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

by Julian Sancton

  

€ 21.25 

ISBN: 9780753560693

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.

368 pages.

Available from 29/01/26.

Usually despatched in 2-5 working days.

Date of Publication: 29/01/2026

Cover of Neptune's Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire - Julian Sancton - 9780753560693Trade Paperback

Neptune's Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire also appears in these Categories:

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