Julian Sancton’s Neptune’s Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire (Crown, January 2026) has been described as “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.” Caribbean shipwrecks and obsession? Sounds like an exciting read!
Description: Roger Dooley wasn’t looking for the San José. But an accidental discovery in the dusty stacks of a Spanish archive led him to the story of a lifetime, the tale of a great eighteenth-century treasure ship loaded with riches from the New World and destined for Spain. But that ship, the galleon San José, met a darker fate. It was drawn into a pitched battle with British ships of war off the coast of Cartagena, and when the smoke cleared, the San José and its bounty had disappeared into the ocean, its coordinates lost to time.
Though a diver at heart, Dooley was an unlikely candidate to find the San José. He had little in the way of serious credentials, yet his tenacity and single-minded devotion to finding and excavating the ship powered him across four decades, even as he became a man in exile from the country of his birth. As Dooley jousted with famous treasure hunters and well-funded competitors, he slowly homed in on a patch of sea that might contain a three-hundred-year-old shipwreck—or nothing at all.
Neptune’s Fortune is a thrilling adventure, taking readers from great naval battles on the high seas to the sun-soaked shores that nurtured history’s most notorious treasure hunters, to the archives that held the secret keys to lost fortune on the ocean floor.
Julian Sancton is the New York Times bestselling author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth and a senior features editor at Departures magazine, where he writes about culture and travel. His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, The New Yorker, Wired, and Playboy, among others. He has reported from every continent including Antarctica, which he first visited while researching his previous book.
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Julian Sancton’s Neptune’s Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire (Crown, January 2026) has been described as “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