Stories of the Sea: A Guest Post by Julian Sancton
A billion-dollar shipwreck. A determined treasure hunter. A vast ocean floor. From the author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth, a gripping true historical adventure and the thrilling quest to recover one of the Spanish Empire’s lost treasures. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Julian Sancton on writing Neptune’s Fortune.
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Neptune's Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire
Neptune's Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire
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Hardcover
$30.00
$33.00
The riveting true story of a legendary Spanish galleon that sunk off the coast of Colombia with over $1 billion in gold and silver—and one man’s obsessive quest to find it—from the New York Times bestselling author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth
The riveting true story of a legendary Spanish galleon that sunk off the coast of Colombia with over $1 billion in gold and silver—and one man’s obsessive quest to find it—from the New York Times bestselling author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth
Despite my incompetence as a sailor, I’m instinctively drawn to stories of the sea. Most of the book ideas that occur to me are about boats. Shipboard journeys are tailor-made for the kind of gripping non-fiction narratives I strive to write: they’re propelled toward a clear destination, they feature eclectic casts of colorful and often unsavory characters, they follow a built-in three act structure — a beginning, a middle, and an end — and most enticing of all they place man at the mercy of the wrathful ocean gods.
In the spring of 2021, I published my first book, Madhouse at the End of the Earth, about an ill-fated nineteenth century Antarctic expedition. As I contemplated writing a second book, I thought long and hard about proposing another harrowing sea story. I didn’t want to repeat myself or be pigeonholed. But there was one idea I simply couldn’t get out of my head. The saga of the San José, a legendary Spanish treasure galleon that sank in the Caribbean in 1708, would not leave me alone since I’d first read about it in the news in 2015. Headlines noted that the gold and silver in its hold was estimated to be worth $17 billion, which I was certain must have been a typo. Surely it was mere millions.
Out of curiosity, I decided to check what had happened in the six years since the reports of its apparent discovery. The whole affair, I learned, was shrouded in secrecy and intrigue and conspiracy theories. The more I read about it, the more questions I had. The sign of a promising book topic! But before committing to dedicating the next few years of my life to it, I decided to test-run it by reporting an article on the subject for Vanity Fair.
I interviewed characters from every side of the story, including Colombian and Spanish politicians, maritime law specialists, treasure hunters, historians, and the quixotic Cuban American archaeologist Roger Dooley, whose 40-year-obsession with the galleon struck me as the emotional crux of the story. Realizing that I’d only skimmed the surface with the magazine article, I relented: I would have to write another boat book. It was simply too good a tale.
My book would have to cover multiple time frames. It would chronicle the tragic final journey of the San José and the epic battle that led to its demise, as well as the modern-day race to find its precious vestiges. I approached Neptune’s Fortune as both a journalist and a historian, with one foot planted in the twenty-first century and the other in colonial times.
Even as I was interviewing modern heads of state and ocean robotics specialists, I was spending time at the General Archive of the Indies, in Seville, consulting many of the same three-hundred-year-old documents that guided Dooley’s quest for the San José. (To my disappointment, the reading room is no longer in the grand vaulted edifice where Dooley did so much of his research in the 80s but in a far less picturesque building across the street. An intimidatingly burly security guard watched on suspiciously, ready to prevent me from absconding with archival material, as one treasure hunter supposedly did years ago.)
It took a while for my high school Spanish to get back up to speed. But once I learned to decipher the 18th century archival documents — the frenzied handwriting, the puzzling contractions, and the strange run-on syntax — the detailed and dramatic accounts allowed me to re-create the battle in all its chaos.
To get into the mindset of a shipwreck obsessive, I even got certified in scuba diving. (I took a course at a pool in Yonkers, New York, a far cry from the warm and limpid Caribbean waters that enchanted the shipwreck hunters I write about.) The experience helped deepen my understanding of the discipline, but I don’t think I’ll be discovering treasure anytime soon. Besides, I had already found what qualifies as treasure in my line of work: an untold story.