transcript

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
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Speaker 2:
[02:03] Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Explorers Podcast. Today, I have an interview. I don't do that many interviews, and I know I had one a couple of months ago, so this is quick for me to have another. But I recently bought a new book titled Neptune's Fortune, The Billion Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire by Julian Sancton. I had had Julian on the show a couple of years ago as he had written Madhouse at the end of the Earth. The definitive book on the Belgica Expedition. It is a fabulous book and I capped off the Belgica series by interviewing Sancton, which was super cool. Well, Julian's new book, Neptune's Fortune came out a couple of months ago. So as I said, I picked it up just to read. The book is about what might be the most valuable sunken treasure ship in history, the Spanish galleon San Jose, which sunk off the shores of Colombia in 1708. The book is a blast and it's so much more than just about a lost Spanish treasure ship. Sancton re-creates that event in detail, and then he dives into the world of shipwreck and treasure hunting, including the people, the legendary wrecks, and the legacy of Spanish gold and silver in the Americas. Even though I don't have a specific topic related to the book, it has a bunch of elements that are a part of so many of our topics on this show. It's related to the early conquistadors and explorers of the Age of Discovery, including Columbus, Cortez, Pizarro, Balboa, Ponce de León and many many others. And we can't forget the modern explorers in the book, specifically the man who finds the San José, a quirky Cuban American named Paul Dooley. He is a fascinating character. Because the book has so much related to what we talk about on the Explorers Podcast, I reached out to Julian and asked if he'd come on and chat about it with us. He graciously agreed and within a few days we got together for a Zoom chat. So here you go. It's great fun. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Julian Sancton, the author of Neptune's Gold, The Billion Dollar Shipwreck and The Ghost of the Spanish Empire. Check out our show notes for a link to learn more about the book or find it wherever you get your books. Hello, folks. I want to welcome you to the Explorers Podcast. I'm here with a guest today and that is author Julian Sancton. Julian is actually first person ever be on the show a second time. He was initially on the show back when I did a series on the Belgica Expedition and Julian had wrote the definitive book on that expedition called Madhouse at the End of the Earth. And it is a fantastic book still one of the best polar stories you could ever get hold of. We are going to today talk about Julian's new book. It is called Neptune's Fortune, but it is not just called Neptune's Fortune because this is more than just about finding gold because it is also subtitled The Billion Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire. And I love that last little part, the Spanish Empire, because on the Explorers Podcast, we do a lot of stuff regarding colonial Spain and exploration and so forth. And this is so important to those stories. This is the legacy hundreds of years later. So I definitely want to touch on that. But anyways, Julian, thank you so much for being here on the show.

Speaker 4:
[05:17] What a pleasure, and thanks for having me again.

Speaker 2:
[05:19] Yeah. You have the new book. It just came out a couple of months ago. And it's definitely different from your first book, which was Polar. But there's still a lot of elements in there, of just the thrill of discovery and the thrill of being in crazy, crazy situations. But one of my favorite things that you hit me and made me feel good when I started was you have one of the greatest quotes from Spanish Explorer, Spanish Explorer, and that's Legacy of Gold, aka Cortez's famous quote of, I think it's something to the effect of like me and my companions, our heart suffers from a disease that can only be cured by gold.

Speaker 4:
[05:58] Yeah, it sounds like Christopher Walken in that Saturday Night Live sketch where he says, I have a fever and the only remedy is more cowbell.

Speaker 2:
[06:05] Yep, yep. But it is such a perfect encapsulation of Colonial Spain. I think it might have been the very first quote you put in the book.

Speaker 4:
[06:15] It may be, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[06:17] I might be a little bit off in that sometimes you're going to get people who are going to want to go, where do we find the treasure and go right to the treasure ship. But talk a little bit to me about what you learned about the absolute single mindedness at times of, I want to just call it Spanish greed. And that was to get gold, to get silver, to get jewels and so forth, and how it affected this story.

Speaker 4:
[06:40] Yeah, I mean, that quest was at the very foundation of the Spanish Imperial Project. I mean, that was Ferdinand and Isabella, when they dispatched Columbus, gave him orders to find gold, humanely if possible, but at all costs, find gold. And throughout the first centuries of the empire, it seemed that the conquistadors that sailed in Columbus's wake definitely followed the first of those two mandates and somehow left the optional plea for restraint unacknowledged. And so, yes, from the beginning, Columbus was out, as we know, to reach Asia by sea. And one of the things that drew him there were reports by Marco Polo of fanciful reports of Japan, which in Marco Polo's description was a land paved with gold that could rival the greatest fantasies of European monarchs. And Columbus thought he had found it when he had gotten to Cuba, which was, I guess, of similar proportions as Japan. But to his great disappointment, he found that there was very little gold. When he was greeted in other islands by indigenous people who had some kind of gold decorations, but it certainly wasn't the cornucopia of gold that he was expecting. But, of course, those first encounters were not representative of the vast mineral deposits of the new continent. And over the course of centuries, the conquistadors did find a formidable amount of gold, but even more of silver. From the beginning, as I say, of the Spanish Empire, it was an extractive enterprise. This idea was not necessarily to set up a new civilization. It was to take what you could from this existing land and bring it back to fill the royal coffers and jumpstart the Spanish economy. And I think that greed was a constant throughout the, let's say, 300-year empire, to the detriment of the Spanish because they failed to set up more sustainable industries. This idea was to take the gold and silver and bring it back across the oceans and pay for the Spain's expenses and wars and debts. And that was, turns out, not a great way to run an empire.

Speaker 2:
[09:12] I like how when they are given all sorts of resources, they just make it bigger, what they want to do. And they don't create or build or whatever within the constraints, even of those resources that you are given. They just went, well, we get more gold coming or silver, so let's do this and this and this. And so they ended up just screwed up. And it never plays out well.

Speaker 4:
[09:34] What fascinated me in writing this and researching the history of Spanish gold and silver, and we should say actually of American gold and silver, because it was taken from the lands that were occupied at the time, is that gold, as we know for the Incas and the Aztecs, was not just a form of currency. It had an element of the divine. The Inca described gold as the tears of the sun god, and silver as the tears of the moon goddess. They were right to some extent in that gold has cosmic origins, that these heavy metals are forged in the cauldrons of supernovas and bring down to earth in the form of meteors, and just sort of that they came from the great beyond, from the skies. But it's one thing to say that the Aztecs revered gold and silver as something divine, but I would say that the European gold lust was just as idolatrous. When you think about it, gold does not have an inherent value. It has value because it shines, because it maintains its luster, and because it is relatively scarce, and ultimately, it looks like it's almost made of the sun. It's something that speaks to us on a primordial level, and it has value because we say it has value. For the Conquistadors, it was almost like the idolatry of the golden calf, except they didn't even need the calf, it was just the gold.

Speaker 2:
[11:11] I don't think there's anything like gold in that wherever it is, it could be a hundred years old, a thousand years old, it still is shiny and attractive. Other metals, they rust or they get encrusted with stuff, but gold, it's still gold.

Speaker 4:
[11:28] Yeah, especially sunken gold. There's something magical about seeing gold at the bottom of the sea, which shines as resplendently after centuries on the seabed as it did the day it was minted, a gold coin.

Speaker 2:
[11:40] Yeah, I think you talk about that in the book sometimes, where they literally will just catch a glimpse of something shiny on the bottom of the ocean, and they're thinking it's gold. That's amazing.

Speaker 4:
[11:49] Yeah, silver, much less so. Silver does get encrusted. But the listener should be reminded that the vast majority of Spanish treasure that has been found on the sea floor and in shipwrecks were consisted of silver coins, because that's what the Spanish produced more of. But gold, as we know, is of much greater value.

Speaker 2:
[12:13] The silver from the Potosi mines was, I mean, it fueled the Spanish Empire far more than the gold ever did.

Speaker 4:
[12:19] That's right. And to think that Potosi is so high up in the Andes, it's, you know, the air is so thin up there. It's just, it's so remote, so difficult to access. And yet the lust for silver at the time, in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds, was such that the population of Potosi was greater at one point than that of London, because of all the opportunists and silver seekers.

Speaker 2:
[12:49] Anywhere you find a lot of money, all the hangers-on and conmen and suppliers and everything, just, they congregate. So yeah, it grows. It's pretty crazy. So we're here to talk about the book, and we haven't really talked about it. So could you, to my listeners, just say, tell us about Neptune's Fortune, and just a little brief understanding of what the book is about. Because it's not just about looking for one of the greatest treasure, perhaps the greatest sunken treasure ever. So tell us about that.

Speaker 4:
[13:21] Neptune's Fortune is the story of the Galleon San Jose, which was the pride of the Spanish fleet, which sank in battle off the coast of Colombia in 1708. It sank in battle with an English squadron that was after its formidable treasure, which is likely the greatest treasure to ever sail, let alone to ever sink. And for 300 years, that treasure became legend, and became known as the San Jose became known as the Holy Grail of Shipwrecks. So the story that I write is half the story of the San Jose and half the story of the man who devoted his life to finding it, an eccentric, unbelievably colorful Cuban-American maritime archaeologist named Roger Dooley, who led an expedition in 2015 to find the wreck after decades of research. And he was maligned by his many detractors as a criminal, as a charlatan, as a fake, a bullshit artist. And yet, it could not be ignored that the people calling him all those things were competitors in the greatest treasure hunt of all time.

Speaker 2:
[14:36] You talk extensively, obviously, about Dooley, but also all the other treasure hunters. And there's an era of what you, I think you called it like the Golden Age of treasure hunters or something like that. And that was people like Mel Fisher, I guess, you know, the Atocha is the most famous of those treasures. But is that era of treasure hunters, you know, the the swaggering people going out and finding things? Is that era over, do you think?

Speaker 4:
[15:06] Well, it still exists in pockets. I mean, you go to some areas of Florida on the Florida's treasure coast or in the Keys. And Mel Fisher is still a demigod down there. He's still spoken of in referential terms. In general, however, the outside of those little pockets of obsessives, of coin collectors and treasure hunting hobbyists who hope to scoop up whatever Mel Fisher and his acolytes left behind, beyond that small circle, treasure hunting has now lost a lot of its glamour. It's now more often described as something akin to grave robbing. And as the academic establishment that I call the UNESCO crowd, which was able to enshrine the principles of archaeologically responsible salvage of underwater cultural heritage in the 2000s, they have successfully convinced the world that treasure hunting is destructive, is antithetical to the values of cultural and historical preservation, and that ultimately that kind of adventurism represents a loss for those interested in history and in our global cultural patrimony. The UNESCO crowd says that the best thing you can do with a shipwreck, like the San José or like the many that we know lie undiscovered in the seafloor, the best thing you can do is leave it where it is until less invasive technology allows us to study them. Then there are treasure hunters who say, well, it's finders keepers, as long as the law allows us to take a certain portion of what we find, we will take it. We take on the risk of seeking, the risk and the cost and the effort of seeking these treasures, and if we find them, we should be rewarded. I think at this point, though treasure hunters still evoke a sense of boyish adventure and that's still attractive and in roguish in some way, I think ultimately the allure of the treasure hunter has been diminished a little bit in recent years, and those who still seek treasure have become adept at using the academic language in describing what they're doing and try to clothe themselves in the clothing of archaeology, or to try to speak the language of archaeology almost as a fig leaf, to cover up what they really want. But I would say that the golden age of treasure hunting ended in the late 80s, early 90s, and ultimately the deathblow was the UNESCO Convention on the Preservation of Underwater Cultural Heritage in 2000.

Speaker 2:
[17:50] I find it difficult in some ways on this debate, and I don't want to spend too much time on it, but if I know that there's really cool stuff down there, I want to see it. Yet on the other hand, I can understand, for example, you find a World War II battleship, I want to say, dude, just leave it alone. Those people died in a war or whatever, and the last thing we need to do is go in there so we can find some tin cups. So what's the balance? And what do you think?

Speaker 4:
[18:20] Those are two very defensible positions. I think that the UNESCO perspective that these ships should be left in situ, meaning where they are, is depriving the world of an opportunity to commune with history. And those stories that the ships have to tell will remain untold if the ships are not allowed to be excavated. And yes, all archaeology is inherently destructive. You only get one shot at excavating a site because once you're done, you've rendered it illegible. Now, if the site is going to be excavated, I would say it's essential to have it be done in a diligent archaeological manner that does not distinguish between the importance of treasure and the importance of other non, I guess, non-commercializable artifacts. But yeah, you also bring up another great point, which is that a lot of these shipwrecks were essentially grave sites. And now that argument has been used by countries like Spain, who maintain a claim to the sunken galleons of 300 years ago, because they sailed under a Spanish flag then, they remain under the principle of sovereign immunity, enshrined in this UNESCO Convention, they remain the property of Spain, no matter how deep they've sunk, no matter how long it's been, and no matter what state of disrepair the shipwrecks might be in. Now the Spanish claim that San José, for example, is a grave site. Now, I think there's a difference between, say, Arlington Cemetery and the San José. These men were not given a burial, they died in horrific circumstances, and are we not to excavate the battlefields of the Civil War because men died there of World War I? There is much to be learned about places where men died. I do agree with you that there's something a little grisly, a little off-putting about breaking into a U-boat or an American submarine from World War II when our memories are still relatively fresh. I mean, these were our grandparents. To see what was in there, we know in those hermetic environments that we're going to find dead bodies. It's a different story with, and I don't know where the cutoff is. Is it 100 years, 200 years? So I guess it's a different story with the San José. For one thing, it's not even clear that there are human remains because the San José sank in waters that are so deep, 600 meters deep. It was encased in wood. This is not a sort of an iron-hulled ship. Wood is going to break down under the corrosive effects of the sea. And so is, you know, bone is going to be... Bone and flesh have long been devoured by marine life, unless they are somehow encased in an anoxic environment like mud, which, possible, some of it might be. But this is my opinion, having spoken to a lot of experts in the field, I do not think that that should preclude a diligent excavation. In fact, if we were going to avoid digging or excavating or studying areas where people died, there would be nothing left. I mean, nothing left to study.

Speaker 2:
[21:45] Now we've talked a lot about kind of some side questions about the story, but I do want to make sure I get in a few things here. And the first is, you know, this story is, I put it three parts. It puts, it's the story of the wreck. You know, you tell the story really well, by the way.

Speaker 4:
[22:04] Thank you.

Speaker 2:
[22:04] And about what happened to the San Jose and all the people involved, then it's the discovery of the San Jose, and then it's kind of like what happens and what will happen in the future, kind of. But the story of the wreck and so forth, I think is pretty straightforward and it's telling a historical story. But the middle area, the discovery of it, of the various people, like I say, the treasure hunters, and there's lots of them. But our primary character, our protagonist, and he's an odd protagonist, is, as you mentioned, Roger Dooley. And you think like, that's a good Irishman, you know, kind of thing. But he was born in Brooklyn.

Speaker 4:
[22:47] Born in Newark, Newark, New Jersey, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[22:49] Newark. And then he moved with his brother to Cuba in the late 50s, if I remember, right?

Speaker 4:
[22:55] Yeah. And he was 13 years old. They were living in Brooklyn and they moved to Havana because his mother remarried. His mother was of Cuban descent and had married at first an Irish American named Dooley. But then she remarried, this time a Cuban man named Montañez. And Roger's stepfather got a job working at the Havana Hilton as a night manager in the late 50s when Havana was really Las Vegas of the Caribbean. It was a mob-run city, kind of a pleasure town, sin city that was very, very American. And the Havana Hilton was the newest jewel of that empire of sin. But overnight on New Year's 1959, Castro's guerrillas topple the Batista regime and sweep into Havana. And Castro commandeers the Havana Hilton with his guerrillas, who bivouac in the in the lobby, and Castro takes over the penthouse. And all of a sudden, Roger, who was hanging out all day and swimming in the pool of the Havana Hilton, all of a sudden, he's thrown headlong into the revolution, enamored with the glamour of these battle-hardened romantic warriors. And from having been this kind of blonde American kid who spoke bad Spanish, he all of a sudden became this miliciano. And he was also in love with the ocean, with spearfishing, and he and his brother, who would become a special forces diver, the two of them became among the first couple scuba divers in Cuba, and would found what they would call the Department of Underwater Investigations, which I love the sound of that, for the Havana Academy of Sciences. And in time, Roger would become, essentially, a self-taught maritime archaeologist, the first maritime archaeologist in Cuba, which was a nascent discipline at the time. And there was much to study, given the centrality of Cuba in the sort of convoy system that Spain operated throughout its 300 years, and all the ships thought to have wrecked off of its treacherous coasts. And Roger set a mission to document all of the mini wrecks around Cuba. But after a few years, when Cuba was teetering into becoming a failed state and becoming very cash poor, Castro decided that one of the ways in which he could bring much needed cash to Cuban state coffers was to create essentially a state-sponsored treasure hunting company that would find lost Spanish gold and silver off of the coast. And Roger, as much as he bucked against this notion of profiting from history of treasure hunting, there was little he could do to say no to the maximum leader, as Castro was known at that time. So he essentially became the head of Castro's treasure hunting operation.

Speaker 2:
[26:07] You know, we have this image of Castro and his rebels and their long hair and their cigars and their military fatigues. And here was a pair, because it was him and his brother. Like you said, these blonde haired kids from America, who probably didn't speak fluent Spanish.

Speaker 4:
[26:24] Well, no, they spoke bad Spanish.

Speaker 2:
[26:26] Yeah. And so they've got New York accents, and they do not look like most of the other islanders.

Speaker 4:
[26:34] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[26:34] Yet they both become, I mean, especially his brother, became like really important. I mean, not just like some like, oh, he's a well-known whatever. They were friends with Castro. They were acquaintances with Castro. And the story is crazy. If you wrote a fiction story and made that up, people would go, no, no one will believe that, but it's nuts.

Speaker 4:
[26:58] Yeah. Michael Dooley, Roger's older brother, was the, in many ways, Roger's opposite. Roger was this studious, funny, sweet kid who became obsessed with his little projects and his little hobbies. Michael was out, and even as early as his, his day as a teenager in Brooklyn, he was out to find trouble. I mean, he was a, he was a gang member. He was, he tried to start a new American style gang in Havana. He was always picking a fight, and he loved his little brother, but he would, he was a domineering presence. You know, this kind of combative nature made him a fearsome warrior. I mean, he became the head of the special, the Cuban Special Forces, or one of them. And yeah, and he rose very high and very quickly up the ranks of the Communist Party establishment. But also, you know, the higher you rise, the more of a threat you represent to Castro, and he would pay the price for that.

Speaker 2:
[27:53] I was gonna say, the higher you rise, the further you fall.

Speaker 4:
[27:56] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
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Speaker 5:
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Speaker 2:
[29:39] I can't stress to listeners, you know, we are just touching on things here. It is a fascinating story, Roger, his brother, and just the path that this guy took to get to where he was. But also, you have a path that you had to take to get to Roger Dooley, because Roger Dooley is central to your story. As I said, he is the protagonist. He is a little odd, a little quirky, or maybe more than a little. But you had to find him and actually extract the story from him. You probably want to be telling the story, at least not the way you did, without Roger Dooley.

Speaker 4:
[30:16] Oh, for sure. I mean, in fact, when I first started looking into this story, Roger's name was barely mentioned. It was people sort of whispering it or hinting at the fact that there was somebody whose name was not mentioned, who was responsible for this incredible discovery. But he was not traceable. He was not affiliated with any academic institution. The whole San José project was a Colombian state secret. And all that was ever said about the archaeologist who led the search was when the president of Colombia at the time, Juan Manuel Santos, went on the radio and they were asked, well, who led this project? And he said, that's a secret, but I can tell you, he's a man who looks like Hemingway, who approached me at a party with a map telling me he knew exactly where the San José was. And it became almost this fairy tale, and it just intrigued people more. But he was described, this mystery figure, this Hemingway-esque figure, was described as somebody who was out to steal the treasure on behalf of his investor, who was an equally mysterious figure of the world of finance in England. His name was not mentioned at the time. His name was successfully hidden from the public. So these seem to me to be sinister characters. And my initial concept was to write a story from the perspective of another band of treasure hunters called Sea Search Armada, who had claimed to have found the San José's wreck in the early 80s and to have been robbed of their discovery and expropriated of the gold to which they were entitled by the successive Colombian administrations. And I spoke with them and they made their best case for why they had been cheated out of their treasure. But the more they spoke, the more these contradictions emerged and these things that just didn't quite add up. And it became clear to me that, in fact, they had not found anything. Again, this is my opinion and something that's being debated in the, or right now, in the Hague, in the Court of Permanent Arbitration, in a lawsuit deriving from that discovery of 45 years ago, a lawsuit worth $10 billion. And we'll see the result of that in the end of this year. But for me, the more they spoke, the more I realized that this was not the whole story. And in fact, whoever Roger Dooley was, he had found the actual San José, and it became imperative for me to track him down. But as I say, he was a ghost. He was this mystery figure, and I couldn't get in touch with him. And nobody who had his contact information would share it with me. One day, I got a call from a 305 area code. I had given up on finding him, but I get this call from Miami. And I pick up the phone, I say, hello. He goes, it's Roger Dooley. He says in this kind of croaky, raspy voice, my heart started pounding given all the sort of nefarious things that had been said about him. And I rushed up to start typing up notes. And it became apparent that the bigger challenge was not necessarily trusting what he had to say, but it was understanding what he had to say because of his very strange, very fast way of talking. That was a mix of, he now has forgotten a lot of his English. And it's the opposite of what it was when he first landed in Cuba. He speaks Spanish at a mile a minute, and his English is imperfect. And he sounds like a mix between, as I described it in the book, between Vito Corleone and Ricky Ricardo played at double speed. But then, and he also has this elliptical way of speaking, where he'll go on these tangents, or he'll jump from one thing to the other, or he'll elide details. He's very hard to follow. His mind is constantly racing. Perhaps my initial suspicions was that he was trying to conceal the truth, in a kind of like, the caricature of a mob guy who says, hey, you take care of that thing? Or, you know, you talk to that guy? That's how Roger spoke. So, it took me years to nail down the story from his perspective, and even longer to track down and to corroborate what he was saying, by tracking down some of the people he was mentioning and some of the historical facts that he was mentioning and the events that he was a part of. But eventually, I was able to assemble that puzzle, and the story told was something, as you say, out of a novel.

Speaker 2:
[35:00] His character is almost unbelievable. It exists. You would just not believe it, if it was presented to you. And you did, if I'm correct, you said you interviewed him for hundreds of hours.

Speaker 4:
[35:14] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[35:14] That's just amazing. Now, obviously Roger Dooley was critical to the story, but you had to do a ton of other research on all of these things. What were some of the fun things you got to do, or laborious, or whatever, in going to different museums or people in the process when you were putting the book together?

Speaker 4:
[35:38] Well, I got to experience both sides of the shipwreck salvage world or the shipwreck hunting world. On one hand, I spent a lot of time in archives, particularly the General Archive of the Indies in Seville, where all of the documents related to the Spanish Empire in the New World were held. Sixty million documents going back to the time of Columbus. I mean, it's just an awe-inspiring, breathtaking experience. I mean, I know it just sounds like looking through papers. It could sound pretty boring to the lay person. But for me as a historian, that's the treasure hunting for me. It's seeking little scintillating details in a sea of archives. And it was just an absolute joy to try to decipher the harried handwritings of various Spanish bureaucrats and historical figures as they bore witness to this tragedy of the loss of the San José. And on the other end, I got to spend time actually with Roger diving in the Caribbean off the Rosario Islands. Near where the battle took place, there were many other ships that were involved. And we looked for another one of the ships, this one without silver and gold that sank on June 8th, 1708, actually a few days later. It was intentionally scuttled by the Spanish to prevent the English from taking it. And that was an incredible experience as well. Then meeting heads of state, I met Juan Manuel Santos and interviewed him. He was the president who had authorized the search for the San José, was deeply invested in Roger's mission and who became a close friend of Roger's later on. That was wonderful. And traveling to Key West to the 400th anniversary of the sinking of the Atocha, where I did a deep dive, so to speak, into the world of Mel Fisher and treasure hunting. You know, all of these wonderful experiences added up to what you read in the book.

Speaker 2:
[37:54] I love how you talk about going into the libraries and so forth because our main character, Roger Dooley, does the same thing. And he tells those same stories of finding pieces of history that no one else had found, you know, something in Seville, something of all places in England, right?

Speaker 4:
[38:11] In London, yeah, the British Library.

Speaker 2:
[38:14] You know, just found a little map stuck in somewhere that no one had ever noticed before.

Speaker 4:
[38:20] Library of Congress was one of the big clues.

Speaker 2:
[38:22] Yeah, those things all over the world, just sitting there, and he just happened to get them in that piece together, his journey, which is...

Speaker 4:
[38:30] It's a testament to his persistence as well. I mean, these, you know, if you keep looking, if you keep an open mind, if you think creatively, over time, these clues are going to accumulate, and this, you are going to fill out your mental picture of what happened on that day. And, you know, we'll never be able to live that day, but we can start to piece it back together. And that's what he did over the course of 40 years, and allowed him to establish the search box area that would be covered by the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle that he and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute dispatched in 2015 to find the wreck of the San José.

Speaker 2:
[39:17] What made this topic attractive to you in the first place that you did write about it?

Speaker 4:
[39:22] Well, you know, after having written Madhouse at the End of the Earth, which is a harrowing sea story, I was hesitant at first to, you know, jump back into the ocean, as it were, and, you know, I didn't want to repeat myself by writing about another shipwreck, but there's something about these sea voyages that is so inherently dramatic. You know, these men are all packed together, which leads to all sorts of conflicts and interesting relationships. They all have a single mission. There is a beginning, a middle and an end. They're surrounded by danger. It's just, it's a very compelling environment in which to write a story. So, and then there's in particular what appealed to, I guess the romantic in me is this idea of this new story. I had remembered reading about five years before the publication of Madhouse in 2015 or so. I remembered reading about the discovery of this lost Spanish galleon with a treasure estimated to be in the billions. And I remembered thinking that must have been a typo, that surely they meant millions. But no, it was indeed billions. And I vaguely remembered there being some controversy. And the controversy I was remembering is that this treasure was claimed by so many different parties. On the one hand, you had Spain, whose ship it was, Colombia, and whose waters it was thought to have sank. You'd have the descendants of the indigenous people whose ancestors were forced to mine the gold and silver of the San José in their own lands. Peru was said to have had a claim because that's where the treasure originated. And then you had this whole idea of Cesar Charmada and these other treasure hunters who cried foul. And so I was thinking, look, I probably won't write another boat book, but I owe it to my own curiosity to see what happened in those five years, just to see. And it turns out that nothing had. In fact, this this whole, the ship remained where it was, no progress had been made, and the controversy was only boiling more hotly. And so that I decided to start making some phone calls. And then just again, the best stories are where you follow your curiosity.

Speaker 2:
[41:43] If you had not found Roger Dooley, would you have written the story or would it just have been very different?

Speaker 4:
[41:49] Well, I started out as a magazine article. I think if I had not found Roger Dooley, I would have written a very bad magazine article and left it at that.

Speaker 2:
[41:59] Again, it's these weird little things that happen that spur an entire book at this point. Just by finding that guy and having that guy give you a call and trust you, which obviously is critical, but also you have to ultimately trust him. And I do have to say, you do end up trusting him at least mostly as you go.

Speaker 4:
[42:21] I do.

Speaker 2:
[42:21] And he is still alive today.

Speaker 4:
[42:23] He is. He's 81 years old.

Speaker 2:
[42:25] And can you update what exactly have we found so far with the San José? And I know they recently had, they pulled up some objects.

Speaker 4:
[42:35] They did.

Speaker 2:
[42:36] Can you kind of like talk about that a sec?

Speaker 4:
[42:39] The wreck that was found in 2015, in November of 2015, represents about two-thirds of the San José. The ship sank after an explosion from deep within the ship, likely ripped it in half, or I guess in two parts. What Roger and his team found in 2015 was the larger of the two. The bow is still missing. And it is unbelievably well preserved. When you think of shipwrecks, you, you know, the popular conception is, you know, something out of cartoons where you see the skeleton at the helm and the, the masts with sort of tattered sails still floating in the sea and mounds of gold like Uncle Scrooge's vault. But in fact, shipwrecks almost never look anything like ships, especially that old, especially wooden ships whose timbers have disintegrated over the years. Because most shipwrecks were dashed against the reefs, they dashed in shallow waters and were dispersed over centuries of storms and hurricanes. And the rolling action of the waves with its contents spread over sometimes miles. The San José is very different. As we can see from photos, you can still see the outline of the ship. You can still see the concentration of artifacts. You still, you see cannons. There are glints of gold, of gold coins, especially towards the stern that leave us to imagine how many more gold and silver coins may lie deep within the wreck. And you see other things that speak to an already globalizing world. You see Ming dynasty porcelain. You see medical equipment. You see gin bottles. You see cooking equipment. It's, you have a microcosm of society at the time. And so that's another reason why you don't want to let people who are motivated by gain and treasure have at it because they would just sort of tear this beautiful book apart and render illegible the side of the San Jose. After the administration of Juan Manuel Santos came the president, Ivan Duque's administration, and he invalidated the deal that Santos' government had signed with Rogers Backers that would have entitled Rogers Backers to 45% of what counted as treasure rather than as a national patrimony. And anything fungible, anything of which there are many multiples, that would count as treasure. And under the agreement that Santos signed, Rogers' financier would have had the lion's share of it, however, or rather 45% of it. But then Duque comes and declares the entire wreck and its contents to be objects of cultural interest, which means that nobody can touch it, nobody can sell anything. And, you know, I respect that decision. It's obviously was disappointing to Rogers' financier, but it makes some sense. But the effect of that is that nobody was able to touch it until the following administration, which is the current one, under Gustavo Petro. And Petro had vowed to excavate the wreck before the end of his term, which ends in, I guess it will end this summer. But so such little progress had been made because of the expense and the cost and the archaeological concerns of such an excavation. And so he and the Colombian Navy and Maritime Authority I guess decided to raise a handful of objects just to prove that they had done something and to prove that they had the technology to do this at least on a small level. And what they took was, I think in the last autumn or winter, they took five objects, namely one cannon, one porcelain cup and three gold coins. And they are now being conserved in what some have described as sub-optimal conditions. And what the fate of the San José wreck will be beyond that is anyone's guess. If I had to bet, I would bet that very little else happens.

Speaker 2:
[47:15] And that probably kills Roger Dooley, who really wanted to bring that stuff up. And by the way, if you go to Wikipedia, he's not mentioned at all.

Speaker 4:
[47:24] He's still a maligned figure. Because there's still a lot of people who believe that he is motivated by greed. And to know him is to realize that he's motivated by nothing of the sort. I mean, he is not a rich man. He is fascinated by shipwrecks, much more so than treasure. It's shipwrecks that he cares about. He doesn't own a gold coin, doesn't own a, he's never sold or owned, actually he owns one silver coin that was given to him by his story in Cuba. To hear him describe in minute detail the intricacies of Spanish ship architecture of the 17th century is to realize that he is just an obsessive and his obsession is not gold or silver. His obsession is these magnificent creations known as Spanish galleons.

Speaker 2:
[48:13] All right, I'm going to give you one last question and then we can wrap up for today. Nothing to do with the new book. You've written now two selling books. I know you come from a family of writers and you've been a writer for a couple of decades, at least now. If someone said to you, I want to be a writer, what's the thing you would tell them to do? I suppose you probably get this a lot.

Speaker 4:
[48:35] No, I don't.

Speaker 2:
[48:36] You don't? Okay. What would you recommend to someone? I always say, write.

Speaker 4:
[48:41] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[48:41] Read books on writing from good people, on writing by Stephen King, things like that.

Speaker 4:
[48:46] It's a masterpiece. I love that book. It's an easy read. It's a wonderful read. I would recommend that they be born to two generations of writers. I would say, read about books on writing, sure, but more importantly, just read voraciously books of all kinds. I can't speak to fiction writing, but I do assume that the advice would hold there too, is that read widely, vastly, frequently, that that is really the best thing you can do. The second best thing you can do is write and get professionals to weigh in and to give unvarnished opinion. What made me, I think, confident as a writer is working for Vanity Fair, particularly, which is where I cut my teeth. I thought I was hot shit when I got there. I studied history, I fancied myself a competent writer, and that disabused me of that notion very quickly. When editors hacked away at my awkward prose, when fact checkers and copy editors made me understand that I did not understand the fundamentals of writing. I would say definitely read Strunk and White, read the Elements of Style, which is probably the best book on writing you can read, and it's very short and unusually readable for ultimately a book on grammar. And look, I came through institutions like particularly various magazines and various publications that I've worked for, and all of them have made me better. But it took me, I guess, 15 years before being able to shape a book proposal, like Madhouse at the End of the Earth, and even that took several drafts. And that was 15 years of writing shorter articles, eventually gaining confidence, understanding the mechanics of story, understanding that conflict and character are the key elements that will keep readers reading. So I can only speak to what helped me get here, but ultimately, reading voraciously, as you say, the best way to learn how to write is to write, and getting as many opportunities as you can for criticism.

Speaker 2:
[51:06] Awesome, awesome. All righty. Is there anything else about the book, about the story, anything that you want to add before we wrap up?

Speaker 4:
[51:13] Only that I'm so thrilled to have met Roger, not just because he served as a great protagonist, but because he's become a friend, and I just hope that people see him as the both inspiring and equal parts inspiring and infuriating character that he is. And I've grown to love him, but I hope readers can find the richness of him. He's a modern day Don Quixote, and I just hope that this book gives him the credit he's due.

Speaker 2:
[51:45] Right. All right. We have been talking with Julian Sancton, the author of Neptune's Fortune. And I will add, it's a really good book about understanding the Spanish colonization of the New World from the beginning, up through the day, and how important it is, because it is all rooted in treasure, and it was all rooted in economics and so forth. And you really get to understand a lot of things. And the other thing I'll add is the details are incredible. I mean, I learned all sorts of things reading this book about Spanish galleons and things like that. So I know my people are explorer people. And so learning those things is just really cool and really fun. So thank you again, Julian.

Speaker 4:
[52:30] Thank you so much, Matt. What a pleasure.

Speaker 2:
[52:32] All righty, folks, we want to just say thank you very much. And thanks to Julian for being here. Again, the book is Neptune's Fortune, The Billion Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire. So it was a great read, highly recommended. And again, thanks to Julian for being here. Thanks and take care. That is it for today's show. I hope you had a good time. Thanks again to Julian Sancton for sitting down with us. I appreciate it. If you want to learn more about Neptune's Fortune, there is a link in the show notes. Thanks again.

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 6:
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