Samuel Scott’s ‘Wager’s Action off Cartagena’ (1747) depicting the Spanish ship San José being attacked by the British near Cartagena, Colombia in 1708 © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
Oceans have become battlefields for salvage companies and nation states — with hundreds of sunken galleons up for grabs
First, they found an anchor hiding in the sand.
Then, silver coins.
A few days later, an uncut 50-carat emerald followed by another twice the size.
The gemstones were from Colombia, and they lay buried in the seabed 30ft underwater.
It was the summer of 1987 and a group of scuba divers led by the American businessman Herbert Humphreys was searching off the coast of the Bahamas for the place where the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas foundered during a storm in 1656 after being rammed by another Spanish ship and colliding with a reef.
She took 600 men with her, as well as her precious cargo.
The next summer, the treasure hunters were back.
This time, their haul included an extraordinary gold bodice jewel decorated with 22 emeralds known as a rosa de pecho (breast rose) that was intended to be worn as the centrepiece of a set of matching jewellery by Spanish royalty or nobility.
The piece was in “perfect condition”, as if “it had just fallen over the side”, wrote one of the crew members, Lee Tippin, in his account of the discovery.
“It is like something being passed to you from the hands of the dead,” said Humphreys.
American businessman Herbert Humphreys (right) and crew member Lee Tippin with their haul from the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas © G Lee Tippin
Next week, the rosa de pecho is going on display at Frieze Abu Dhabi with the London gallery ArtAncient.
It will be shown alongside gold belt fittings also recovered by Humphreys from the remains of the Maravillas, and a heavy gold chain from the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, a Spanish galleon laden with riches that sank in 1622 west of the Florida Keys.
Her treasure was recovered by another American, Mel Fisher, in 1985.
A Tudor-era diamond ring discovered in 2024 by a metal detectorist in Gloucestershire has been added to the Spanish gold; ArtAncient is offering the entire group for £1mn.
“What all these pieces have in common is that they survived because they were lost — that’s the paradox,” says jewellery historian Sophie Morris, who has written the introduction to ArtAncient’s catalogue for the display.
“If the gold jewels hadn’t gone down at sea, they would have been melted down hundreds of years ago or redesigned when fashions changed.”
The ‘rosa de pecho’ (breast rose), part of Humphreys’ Maravillas haul . . . ...
is a gold bodice jewel decorated with 22 emeralds intended to be worn by Spanish royalty or nobility
© ArtAncient
The shipwreck finds were “almost certainly made by Spanish or Spanish-trained metalworkers in workshops set up in Latin America to service the demand for New World jewellery back in Europe,” says ArtAncient director Jethro Sverdloff.
In particular, the appetite for Colombian emeralds was enormous.
“The last time Europe had access to great emeralds was in antiquity when there were mines in Egypt, but these were largely exhausted by the Middle Ages.
The Spanish had never seen emeralds that were as vivid and deep in colour as those coming from Latin America.”
Intriguingly, ArtAncient’s rosa de pecho and gold chain do not appear to have been registered in the records of their respective ships, possibly to avoid the crown tax.
“They may have been contraband items, or they may have been owned by passengers.
We just don’t know,” says Sverdloff.
Gold belt fittings also recovered from the remains of the Maravillas
A heavy gold chain from the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha
© ArtAncient
The jewels were on their way back to Europe when they were lost at sea.
In the three centuries that Spain presided over Latin America, it extracted massive amounts of wealth: 150,000 tonnes of silver by some estimates, as well as gold, copper, emeralds, amethysts and more.
These riches powered an empire, funding its wars, building its palaces, servicing debts and buying foreign goods.
Every year, fleets of galleons set sail for Spain.
But many ships never made it home.
Some sank in foul weather or shallow waters; others were downed by enemy combatants.
More than 700 Spanish wrecks still lie submerged off the coasts of the Bahamas and the US, according to the Spanish ministry of culture, which has produced an inventory of the lost ships.
Only 25 per cent of these have been precisely located and, of those, only a handful have had their treasures recovered.
So how did ArtAncient come to own this rare shipwreck gold? Before retrieving the Maravillas’s treasures from the sea, Humphreys negotiated salvage rights to the vessel with the government of the Bahamas.
In exchange for funding the discovery of the wreck and the recovery of its cargo, he would keep three quarters of everything he found; the rest would go to the Bahamas.
Mel Fisher with some of the treasure he recovered from the vessel Nuestra Señora de Atocha © Mel Fisher’s Treasures
A few years earlier, Fisher had retrieved an estimated $400mn in gold, silver and emeralds from the Atocha, following a 16-year search for the vessel.
He kept all of it following a 1982 ruling by the US Supreme Court that blocked the State of Florida from claiming a share.
Salvaged by Humphreys and Fisher respectively, the rosa de pecho, belt fittings and gold chain were then offered at Christie’s in London in 1990, where they were acquired by the late Robin Symes, the disgraced antiquities dealer linked to the trade in looted artefacts.
After Symes declared bankruptcy in 2003, his gallery stock was seized by liquidators and ArtAncient purchased the Spanish gold from them.
“Because of the Symes connection, we did a lot of due diligence, tracing each piece back to the moment it was recovered from the seabed.
The legal status is solid,” says Sverdloff.
A diver recovers a gold bar . . . ...
and emerald jewels from the Maravillas wreck
© Diving the Maravillas
ArtAncient’s shipwreck gold comes from an era of treasure hunting that is now over; the commercial market for these works is restricted to pieces recovered from only a handful of wrecks such as the Maravillas and the Atocha because Spain chose not to dispute their ownership in the 1980s.
It has since changed tack.
In 2000, Spain asserted its sovereignty in US courts over two navy frigates found off the coast of Virginia and won.
In 2012, it won again in a dispute over the ownership of the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, which went down in 1804 on its way from Peru to Spain after it was sunk by a British warship.
The US salvage company Odyssey Marine Exploration had located the wreck in 2007 and recovered 17 tonnes of silver and gold coins.
After Spain sued and won in the US, the salvage company was forced to hand over all of its treasure.
‘Four Frigates Capturing Spanish Treasure Ships’ (1804) by Francis Sartorius
© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
“US courts now tend to find against the salvager and in favour of, for example, Spain,” says Tim Maxwell, head of art law at the London firm Wedlake Bell, adding that it is a contentious area given the competing interests between preservation of underwater cultural heritage and the sometimes huge financial values involved.
For most governments, the only plausible way to recover wrecks is to form a partnership with a reputable salvage company.
“It costs hundreds of thousands a day to have a boat at sea looking for shipwrecks; so you likely need private capital to do this kind of speculative exploration.
Equally, you don’t want private salvage companies putting conveyor belts on the seabed and just wiping out anything of archaeological interest in order to recover gold or jewels.”
These days, formerly colonised countries are likely to assert their rights more vigorously in defiance of Spanish claims.
A case in point is the fight over the San José, a Spanish ship sunk by the British near Cartagena, Colombia, in 1708.
Its wreck is believed to conceal the richest haul of any lost ship in history.
Almost all of it still lies submerged, protected by the Colombian navy.
A US salvage company is now claiming $10bn from the government of Colombia, arguing this is its share of the San José treasure.
A decision on the dispute by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague is pending.
Spain’s attempt to join the arbitration was rejected by the court.
With technological advances making the discovery of shipwrecks easier, perhaps the only certainty in this field is the array of competitors — treasure hunters, salvage companies and nation states — racing to claim riches still buried at sea.
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