By Juan Carlos Gomi

Bogota, Jan 11 (EFE).– The Spanish galleon San Jose did not sink off Colombia under attack by English ships, as contemporaneous accounts say, and perhaps it did not go down in the Caribbean with its load of treasure due to a powerful explosion, as English commodore Charles Wager reported, nautical researcher Daniel de Narvaez MacAllister told EFE.

The story was completely different, the expert said.

During a battle on June 8, 1708, the vessel split in two and went down without being hit, De Narvaez said, adding that the reason for the wreck predates the clash with the English ship.

“When the galleon left port in Cartagena de Indias headed toward Panama, the hull had an impact that caused structural damage,” the historian, who found the wreckage of the San Roque fleet off Colombia’s Serranilla Key in 1990, said.

De Narvaez bases his theory on Spanish sailors’ log books and information provided by the Colombian Anthropology and History Institute, or ICANH, after the San Jose’s wreckage was found on Nov. 27 in Colombian waters.

“The photographs released by ICANH are interesting. In one of them, four cannons, one on top of the other, can be seen. If there had been an explosion, the distance between the cannons would have been considerable,” De Narvaez said.

A different example is provided by the hull of the frigate Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, discovered by Odyssey Marine Exploration in 2007 off Portugal.

The frigate’s 36 cannons are spread over “an area the size of five soccer fields,” showing how a ship breaks apart in an explosion, De Narvaez said.

Relying on speculation and drawing on the galleon’s log book and information provided by the ICANH, De Narvaez noted the mystery surrounding the San Jose’s cargo, a topic on which experts cannot reach agreement.

Uncorroborated estimates place the value of the San Jose’s presumptive treasure – gold coins, gold and silver ingots, and emeralds – at $10 billion. EFE