Neptunes Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire

(Paperback)

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The riveting true story of a legendary Spanish galleon that sunk with over $1 billion in gold and silver-and one man's obsessive quest to find it-from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth Roger Dooley wasn't looking for the San Jose. 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 riches from the New World for a long-awaited delivery to the King of Spain nearly three centuries earlier. But that ship, the galleon San Jose, never reached its destination. Instead, the Spanish treasure fleet was drawn into a pitched battle with British ships of war off the coast of Cartagena. When the smoke cleared, the San Jose had disappeared into the ocean. Though a diver at heart, Dooley was an unlikely candidate to find the San Jose. Half Cuban by birth, he lived a life that 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 Jacques Cousteau, before finding himself placed on an international watch list and barred from the United States. Dooley had little in the way of serious credentials, yet his tenacity and single-minded devotion to finding the San Jose led him to breakthroughs once thought impossible. As he jousted with famous treasure hunters and well-funded competitors, Dooley 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 the decades-long quest to shine a light on the bounty at the bottom of the sea.

Reviews

A wonderful book, full of heroism, greed, piracy, sunken treasure, and adventure on the high seas. A wild, incredible story from beginning to end, with a central character straight out of Hemingway, its even more remarkable because its true * Eric Schlosser, New York Times bestselling author of Chew on This and Fast Food Nation *
For more than three centuries the Spanish galleon San Jos remained a mystery, lost in battle and vanished in the pitiless deep ocean. Whoever found this shipwreck and its legendary treasureamong the many searching for itwould find their name etched in history. How fortunate for us that one mans obsession with the San Jos led to its discovery, and that master storyteller Julian Sancton has chronicled this triumph. Neptunes Fortune is a real-life drama, a maritime riddle, a swashbuckling adventure, and above all, a riveting tale * Susan Casey, New York Times bestselling author of The Underworld *
Sancton is a masterful storyteller, and he has struck goldpun intendedwith Neptunes Fortune. Through extraordinary research across three continents and with a journalists 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 *
Of all the prizes slumbering upon the worlds 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. Neptunes 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 thats been researched meticulously and told exceptionally well * Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of The Wide Wide Sea *

Author Bio

Julian Sancton read History at Harvard, and is a senior features editor at Departures magazine, where he writes about culture and travel. His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New Yorker, Wired, and Playboy, among other publications. Madhouse at the End of the Earth was both a New York Times bestseller and a Sunday Times bestseller.