This year marks a decade since the discovery of the Spanish galleon San José off the coast of Colombia—yet its fate is as uncertain as ever. The Colombian and Spanish governments, a private U.S. salvage company, and Indigenous groups in Bolivia and Peru have each staked a claim to what is routinely dubbed the “holy grail of shipwrecks,” with its prodigious cargo of gold, silver, and emeralds, valued at around $17 billion.
The Colombian government has already committed millions to its recovery, which is underway, but litigation has been an added difficulty to what is already an enormous, complex, and expensive salvage mission. Archaeologists worldwide have been worried that bickering over money has taken precedence over concerted international action to salvage the wreck, given its enormous potential significance to our knowledge of colonial trade networks at the height of the Spanish empire. The case has reignited global discussions about postcolonial restitution, highlighting the need to reconsider who truly owns underwater cultural heritage.
In the 10-year stalemate since the ship was found, the conversation regarding postcolonial restitution has taken prodigious strides, with major museums across Europe and America having delivered or promised returns of artifacts taken during the colonial era. Earlier this month, the lawyer Tim Maxwell, a partner at London-based Wedlake Bell, proposed that the exemption of underwater cultural heritage from this conversation was an anomaly that ought to be rectified. As Maxwell asked in the Observer: “Why should countries in the Caribbean, South America, and elsewhere not be able to lay claim to their underwater cultural heritage?”
Shipwrecked artifacts make up a small proportion of colonial-era heritage, but their number seems set to grow. “There are some very significant wrecks out there, and with new technologies it’s now much easier to get to them,” Maxwell told me. So the time is ripe for a fuller appraisal of sunken heritage.
As the San José case illustrates only too well, the legal status of underwater cultural heritage often falls into a jurisdictional quagmire. An attempt to standardize an international approach to protecting this heritage—and safeguard against commercial exploitation and looting—occurred in 2001 with the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage (CPUCH). But this is now a quarter-century old and its emphasis was on preserving the integrity of the wreck, rather than necessarily considering how heritage recovered might benefit the countries from which it originally came.
“Not much heed has been paid to the argument that, because the cargo and artifacts were originally taken from, say, Peru, then that is where they should be returned—which strikes us as being 40 years behind where the restitution debate is,” Maxwell said.
International conventions and treaties have largely resulted in the former colonial power’s claims being given precedence. Spain has been particularly aggressive in asserting its right to intervene—as in the case of the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, a frigate found by the U.S. deep-sea exploring company Odyssey off the coast of Gibraltar; in 2007 a Spanish warship forced the Odyssey Explorer back to port at gunpoint.
But just because the law is the way it is now doesn’t mean that things can’t change. Maxwell compared the situation to Nazi spoliation, with which he has worked extensively. “With Holocaust restitution, the black letter of the law was very clear—until the moral and ethical argument was made that, actually, this was so reprehensible that you shouldn’t apply normal legal principles to it,” he explained. “The impetus is to reach a fair and just solution.”
For Natasha Reichle, associate curator of Southeast Asian Art at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the special archaeological value of shipwrecks is as “time capsules,” which make it possible to “trace the movement of objects” with exceptional clarity. Accordingly, sunken heritage has particular value in the field of provenance research, enabling us to better “consider the longer histories: the laws of the places where objects come from; the people and their voices,” she said.
In 2019, Reichle curated the exhibition “Lost at Sea: Art Recovered from Shipwrecks” at the Asian Art Museum, focusing on objects salvaged from two sites: the Hội An, which sank in the 15th century in a typhoon in the South China Sea, carrying a valuable cargo of Vietnamese porcelain; and the Meï-kong, a French ocean liner that was wrecked in the Red Sea off Somalia in 1877, carrying a group of 13th-century stone sculptures made by the Vietnamese Cham people.
The stories of both of these wrecks make plain that one of the key issues at stake in preserving underwater cultural heritage is the sheer difficulty and expense of salvage, “which means the financial disparities of different nation states and private sectors come into play,” Reichle told me. In the case of Hội An, a three-party agreement was struck up between the Vietnamese government, a Malay private salvager, and the University of Oxford’s Marine Archaeology Research Division.
But there were problems throughout. A report promised by the Oxford archaeologists was never published. While more than 250,000 objects were recovered, with most consigned to auction to raise funds for the Vietnamese cultural sector, the sheer volume of material flooded the market and the money made was negligible. In relation to other wrecks, Reichle has even heard rumors of private commercial salvagers intentionally destroying objects to drive up the scarcity factor of what remains.
Since 2008, the Slave Wrecks Project (SWP), hosted by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, D.C., has been mobilizing maritime archaeology with a view to recovering and redistributing not treasure, but rather knowledge and understanding. According to Gabrielle Miller, program specialist and archaeologist for the Center for the Study of Global Slavery at the museum: “It’s really fostering what the ship itself represents as an opportunity for people of African descent to access history—the power of being in control of that narrative.”
In 2022, the Slave Wrecks Project Academy brought together a cohort of 12 students from West Africa and Haïti to undertake archaeological dives off Gorée Island, Senegal. “Archaeology still hasn’t fully moved into the idea that people of the community can be the researchers and scientists themselves,” Miller told me. Rectifying this is an impetus the SWP shares with recent museum projects across the African continent, such as the Museum of West African Art in Benin City, which likewise sets out to question preconceived notions of who gets to participate in the writing of history. In Miller’s words, “Who is a historian? It might be a griot—it might be your grandmother.” The project also works with local museums from Brazil to Mozambique, training staff in the specialist conservation required by previously submerged artifacts, reframing collections of submerged material, and also addressing the legacy of extractive maritime archaeological practices.
Since it opened in 2016, a small exhibition of items retrieved from the São José Paquete Africa, a Portuguese slaver that sank off South Africa in 1794, has been on view at the NMAAHC. The artifacts include iron ballasts, used to displace the weight of the human cargo, as well as remnants of shackles. These objects may not come with the price tag of the San José treasure, but they are eloquent reminders of the power of sunken heritage to communicate global historical forces on a human scale—and in that sense, every bit as valuable.