Glocca Morra, now called Sea Search Armada, is suing for half the treasure - around $10bn according to estimates - under the US-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement, according to Bloomberg.

But the Colomobian Minister of Culture Juan David Correa said the government's team had visited the coordinates given by Sea Search Armada and found no trace of the San Jose.

Complicating matters further, there are competing claims from the Spanish - whose Navy the vessel belonged to - and Bolivia's indigenous Qhara Qhara nation which says its people were forced to mine the gold and jewels, so the treasures belong to them. 

Reading between the lines, I'm pretty sure I know what happened. The Spanish government sent a bunch of pirates to Bolivia to retrieve buried treasure. The buried treasure was on sacred Qhara Qhara land. So the pirates overthrew the Qhara Qhara and forced them to dig up the treasure for them. After they dug it up, they threw the treasure on their ship. But what they didn't account for is that one of the Qhara Qhara elders put a curse on the treasure, so as soon as the Spanish pirates sailed way, their ship was blasted with cannons and fell to the bottom of the sea.

Now the treasure just sits there while the Spanish, the Colombians, and some American treasure hunting company have a pissing match over who it belongs to. But even if one of them get to the treasure, something terrible is going to happen to them (because of the curse). If they were smart, they'd team up with the Qhara Qhara. I'm willing to bet the Qhara Qhara doesn't have the resources to raise 200 tons of treasure on their own. I'm sure they need help. If one of these countries could strike some sort of deal with them, it would alleviate the curse, and they'd still walk away with billions of dollars.

But stupid hypotheticals aside, there's one thing I don't understand. Why are people not making individual trips down there for pieces of the treasure? I did some math. There's $20 billion worth of it, totaling 200 tons in weight. If my math is correct, that's $100k per pound of treasure. If they've been able to get down there before, either with a camera or a submarine, it seems like they could find a way to collect a few pieces of it right? I don't know how much that excursion costs, but if you have the equipment, making a treasure run once every few months for a quick $300k seems like a very profitable endeavor. 

I'm just happy to learn that somewhere in this world is sunken treasure. I like to imagine a world where I leave everything behind to embark on a treasure hunt. I tell my family I'm going out for a pack of cigarettes, take my kids college savings for myself, then call up the OceanGate Submarine guy and say, "Cook up another one of your deep sea death machines. I got a mission for us."