More than 250 years after Spanish forces sank British warship Lord Clive off the coast of Uruguay, treasure hunter Ruben Collado is working to raise it from its watery grave.
Collado believes the ship might have been carrying 100,000 gold coins when Spanish cannon fire sank it in 1763, as Britain and Portugal tried to seize the city of Colonia del Sacramento during the Seven Years’ War.
The Argentine adventurer spent 14 years searching for the wreckage before finding it by accident in 2004, when the propeller of his boat struck a sunken mast as he trolled around the River Plate estuary.
Photo: AFP
After waiting more than 10 long years for authorization from the Uruguayan authorities, Collado is finally set to fulfill his dream: to haul what is left of the wreckage to the surface, repair its cracks and bring it to shore.
The 78-year-old bursts with energy as he discusses his plans, brushing aside conservationists’ calls to leave the ship where it is and skeptics’ doubts about its cargo.
“I’m a professional treasure hunter. If the ship doesn’t have any treasure, investors don’t put up any money,” he said, his eyes alight as he looked out over the water from a bar in Colonia del Sacramento.
This fortified city of cobblestone streets was founded by the Portuguese in 1680 and is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Just off the coast, in the estuary that splits Argentina and Uruguay, five orange buoys float above the remains of the Lord Clive, marking the spot where Collado and his team are at work.
Pencil in hand, Collado sketches out a map to show where the 64-gun privateer lies, with a cargo he says also includes thousands of liters of rum, 18th-century weaponry and other vestiges of an era when Europe’s colonial powers were battling each other around the world.
Collado, who has done extensive research on the ship and its cargo, says its fatal error that Jan. 6 was casting anchor too close to shore.
The Lord Clive, which belonged to the British East India Company, was sailing at the head of a fleet of 11 ships.
Collado believes its mission was to drop arms and equipment ashore to supply an uprising against the Spanish crown across a vast swath of South America, in hopes of winning control over the region’s commerce.
“The ship had incredible firepower,” he said.
“It’s a fabulous historical treasure for research on period weaponry,” he said.
However, despite its three storeys of cannon, the Lord Clive anchored just 350m offshore — making it an easy target for the Spanish and putting it too close for its own guns, which fired over the city.
“They kept lowering the cannon, but they couldn’t hit the city because Colonia sits so low,” Collado said.
“The Spanish hit them and hit them, until the ship started to sink,” he said.
Collado says he has not managed to locate the ship’s manifest to confirm its cargo.
However, he believes it was carrying the gold from a Uruguay-bound cargo ship it had captured. And he has convinced investors to fund him.
He estimates his haul could total hundreds of millions of dollars — half of which would go to the Uruguayan government.
It will take two years to clear the rocks and mud covering the ship, run a huge metal lattice under it, raise it, patch it up and bring it to shore.
He and his team have already found cannon balls, bottles of rum, a fragment of the main-mast and shoes made with iron nails.
No one knows for sure what else lurks beneath the surface, but Collado is confident.
“You have to get out there and search to have good luck,” he said.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not