The wreck was in international waters but it wasn’t abandoned. It was sunk by the British. It was a Spanish owned ship with Spanish owned gold. I can understand abandoned ships, this wasn’t it. Just because the Spanish never got around to recovering their wreck for whatever reason does not give anyone else the right to steal it.
If you lose your wallet on a street and I find it knowing its yours and keep it, am I not stealing from you?
One could argue that some of that gold belongs to Peru or whatever colony it came from. That would possibly be an issue for the courts too.
If you lose your wallet in the street and leave it there for a couple of decades, absolutely there is no issue with someone picking it up and taking it. You forfeit rights to it by not searching for it or picking it up in a reasonable amount of time.
An issue with the idea of returning everything is when is it cut off, when does the cultural significance of an object in its new country overshadow the significance in another?
For example both Paris and Constantinople are home to an Egyptian Obelisk. Paris’s dates from the Napoleon, Constantinople’s to Constantine. In the later case Egypt was even an integral part of the Empire which took it.
In these cases who has the rights to it?
Another case:
Pergemum; Located in modern Turkey, this is the city where Rome became an Empire. It has been a Greek City for much of its existence. In the 19th century German treasure hunters looted it.
To whom does the treasure belong? To the foreign state which holds the land, or to the country with the culture closest to that of the day?
Its easy enough to say everything should be returned, but it is never quite so simple.
In the case of this ship, unless the Spanish government was looking for it, it should be forfeit.
