Colombia in Dispute over Shipwreck Treasures

[doc-d]

https://www.eluniverso.com/noticias...as&utm_content=ampliada&utm_campaign=Ma%F1ana

Original in spanish, translated below.

Thursday, january 18, 2018 - 23h02
Off the coast of Cartagena are the remains of the San Jose galleon, sunk more than 300 years ago, and in which there would be a treasure that could exceed 10,000 million dollars, which is in dispute.

The coordinates of its location were known by the Government since 2015, but this Thursday it was made public by the digital media Infobae , in the middle of the legal fight that includes Spain and the US exploration company. Sea Search Armada.

The latter maintains that the Government used the coordinates it calculated on the possible location of San José in the early 1980s, which is why it maintains an embargo on any extraction.

It is estimated that the galleon has 200 tons of gold, silver and precious stones from the viceroyalties of Peru and New Granada. (I)

 

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[seekerGH]

Quite a bit on this already here on TNET

 

[enrada]

Go to google and type in "infobae san jose"
Then on the first article hit the "translate page" and you will see an excellent article on the San Jose. Even gives both locations of the location of the San Jose including the distance between the US groups claim and Colombias claim.

 

[Simon1]

10,000 million dollars equals 10,000,000,000.00 or 10 billion.

 

[Tom_Restorer]

10,000 million dollars equals 10,000,000,000.00 or 10 billion.

Why not 1000 billions ?
Who makes this crazy estimations on shipwrecks and what is the reason for it ? Lawyer games to make most possible money? Pushing prices up for the few collectors who buys this stuff?
May someone can explain this to me because compared to the entire antiquitie business this prices and estimations are way to high.

 

[Simon1]

Why not 1000 billions ?
Who makes this crazy estimations on shipwrecks and what is the reason for it ? Lawyer games to make most possible money? Pushing prices up for the few collectors who buys this stuff?
May someone can explain this to me because compared to the entire antiquitie business this prices and estimations are way to high.

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But then again, I believe they are assuming a certain percentage was not listed in the ship's manifest and can run even more than what the amount reported was.

 

[Tom_Restorer]

========================
But then again, I believe they are assuming a certain percentage was not listed in the ship's manifest and can run even more than what the amount reported was.

ok, sure. But makes it such amount of difference?
There will be for sure a few outstanding coins, emeralds etc. but most - as always - is just low quality stuff and I real don´t know how they can make such an estimation.

 

[TRG]

In 1686 and 87 William Phips' expeditions salvaged around 36tons of mostly silver treasure from the 1641 wreck of the almiranta Concepcion off Hispaniola.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Phips

It had reportedly been carrying ~100tons of silver and gold. The salvaged treasure was valued at £215,536. Phips was paid £11,000.

Using the calculations suggested here:

https://www.measuringworth.com/ukco...1=&amount=1&year_source=1686&year_result=2017

and the "income" or "status value" equivalent for 2016 Phips' share was equal to about $53,000,000 in today's money and the total salvage value comes out to $1,037,344,000. Various other salvagers also recovered treasure from the wreck site (including Burt Webber), so perhaps we could estimate that the wreck yielded something in the neighborhood of 1.5 billion USD in today's money. Total value of wrecked cargo figured this way would be something over 3 billion USD.

Total value of the cargo of one of these treasure ships, figured this way, could approach 10 billion USD. Recovering 30% of such a cargo today would seem to me to be a best case (and rather unlikely) scenario.

[Edit] This is probably an over-generous way to evaluate "value". 36 tons of silver valued @ $17/ounce comes out to $19,584,000. If someone were able salvage that volume of treasure today and realize ~$20 million USD in returned funds for their efforts I would guess they might feel rather pleased.

 

[Jason in Enid]

[Edit] This is probably an over-generous way to evaluate "value". 36 tons of silver valued @ $17/ounce comes out to $19,584,000. If someone were able salvage that volume of treasure today and realize ~$20 million USD in returned funds for their efforts I would guess they might feel rather pleased.

You are forgetting that "shipwreck treasure" is sold at massive premiums. A 1 ounce silver coin from the Atocha sells for thousands of dollars. 36 tons of silver would be billions in sales.

 

[TRG]

You are forgetting that "shipwreck treasure" is sold at massive premiums. A 1 ounce silver coin from the Atocha sells for thousands of dollars. 36 tons of silver would be billions in sales.

Actually, no - you can't flood the market with tons of silver, or even gold coins and expect to get much over the silver value. You can get a premium for some portion, depending on what the market will stand and how skilled the marketing team is. One-off gold jewelry and the like does fetch a huge premium. Realizing "billions" from a wreck is a fantasy - entertaining but unlikely in the extreme IMO.

 

[seekerGH]

The latest recovery from the SSCA sold to CGMG for only $30M.

They realized how much flooding the market with silver dollars would depress that year (again)

 

[Tom_Restorer]

You are forgetting that "shipwreck treasure" is sold at massive premiums. A 1 ounce silver coin from the Atocha sells for thousands of dollars. 36 tons of silver would be billions in sales.

The MOST MASSIVE PREMIUMS in the entire antique business mate !
Thats what I mean! They make this stuff artificially rare! Good to see on the fisher websites... They show just a handful of stuff in their interent shops.
But the auctions show what the stuff is real worth. As example, on ebay you get genuine atocha coins (Grade 1 and 2) for much less and same happens also at Sedwick, who HAS only special collectors for wreck items!!. Only uninformed people buy stuff in their shops for thousands of $ and later they wonder why they can´t get just 50% of their spent money back...
Or if you look at pirate coins, he has for sure some outstanding gold coins but they don´t sell for years now!
May they all sell some stuff overpriced and sit on all the rest for generations but the real money is to get on a wider global market and this would also catch new collectors in this very interesting field.
If you compare: a two escudo piece as a land find in good condition costs approx 600 and 800$. If it comes from an anonymous ship where you can´t say anything about his history at all, it costs minimum 3500 $ JUST because it comes from a wreck! What justifies this massive price explosion...?!

@TRG: you can "flood" the market with ancient silver and gold because this don´t affect the precious metal market in any way. This is material with an historical background and worth and will allways hold his higher price as an antiquitie. Sure the price will go to an realistic value but the market takes all this stuff within a few years and so it gets more rare again and the prices goes up again. I have seen this 25 years ago when all this bulgarians and hungrians flood the market in europe with this regular roman silver denarius. First the prices gone down, more callectors bought them and new collectors was created (!!) and a little bit later the prices gone up again because more people still want them now and pay for them to get it.

I say it again, you don´t get rich with selling a few overpriced pieces and sit on all the rest and just counting yourself rich !!

 

[ARC]

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But then again, I believe they are assuming a certain percentage was not listed in the ship's manifest and can run even more than what the amount reported was.

So... lets just call it 1 trillion. :P

 

[Taboga]

I believe the article placed the value in Colombian pesos which is about 2800(COP) pesos = $1.00. Colombia also uses the $ sign for pesos. Divide the $10,000 million by 2800 and it should seem more realistic. So chalk it up to a bad translation.

 

[seekerGH]

Like $500 Million for 500,000 1812 pieces spanish silver?

 

[Marine Archaeology Int.]

Sometimes, the translation of the word "billion" between English and Spanish is tricky; it literally means two different things. In English, a billion is represented numerically as 1,000,000,000. In Spanish, a billion (un billón) is represented numerical by 1,000,000,000,000 (or what we would call a trillion in English).

The value of the San Jose has been [mis]represented in the literature and the press with the denomination of "$10 billion" for a long time, as does the latest article in Infobae. The only thing that can be assumed about the value of this particular shipwreck, is that I carried around 7 to 8 million "pesos" [a Spanish unit of value equivalent to 1 once of silver in colonial times]. How much is a peso worth today is a subject that deserves careful considerations, with estimates that run from $50 to a $1000 depending who you ask. Personally, I believe that with the right marketing and shipwreck history, a peso could be worth around $150 today (assuming that the proportion silver to gold on that wreck was the historical average of 90 - 10% respectively).

Taking this into consideration, the treasure of the San Jose could then be worth around $1 billion dollars in my opinion (not ten). There is good reason to think that there was more gold than normal on this particular wreck and that the emeralds could also help to raise the final valuation. But it is also true that the galleon did not make it to Cartegena, therefore there was a portion of the final cargo that was never loaded on the vessel. On the other side, they have not had a fair in Portobelo for many years due to wars, and an unusual amount of treasure was loaded at that port in 1708. It is difficult to know what the final tally will be (but we are close to find out).

The issue of how much a "peso" is worth today is an extremely important one in order to calculate the valuation of any given shipwreck project and/or commercial archeology company. Leaving aside exaggerations in order to raise funds, I will appreciate if we, as a community of ocean explorers and shipwreck experts, could debate this issue and come to a conclusion or aproxiamtion of realistically how to make this calculation so investors, entrepreneurs and governments can look at these valuations with more realist eyes.

Thank you for your opinions in this matter.

 

[enrada]

Can we not assume also that there will be no emeralds from the Muzo mine if the San Jose never made it to Cartegena?

 

[seekerGH]

Emeralds of the day were simply large crystals with not the emphasis on cutting them to a gemstone as we know today, like the kilo bags of emeralds for sale on ebay. You can root through the bag an perhaps find one to cut down to todays standards of clarity, but not the huge value we assume on emeralds on these shipwrecks.
Look at the "quality' of emeralds that are in the artefacts, such as the crosses, that have been recovered.




shipwreck emeralds.



Those stones would be worth little on todays market.

 

[Salvor6]

Emeralds of the day were simply large crystals with not the emphasis on cutting them to a gemstone as we know today, like the kilo bags of emeralds for sale on ebay. You can root through the bag an perhaps find one to cut down to todays standards of clarity, but not the huge value we assume on emeralds on these shipwrecks.
Look at the "quality' of emeralds that are in the artefacts, such as the crosses, that have been recovered.


View attachment 1543761

shipwreck emeralds.

View attachment 1543765 View attachment 1543768

Those stones would be worth little on todays market.

I worked "Emerald City" on the Atocha site as a subcontractor in 1992. The emeralds we found were all of exceptionally good quality. They were sold at a premium with a certificate of authenticafancy since they came from a famous shipwreck. Michaels "Emeralds International" bought most of them for re-sale.

 

[Au_Dreamers]

Current market value USD on a 1715 8 reale is more than $150 so is an Atocha 8.

Oddly 16 pesos @ $150 a peso for a 1 escudo is $2,400 USD which is closer to a 1 escudo market value.

The San Jose should also hold some very desirable numismatic Lima 8 escudos.