Neptune's Fortune
The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
The riveting true story of a legendary Spanish galleon that sunk off the coast of Colombia with over $1 billion in gold and silver—and one man’s obsessive quest to find it—from the New York Times bestselling author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth
“Splendid . . . Sancton is an expert guide through eighteenth-century European geopolitics [and] modern marine archaeology.”—The Wall Street Journal
Roger Dooley wasn’t looking for the San José. But an accidental discovery in the dusty stacks of a Spanish archive led him to the story of a lifetime, the tale of a great eighteenth-century treasure ship loaded with riches from the New World and destined for Spain. But that ship, the galleon San José, met a darker fate. It was drawn into a pitched battle with British ships of war off the coast of Cartagena, and when the smoke cleared, the San José and its bounty had disappeared into the ocean, its coordinates lost to time.
Though a diver at heart, Dooley was an unlikely candidate to find the San José. He had little in the way of serious credentials, yet his tenacity and single-minded devotion to finding and excavating the ship powered him across four decades, even as he became a man in exile from the country of his birth. As Dooley jousted with famous treasure hunters and well-funded competitors, he slowly homed in on a patch of sea that might contain a three-hundred-year-old shipwreck—or nothing at all.
Neptune's Fortune is a thrilling adventure, taking readers from great naval battles on the high seas to the sun-soaked shores that nurtured history’s most notorious treasure hunters, to the archives that held the secret keys to lost fortune on the ocean floor.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Who gets to keep sunken treasure that’s been on the ocean floor for centuries? Neptune’s Fortune recounts the history of the San Jose, an imperial Spanish galleon that sank along with a billion dollars’ worth of treasure in 1708. It’s also the story of eccentric Cuban American archaeologist Roger Dooley, who made it his life’s mission to retrieve the treasure amidst no shortage of legal battles about who actually “owns” a centuries-old shipwreck. Journalist Julian Sancton captures Dooley with flair and evenhandedness, from accusations that he was just a shady, would-be looter to his own aspiration to be a heroic explorer of sorts. Sancton depicts life in the Spanish colonial era vividly, detailing not only the San José’s violent demise in battle but also the vicious Spanish greed that was the reason it carried all those riches in the first place. Neptune’s Fortune delivers a multifaceted mix of history, war, science, and politics, all enveloped within one man’s dogged determination.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Sancton (Madhouse at the End of the Earth) unravels a thrilling maritime saga that spans three centuries. In 1708, the Spanish galleon San José, laden with gold and silver, sank off the coast of Colombia during an English ambush. The wreck, a holy grail for treasure hunters, was finally located in 2015 due to the work of Roger Dooley, a shadowy "self-described maritime archaeologist" from Cuba (born in 1944, he emigrated there from Brooklyn as a teen). Following the discovery, however, Dooley was considered a con man, a smuggler, or even a "grave robber" by the rest of the maritime archaeological community—a nefarious reputation that persisted partly because Dooley never publicly explained how he found the wreck. Sancton tracks down the reclusive and somewhat eccentric Dooley and tries to set the story straight, untangling fact from fiction in his enthusiastic but vague retelling of events. It's no easy feat, since Dooley's lifelong quest, which began in the 1980s, took many stranger-than-fiction turns, among them his stumbling upon an 18th-century map with literal X's marking spots that turned out to be islands near the ambush site. In a technically complex, nail-biting conclusion, Sancton unveils the final discovery that allowed Dooley to home in on the ship's location, and then brings readers gasping to the surface for the "cultural, legal, and political quagmire" that followed. The result is a rollicking historical mystery and a beguiling human drama rolled into one.
