Who should get the billions from sunken treasure? Depends whom you ask.

Julian Sancton is the author of the forthcoming book “Neptune’s Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire.”

On the night of July 30, 1715, a dozen Spanish ships were sailing north along Florida’s Atlantic coast, weighed down with gold and silver stripped from the mines of the New World. Before dawn, a hurricane swept across the fleet’s path. It resulted in one of the deadliest maritime disasters in history, sinking 11 ships, killing more than 1,000 men and sending tons of gold and silver coins down to the ocean floor — worth an estimated $400 million today.

On Sept. 30, a team working for the Florida-based treasure- hunting company 1715 Fleet Queens Jewels, which has the exclusive rights to salvage the area and has been scouring it for decades, announced