Neptune’s Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire

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. (Jan.)