With 70 guns and about 400 hands, HMS Expedition was exactly the kind of ship-of-the-line that formed the backbone of the 18th-century Royal Navy.
At about 7pm on June 8 1708, she fired a broadside that not only sent a Spanish enemy carrying 600 people onboard to the bottom of the Caribbean Sea but, after the passage of more than three centuries, triggered a diplomatic and legal row that has suddenly escalated.
The dispute is over the wreckage of the San José, a galleon carrying a priceless hoard of gold, silver and emeralds from Panama to Colombia for onward travel to Spain.
