Julian Sancton on NEPTUNE'S FORTUNE
"The Holy Grail of shipwrecks."
Welcome back to SOURCE NOTES, my monthly dive into the research behind banging works of narrative history. Back in 2022, when I was a correspondent at Vanity Fair, the magazine published a feature—by fellow VF alum Julian Sancton—that I was instantly jealous of: “In 1708, the Spanish galleon San José sank in a deadly battle against English warships, taking with it billions in treasure. Centuries passed until a secretive archaeologist found the wreck, but now nations are again warring over who may claim the gold and glory.” Julian’s piece about the San José was a test run for his new book, NEPTUNE’S FORTUNE: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire, which I couldn’t wait to read considering how much I enjoyed his first book, MADHOUSE AT THE END OF THE EARTH: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night. Anchors aweigh…
Tell us about NEPTUNE’S FORTUNE.
It’s the story of the galleon San José, which is often called the Holy Grail of shipwrecks. It was a Spanish galleon that sank off the coast of what is now Colombia in 1708 in a battle with an English squadron that was after its legendary treasure. From the moment the ship sank, it entered the realm of myth and became the most legendary treasure in the Caribbean, and perhaps in history. And so the book talks about that battle, but also the efforts of treasure hunters. It follows one in particular, a marine archeologist and a ludicrously colorful figure named Roger Dooley. He essentially came out of nowhere and mounted a incredibly ambitious expedition and managed to track down the San José. And his discovery in 2015 led to a renewed Battle Royale for the treasure.
Did Roger Dooley give you access to his archival records?
He provided a lot, but more importantly, he gave me a roadmap to find things for myself in the archives. A lot of the book has to do with the joys of archival research. It’s a bit of a challenge to try to make that exciting, but it really is so exciting for me to find treasure in those archives, and I tried to communicate that to to the reader. I wasn’t just going to to rely on this guy’s copies of it. And also, he did not want to show me everything. He wanted to give me a few breadcrumbs so that I could find things myself.
Where did you find these things?
The Archive of the Indies in Seville, which contains sixty million documents going back to the time of Columbus. The Spanish were meticulous bureaucrats, and kept every record of their colonial project. It’s a beautiful, beautiful building, and I spent a lot of time there just trying to navigate this Byzantine edifice. As Roger says, it’s not like there’s a shipwreck section. You have to follow the categories that were established in the in the 1700s, and it takes a lifetime, honestly, to figure it out. I needed a Virgil to guide me through that, and my Virgil was was Roger, who was helping me from afar.
How long did you spend there?
I was there for a week or two. I would spend the days just going through the archives, making some discoveries of my own. What took the most amount of time was—you know, I speak decent Spanish, but obviously the language has evolved in three hundred years. And then there’s the handwriting, this sort of 18th Century shorthand, and the ink has bled into the paper so much that that sometimes the ink from the other side makes the side you’re looking at illegible. Also, the Spanish had this incredibly frustrating style of run-on sentences.
What other archives did you visit?
The National Archives in London and the British Library to research the English side of the story. They kept much more detailed logs. The Spanish at that time did not really keep logs. They had reports of incidents that happened at sea, which were helpful after the fact, but they didn’t have logs, and they certainly didn’t have the coordinates the way the English had.
What were some of your most exciting moments in the archives?
The beginning of the first chapter starts with my favorite discovery, which was this account of a French prisoner who I had heard of in another account of the San José. He escaped in early 1708 from a British ship and came to report to the governor of Cartagena that these Ships were lurking and had designs on the Spanish treasure fleet. This guy’s described as having thrown himself into the water and swum in the murky waters of the Magdalena River all the way to the shore to Cartagena, and then warning the governor of what was going to happen. When I read that, it was like I was reading exactly what I wanted the first chapter to be.
Aside from traveling to the archives, what places did you visit to inform the historical storytelling?
Cartagena, where the sinking took place. You can see all the landmarks that the navigators would have been looking at to figure out where they were going. You can see this famous hill they spotted in the distance. You can see the island they called Treasure Island. That was very useful, just to be able to position myself. You never know how it’s going to help when you do something like that, but you know you have to do it. And once you’re writing you, it comes back to you, and you feel the confidence that what you’re writing is grounded in experience. With the kind of stuff you and I write, our stock in trade is detail, and the reader will trust us further if they know that what we’re writing is based on on experience.
What about ancient newspaper accounts?
I forget the name of it, but the first newspaper in the New World was in Lima, Peru. In that newspaper there are accounts of some of the passengers who would make their way to the San José and end up sinking with it—very wealthy passengers trying to make their way back to Spain. So, yes, there were newspaper accounts, and I did consult them.
Where’d you find them?
Roger found them, and he sent those to me. You wonder how, before Google, how these narrative nonfiction writers would find these obscure newspaper articles. And you realize it’s because they were relying on people who had a reason to find them at the time, and to collect them and clip them.
You tracked down a descendant.
Javier Solis-Beaumont, the eleventh Count of Casa Alegre. The first Count of Casa Alegre was the commander of the San José.
Did he share any useful information that’s not in the historical record?
There’s no portrait of the Count of Casa Alegre. However, Javier Solis-Beaumont sent me a family portrait of the count’s brother, who was also a naval officer. Since we don’t have an image of the count, this is the closest there is. He also gave me some of the the family archives, to explain the count’s backstory.
Do you think you’ll stick with the maritime-adventure genre for your next book?
I do. There’s another naval battle I’m quite interested in. I don’t know whether it’s because I want to to keep doing what I’ve been doing, or because this is just the kind of stuff that I like. Naval stories have such built-in arcs. They’re journeys. They have destinations. There’s conflict inherent in them, because a bunch of guys are packed together in a dangerous situation surrounded by a dangerous element. But anyway, I’m researching a naval battle that takes place during the Civil War. My dad was a Civil War historian, and this was a bedtime story he used to tell me when I was a kid. It’s different, because the archival record is huge and it has been written about a lot. But I do think there’s something new to say.
