There are billions of dollars just right there.
I’m talking rubies, diamonds, gold, and pearls.
Literally billions of dollars just right there, waiting on the ocean floor for anyone to come along and scoop them up.
But the thing is I don't think that's actually going to happen because honestly, they aren't that accessible.
And even if they were, the government here would never let you take them home.
So, if anyone was going to go get that treasure they would have to be, well, a pirate.
In 1594 the richest treasure ship that ever set sail was heading home towards Portugal,
weighed down so heavy with Indian gems that it could barely stay afloat.
In its hold it contained more wealth than the entire royal family. Well, at least, in theory.
I mean nobody can really say for certain, this was more than four hundred years ago,
but the last calculation of that treasure’s value was as high as forty billion dollars. With a b.
It was originally split between three large carracks, 2000 tons apiece. But African storms had damaged two,
and and by the time it was off the coast of the Azores
the entire treasure was resting in the hold of a single ship:
The Cinco Chagas, the five wounds of Christ.
For the crew of the Chagas, seeing the Azores on the horizon must have felt like the greatest relief they’d ever experienced.
It meant home.
A friendly port where they could finally spend some of that massive wealth that they'd been sitting on all year.
But before they could dock at that harbour of their dreams, the winds would need to carry them in,
and on the morning of June 21st the weather wasn't quite in their favour.
So rather than land in the closer port of Horta, on the island of Faial,
they changed gears and made a beeline towards the island of Terceira a few hundred kilometers away.
It would turn out to be the worst decision of their lives.
Because the crew of the Chagas weren’t alone in these waters.
The Azores are the exact bottleneck returning to Europe from the new world.
So, virtually every bar of gold, every spice from Indonesia, every gem from India,
it all spent some time in these bays.
Which naturally, made it the perfect place to be a pirate.
And on that day in late June just off the coast of Faial was a set of five greedy little ships.
They were famed English privateers, pirates operating with the blessing of their Queen,
and they were looking for any Spanish aligned ship that they could capture and take towards home.
They were like hyenas searching for an elephant, patrolling the Azores,
waiting for any worthy meal to break off from the pack.
And the Chagas was the biggest slab of meat to ever walk through this jungle.
By the time the Portuguese saw the English flag in the distance, it was all but too late.
Small ships are fast, but treasure ships aren’t.
The Chagas might have had more men, bigger guns, and a stronger hull, but with those little hyenas nipping at their heels,
those Five Wounds of Christ quickly became six. And then seven. And then too many.
The battle they fought lasted for more than twenty four hours, with three separate attempts by the English
to board and take command of the ship. To take that money and run.
But for the crew of the Chagas, surrender simply wasn’t an option. There was too much at stake.
Every man on board vowed to fight to the death, and nearly each and every one of them would be forced to live up to that word.
But after a full day of hard fighting, those pirates were exhausted,
and they decided that they were going to mount one final attempt.
Noting that the Chagas had no guns in the rear, they swung around behind and started to fire directly at the back.
And in a sense their plan was too successful, because one of their shots lit the mast on fire.
And with their snipers holding down any Portuguese sailor who tried to put it out,
it quickly spread across the deck and down into the hold.
Within minutes the fire came across the powder room, and without warning the Chagas exploded like a bomb,
creating a death cloud that none there had ever witnessed and none would hope to witness again.
It must have rained gold. Gems falling from the sky, sizzling as they hit the water.
On June 23rd, 1574, the greatest treasure on earth sank into oblivion.
Those English hearts must have broken watching it drown.
But it would have been nothing compared to the pain of those six hundred Portuguese men
who were propelled into a grave so opulent, it would have made the Pharaohs feel jealous.
Nobody would ever get the treasure of the Chagas. Nobody but the waves.
So today, just eight miles out and one mile down those gems are all still there.
Just waiting to be found. Waiting for anyone to come and just scoop them back up.
But, chances are nobody ever will.
Let’s be real, those gems didn’t go down in a storm, they went down in a boom.
And I don’t know about you, but I’d be kinda hard pressed to dive a mile deep into the ocean and pull up some individual gem
that has been buried by 400 years of volcanic runoff. It seems complicated.
Even if I did have the technology, chances are I’d spend more money looking for them than I did finding.
But, that said, the Chagas isn’t the only ship that went down here.
It might be the big name, but there are at minimum millions of dollars in gold and jewels still sitting in the holds of other wrecks
scattered all over this coast.
Hundreds of ships went down in the Azores. Maybe even thousands.
And although a bunch of them were obviously just fishermen who gave their lives for a little bit of cod, some weren’t.
Now obviously I’m not the first guy to have thought of this.
In the 1970s, the moment technology allowed it, treasure hunters came to these bays and stripped them right down to the bone.
Sometimes quite literally. They did a big PR campaign so they can say 'hey, it's not really theft'.
And as long as they gave back 50% to the government, they were cool with it too.
PR campaign or not, them being here didn’t exactly sit right with everybody.
Most people didn’t really care what happened offshore, but to some local Azoreans, they saw the hunters for what they were,
and over the course of a few decades they started a campaign against them.
University professors, history buffs, tourism advocates, deep sea divers,
almost as rag tag a collection as you can get, really.
But despite being far from the centres of power, they spoke together in a voice that the mainlanders could hear,
and as time went on they genuinely changed the public’s opinion on
what they saw as the wholesale extraction of a local resource.
By the 1990s, they'd even ended up making treasure hunting illegal.
The question at the core of this episode isn't how to get those gems off the bottom but:
How much are they actually worth just sitting there?
After all, what’s the monetary value of untouched archaeology when that archaeology is literally diamonds?
Especially if leaving it there will never create another penny or never draw in a single tourist.
And let’s add another layer to that. Over six hundred people went down that day.
The Chagas is a graveyard.
It’s gems might look nice in a rich woman’s ear, but what about the skeleton whose hands they was ripped from? Do they matter?
It’s easier to take the moral high road when we know we can’t actually get to the riches.
So let’s imagine that the Chagas is accessible, its gems are already neatly collected in some locked chest that we can find.
Is the history of that blown up ship really worth billions of dollars?
I suspect that there’s very few of us who’d agree with that statement, especially if we’re the one getting the billions.
But what if we could only find ten million? What about ten thousand?
What about a single gem?
Is it still worth it to dig up the wreck?
Put another way, when we return to the moon, will we pack up those original flags
and sell them to the highest bidder? Will we put them in a museum?
Or do we understand that are they worth more to humanity standing exactly where we left them all those years ago?
Even if we know that by doing so we’re guaranteeing that virtually nobody will ever get to see them?
I don’t have an answer.
But I do know that by letting treasure hunters strip these ships the Portuguese have, in a tangible way,
willingly destroyed the history of what happened to their people.
They quite literally let a stranger come in and rob their graves.
And for a while it made them millions of dollars, but at least since the '90s,
keeping those memories safe has been treated as more valuable than half the gold that surrounds these shores.
But let me tell you one thing, if I find that wreck, they’d better have some fast ships.
Because my people were English. And stealing from the Portuguese? Well, hell that’s just my ancestry.
In 400 years maybe they’ll even call it history.
This is Rare Earth.