By Clyde Hughes From Newsmax

A 300-year-old Caribbean shipwreck laden in gold believed to be worth $17 billion has been detailed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, which played a role in finding the historic site using robot submarines.

The REMUS 6000 discovered the Spanish galleon on Nov. 27, 2015, and its contents are in legal dispute with the Colombian government and an American salvage company wanting a piece of the pie, the Boston Globe reported. The institute said it could not give information on the discovery until this week.

London’s Daily Mail reported that the 18th-century ship, which was found off the Colombian coast, near Cartagena, could be worth billions. It sank during a battle with British forces in the 1708 War of Spanish Succession, some 68 years before the United States would declare independence.

“The San José discovery carries considerable cultural and historical significance for the Colombian government and people because of the ship’s treasure of cultural and historical artifacts and the clues they may provide about Europe’s economic, social, and political climate in the early 18th century,” said a statement from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Monday.

“The Colombian government plans to build a museum and world-class conservation laboratory to preserve and publicly display the wreck’s contents, including cannons, ceramics, and other artifacts,” the statement continued.

The Globe wrote that UNESCO, the United Nations cultural agency, asked Colombia not to commercially exploit the wreck as the rights continued to remain in dispute. The Daily Mail said the exact location of the shipwreck remains a secret to protect the site.

In the 1700s, Spain’s enemies Britain, the Netherlands and France hired pirates to plunder Spanish galleons in the Caribbean Sea, the Daily Mail reported.

The pirates, called privateers, joined buccaneers from local Caribbean islands to sink more than 1,000 Spanish galleons and merchant ships off Colombia during three centuries of colonial rule, leaving vast sums of treasure lying on the seabed, the Daily Mail wrote.

Some archaeologists have estimated the total value of such wrecks to be worth tens of billions of dollars if found and retrieved, the Daily Mail reported.

IMAGE: Image: 300-Year-old Caribbean Shipwreck Includes $16.7B in Treasure
(Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

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