Neptune's Fortune

'full of heroism, greed, piracy, sunken treasure and adventure on the high seas... it's even more remarkable because it's true' ERIC SCHLOSSER New York Times bestselling author of Command and Control and Fast Food Nation

'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'

'a rousing slice of narrative history, and a rip-roaring tale from bow to stern' TELEGRAPH

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.

'brilliantly written... if I were to choose one book to exemplify the fascination and folly of treasure-hunting, this would be it' DAVID GIBBINS, author of A History of the World in Twleve Shipwrecks

'a thoroughly engrossing read' SUSAN ORLEAN, bestselling author of The Orchid Thief and The Library Book

'Sancton is a masterful storyteller... Readers are in for a rare treat' SCOTT ANDERSON, New York Times bestselling author of Lawrence in Arabia