History Fix

Ep. 118 Shipwrecks Part 2: How Time Capsules of the Sea Have Provided Important Discoveries and Posed Difficult Questions

• Shea LaFountaine • Episode 118

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I'm back this week with four more shipwreck stories. We'll start with the horrific explosion of the Mississippi river steamboat, the Sultana in 1865. Next, we'll tackle the Titanic which famously sank in 1912, killing around 1,500 passengers. On to another famous ship, the Endeavor. The Endeavor was the British naval ship used by explorer Captain James Cook during his first voyage of discovery which landed him in Australia, New Zealand, and Tahiti in the mid 1700s. Later the ship changed hands and was eventually used and intentionally sunk during the American Revolutionary War. Finally, I'll end with what is, quite possibly, one of the most controversial shipwrecks ever found, the San Jose. This Spanish galleon has been called the "holy grail" of shipwrecks because it was supposedly carrying treasure worth up to 17 billion dollars today when it went down in 1708. As five plus countries argue over the San Jose's treasure, the ethical question remains - what should be done with these shipwrecks?

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On April 15th, 1865, Captain James Cass Mason nearly spit out his morning coffee aboard his steamboat, the Sultana. He was staring at the front page of the morning newspaper and he simply could not believe the words printed there. “President Lincoln Dead” it read. Stunned, he quickly decided that he must be the one to spread this news down the Mississippi. The Sultana was headed to New Orleans and, knowing telegraphs to the south had been nearly completely cut off due the recently ended Civil War, Mason figured it was up to him to alert the southern states of the president's assassination. He grabbed an armload of newspapers and set off. Upon reaching Vicksburg, Mississippi, a Confederate stronghold now harboring thousands of Union prisoners of war waiting to go home, Mason was approached by Captain Reuben Hatch, chief quartermaster of Vicksburg. Hatch had hatched a devious plot to earn a little extra money but he needed Mason in on it. The US government would pay $2.75 for the transport of each Union soldier back to the north and $8 for each union officer. Hatch promised Mason that he could provide him with around 1,000 prisoners of war for transport back to the north aboard the Sultana, if Mason would give him a cut of the profits. Mason, quickly abandoning his previous mission to take on this new one, agreed. But there were several serious problems with this plan. Number one, the Sultana was only designed to hold 376 people. Number two, while Hatch had promised 1,000 soldiers, Mason actually ended up with around 2,000 in addition to the crew and fare-paying cabin passengers already on the ship. And number three, hastily repaired leaking boilers had turned the ship into a literal ticking time bomb. All of this would soon coalesce into the deadliest maritime disaster in US history. And yet most people know nothing about it. Overshadowed by the news of Lincoln’s assassination and the end of the Civil War, the Sultana tragedy went mostly untold. Let’s fix that. 


Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. I am back this week with four more shipwrecks for you in this part two episode. I also released a mini fix this past Wednesday called “what does a pirate read?” Here’s a quick preview: 


Pirates aren’t exactly thought of as intellectuals. They’re rough and mean, barbaric, they’re criminals. When you think pirate, you don’t typically think well read. I mean could pirates even read? How educated were they really? Well, it certainly depends on the pirate, but evidence uncovered on the wreck of Blackbeard’s ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, certainly suggests that at least some pirates enjoyed kicking back with a good book. Let’s fix that. 


Listen to the full mini fix episode at patreon.com/historyfixpodcast. It’s just $5 a month to subscribe or you can just purchase a particularly interesting mini fix for $3 if you aren’t the subscription type. All of that goes to ensuring that I can justify continuing to pour hours and hours and hours into creating this podcast and is so incredibly appreciated, more than I can even express. 

In last week’s part one episode, we talked about four shipwrecks, the Antikythera, the Mary Rose, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, and the HMS Victory. And I promised you that I would be back this week with four more shipwrecks to round out this two parter. This week I have for you the Sultana, the Titanic, the Endeavor, and the San Jose. So let's start with the wreck of the Sultana which was the topic of the opener. Now, we talked a lot about how shipwrecks were really cool because they were kind of like time capsules and in most cases that’s true. We learned a lot about Tudor England, for example, under the reign of Henry VIII by examining the wreck of his flag ship, the Mary Rose. We learned a lot about pirates of the golden age of piracy, with the excavation of Blackbeard’s ship the Queen Anne’s Revenge. This next wreck, the Sultana, is a bit different. And if you’re watching on YouTube or Patreon, there are images popping up of these ships and people and whatnot so don’t forget to check that out in the video version if that would add to your enjoyment of the show. But the Sultana was a bit different because there really wasn’t much left of it and what was left is actually thought to be buried underground now, not underwater. This shipwreck was bananas. Let’s get into it. 


As I already said, the Sultana was a steamboat captained by a guy named James Cass Mason and Mason was spreading the word of Lincoln’s assassination down the Mississippi river when he was approached by Captain Reuben Hatch stationed at Vicksburg. Vicksburg was essentially a Confederate fortress in Mississippi during the Civil War and after the war ended in early April of 1865, thousands of Union prisoners of war from surrounding prisoner of war camps had been brought to a parole camp at Vicksburg to await being sent back to the north. Hatch wants Mason to transport a bunch of these Union soldiers back north on the Sultana in order to get the money for it. The US government was willing to pay per head for the transport of these troops back home. And Hatch and Mason are going to split the money. Hatch promises him 1,000 troops which is already way over the limit for how many people the Sultana could carry which was only 376. And they already had 85 crew members and 70 fare-paying passengers on board. So this is a really stupid plan from the start. Mason is like “hmm well we’ve only got room for 220ish more people, so, sure, we’ll take 1,000.” 


To make matters worse, just before returning to Vicksburg from New Orleans to pick up the promised Union soldiers, the Sultana’s four boilers sprang a leak. But, no matter, they get a mechanic on board the check things out in Vicksburg as the soldiers are heading towards the ship. The mechanic is like “eh, it’s not looking good. This seam right here is ruptured. We need to cut it out and replace it.” And Mason is like “how long is that gonna take?” A few days. Well that’s no good. That’s too long. He doesn’t have a few days. If he waits a few days, the 1,000 Union soldiers will be piled onto other ships north and he’ll lose his government pay out. So he convinces the mechanic to just patch the boilers, a temporary fix. Instead of cutting out the ruptured seam and replacing it, he just rivets a patch over top of it. And while he’s doing this, while he’s making this hasty repairs, the soldiers are already piling onto the ship. And there aren’t just 1,000 of them. According to Wikipedia quote “Although Hatch had suggested that Mason might get as many as 1,000 released Union prisoners, a mix-up with the parole camp books and suspicion of bribery from other steamboat captains caused the Union officer in charge of the loading, Captain George Augustus Williams, to place every man at the parole camp on board Sultana,” end quote. This ended up being something like 1,950 paroled prisoners. We’ll call it 2,000. 


So the ship was severely overloaded to the point where the decks began to sag and they tried to shore them up with wooden beams. After about 2 days of traveling up the river, making a couple of stops, disaster struck. It was around 2 am on April 27, 1865 about 7 miles north of Memphis, Tennessee when suddenly 3 of the 4 badly repaired boilers aboard the Sultana violently exploded, blowing apart the center of the boat and lighting the rest on fire. Many were killed immediately, some managed to jump off of the boat and into the water but still many of those drowned or died of hypothermia or of burn injuries from the fire. Bodies continued to be found down river for months after the explosion and many were never found. In all, the estimated death toll sits at around 1,195, making it the deadliest maritime disaster in US history. 


According to a New York Times article from July 1982, a lot of the pieces of the ship that were left, I mean this thing literally exploded, a lot of the pieces were recovered soon after, within six months of the tragedy. But, in 1982, when this article was published, it reported that researchers had located the rest of the ship. It was not underwater, not under the Mississippi River. It was actually underground, under a soybean field northwest of Mound City, Arkansas just across the Mississippi River from Memphis. The author writes quote “The river has shifted its course frequently over the years, often leaving old wrecks buried in silt far from the river's present course,” end quote. In 1982, blackened wooden deck planks and timbers were found buried about 32 feet below this soybean field. So they’ve found this evidence but they haven’t actually excavated it. It’s still there. And that’s partly due to the difficulty of excavating it because of how deep it is and its proximity to the river. And also because a lot of people don’t want it dug up, including the descendents of those who died who view it as hallowed ground, essentially a graveyard that should not be disturbed. 


This one is truly heartbreaking for a lot of reasons. I think about those nearly 2,000 Union soldiers who were heading home. They were heading home you guys. They spent God knows how long in a prisoner of war camp, they made that sacrifice, it worked, they won the war, and they were finally heading home to be reunited with their families, triumphantly, to be welcomed home as heroes. I imagine them boarding the Sultana just full of relief and joy, and then disaster strikes. And it wasn’t like a freak accident. This was egregious behavior on the part of the men involved in this plot to make money off packing the Sultana with way way way too many people. This was greed that caused this tragedy. They should have repaired the boilers properly. They should have separated the men onto various ships so as not to overload any of them. But they didn’t because of greed. Because they wanted to make more money. It’s really sad and there’s really a very important lesson to be learned here. 


The next shipwreck is one I’ve already talked about extensively in episode 7, the Titanic. Now, I want to point out, the Titanic did get a lot of attention, it was all over the newspapers, it was all anyone was talking about, this horrible tragedy aboard the Titanic. The Sultana did not. It didn’t get much press at all. No one really knew about it. It took a long time for the news to sort of trickle out and that’s because of what else was going on at the time. Okay so April 9th, the Civil War ended, April 15th President Abraham Lincoln died, April 27 the Sultana exploded. It was just, there were just too many other big news stories already that overshadowed it. But the Titanic, no. This was probably one of the most widely reported on shipwrecks ever. And I’m not going to go too deep into the story of how it sank because I already did that in episode 7. It is super interesting so definitely go back and revisit that one if you missed it. Long story short, the Titanic was traveling from England to New York City in April of 1912 when it struck an iceberg just before midnight on April 14th and sank, killing around 1,500 people. And, as I talk about in episode 7, it was really this perfect storm that came together to make the wreck of the Titanic the extreme tragedy that it was, this perfect storm of circumstances - the subpar quality of the steel used to build the ship, budget cuts, competition with another ship, Titanic’s “unsinkable” reputation, inaccessible binoculars, weird atmospheric conditions limiting visibility, poor communication, and nowhere near enough life boats. 


And so the Titanic went down in the North Atlantic where it remained until its discovery in 1985. I’m going to let my episode 7 self tell you the story “Immediately after it sank people wanted to find the wreck. But the ship drifted quite a bit between the time it sent out its last distress call with coordinates and the time it actually sank to the bottom of the ocean. This narrowed it down to an area of hundreds of miles and the technology just did not exist to find the wreck for a long time. 


By the mid 1980’s the technology exists but it’s still out of reach. Oceanographer Robert Ballard requests the help of the US Navy to fund the development of an unmanned camera that could be dragged behind a ship at depths of up to 20,000 feet. Ballard wants to use this camera to find Titanic but the Navy is like, “uh, no, why would we fund that?” But then they reconsider, they're like “actually, wait, there could be something in it for us.” They make a deal with Ballard. They’ll fund the camera as long as Ballard uses it to locate and survey the wrecks of two nuclear submarines that sank in the 1960s. This is super top secret though because of the cold war. This plan doesn’t get declassified until the year 2000, after the movie Titanic came out so this bit about the nuclear submarines and the deal with the navy - not in the movie. 


Ballard does it, the camera is awesome, he finds the submarines for the navy. But after that, he only has 12 days left to find Titanic which is all he really wanted to do anyway. 12 days. That’s a tight timeline. But, Ballard noticed something while surveying the submarines. He noticed that, as they sank to the bottom, the current created a trail of debris. He realizes, instead of looking for the Titanic itself, he should look for this much larger debris trail and then follow it to the wreck. 


And that’s exactly what he does. After combing the seafloor for more than a week, something finally enters the live video feed. It’s unmistakably one of Titanic’s boilers. They’ve found it. Ballard and his crew start cheering and applauding, someone busts out champagne and then they realize… it’s 2:20 am… the exact time Titanic sank 73 years ago. A hush falls over the room as the gravity of that hits them. Ballard later told 60 minutes “We were embarrassed we were celebrating and all of a sudden we realized that we should not be dancing on someone’s grave.” 

They followed the debris trail and sure enough, Titanic’s bow came into view with the stern some 400 meters away. Debris littered the ocean floor - china plates, furniture, an unopened case of champagne, and leather shoes. Any bodies that had sunk with the ship were long gone. But their shoes remained, scattered on the sand. 


REMOVE Bad weather forced Ballard and his crew to abandon the find a few days later but he returned the next summer and explored the wreck in person using a submersible, like a tiny submarine called Alvin. Actually never before seen footage from Alvin was just released a couple months ago on YouTube. I’ll post a link to that video in the description. 


Since its discovery in 1985, Ballard has been adamant that the wreck not be disturbed. In his words “The Titanic lies now in 13,000 feet of water on a gently sloping alpine-like countryside overlooking a small canyon below. There is no light at this great depth and little life can be found. It is a quiet and peaceful place—and a fitting place for the remains of this greatest of sea tragedies to rest. Forever may it remain that way.” 


Back to episode 118 me. So the Titanic is still there. Most of you are probably familiar with the second tragedy involving the Titanic that occurred a couple years ago in June of 2023. That actually happened after I did episode 7 so it’s not mentioned in that episode. That was of course when a small submersible called Titan that was going to get a glimpse of the Titanic wreck imploded killing all five people on board. Super sad, I know a lot of people made light of it at the time because it was like these rich guys you know just looking for adventure or whatever and they had paid this company OceanGate Expeditions all this money to do this and serves them right or whatever but, like, does it? Does it serve them right? These were real people. There was a 19 year old on board. It’s a tragedy not a joke. They left behind loved ones. Can you imagine seeing the memes of people poking fun at your dead son who died in this really horrible way. Enough of that. 


Now, the Titanic wreck has been in the news again recently because of a really cool thing National Geographic is doing called Titanic: the Digital Resurrection where they’ve used these super advanced underwater scans to digitally recreate perfectly accurate images of the wreck. There’s a documentary you can watch, I haven’t yet but I’ve seen some clips. National Geographic wrote in a press release about it quote “Using exclusive access to cutting-edge underwater scanning technology, including 715,000 digitally captured images, the special unveils the most precise model of the Titanic ever created: a full-scale, 1:1 digital twin, accurate down to the rivet,” end quote. And I think this is so cool because it’s kind of a work around to the issue that keeps coming up with all these shipwrecks. This ethical moral issue of, do we dig up these wrecks and pull stuff up to study and display in museums, or is this a graveyard that should be left undisturbed, in peace as the final resting place of all these victims. What National Geographic is doing here is kind of both in this really neat way. Because it is being left undisturbed, as Robert Ballard wanted, but we’re also sort of getting to see it and I mean down to like the tiny details, personal items like pocket watches, purses, that kind of thing. It’s all left in place but it’s been scanned and digitally recreated in a way that sort of bridges the gap of this moral shipwreck dilemma we keep having. I really need to watch this special now. Not a sponsor, unfortunately, just probably really cool to see. National Geographic hit me up if you want to sponsor History Fix. I’ll talk about the doc all day long. 


Our seventh shipwreck, counting the four last week, is the Endeavor, not to be confused with the Endurance, Ernest Shackleton’s ship which came up organically a couple weeks ago when I was chatting with Gary Arndt, episode 116 about UNESCO. I literally, I don’t know what happened but for like until right now in the episode thought I was doing Shackleton’s ship and then was like wait no, Endeavor not Endurance. Wait, what even is the Endeavor? I got so confused. I am going to talk about the Endeavor, not the Endurance although that is another interesting shipwreck story. I have plans to do a full episode about Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance so I’m going to save that one and we’re going to do the Endeavor instead. To make things even more confusing, these two famous shipwrecks were discovered about a month apart in February and March of 2022. The Endeavor was discovered off of Rhode Island in February of 2022 and no it was not Shackleton’s ship it was another famous dude we’ve talked about before’s ship, Captain James Cook. He actually came up in my mini fix I put out just a few days ago. And guys this is how turned around I got, I literally thought I was talking about Shackleton’s ship until I saw that it was found off Rhode Island and I was like “wait, Shackleton wasn’t anywhere near Rhode Island, he was in Antarctica, what the heck is going on here.” No, no, this was Captain James Cook’s ship. 


So who was Captain Cook? Why is he such a big deal? Well, he was a British Navy officer, explorer, and cartographer best known for his three voyages to the Pacific and Southern Oceans between 1768 and 1779. He is the first known European to have visited Australia and the Hawaiian Islands. He is also credited as the first person to have circumnavigated New Zealand but something tells me that’s probably wrong considering how skilled Pacific islanders were as navigators and seamen. I feel like someone else definitely did that first. it just wasn’t recorded in writing for us to refer back to in the way that Cook’s expeditions were. So, Captain James Cooks is sort of touted as a hero. He’s this heroic historical figure, this important explorer. But of course there’s a whole lot more to his story than that. Of course there’s a dark side to Captain Cook just like there was a dark side, a very dark side to Christopher Columbus. Both of their voyages, their expeditions, led directly to the displacement and subjugation, oppression of indigenous people in the lands that they stumbled upon. I’m not going to get into all that now because I mostly want to focus on the ship. But, yeah, I’ll have to do a future episode on Captain Cook for sure. 


So the ship that Cook captained to Australia and whatnot during his first voyage was called the HMS Endeavor. It returned to England in 1771 after having been at sea for around 3 years exploring Tahiti, Australia, and New Zealand. Cook took another ship altogether for his second and third voyages of exploration. So it gets docked back in England in 1771. In 1775, the Endeavor was sold into private hands and renamed Lord Sandwich after the Earl of Sandwich who is believed to be the inventor of the actual sandwich but, once again, not buying that. Dude lived in like the mid to late 1700s. You cannot convince that someone else somewhere in the world didn’t come up with the concept of a sandwich before that. There’s just no way the ancient Egyptians whoever didn’t dabble in sandwiches, put something between two slices of bread, there’s no way that didn’t happen. This guy just happened to be rich and white and so he got the credit. Anyway, unrelated. The Endeavor leaves the Navy, gets renamed Lord Sandwich and is used commercially starting in 1775. 


Now, something else significant that happens in 1775, Great Britain’s American colonies sign the Declaration of Independence and the American war for independence the Revolutionary War begins. Starting then, the Endeavor AKA Lord Sandwich was rehired by the British Navy, they were like “woops, nevermind,” to transport British troops to the colonies to fight in the war. After a few years of doing this, in 1778, they needed the Endeavor for another purpose. They needed to use it to blockade Newport Harbor in Rhode Island. The French were involved now, the French were helping the Americans and they needed to get into this harbor and the British were not going to let that happen. So they sank the Endeavor along with some other ships, scuttled it, it’s called scuttling apparently when you intentionally sink a ship to blockade a port or whatever. So they scuttled it to block the harbor so French ships couldn’t get through. And that was that, they sank it and there it remained. 


So it really had nothing to do with Captain James Cook at the time that it was scuttled, sunk. He hadn’t had anything to do with it for around 7 years and he actually died the year after the Endeavor was sunk in 1779 after being injured in a confrontation with indigenous Hawaiians. He kind of deserved it. I talk about that more in episode 59 about Hawaii. But, the Endeavor’s stint as Captain James Cook’s ship during his first voyage of exploration when he landed in Australia was a big enough deal to Australians that they wanted to find the ship, to white Australians I should say. Aboriginal Australians probably feel very differently about Captain James Cook and the Endeavor. But, between 2018 and 2021 the Australian National Maritime Museum’s archaeology team began looking for the wreck of the Endeavor. Because, I mean, we kind of knew where it was. We knew the British sank it and we knew the general area in which they sank it, Newport Harbor Rode Island. So the Australian archaeologists teamed up with the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project to investigate a wreck known as RI 2394 that had been discovered in the late 90s and was just sort of a John Doe of a shipwreck. 


In February of 2022 they were able to use various pieces of evidence from the RI 2394 wreck to link it to the Endeavor of Captain Cook fame. Because they have detailed plans, like blueprints, of the Endeavor from when it was acquired by the British Navy in 1768 and so they were able to confirm the type of wood that was used, white oak, the size of the ship. They were able to superimpose images of the wreck on top of the blueprints and it all lines up perfectly. The bilge pump in particular was a dead ringer. They were also able to identify places where the ship had been repaired that matched known repairs the Endeavour underwent, documented repairs, Cook recorded these in his journal. And they also found evidence of scuttling, intentionally sinking the ship to blockade the port. So when a ship is scuttled, they usually try to leave the possibility open of salvaging the ship at some point, bringing it back up and fixing it to use again. So they would just make a series of small holes in the hull of the ship below the water line to let enough water in to sink it without actually destroying the whole ship. And this is what they found on the wreck, holes low in the hull that appeared to have been intentionally made with tools like axes or crowbars, some of them had evidence of intentional cutmarks around the edges. So someone intentionally put these holes in the ship to scuttle it. 


So this was the theory proposed by the Australians back in February of 2022 but there was still some debate, some pushback. The Rhode Island Archaeology guys were like “eh, I don’t know, they sank a lot of ships like this, we might need more to confirm it.” It wasn’t until like a week ago actually that this find was sort of confirmed. According to a Guardian article from June 4th, quote “On Wednesday, the museum’s director, Daryl Karp, said it stood by its 2022 conclusions – the culmination of 25 years of research,” end quote. That is the Australian National Maritime Museum. So they didn’t like find a smoking gun or anything, they just sort of sat on their theory for three more years and were like “it’s good enough, confirmed.” There are no plans to like pull the wreck up or anything like that. There wouldn’t be much of anything left on it because it was intentionally sunk. But the Australians would like plans put in place to protect the wreck from shipworms and gribbles which are eating the wood. Gribbles are apparently a type of wood eating crustacean. So, yeah, shipworms and gribbles, yikes. But of course it’s in American waters not Australian so that complicates things I’m sure. And then, you know, when you factor in what this ship was used for, transporting foreign invaders to Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, lands that were already inhabited, populations that would be decimated, ways of life destroyed by these outsiders and then again during the Revolutionary war, it was used to try to keep the American colonies oppressed, to continue to subjugate and abuse the Americans who so badly yearned for freedom and independence. There’s a lot of people who might prefer to see the Endeavor go to the shipworms and gribbles. Let the gribbles have it y’all.  


Our final shipwreck is that of the San Jose. I was going to go in chronological order but I don’t know what happened. We went chronologically up to the Titanic and then we started going backwards again. Just sort of happened that way. The San Jose was a Spanish galleon that sank in 1708 off of Columbia and it has been called the holy grail of shipwrecks. It’s also highly highly controversial. And that’s because it carried a load of gold, silver, and emeralds worth an estimated 17 billion dollars in today’s money when it sank, holy grail indeed. Now, if you’re like me, you think Harry Potter when you hear the word galleon, right, a galleon is the largest denomination of coin, wizard money, in the Harry Potter series. It’s a big gold coin. But in this context, the San Jose being a Spanish galleon, that was a type of sailing vessel used by Spain in mostly the 15, 16, and 1700s. But even just the word galleon brings to mind gold, gold coins because the Spanish were known to transport riches like this in their ships. Spain was a very very wealthy country during this period of history. The San Jose and its twin ship, its brother San Joaquin, were part of the Spanish treasure fleet that operated between 1566 and 1790. Spain was raking it in. You have to be raking it in to have a designated treasure fleet. Specifically, the San Jose operated during the Spanish War of Succession in the early 1700s. This was a conflict over who would take the Spanish throne after the death of the childless King Charles II. He was the real funky looking one with the Hapsburg jaw, which is a sign of inbreeding. My video watchers are seeing his lovely portrait on the screen now. 


In 1708, the San Jose was carrying a bunch of riches, gold, silver, emeralds, jewelery etc. from South America back to Spain to fund the king’s war effort when it encountered an enemy British warship off the coast of Columbia. The British wanted to seize the ship including its treasure but accidentally fired a cannon into the powder magazine where they stored the gun powder. It detonated, exploded, sinking the ship including any treasure it was carrying and killing all but 11 of the 600 men on board. The British massively screwed that one up. They really blew it. So how do we know how much the riches aboard the San Jose were worth? The number 17 billion dollars is thrown around a lot. Well we don’t really. That’s speculation based on what we know the San Jose’s twin ship, the San Joaquin was carrying at the time. We’re assuming the San Jose was carrying a similar treasure haul. So, eh, but promising enough to prompt major treasure hunting efforts. 


This began in the 1980s, according to a BBC article by Gideon Long. In the 80s, a US salvage company called Glocca Mora claimed to have located the shipwreck and tried to persuade the Colombian government to go in it with them, help them raise the treasure and they would split it. But, of course, the two parties immediately disagreed over who should get what theoretical share and it all got locked in a legal battle that kept the whole thing at a stand still. In 2015, so like 30 some years later, the Columbian government was like “whoa, we found this shipwreck, the San Jose. We found it. It had nothing to do with the Americans, Glocca Mora. We found it in a completely different place than where they said it even was.” And so Columbia started to argue that Glocca Mora, now called Sea Search Armada, has no right to the wreck or any of the treasure. But others argue, neither does Columbia. Spain, for example, has staked a claim. I mean it was a Spanish government ship. They say that treasure was the property of Spain and still is. But then the indigenous people of South America disagree, of course, specifically the people of Bolivia and Peru. They argue that Spain plundered those riches from mines in the Andes mountains, stolen goods. 


So while Columbia has released what Long calls tantalizing videos of the wreck taken with submersible cameras that show quote “the prow of a wooden ship, encrusted with marine life, a few bronze cannons scattered across the sand, and blue-and-white porcelain and gold coins shining on the ocean floor,” end quote, all of these factions are at a legal standstill once more over what to do with the wreck and who owns the rights to the treasure. Columbia, the American salvage company, Spain, and the indigenous people of Peru and Bolivia have all staked a claim. I’m honestly surprised Britain hasn’t jumped into the mix to be like “well, actually we sank the ship, sooo…” It’s messy and it really brings the shipwreck controversy to light. Because there aren’t really any clear cut laws over what to do with shipwrecks and who, if anyone, has rights to them. And, you know, shipwrecks are international, they’re all over the place and so it has to be some sort of international law, international agreement and that, of course, is very hard to pull off. 


And then, we have to factor in, of course, the reality that many of these wrecks are actually graveyards. Taking treasure off of a shipwreck is really no different than taking treasure out of someone’s grave or tomb. It’s graverobbery. For many, including archaeologists concerned about the historical value of these wrecks, they should be left in peace, undisturbed. Shipwreck explorer Rodrigo Pacheco Ruiz says in that BBC article quote “if you just go down and take lots of artefacts and bring them to the surface, you just have a pile of stuff. There’s no story to tell… You can just count coins, you can count porcelain, but there is no ‘why was this on board? Who was the owner? Where was it going?’ – the human story behind it,” end quote. Colombian maritime archaeologist Juan Guillermo Martín adds quote “The treasure of the San José should remain at the bottom of the sea, along with the human remains of the 600 crew members who died there. The treasure is part of the archaeological context, and as such has no commercial value. Its value is strictly scientific,” end quote. 


The human story matters. The historical context matters. This is really cool stuff that they’ve recovered from some of these shipwrecks but once they recover it, once they haul it up out of the water and put it in a museum, it’s just old crappy stuff. It really only matters as part of the shipwreck, within that context. And is it really worth disturbing the sanctity of a burial ground, a graveyard, to get it? Especially if your motives are financial. Columbia, the United States, Spain, Peru, and Bolivia - they aren’t arguing over the San Jose because they all want to have the coolest museum ever. They’re arguing over it because of money. They all want the treasure and that’s not right. That’s disrespectful. These sites, these shipwrecks, this is hallowed ground. These were tragedies, immense tragedies some of them and to profit, even now, from those tragedies… it’s just not right. So I think, after all this, I’m leaning more in the direction of leave it. Leave them there. Let them be at peace. But, document what you can, preserve what you can in situ, for scientific and historical, educational purposes. I can’t stop thinking about the National Geographic Titanic special, I promise they really aren’t a sponsor. But that technology they’re using where they do these high tech scans and then they are able to recreate a digital exact life size replica of the wreck and everything on it, all the debris. It really is the perfect solution to the leave it but also learn from it conundrum. 


1,500 people died when the Titanic sank. Only 340 of those bodies were recovered from the water meaning there’s something like 1,160 bodies down there with that ship. That’s heavy and it commands respect. And yet, up to 6,500 artifacts have been taken from the wreck. Submersibles have landed on it, damaging what’s left of the ship. In 2001, a New York couple was married in a submersible perched on the ship’s deck, leading to outrage that they were insulting the dead. Don’t do this guys. Don’t get married on a shipwreck, a plantation. Plantation weddings are a thing here in the American South. Just, don’t. It’s so disrespectful to have a party, a celebration in a place where so much suffering took place. I’m reminded of the moment Robert Ballard and his team first laid eyes on the wreck of the Titanic. After searching and searching, they’re running out of time, and the boilers come into view and they know they’ve finally found it. They are cheering, champagne comes out, this is a huge moment, success, and then they realize, this sobering realization, they’ve found it. They’ve found the final resting place of over 1,000 people and this is no cause for celebration. “We were embarrassed,” Ballard said, “we were celebrating and all of a sudden we realized that we should not be dancing on someone’s grave.”


Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix. 


Information used in this episode was sourced from American Battlefield Trust, the New York Times, Live Science, National Geographic, The Times, Wikipedia, the Australian National Maritime Museum, the Guardian, and BBC. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.