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Spanish galleon San José
Here is an interesting post and great read! Check it out! By Julian Sancton
January 7, 2022
The Global Race for a CenturiesOld Shipwreck and Its BillionDollar Treasures
Illustrations by YUKO SHIMIZU.
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From the Magazine
February 2022
What Lies Beneath
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.
By Julian Sancton
January 7, 2022
The Global Race for a CenturiesOld Shipwreck and Its BillionDollar Treasures
Illustrations by YUKO SHIMIZU.
June 8, 1708 the count of Casa Alegre knew a squadron of English warships was lurking in the area, but he thought he could avoid it. As captain of the Spanish galleon San José, he was charged with leading the Tierra Firma fleet from the Caribbean back to Spain, 17 ships in all, loaded with several years’ worth of treasure from the New World, enough perhaps to turn the tide of war in Europe. Casa Alegre had no doubt the English would be after the precious cargo. If he could reach the harbor of Cartagena de Indias, on the coast of what is now Colombia, the fleet would be safe.
Then they appeared on the horizon to the north. Four English sails. To give the fleet’s merchant ships a chance to reach the harbor, Casa Alegre had no choice but to turn and fight. He hoisted the red battle flag up the mainmast and sailed toward the enemy, accompanied by two armed galleons.
As in a bar brawl, the two most fearsome combatants sought each other out. At sunset, the 70-gun HMS Expedition, helmed by Commodore Charles Wager, took on the 62-gun San José. For more than an hour, they traded broadsides, sailing past each other while firing their cannons at close range, pulverizing wood and bone.
What happened next is unclear. Night had fallen, and the air was thick with smoke and the smell of gunpowder. Bellowed commands, screams of agony, and bursts of cannon fire resonated across the water. The English heard a powerful explosion from deep within the San José and felt the heat of the blast. A fire broke out on the ship, and soon the Spanish side went silent. By the time the smoke cleared, the galleon was gone. All that was left was a field of flotsam onto which fewer than a dozen young sailors clung for life.
It had sunk in a matter of minutes. Wager did not consider the battle a victory but a devastating failure. As the flagship, the San José carried far more silver, gold, emeralds, and pearls than any of the merchant vessels. Wager’s prize had slipped his grasp, and its treasure now gilded the seabed at unknowable depths, along with the bodies of Casa Alegre and almost 600 of his men.
In the three centuries since, the San José has become a myth. Its legend is built upon gold, which does not oxidize. A gold coin will shine as brightly after 500 years on the ocean floor as the day it was minted. So too in the imagination.
The luster of gold from the New World entranced explorers from Columbus to Hernán Cortés, who is said to have told Montezuma’s messenger, “I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart which can only be cured with gold.” That craving didn’t abate with time. In Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Love in the Time of Cholera, the lovelorn protagonist, Florentino Ariza, is stricken with “an overwhelming desire to salvage the sunken treasure [of the San José] so that Fermina Daza”—his beloved—“could bathe in showers of gold.” Colombia’s most celebrated author, García Márquez valued the treasure at “five hundred billion pesos in the currency of the day,” a magical realist embellishment.
Since no complete manifest exists, historians can only guess at the amount of silver and gold coins the galleon carried on its final voyage, including contraband: perhaps 7 million to 12 million pesos, believed by many to be worth more than $10 billion in today’s money.
Regularly referred to as the Holy Grail of shipwrecks, the San José had been the object of several extensive searches over the decades, becoming only more legendary the longer it remained undiscovered. And then, on December 4, 2015, Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos sent the following tweet:
Great news: We found the galleon San José! Tomorrow I will give the details at a press conference from Cartagena.
The next day, at the naval base in Cartagena, an exultant Santos touted the discovery as one of the most important “in the history of humanity” and promised to build “a great museum” to house the contents of the galleon. He said the search was a joint effort between the government of Colombia and an international team of scientists “of the highest level.” But he offered no specifics. Everything having to do with the San José, he said, was classified, including the coordinates of the wreck.
Elected in 2010, Santos had two grand objectives as president, say people familiar with his thinking. One was to end the war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the Marxist guerrilla group that had terrorized the Colombian countryside since the 1960s.
The other was to find and excavate the fabled San José. Santos won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016 for securing the FARC’s surrender. Success with the San José would prove more elusive. If he had hoped the discovery would be an unadulterated legacy-cementing triumph, the passions unleashed in the wake of the announcement would quickly disabuse him of the notion.
More than 300 years after its sinking, the San José has become embroiled in a battle of a different kind, no less vicious, involving international high finance, treasure hunters, archaeologists, accusations of corruption, and elaborate conspiracy theories. At stake is not just a nation’s ransom in riches, but an archaeological godsend: As long as it is excavated with an eye toward science rather than lucre, the wreck can deepen our understanding of a period of colonial history that helped shape the Western Hemisphere.
The Global Race for a CenturiesOld Shipwreck and Its BillionDollar Treasures
In a radio interview shortly after his announcement, Santos offered tantalizing clues about the person behind the discovery of the San José. “I will tell you the tale,” he teased. During a consular event outside the country, he recalled, Santos had been accosted by “a man who looked like Hemingway…with white hair and a white beard.” The man had asked the president for two minutes of his time and offered him a framed copy of a large antique map. “He told me, ‘This map is not known to anyone,’ ” said Santos. “ ‘This site’—he showed me the site—‘does not appear on any other map and that site almost guarantees that I know where the galleon is.’ ”
Santos, who had been a sailor in his youth and made no secret of his love for the ocean, clearly relished the swashbuckling quality of the story. But when the interviewer pressed for more details, Santos allowed only that the mystery man “is not a treasure hunter. He’s not after money and he genuinely has an anthropological, historical, and cultural vocation.”
Questions abounded in the weeks that followed. Whoever “Hemingway” was, he had determined the search area, found the financing, and gotten into the president’s head. But who was bankrolling his operation? How much did it cost? Who stood to benefit? Was Colombia selling off its cultural patrimony? Was it even Colombia’s to sell?
Since the wreck had reportedly been found west of Cartagena in Colombian waters, Santos believed his government had the strongest claim to the galleon and its contents. Within days of Santos’s announcement, Spain’s minister of culture offered his country’s cooperation in salvaging the wreck while also invoking the principle of sovereign immunity, according to which a warship sailing under a nation’s flag remains that nation’s property even after it has sunk, regardless of how much time has passed. The Spanish foreign minister, José Manuel García-Margallo, issued a blunter warning: “If this cannot be resolved on friendly terms,” he told the press, Colombia “must understand that we will claim it and defend our rights.”
“I WON’T BE SURPRISED IF, AS WE SPEAK, THE SAN JOSÉ IS BEING PLUNDERED. I THINK THERE’S PROBABLY A 50-50 CHANCE THAT IT’S HAPPENING TODAY.”
Santos didn’t back down. “There are a lot of owners who are now popping up,” he said at the time. “No sir, this is the Colombian people’s cultural heritage.” Rattling the ghost of the Spanish Empire has long been a winning political strategy in Latin America, so there was little incentive for Santos to give in. But what of other claims from Spain’s former colonies? Most of the gold and silver on board was loaded onto the San José in Panama and had been mined in what is now Peru and Bolivia. Peru had sued for its right to sunken Spanish gold before, arguing that colonists had stolen it from the land’s previous occupants. What was to stop it from doing so again?
The most troublesome claim, however, came not from a foreign government, but rather from the North American treasure hunters who contended that they had already located the wreck, 34 years earlier, and were entitled to half its value.
More than 8,000 Spanish vessels are believed to have been lost during the colonial era, between 1492 and the early 19th century. Sinking in battle, as the San José did, was rare. Most were dashed against reefs during storms. If their wrecks could be located, the Spanish did their best to salvage them. They usually forced enslaved or Indigenous divers to carry out the highly dangerous task. The wrecks they couldn’t get to—too deep or too dispersed—remained inaccessible until the second half of the 20th century.
Modern underwater treasure hunting was born in the 1950s, following the development of practical scuba equipment and survey technology. What began as a hobbyist’s pursuit had by the 1970s become a subaquatic gold rush, involving mostly American adventurers like Mel Fisher and Burt Webber, who each discovered Spanish treasure they claimed was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
It was in this context that, in 1979, a pair of New York–area stockbrokers named Jim Bannigan and Jim Maloney founded a company called Glocca Morra to search for the San José. (In a distinctly ’70s touch, their investors included the actor Michael Landon, of Little House on the Prairie, and disgraced Nixon adviser and Watergate mastermind John Ehrlichman.)
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Glocca Morra secured a permit from Colombia’s main maritime authority, Dirección General Maritima, to search a 1,100-square-kilometer area off Cartagena. The first two phases of the search were conducted from a surface vessel equipped with side-scan sonar and a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to identify any man-made objects on the seafloor. The team found a single cannon and located a few possible targets but ran out of money before it could pinpoint the wreck.
Locals in Cartagena paid close attention to the vessel’s comings and goings. “My biggest fear was always that some of the banditos would think we already found [the treasure],” recalls Bob Smith, the U.S. Navy veteran who led the operation. “We were shot at a few times.”
The third search phase took place aboard a civilian submarine called the Auguste Piccard, built for the 1964 Swiss expo to take tourists to the bottom of Lake Geneva. (The mesoscaphe was named after the famous Swiss inventor and balloonist—an inspiration for both Star Trek’s Jean-Luc Picard and The Adventures of Tintin’s Professor Calculus—and designed by his son, Jacques Piccard.) In early December 1981, according to members of the crew, the side-scan sonar mounted on the Piccard picked up a large, shiplike anomaly on a ledge about 200 meters deep. The vessel returned to the site several times over the next few weeks, often resting on the seabed so the team could shoot video of the target or hide from nosy Colombian Navy submarines.
After one such occasion, the crew surfaced to discover that a piece of wood from the site had been lodged in the Piccard’s propeller shaft. Subsequent analysis determined it was consistent with wood used in the construction of a late-17th-century galleon, says Roy Doty, who served as the mission’s archaeologist.
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This evidence was enough for Glocca Morra’s investors to declare that they had found the San José. In early 1982, they reported the coordinates of the target, which they said was “in the immediate vicinity of 10°10’17” N–76°00’20” W.”
The head investor, a Chicago financier named Warren Stearns (who died in 2010), met with a Colombian government committee in Bogotá to discuss how the treasure would be divided once salvaged. He had understood that it would be split evenly between Glocca Morra and the government. But when it came time to sign the paperwork, Colombia offered Glocca Morra only a 25 percent cut.
Stearns refused. Perhaps believing it would give him a better negotiating position, he told his interlocutors that there had been an error in the reported coordinates. “Which put a very negative atmosphere on the meeting,” recalls the Piccard’s captain, an even-keeled Englishman named John Swann, who was in the room.
When they stepped out of the meeting and into a downpour in the streets of Bogotá, an agitated Stearns told Swann to immediately demobilize the operation. A few days later, upon surfacing from a dive to recover the transponders they’d dropped on the seafloor, the Piccard was intercepted by a Colombian gunboat and its crew arrested on what Swann believes was the trumped-up charge that they had no license to operate a submarine in Colombian waters.
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In 1984, Glocca Morra’s cut was slashed even further when Colombia passed a law—applied retroactively—reducing the ownership rights of a shipwreck’s discoverer down to 5 percent of the wreck’s contents. By this time, Glocca Morra’s stake in the San José had been taken over by a company called Sea Search Armada. Its CEO, Jack Harbeston, has spent the last 35 years fighting the Colombian government for the rights to half the San José treasure in both American and Colombian courts.
“There’s no doubt that they (the Colombians) are trying to steal the treasure,” Harbeston told the Huntsville Times in 1988. “The value of what’s down there could double (Colombia’s) foreign reserves.”
In 2007, Colombia’s Supreme Court ruled in his favor, declaring that the treasure didn’t qualify as cultural patrimony and that Sea Search Armada was entitled to 50 percent of whatever was found at or around the reported coordinates. But the government has refused to allow Sea Search Armada to return to the area to verify the coordinates, threatening to use force.
“It’s been just kind of a standoff,” said Harbeston, speaking from his home in Bellevue, Washington, in a Zoom session with surviving members of the expedition. At 89, Harbeston continues to fight. Sea Search Armada has sued the Colombian government in U.S. courts and envisions further litigation. Harbeston has taken up the matter with Congress, where it has caught the attention of, among others, Senator Robert Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “It would seem that the debate was settled definitively when Colombia’s Supreme Court issued its decision in 2007 in favor of Sea Search Armada’s claim,” Menendez wrote in a statement to Vanity Fair. “If there is one thing I have observed over the last two decades of work with the Colombian government it is that due to its turbulent past, Colombia is a country that values the rule of law and decisions by their Supreme Court cannot be ignored.”
The Colombian government, meanwhile, argues that since, by Sea Search Armada’s own admission, the reported coordinates were incorrect, the Supreme Court’s decision is irrelevant. “There is no margin of error,” said Camilo Gómez, the general director of the National Agency for the Legal Defense of the State.
Harbeston has vowed to give a portion of the treasure (or whatever settlement he might receive instead) to Indigenous causes in Latin America. Spain’s gold and silver was taken from those who lived on the land before, he argues. “I don’t really have a plan,” said Harbeston. “I just said it’s the right thing to do.”
Treasure hunters used to be seen as roguish heroes, dreamers, risk-takers, literal venture capitalists who spent decades in pursuit of unimaginable riches. But as maritime archaeology developed into a serious academic discipline, the glamour of treasure hunting waned. To call someone a treasure hunter today is essentially to call them a grave robber.
“I analogize it to elephant hunting,” said James Goold, a lawyer who has successfully fought American treasure hunters in U.S. courts on behalf of Spain, forcing them to return millions of dollars’ worth of salvaged coins. “It used to be something that people thought was really cool and adventurous,” he said. “Not so anymore.”
One major turning point was UNESCO’s 2001 Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage. The agreement aimed to prevent the plundering of shipwrecks and other archaeological sites that have been underwater for more than 100 years and prohibits the selling of salvaged artifacts.
But until recently Colombia remained open for business. The country never signed the UNESCO convention, in part because doing so would have granted Spain ownership rights over the San José, as well as the hundreds of undiscovered colonial-era shipwrecks believed to lie in Colombian waters.
THE MOST TROUBLESOME CLAIM CAME FROM THE NORTH AMERICAN TREASURE HUNTERS WHO CONTENDED THAT THEY HAD LOCATED THE WRECK 34 YEARS EARLIER AND WERE ENTITLED TO HALF ITS VALUE.
The Santos government further defied the spirit of UNESCO’s convention in 2013 by passing a law that allows private contractors to salvage wrecks and then keep “up to 50 percent of the value of those objects that do not constitute the Cultural Patrimony of the Nation.” According to the law, artifacts of which there are multiple interchangeable examples—such as uncut gemstones or coins of the same denomination from the same year—don’t count as patrimony beyond the first few specimens. The rest would qualify as treasure, and the contractor could keep up to half of it.
The law sparked outrage among a number of observers who saw it as sanctioned looting. “The robbers are going to flee the bank, escorted by police,” said Francisco Muñoz, a Cartagena historian and self-appointed San José watchdog, in a recent interview. A former state’s attorney named Leandro Ramos has referred to the law as a “criminal plot.”
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Others were more pragmatic, recognizing that Colombia likely didn’t have the means to finance ambitious search and salvage expeditions on its own. Nevertheless, critics feared the ambiguity of the law—especially that “up to 50 percent” provision—would be an invitation to graft.
“I really didn’t like that because that opens the door for countries like ours that are prone to corruption,” said Daniel De Narváez McAllister, a nautical historian who helped shape the law but had lobbied for an even 50-50 split.
De Narváez says the law was “obviously” written with the San José in mind. And just two years after it passed, the galleon was found.
More than 100 archaeologists and academics around the world signed an open letter, published in the Spanish newspaper ABC, urging the Santos government to ensure that any excavation be conducted with the strictest archaeological rigor and in total transparency, avoiding “a debacle that keeps wealth in the hands of few.”
The longer the government went without revealing any details about “Hemingway” or his backers, or their plans for the excavation, the louder the critics grew.
Santos had hoped to see the excavation of the San José begin before the end of his presidency, in August 2018. On July 23 of that year, the day he was supposed to announce the public-private partnership to excavate the wreck, Santos returned to national airwaves to make a different, more regretful declaration: He was suspending the process.
This was a far cry from Santos’s triumphant first press conference three years before. The swagger was gone. Here was a man defeated but defiant. He attributed the decision to sustained activism by “concerned citizens,” to which he affixed a disdainful pair of air quotes.
In hopes that his successor would restart the partnership, he at last introduced the nation to the discoverers of the San José (and made no mention of Sea Search Armada). The effort had been bankrolled by a previously unknown English company called Maritime Archaeology Consultants, or MAC. Though he didn’t identify the principal financier, whom he referred to simply as “the originator,” Santos name-checked the search expedition’s main participants, describing them as a “dream team.”
They found the wreck, he said, with assistance and technology from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, the internationally renowned Massachusetts-based research organization that helped locate the Titanic. But the driving force behind the effort, the person who cracked the mystery of the San José, he said, had been an archaeologist named Roger Dooley. After the press conference, Santos played a short video documenting the search effort in 2015. The moment Dooley appeared on camera, it was clear: white hair, white beard. Hemingway.
Dooley welcomes me into his 21st-floor condo in Aventura, Florida, and shows off his spectacular view of the Atlantic Ocean, as well as the dazzling celebrity properties across the canal, including Lionel Messi’s over to the right in Sunny Isles Beach.
You’d be forgiven for taking him for a treasure hunter at first glance. It’s not only the look, less Hemingway than Ancient Mariner, with deep-set eyes, flowing gray hair, and a scar on his hand from the bite of a moray eel. His walls are covered with yellowed maps and images of galleons; his shelves contain numerous books on treasure hunting; on his coffee table is a special edition of National Geographic all about pirates; on a side table is a miniature treasure chest.
Nevertheless, Dooley dispels the myths of treasure hunting: Gold coins were never kept in chests except in novels and movies; they were stored much more sensibly, in small, portable boxes. And X never, ever marks the spot—except that one time it did, on an old map he found of the Cuban coast that marked the location of an early 18th-century shipwreck with a Maltese Cross.
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Dooley, 76, says he has found more than 100 shipwrecks since the late 1960s but insists that he’s no treasure hunter—that he loathes the practice. “I’m an archaeologist,” he said. “I have never found gold. I have never touched a gold coin.” (Most colonial-era coins were silver, but it doesn’t seem like he’s trying to get by on a technicality.)
He concedes that if there’s as much treasure on the San José as many historians believe, he will have found more sunken gold and silver than anyone in history. The suggestion doesn’t faze him. He has long been obsessed with the San José and seems more interested in the number of bronze cannons on the galleon—62, he says, not 64 as is commonly reported—than the amount of gold, which he says is unknowable and only a small part of the story.
Should MAC be granted the contract to excavate the San José, an undertaking he estimates at between $70 million and $100 million, Dooley says he will not take any share of the treasure and would refuse it if offered.
“I don’t want to be rich,” he said. “I’m never going to be rich. I just want to lead a nice normal life…. With my salary [from MAC] it’s enough.” He pauses. “Of course, they might give me a bonus, give me a gift, I don’t know. What am I gonna do, throw it away?”
Dooley speaks frenetically, in a desiccated rasp, with a thick Cuban accent that belies his childhood in Brooklyn. He never knew his father, who was of Irish descent. His parents divorced when he was an infant, and his Cuban mother remarried a Cuban man by the name of Montañes, who moved the family to Havana in 1957 and found work as night manager of the new Hilton hotel.
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After forcing President Fulgencio Batista to flee the island on December 31, 1958, Fidel Castro and his Marxist rebels nationalized the Havana Hilton—which they considered a totem of capitalism—and renamed it the Havana Libre. It became the unofficial headquarters of the revolution. Castro took over a whole floor and occasionally snuck into the kitchen after hours. (“Castro loved to cook,” recalls Dooley.)
Almost overnight, Roger Dooley, the Brooklyn teenager who spoke bad Spanish, became Roger Montañes, aspiring Cuban revolutionary. He says he trained to become a MiG pilot but, being American-born, was deemed untrustworthy. Instead, he found his vocation underwater, becoming a skilled diver.
The many shipwrecks he encountered inspired him to study marine archaeology. He matriculated at Cuba’s Academy of Sciences and was soon representing Cuba at international conferences on underwater heritage.
To Dooley’s disappointment, Cuba lacked the resources to conduct proper excavations. In the early ’80s, he went to work for a new government company called Carisub, whose raison d’être was to extract wealth from the ocean, including by harvesting black coral for jewelry and prying treasure from colonial shipwrecks.
It was at Carisub that Dooley made his first major discovery, a wrecked galleon called the Mercedes, which foundered a few miles east of Havana in 1698. He looked forward to conducting the first rigorous, by-the-book excavation of a galleon in Cuban waters. But his boss—who, according to Dooley, considered the job an opportunity to drink whiskey all day and feast on freshly caught lobster—had no interest in archaeology. He planned to use any means necessary, including explosives, to get to whatever gold or silver coins the Spanish might have left behind on the Mercedes.
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When he heard of these plans, Dooley flew into a rage. “I said, ‘You know something, I quit,’ ” he tells me, and feels compelled to add that his former boss died, years later, drunk at his desk.
But Dooley longed to know more about the Mercedes, to imagine the excavation that could have been. He flew to Seville, Spain, to the General Archive of the Indies, a notoriously labyrinthine trove of records dating to the beginning of the Spanish Empire.
“You could spend 20 years there and not find what you’re looking for,” Dooley tells me. “It’s not like there’s a shipwreck section.”
While rummaging through bundles of paper, he chanced on a curious document, a sewn-together collection of letters about a different shipwreck—the San José. As he read about the dramatic circumstances of its sinking, he grew transfixed. And he began to believe he could find it.
The task would involve almost 30 years of research in multiple countries. At the British Library, Dooley discovered a key source: a mariner’s handbook—or *derrotero—*written by a pilot of the San José. While he did not take part in the galleon’s final voyage from Portobello, Panama, to Cartagena, the pilot knew the route well. Dooley says the handbook, combined with meticulous study of winds, currents, and firsthand accounts of the battle, allowed him to map out six search areas in which he believed he had the highest likelihood of finding the wreck.
Throughout the early 2000s, he hounded lawmakers in Colombia for updates on what would become the law of 2013, allowing public-private partnerships in the excavation of historic shipwrecks. When it seemed like it was on the verge of passing, he sought an investor to bankroll the search.
The richest families in Colombia seemed like a good place to start. He showed his plan to a few and offered them the chance to sign their names to one of the nation’s most enduring legends. After they politely declined, he considered the Mexican business mogul Carlos Slim, then the wealthiest person in the world, hoping to keep the financing in Latin America. No success.
Finally, he found a willing backer in England. “The originator” is a phenomenally wealthy 40-something London financier who’s as passionate about naval history as he is about guarding his anonymity. Dooley will say nothing about the originator except that he’s “a genius” and has not balked at any cost.
Together, they founded MAC in the early 2010s, with the sole purpose of finding and excavating the San José.
While Dooley claims he doesn’t want to benefit from the treasure, the same can’t realistically be said about the originator. Yet the possibility of tremendous profit is not the only reason people invest in shipwreck salvage—nor is it simply about vicarious adventure or a love of history. Treasure hunting is an objectively terrible investment, with high operational costs and very low chances of finding the loot, let alone getting to keep it.
That may be the point: In the likely event that an expedition fails, savvy financiers can sometimes write off the totality of their investment to reduce their taxable income. In 2012, British fiscal authorities investigated 129 people suspected of taking part in salvage-related tax-avoidance schemes, including the TV adventurer Bear Grylls and billionaire hedge fund manager David Harding.
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Dooley steers the conversation away from any discussion of financing. Asked how many investors MAC has, he says he doesn’t know and doesn’t care to—“It could be one, it could be four….”
With money behind him, Dooley was now ready to act. After failing to make headway with underlings in the Santos government, Dooley decided his best shot—perhaps his only shot—would be to win over the president himself. For that, he needed to leave a memorable impression. But he had an idea.
A few years earlier, at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., Dooley had found a map of the Cartagena region from 1729 that contained a curious detail. In the general area where the San José was thought to have sunk was a grouping of islets labeled “Bajo del Almirante,” or “shoals of the admiral.” The name appeared on no other known map. Dooley was certain it was a reference to the English commodore Charles Wager, of the HMS Expedition, who had attacked the San José and whom the Spanish would have referred to as The Admiral. There was surely a connection between these shoals and the site of the battle, he thought.
More importantly, it was just what you’d imagine an old treasure map would look like. He downloaded the map, cleaned up the image, had it framed, and in December 2014 brought it to a consular event in New York that he knew Santos would be attending. He waited all night for the opportunity to speak to the president and present him with the map. In the wee hours, after nearly everyone had left, he got his chance.
Dooley is vague about how the map helped him locate the wreck, but as a piece of theater it worked brilliantly. Santos was dazzled by the man with the white beard and arranged to have him meet with Colombia’s minister of culture, Mariana Garcés Córdoba. Within six months, MAC had its permit and Dooley began to assemble his team.
Hired as a contractor, Woods Hole provided the search technology. But Dooley’s closest collaborator was a veteran underwater surveyor, one he’d worked with before, named Garry Kozak.
“I gotta tell you, when I first met Roger, I thought he was a little bit of a crackpot,” Kozak said. “He was very flamboyant. My first reaction was like, man, I don’t know about this guy. And then as time went on and I learned more about him, I realized this guy really knows a lot more than some people think he does.”
The search began in the spring of 2015, aboard the aging Colombian research vessel ARC Malpelo. Day after day, the Woods Hole crew released the Remus 6000, a torpedo-shaped autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) mounted with a side-scan sonar, programming it to travel back and forth over a given area of the seafloor in a pattern called “mowing the lawn.” Then Dooley and Kozak would peruse the sonar data for any anomalies.
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After several weeks, they had found nothing. The search was paused until the end of the year because Woods Hole had another job. Though he tried not to show it, Dooley was worried.
Garcés, the minister of culture, began to doubt whether Dooley actually had any idea where the wreck was.
“If I don’t find it, I’ll cut my head off,” Dooley told her, dragging a finger across his throat. The gesture became a running joke.
The time and money hadn’t been wasted, however. In a systematic search, it’s crucial to know where something isn’t. When the survey resumed that November, it took just a week for the AUV to pick up a promising object on the seabed, more than 600 meters deep.
“Now, I’ve been analyzing sonar data for 45 years,” said Kozak. “And when I saw that signature, I knew that it was almost certainly the remains of an old wreck.”
That same day, November 26, Dooley ordered a higher-resolution scan of the area. The images the AUV recorded were electrifying. Dooley saw jars, bottles, and other artifacts that appeared to date from the turn of the 18th century. But what jumped out at him first was the presence of bronze cannons with two dolphin-shaped loops on the barrel, and another one at the breech—a rare design the archaeologist was specifically looking for. Dooley knew that he had found the San José.
When he saw Garcés next, he slashed a finger across his throat and smiled.
Many colonial-era shipwrecks no longer look like ships. Wooden hulls often smashed against reefs during hurricanes, their fragments dispersed by currents, swells, and storms over hundreds of years. Whatever is left is typically covered in sand and coral. MAC’s photographs of the San José, by contrast, reveal a vessel in a remarkable state of preservation. It is nestled into the mud at a depth where currents exert little force.
The masts and rigging are long gone, but the contours of its hull are easy to follow. Twenty-two bronze cannons are scattered on and around the deck like pickup sticks, alongside ceramic jars, cooking pots, enema syringes, Dutch gin bottles, and hundreds of Chinese porcelain cups—vestiges of a complex, globalized society.
And after three centuries in seawater, pretty much all that glitters is gold. A surprising amount of it is visible in the photos, concentrated at the stern of the ship in the form of coins and finger-size bars, hinting at the untold riches buried below.
To Dooley, the site also tells a story of horrific violence. The blanket of mud dips steeply toward the front of the galleon, indicating that the entire bow of the ship had broken off, likely as the result of an explosion in the powder magazine. Once that happened, the galleon was no more seaworthy than a sideways bucket. Water would have quickly filled what was left of the hold, and the San José would have sunk before most men could abandon ship. The only survivors would have been those high up in the rigging.
When JACK Harbeston heard that Dooley had found the San José, he immediately suspected foul play. In the early 2000s, Dooley had worked on a project for another salvage company Harbeston ran, Iota Partners, overseeing the excavation of a colonial Spanish shipwreck in the Pacific islands.
“When we were routinely cleaning out the computers at the end of the work season,” said Harbeston, “I found on his computer notes about the San José.” Harbeston believes Dooley had access to Sea Search Armada’s computers while on location, and could have stolen the coordinates of the San José.
Dooley has called the accusation “absurd and irresponsible.” At his condo, he rolls out a large map of the Colombian coastline on the dining room table. He points to a red dot labeled “SJ,” where MAC found the San José, then puts a finger on the location reported by Glocca Morra in 1982, several miles away. (When he caught me trying to eyeball MAC’s coordinates—still a state secret—he quickly rolled the map back up. “Okay, that’s enough.”)
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There’s ample evidence that Glocca Morra and MAC located different objects. The anomaly that the submarine Auguste Piccard investigated in 1981 lay at a depth of about 200 meters, on hilly terrain, while MAC reported that the wreck of the San José was found on a flat expanse of mud and silt some 600 meters deep.
Glocca Morra claims to have spotted several woodpiles and at least one cannon, so it is quite possible the team found debris from the battle of 1708, perhaps even from the San José, though that has never been established. Whether the company found the galleon itself is less certain. Harbeston says a broad margin of error should be applied to Glocca Morra’s coordinates, since GPS wasn’t widely available in the early ’80s, and the radio navigation system the company used was far less accurate.
In 1994, seeking to verify those coordinates, the Colombian government hired the American explorer and treasure hunter Tommy Thompson to investigate the spot and surrounding areas. He found nothing. “There’s not the slightest possibility the galleon is there,” Thompson said at the time.
(Sea Search Armada argues that Thompson is far from a credible source: He has spent the last six years in a federal prison in Michigan for refusing to divulge the whereabouts of gold coins he salvaged from the SS Central America, worth an estimated $2 million to $5 million.)
So what, then, was the shiplike object picked up by the Piccard’s side-scan sonar? Since we now know that the bow of the San José broke off, could that section of the ship be buried beneath the coral?
Rodrigo Pacheco-Ruiz, a marine archaeologist at the University of Southampton who has closely followed the San José affair, is doubtful. “If this was a shipwreck and not a natural rocky outcrop, I would say that it could be more a metal hulled ship,” he told me in an email after analyzing the sonar image.
Harbeston believes there is an international plot to rob Sea Search Armada of its right to the galleon’s treasure. “This scheme to steal at least SSA’s share of the San Jose had to involve political figures in Colombia, the U.S. and Great Britain,” he wrote in an email.
This notion of a nefarious conspiracy to abscond with the riches and cultural heritage of the San José is echoed in the reporting of Spanish investigative journalist Jesús García Calero, who has covered the saga for the newspaper ABC. He has traced elements of MAC’s corporate structure to the Cayman Islands and alleges that some of the people affiliated with MAC have been involved in the disreputable kind of treasure hunting. (No representative for MAC was available for comment because, according to Dooley, the company has suspended its operations as the originator continues to negotiate with the Colombian government. “I don’t work now for MAC, nor [does] anybody else,” Dooley told me.)
Calero has also repeated the rumor, now gospel among critics of the Santos administration’s deal with MAC, that one of the masterminds of this supposed conspiracy is former British prime minister Tony Blair, a close friend of Santos who has been scrutinized for his lucrative consulting work in Colombia, among other countries. Calero has offered no concrete evidence to support the imputation, which a spokesperson for Blair vociferously denied: “We have no knowledge of, nor had any involvement with, the deal you refer to. To suggest otherwise is a pure fabrication based on ill-informed gossip and wild speculation.”
One well-connected San José specialist refused to discuss the politics of it on the record. “Just do a quick read on Jorge Enrique Pizano and his son Alejandro…,” he wrote to me. “That’s the way things work here [in Colombia].” I looked up the case: Pizano was a whistleblower in a far-reaching corruption investigation into a government deal with Odebrecht, the Brazilian construction giant. Pizano was found dead of a heart attack in 2018. Three days later, his son Alejandro drank from a bottle of water he found on his father’s desk and died of poisoning.
Dooley tells me “a couple people insinuated” that they could help him move his project along in exchange for a kickback, but that he “never got into that.” He had managed to entice Santos personally, so no intermediary was needed.
The secrecy surrounding the project has only fueled suspicion. “Normally, between archaeologists, we share our stuff, and we talk about it,” said Pacheco-Ruiz, the Southampton archaeologist. “But these guys don’t share anything.” Pacheco-Ruiz has analyzed the few images of the site that MAC has released publicly and admits they are of “very high quality.” But he has pointed out what he considers to be troubling discrepancies between photos taken in 2015 and those from 2016: slight but noticeable changes in the topography, the arrangement of shells, the mounds of silt and mud. At a depth of 600 meters, such changes are likely not due to the current, which is almost nonexistent.
Pacheco-Ruiz is careful not to allege any specific wrongdoing by the MAC team. “What I can say is the site is not the same,” he tells me. His caution hasn’t prevented critics from concluding that MAC has already tampered with the site and perhaps taken objects, which would violate the firm’s agreement with the government.
Dooley asserts that no artifact has been touched, and attributes changes at the site to natural phenomena. “Our wreck lies in an area that is almost flat, compose[d] 95% of silt and clay (like mud),” he wrote in an email. “Therefore, once our wreck arrived it create[d] like an oasis, in the desert, like a small reef, with plenty of wood, hiding and protecting places, holes, etc., therefore it was invaded by many marine organisms.” The most likely culprits, he says, are larger fish, who flap their fins to move sand around in search of food.
The true value of the treasure is impossible to know. The coins are worth whatever collectors are willing to pay for them: It is a legendary ship because its treasure is estimated to be worth billions, and the treasure is estimated to be worth billions because it comes from a legendary ship. But it is not exempt from the laws of supply and demand. A single rare silver real or gold escudo from the San José might sell for hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars at auction. Yet if all 7 million to 12 million pesos were to hit the market at once, the price of the coins would quickly approach the meltdown value of the gold and silver.
In 2020, Colombian vice president Marta Lucía Ramírez—serving under President Iván Duque—declared all the contents of the San José to be “objects of cultural interest.” What that means, in practical terms, is that “nobody, neither MAC, nor Sea Search Armada, nor another contractor, can take anything from the galleon San José,” said Camilo Gómez, of the National Agency for the Legal Defense of the State.
But the resolution has only led to more uncertainty. A relatively poor country, Colombia has lately been shaken by unending protests sparked by a revolt over taxes. The government may thus find it politically unsound to fund an ambitious deep-water excavation—likely costing more than the entire annual budget of the Ministry of Culture—with public money. Let alone a new museum.
Dooley argues that the measure, while well-intentioned, is self-defeating. By outlawing the sale of objects of which there are many nearly identical specimens, the government will be saddled with the cost of conserving more artifacts than any museum can possibly display. “What are you gonna do with a million coins?” he asks.
Some have suggested that, since the San José is part of our global cultural patrimony, the excavation and conservation should be an international collaboration. But Spain, the country with the strongest historical ties to the galleon, has shown little interest in paying for a project that will redound to the glory of Colombia. So why would the United States, France, or Norway be more inclined?
Gomez says negotiations with the originator are still ongoing, but Dooley doesn’t believe any progress will be made until after the next president takes office in August. Faced with the certainty of a judicial free-for-all the second the first ingot of gold reaches the surface, the next government may well decide to leave the San José on the ocean floor.
For many archaeologists, that’s just as well. “The best would be to leave the galleon where it is,” said Juan Guillermo Martín, a professor of archaeology at Colombia’s Universidad del Norte and one of the most outspoken critics of the Santos-MAC project. “It’s been there 300 years, well conserved, and can surely last for centuries more until we acquire the technology, the experience, and the resources to do a suitable job.”
Garry Kozak, the maritime surveyor who helped Dooley find the San José, begs to differ. “Archaeologists, for the longest time, have promoted this inaccurate philosophy that leaving something in the ocean is the best preservation,” he said, “and that’s so much bull crap. Because the ocean is a destructive environment, and everything that is in it is degrading and will disintegrate and go into the bottom. Titanic is a classic example of it.”
Advocates of leaving the San José untouched for the moment say that, unlike the corroding wreck of the Titanic, the galleon is largely encased in mud, which keeps it in a state of relative equilibrium. But there is another reason to salvage the San José as soon as possible, says Daniel De Narváez, the nautical historian. The idea of leaving shipwrecks in situ, he says, “is very romantic. I love it. It’s really nice. But it doesn’t work when you have people that are starving. Once it’s been found, who’s not going to go there and see if I find a gold bar or an emerald, or a ring or something? I won’t be surprised if, as we speak, the San José is being plundered. I think there’s probably a 50-50 chance that it’s happening today.”
The Colombian Navy patrols the waters above the San José 24/7, but that wouldn’t discourage a resourceful pirate equipped with a long-range ROV or a small submarine, presuming they know the coordinates. The Titanic lies more than two miles deep—almost five times deeper than the San José—yet thousands of its artifacts have been pillaged and sold on the black market since the wreck was discovered in 1985.
Purist archaeologists say what makes the San José the Holy Grail of shipwrecks is not the gold and silver it carried but its cultural significance to the people of Colombia. Yet, undeniably, one of the main reasons it looms so large in the Colombian consciousness is its formidable treasure. That is what Commodore Wager was after, what the Count of Casa Alegre gave his life to defend, and what fired Gabriel García Márquez’s imagination.
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Kozak believes archaeologists are not immune to Cortés’s disease of the heart. “They’re a bunch of hypocrites,” he said. “The reality is what motivates everything is the gold and silver on board.” While searching for the San José, he says, the team encountered another shipwreck, probably Spanish, probably just as old, but not likely to contain any treasure. “Does anybody give a shit about that wreck?”
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