I'm guessing you're running with the "Experts believe it contains at least 200 tons of gold, silver and emeralds" line from the article. Without further breakdown you don't really know if you're talking about $12 billion (if virtually all of the 200 tons is gold) or $150 million (if the hoard is virtually all silver) or (probably) somewhere in between.

EDIT: Further research (reading the Wikipedia page) makes it sound closer to your estimate. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_galleon_San_José:

> The wreck of the San José is estimated to be worth about $14.43 billion as of 2021, based on the speculation that it had up to 11 million 4-doubloons (i.e. 11 million 8 escudos gold coins, or 11 million coins each of 27 grams of 92% gold, totaling 8.8 million troy ounces AGW, or $11.5 billion) and many silver coins on board at the time of its sinking

I now heartily endorse your plan!

real question: we are assuming the value of the gold is market price by weight, but would people really melt this down? i think the value of the coins could be quite different than just the materials they are made of (maybe that sets the floor value)

Quite possibly, in that it is 'easier' (after all the risk entailed in the salvage of the wreck, ofc) to sell plain gold in some form rather than historical artifacts that are easier to track, more notable, have a smaller audience, etc etc. Its tragic, but sensible in a cold blooded, economical fashion.

E.g. Would the criminal enterprise that went to such great lengths to obtain the material rather sell a sizable quantity of unmarked gold ingots to WeDon'tCareWhereItCameFromJewelers LLC for a nice return, or go through an arduous process to sell coins in varied quantities to wealthy collectors.

There is no way most of it is accessible.

I can imagine a new History Channel show where Robert Clotworthy no longer utters the phrase 'There is an island...', but now says 'There is a shipwreck...'

Commercials will be more than content. Seasons will be made out of 15 minutes of footage. It'll be huge!

this sounds like a job for Dog the bounty hunter

The problem with sonar is that anyone can listen in. You'd have to do this in a manner that scheduling when nobody else is listening is front of mind. The probelm is that passive systems are damn near impossible to detect so you just have to assume someone is listening at any moment.

One ping only Vasili!

How exactly did they give away the location? I struggle to imagine how those pictures would help, unless they left the exif data. And if knowing it was in Columbian waters was enough to find it with publicly available tools it'd likely have already been discovered.

>>>How exactly did they give away the location?

They didn't, not with sufficient detail. Hence the need for the sonar on the submersibles, probably need to do some undersea mapping to pinpoint the wreck. I only know it is "near" Islas del Rosario. It's in water 950 meters deep, so the average concerned citizen can't exactly strap on a wetsuit and go poking around the ocean floor for it.

This site [1] from 2015 claimed it was in 300 meter waters, ~25km from Cartagena. Some of the infographics suggest it is NW of Isla del Tesoro. Maybe best to look at nautical charts of the area, and plot a course from west of Isla Rosario to northwest of Isla del Tesoro, along the part of the sea floor that is ~900m deep (course runs roughly NE). Map/scan that with the sonar on the submersibles, focus on major "outcroppings" that are possibly the San Jose (or the other two nearby shipwrecks). For a second pass, go straight to those outcroppings with a higher-resolution scan, plus visual cameras (use the released photos as reference for visual confirmation). Once pinpointed, send in the bigger cargo-carrier sub with robotic arms, excavator shovel, etc. and start scooping up the treasure.

Split it 60/40 with HSBC, and your team still gets to keep ~$4.7 BILLION. That's a better unicorn offramp than building yet another BS SaaS cloud app.

[1] https://blog.geogarage.com/2015/12/spanish-galleon-may-conta...

With HSBC money you can bribe officials/sailors for the location.

You could set up monitoring of Colombian Naval resources.

You could position your team/startup to be the best contract to work the government retrieval job. Using knowledge from the winning bid, you extract part of the treasure during sanctioned reconnaissance.

Using some legal nonsense, you stake an organization to claim partial rights to the treasure and hope discovery during the legal nonsense reveals the location

You marry a daughter of Poseidon and ask for the treasure as dowry.

A careful review of commercial satellite imagery would probably allow for identifying the approximate location where Colombian ships were running search patterns. Then to actually localize the wreck would require a large, well-equipped boat with side-scan sonar and an ROV. (Don't actually do this.)