
Neptune's Fortune
The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire
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Narrated by:
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Julian Sancton
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
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 listeners 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.
©2026 Julian Sancton (P)2026 Random House AudioCritic reviews
“Of all the prizes slumbering upon the world’s seabeds, no shipwreck has stirred more mystery, intrigue, or controversy than the galleon San Jose. In these briskly paced pages, Julian Sancton takes us from moldering Spanish archives to the murk of the Caribbean to tell the thrilling story of how one quixotic, eccentric, and thoroughly obsessed sleuth stubbornly defied the odds to locate this most legendary of underwater bounties. Neptune’s Fortune is about treasure and the subculture of treasure seekers, but more importantly, it reminds us of the deeper and more satisfying riches that come embedded within a splendid historical tale that’s been researched meticulously and told exceptionally well.”—Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of The Wide Wide Sea
“Sancton is a masterful storyteller, and he has struck gold—pun intended—with Neptune’s Fortune. Through extraordinary research across three continents and with a journalist’s eye for the telling detail, he has penned a rollicking tale of buccaneers, shady treasure hunters and sea battles both past and present. Readers are in for a rare treat.”—Scott Anderson, New York Times bestselling author of Lawrence in Arabia
“Neptune’s Fortune is a wonderful book, full of heroism, greed, piracy, sunken treasure, and adventure on the high seas. A wild, incredible story from beginning to end, with a central character straight out of Hemingway, it’s even more remarkable because it’s true.”—Eric Schlosser, New York Times bestselling author of Chew On This and Fast Food Nation
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