More than a decade after it was found, a centuries-old Spanish treasure ship worth billions remains nearly untouched on the seafloor while Spain, Colombia, Indigenous groups, and American booty hunters wage a bitter international legal war.
On Thanksgiving Day of 2015, Roger Dooley, a maritime archaeologist from Miami, saw something he’d been searching for for decades.
Looking at the computer screen in his waterfront apartment in Cartagena, Colombia, his hands trembled. He was reviewing footage from a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution underwater robot that had spent seventeen hours scanning the Caribbean seabed.
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In 2015, archaeologists found the lost Spanish galleon the San José off the coast of Colombia. Colombian Presidency/AFP via Get
Clicking through grainy sonar images, Dooley and his colleague saw a
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