Truth can be strange, and those who think to the contrary should try reading Julian Sancton’s new book, “Neptune’s Fortune, The Billion Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire.”
At the center of the book is Roger Dooley, a Cuban American who explored the island’s waters for Castro, scoured the Spanish archives for decades, and at age 71 found off the coast of Colombia the wreck of a famous 18th century ship loaded with gold, which neither he nor anyone else has gotten to touch.
The author who pieced Dooley’s story together – Dooley speaks in heavily accented and sometimes elliptical pieces – works for a California newspaper and comes from a family of writers with roots in Jackson. His great-grandfather was Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Julian Alexander. His mother, Seta Alexander Sancton, married a journalist and wrote a short book about Jackson, “The World From Gillespie Place.” Her son, Tom Sancton, was the chief Paris correspondent for Time magazine. He made enough money off a book about the death of Princess Diana to send his son Julian to college, and later published a fine remembrance, “Songs for My Fathers: A Memoir in Black and White,” about learning to play the clarinet as a teenager in New Orleans at the feet of Preservation Hall musicians.
Pedigree does not always pay off. Regression to the mean is an unfortunate fact of life in general, and especially genealogy. But Julian Sancton gives every evidence of having escaped that fate. The book spins a tale that has all the fascination of its primary subject, the hunt for Spanish gold at the bottom of the Caribbean Ocean, tempered with a flair for fact-checking not common to that genre.
Born in New Jersey in 1944 and raised in Brooklyn, Dooley moved to Havana with his Cuban mother and step-father in 1957. After watching Sea Hunt on television, he took up spearfishing in the Havana harbor. He hung out at the Havana Hilton, which Fidel Castro made his headquarters when he ousted the Batista regime in 1959. Dooley learned to scuba dive. Working for the government, he explored and mapped shipwrecks in Cuba’s waters but did not have the money to excavate them.
When Cuba eliminated his job, he earned a degree in maritime archaeology. He tried underwater tourism, piloted planes to Miami for an outfit the U.S. government shut down, and in 1983 returned to Cuba. The next year in the Spanish archives he stumbled across a packet of letters documenting the sinkingof the San Jose, a galleon carrying gold and silver from Peruvian mines. It went down off the shore of Colombia in a battle with the English navy in 1708.
The San Jose was the flagship of a fleet charged with carrying several years’ worth of treasure to Spain. Sancton explores the history of Spain’s exploitation of Peruvian minerals, what life was like on board the ship, the strategy the Spanish admiral used in an attempt to reach a safe harbor in Cartagena, the estimated eight tons of gold on board, the English commodore’s battle plan, and the reports of a mysterious explosion that sank the San Jose.
But Dooley had a long journey ahead before he would ever be able to look for the San Jose. He worked as a consultant for others who looked for wrecks. In 1999, he visited the Library of Congress and found a map from 1729 that yielded another clue as to the location of the San Jose.
He collected books and stories about others who used the invention of scuba diving to find treasure on the floor of the Caribbean off the coast of Florida. Sancton shares those stories, describes a variety of fictions the hunts spawned, and the even more elaborate litigation that followed the discoveries as governments and fellow adventurers fought over the treasure.
Then in 2013, events turned Dooley’s way. Colombia elected a president who wanted to find the San Jose and passed a law to allow partnership with private contractors. Dooley found a British billionaire who had invested in searches for other wrecks. On a map, Dooley drew a search box. The sea floor was 1,000 meters deep, so he hired an autonomous underwater vehicle of the type used to find the Titanic.
When the vehicle’s cameras found the wreck, Dooley identified it by the distinctive dolphin carving on its cannons. But that was his only victory. Spain claimed the treasure. A previously unsuccessful group of treasure hunters also claimed it. Colombia reversed course and decided it did not want the wreck disturbed, and that mooted the controversy.
But Dooley’s life’s work was vindicated.
Luther Munford is a Northsider.
