The riveting true story of a legendary Spanish galleon that sunk off the coast of Colombia with over 1 billion dollars 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
Roger Dooley wasn’t looking for the San Jose—he was looking for the galleon Mercedes. But an accidental discovery in the dusty stacks of a Spanish archive in the 1980s led him to the story of a lifetime—the journey of a ship that had gathered a mountain of plundered riches from the New World for a long-awaited delivery to the King of Spain. But that ship, the San Jose, never reached Spanish shores. Nearly three centuries earlier, somewhere miles off Cartegena, the Spanish armada was drawn into a pitched battle with British ships of war. When the smoke cleared, the San Jose had disappeared into the ocean, its precise location unknown and its decaying hull shrouded in darkness beyond the reach of divers.
Dooley was at once an unlikely candidate to find it, but also a singular figure. Half Cuban by birth, his life stretched from the ballfields of Brooklyn to the shores of Castro’s Havana at the dawn of revolution, where he would help birth a fledgling nation’s diving program and make films with the likes of Jacques Cousteau before finding himself placed on an international watch list and barred from the United States. A diver at heart, Dooley had little in the way of serious credentials, yet his tenacity and single-minded devotion to the science of ocean archeology—and to finding the San Jose—led him to breakthroughs thought impossible, as he jousted with famous treasure hunters and well-funded competitors and ultimately homed in on a patch of sea that might contain a three hundred year old shipwreck—or nothing at all.
Neptune's Fortune plunges into a rarified world through the eyes of an idiosyncratic protagonist, one whose work would spark the hopes of presidents and make real the dreams of a nation. This tale of temerity and treasure is a one-of-a-kind story of a lost fortune and a decades-long quest to shine light on the bounty of gold and silver at the bottom of the sea.
“Of all the prizes slumbering upon the world’s seabeds, no shipwreck has stirred more mystery, intrigue, or controversy than the galleon San Jose. In these briskly paced pages, Julian Sancton takes us from moldering Spanish archives to the murk of the Caribbean to tell the thrilling story of how one quixotic, eccentric, and thoroughly obsessed sleuth stubbornly defied the odds to locate this most legendary of underwater bounties. Neptune’s Fortune is about treasure and the subculture of treasure seekers, but more importantly, it reminds us of the deeper and more satisfying riches that come embedded within a splendid historical tale that’s been researched meticulously and told exceptionally well.”—Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of The Wide Wide Sea
“Sancton is a masterful storyteller, and he has struck gold—pun intended—with Neptune’s Fortune. Through extraordinary research across three continents and with a journalist’s eye for the telling detail, he has penned a rollicking tale of buccaneers, shady treasure hunters and sea battles both past and present. Readers are in for a rare treat.”—Scott Anderson, New York Times bestselling author of Lawrence in Arabia
Julian Sancton is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ, The New Yorker, Departures, and Playboy, among other publications. He has reported from every continent, including Antarctica, which he first visited while researching his previous book Madhouse at the End of the Earth. He lives in Larchmont, New York, with his partner, Jessica, and their two daughters.
View titles by Julian Sancton
The riveting true story of a legendary Spanish galleon that sunk off the coast of Colombia with over 1 billion dollars 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
Roger Dooley wasn’t looking for the San Jose—he was looking for the galleon Mercedes. But an accidental discovery in the dusty stacks of a Spanish archive in the 1980s led him to the story of a lifetime—the journey of a ship that had gathered a mountain of plundered riches from the New World for a long-awaited delivery to the King of Spain. But that ship, the San Jose, never reached Spanish shores. Nearly three centuries earlier, somewhere miles off Cartegena, the Spanish armada was drawn into a pitched battle with British ships of war. When the smoke cleared, the San Jose had disappeared into the ocean, its precise location unknown and its decaying hull shrouded in darkness beyond the reach of divers.
Dooley was at once an unlikely candidate to find it, but also a singular figure. Half Cuban by birth, his life stretched from the ballfields of Brooklyn to the shores of Castro’s Havana at the dawn of revolution, where he would help birth a fledgling nation’s diving program and make films with the likes of Jacques Cousteau before finding himself placed on an international watch list and barred from the United States. A diver at heart, Dooley had little in the way of serious credentials, yet his tenacity and single-minded devotion to the science of ocean archeology—and to finding the San Jose—led him to breakthroughs thought impossible, as he jousted with famous treasure hunters and well-funded competitors and ultimately homed in on a patch of sea that might contain a three hundred year old shipwreck—or nothing at all.
Neptune's Fortune plunges into a rarified world through the eyes of an idiosyncratic protagonist, one whose work would spark the hopes of presidents and make real the dreams of a nation. This tale of temerity and treasure is a one-of-a-kind story of a lost fortune and a decades-long quest to shine light on the bounty of gold and silver at the bottom of the sea.
Reviews
“Of all the prizes slumbering upon the world’s seabeds, no shipwreck has stirred more mystery, intrigue, or controversy than the galleon San Jose. In these briskly paced pages, Julian Sancton takes us from moldering Spanish archives to the murk of the Caribbean to tell the thrilling story of how one quixotic, eccentric, and thoroughly obsessed sleuth stubbornly defied the odds to locate this most legendary of underwater bounties. Neptune’s Fortune is about treasure and the subculture of treasure seekers, but more importantly, it reminds us of the deeper and more satisfying riches that come embedded within a splendid historical tale that’s been researched meticulously and told exceptionally well.”—Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of The Wide Wide Sea
“Sancton is a masterful storyteller, and he has struck gold—pun intended—with Neptune’s Fortune. Through extraordinary research across three continents and with a journalist’s eye for the telling detail, he has penned a rollicking tale of buccaneers, shady treasure hunters and sea battles both past and present. Readers are in for a rare treat.”—Scott Anderson, New York Times bestselling author of Lawrence in Arabia
Julian Sancton is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ, The New Yorker, Departures, and Playboy, among other publications. He has reported from every continent, including Antarctica, which he first visited while researching his previous book Madhouse at the End of the Earth. He lives in Larchmont, New York, with his partner, Jessica, and their two daughters.
View titles by Julian Sancton
