Archaeologists Discovered the ‘Holy Grail’ of Shipwrecks a Decade Ago. Now, They’re Finally Beginning to Unravel the Secrets of the ‘San José’

A painting of the San José, which sank off Cartagena, Colombia, in 1708. Archaeologist Roger Dooley commissioned this illustration based on his research on the galleon. Roger Dooley collection

A new book by author Julian Sancton explores the lengthy quest to find the Spanish galleon—and the political firestorm that has engulfed the wreck ever since

Behind massive walls erected after English privateer Francis Drake ransacked the city in 1586, a stronghold called the Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas dominates the shore. The Palace of the Inquisition, where a tribunal tried people for magic, witchcraft, heresy and blasphemy, offers a stark testament to the tortures endured by the accused. Less than a mile away, shoppers browse for wares at Las Bóvedas, a former munitions storage space that now houses souvenir shops.

But one of the most notable traces of Cartagena’s history remains hidden underwater: the San José, a Spanish galleon often referred to as the “world’s richest shipwreck.” Resting some 12 miles offshore at a depth of nearly 2,000 feet, the vessel was once the flagship of a Spanish Empire Tierra Firme fleet. In June 1708, the San José ran afoul of an English warship while transporting silver, gems, up to eight tons of gold and other precious cargo back to Spain.

The galleon sank with a payload of roughly 7 million to 12 million pesos on board. Its wreckage was only discovered in the Caribbean Sea in November 2015, under secretive circumstances involving an English hedge fund manager and a former employee of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. The ship has rested on the seabed ever since, ensnared in a tug of war over its ownership and fate.

Neptune’s Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire, a new book by author Julian Sancton, lifts the veil of silence around how the galleon—“the biggest treasure in the history of humanity,” as the Colombian government calls it—was found, only to be trapped as a political pawn. It’s a tale worthy of Indiana Jones himself. Sancton tells Smithsonian magazine, the San José matters because “it was the last of the great galleons, the last representative of this trans-Atlantic system, a major vector of globalization, of the transformation of the Western Hemisphere.” As a symbol, he adds, “it is incredibly powerful.”

First launched in 1698, the San José supported the defense of the Spanish city of Cádiz during the early years of the War of the Spanish Succession. The galleon set sail for the Americas in March 1706, tasked with transporting royal revenues and assorted treasures from Portobelo, Panama—the site of a famous fair—to Cartagena before meeting up with another fleet and returning home to Spain.

The San José sailed at the head of the first Tierra Firme fleet to depart for the Americas in more than a decade. The fleet’s valuable cargo made it a prime target for English Royal Navy Commodore Charles Wager, whose “objective was to intercept and if possible capture the Spanish galleons and merchant ships returning from the Portobelo fair,” writes historian Carla Rahn Phillips in The Treasure of the San José: Death at Sea in the War of the Spanish Succession. “Timing was everything.” Wager eventually chased down the San José off the coast of Cartagena, at the helm of the 70-gun Expedition. Nearly all of the roughly 600 passengers and crew on board the San José died when the ship sank on June 8, 1708.

The obsession of a lifetime
Some shipwrecks are found by fishing boats or lucky divers. Still others are discovered by marine archaeologists who spend years researching shipwrecks in the archives and diving to potential wreck sites.

Roger Dooley, the Cuban American archaeologist behind the San José’s discovery, poured his reputation, his money and his health into the project over the course of three decades. When Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced the discovery of the San José in December 2015, however, Dooley was sidelined. All anyone knew about the white-bearded man who’d orchestrated the mission was that he bore a striking resemblance to Ernest Hemingway. Though the “Holy Grail” of shipwrecks had been found by an international team, Santos reinvented the tale of the San José’s discovery as a feel-good story starring Colombians.

Dooley’s journey to the San José wreck site began in Seville, Spain, in July 1984, at the General Archive of the Indies. Then the chief archaeologist for Cuba’s state-owned Carisub organization, Dooley was operating under orders from President Castro, who wanted him to find historic ships wrecked off the island country’s shores and recover their riches.

Dooley dreamed of being the first person to excavate a Spanish galleon in Cuban waters. To achieve this goal, he’d made a deal with Castro, who intended to seize any artifacts recovered from Carisub-excavated shipwrecks to shore up Cuba’s finances. The dictator’s plan, unsurprisingly, was at odds with the aim of underwater archaeology, which seeks to preserve sunken treasures

In Seville, Dooley was scouting for leads about the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, a vice-flagship of the Tierra Firme fleet, which sank near Havana on March 13, 1698.The search required dogged focus and luck, especially because the archive had no comprehensive catalog or index. “It’s not like there’s a shipwreck section,” Dooley later told Sancton. “You could spend 20 years there and not find what you’re looking for.”

While studying the contents of a six-inch-thick ledger, Dooley stumbled onto a trove of letters. Words and phrases immediately jumped out at him: “galleons,” “battle,” “English warships,” “gold,” “silver,” “His Majesty’s treasure” and “everybody drowned.” The reports had been smuggled out of Cartagena in 1708, past an English blockade of the city. The small sloop that carried the messages was bound for Cuba (then a Spanish colony), with instructions urging the governor of Havana to inform Philip V of the loss of his treasure-filled flagship. Dooley had stumbled upon critical clues to the most valuable shipwreck in history, the mythical San José. “That’s when I fell in love,” he said to Sancton.

At the time, most known wrecks of Spanish galleons in shallow waters had already been salvaged or looted, either close to the time of their sinking or in later decades. None was found entirely intact. But the records Dooley had unearthed noted that the area where the San José sank was “not possible to dive in any way.” Deep-sea wrecks might have been inaccessible to divers in the 1700s, but new technology meant this was no longer the case by the late 1980s.

In 2000, Dooley’s research took him to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where he uncovered a 1729 chart of the coastline around Cartagena. Below the Rosario Islands, he spotted four tiny x’s and the handwritten words “Bajo del Almirante,” or “Shoals of the Admiral”—seemingly a reference to Wager, the English commodore (and later admiral) whose gunship had attacked the San José. Dooley was convinced he’d found a literal “x” marking the very spot where the Spanish galleon sank.

Dooley’s quest to find the San José slowly gained traction. In 2013, he secured funding from Anthony Clake, an English hedge fund executive who quickly established a company called Maritime Archaeology Consultants (MAC) to oversee the project. In 2014, Dooley persuaded Colombia’s then-president, Santos, to officially greenlight the search.

For Dooley, discovering the wreckage was a matter of life and death. “If I don’t find it, I’ll cut my own head off,” he told Colombia’s culture minister.

The search for the “Holy Grail” of shipwrecks
The venture moved quickly once the Colombian government joined the project. In collaboration with the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Dooley and MAC twice surveyed Cartagena’s waters in 2015 with an advanced autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV).

During the second expedition, the AUV detected “a few light specks on the screen that looked like breadcrumbs on a smooth, rust-colored yellow place mat,” Sancton writes in Neptune’s Fortune. The discovery was promising enough to persuade the team to bolt a camera to the AUV and capture tens of thousands of photos of the site.

One of the snapshots showed three cannons in a bed of seashells. “In that instant, as my eyes remained fixed on the image, I disconnected from reality,” Dooley explained to Sancton. “My body was literally paralyzed, but my mind was racing at the speed of light, flipping through the pages of my life.”

Dooley’s research provided the smoking gun that confirmed the team’s find. He’d learned that the 60-plus bronze cannons cast for the San José by craftsman Enrique Habet were decorated with dolphin-shaped cascabels (a unique decorative loop at the tail end of the gun). When Habet’s son followed in his father’s footsteps, he replaced the dolphin with a plain round knob.

The photos were unmistakable: All of the guns had dolphin cascabels. The wreck of the San José was exactly where Dooley had said it would be. The closest landfall to the site was the Shoals of the Admiral, as identified on the 1729 map of Cartagena. Dooley, about to turn 71—the age of the galleon’s commander when he went down with his ship—would not lose his head.

A May 2016 survey of the wreck site by two manually controlled robots recorded every inch of the doomed galleon. Copper cauldrons signaled where the kitchen once stood. Hundreds of blue-and-white porcelain cups were identified as contraband from China. Crates of pewter syringes—yet more smuggled goods—were likely bound for members of Spain’s high society, who believed that administering enemas would improve their complexion and make them look more youthful. In the stern, where the commander’s quarters once stood, gold escudos (a type of high-end Spanish currency), gold bars and bags of silver coins “hinted at the vastness of the treasure buried below and gave reason to believe the most extravagant estimates of the galleon’s wealth,” Sancton writes.

When the San José sank, Spanish contemporaries suggested that the cause was a leaky hull in desperate need of caulking. They were convinced that recoil and vibrations from cannon fire in battle broke the ship apart. The English, meanwhile, attributed the sinking to a massive explosion sparked by gunpowder aboard the San José.

When researchers digitally stitched together thousands of photographs of the wreck site into a single aerial view, they found that the galleon’s entire bow was missing. A clean break had cut through the ship near the mainmast, where munitions were stored in the powder magazine. The San José had been lost to enemy fire from Wager’s Expedition after all.

The future of the San José wreck
Dooley, with MAC’s backing, was still dreaming big, planning the deepest underwater archaeological excavation ever conducted. He wanted to lower a giant metal frame onto the seabed as a base for remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to hover above the wreckage and dig without crushing anything. The project would require a budget of about $70 million.

But infighting and criticism by parties outside of the secretive expedition soon put a stop to Dooley’s plans. Spain laid claim to the wreck as the original owner of the San José, as did several Indigenous Bolivian communities, whose ancestors had mined the silver stored in the ship’s cargo. A United States-backed search group that argued it had located the wreck site in the 1980s, decades before Dooley’s team, also raised objections. Closer to home, a Colombian historian formed a one-person “Oversight Office” after accusing his country’s leaders of conspiring to steal the galleon’s treasures.

In 2020, Colombia’s government, under the leadership of President Iván Duque Márquez, abruptly changed tack by declaring all of the San José’s contents to be “assets of cultural interest.” No artifacts from the wreck could now be taken out of the country or sold. Two years later, the Colombian Navy began fresh surveys with a new ROV that was far less sophisticated than the tools used by Dooley and MAC. Still, the robot had several advantages in the government’s view: It was Colombia’s property, transported on a Colombian research vessel staffed by Colombian personnel.

Dooley, for his part, remains sensitive to Colombia’s wishes regarding the wreck’s fate. He has pivoted to proposing that any gold and silver recovered from the San José should be held by the Bank of Colombia to offset the costs of excavating artifacts. Dooley is now working to set up a nonprofit foundation dedicated to studying the San José. He also hopes to create a world-class museum commemorating the galleon—an idea that has been proposed by various parties but never realized.

“It’s frustrating that people can’t come to an understanding to share such a momentous discovery with the public,” Sancton tells Smithsonian. “It’s been ten years, and this thing is still sitting there. There is a tremendous amount of pettiness and misplaced priorities.”

For now, the San José’s treasures officially belong to Colombia. Last November, Colombian archaeologists raised a cannon, three coins and a Chinese porcelain cup from the wreck, but few outside the country know what its government will do next.

At a time when many Western powers are reckoning with the harmful legacy of colonialism, some experts have little sympathy for Spain’s claim to its centuries-old maritime heritage. “Spain’s unusually aggressive pursuit of its sunken ships points to an unresolved relationship with an imperial past that is long gone,” Daniel de Narváez, a Colombian shipwreck historian, tells Smithsonian. “These wrecks are treated less as archaeological sites than as symbolic extensions of former sovereignty, a way of sustaining an imperial narrative long after political control has ended. But the San José is not a floating Spanish embassy at the bottom of the sea.”

Sancton doesn’t believe that leaving the ship’s remains in situ makes sense. “You’re not benefiting anybody by leaving the San José where it is,” he says. “I would like to see these artifacts, and I think humanity would, too. To me, the wreck should be a gift owned by all of humanity.”

Source: smithsonianmag.com.        Sean Kingsley.  History Correspondent            Photos: Armada de Columbia - Dimar