Hello and welcome to Business Daily with me Gideon Long, where once again we're looking at shipwrecks

and sunken treasure waiting to be found on the seabed. In yesterday's program, we heard about the

San Jose, a Spanish galleon that lies off the coast of Colombia. Its cargo of gold, silver and

emeralds is supposedly worth billions of dollars, but it's just one of

around three million shipwrecks around the world. And in today's program, I'll be looking at the

wider question of what should be done with them. And it's not all about treasure.

If you just go down with a grab and take a lot of artifacts and bring them to the surface and

just have a pile of stuff, there is no story to tell. You can just count

coins, you can count porcelain, but there is no human story behind it. Some archaeologists say we

should leave sunken ships where they are, especially when they're graveyards. Others, salvage

operators, say we should bring them to the surface, put them in museums to educate people,

make money from them,

and perhaps even sell off some of the treasure. Who owns the world's shipwrecks? Who has the right

to explore them? And when there are valuables on board, who gets to keep them?

The legal framework right now is neither clear nor comprehensive. International law does not

have clear-cut answers.

We'll be trying to provide at least some answers

to these tricky, legal and ethical questions

on today's episode of Business Daily

here on the BBC World Service.

A 17th century shipwreck has been uncovered off the Norfolk coast in the east of England.

HMS Gloucester sank 340 years ago.

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