This Appalachian Life: Learning to surf

This is The Guardian. Today, the billion-dollar shipwreck everybody wants a piece of. 500 orders a month was manageable. 5,000 is madness. Embrace intelligent order fulfillment with shipstation. The only platform combining order management, warehouse workflows, inventory, returns, and analytics in one place. What used to take 5 separate tools, shipstation does in one. Automate fulfillment and rate shopping to ship up to 15 times more with up to 90% savings. Go to shipstation.com and use code audio to try shipstation free for 60 days. A few years ago, Julian Sankton, a journalist, came across a story about a shipwreck found off the coast of Columbia. An on board were treasures supposedly worth a billion dollars, which he thought must have been a typo. Surely it meant millions of dollars worth of gold and silver, but indeed it was supposedly billions, many tons, more than a hundred tons of gold and silver. For Vanity Fair, Julian wrote a piece about the extraordinary 300-year mystery, where the ship had sunk, and how it was finally found a decade ago. The magazine piece became a book project, and the more Julian dug into the story, the more he realized, just as tantalizing as the story of how the San Jose was found, was the tale of the man who had done more than anybody to find it. But there was a problem. The man responsible for this discovery was secret. I heard whispers of a mysterious Cuban-American archaeologist named Roger Dooley, and in all of those whispers, he was painted as a sinister, shady figure. People described Pintamy as a criminal, possibly a drug trafficker, even a human trafficker. It was implied that he had stolen the coordinates of his greatest discovery, and he was, to me, perhaps I imagine that he might be the villain of this story, but as a journalist, I needed to at least get his perspective. And I could not trace him. He was a ghost. And then all of a sudden, a few months into my reporting, I get a call from a 305 area code, and knew that that was Miami. And I pick up the call, and I hear, on the other end, this raspy voice, as if it's coming from the bottom of a crypt, saying, "It's Roger Dooley." Two months ago, I had a heart attack, and I said, "I had a heart attack, but people say, "What? You survived? I knew it, because if I let them. " Roger Dooley talked fast, full of stories like the time he'd survived nine minutes without a beating heart, and others that seemed too fantastic to be true. I didn't know whether to, after everything that had been said about him, believe what he was saying. In his telling, he was almost like the forest gump of Cuba, where he's, he's happening to show up at all these major events in Cuban history. But the more I followed up on that, the more I realized that everything he was telling me was true. And this is something that I was able to nail down only after hundreds of hours of cross-referencing, what he said, and speaking to people that I could reach back in Cuba, about his particularly colorful, life story, which led him from Cuba over the course of a 40-year obsession with this ship, too, in 2015, discovering the wreck of the sand who's there. So why did so many people try to paint him as a villain? From the Guardian, I'm Michael Safi, today in Focus, the most valuable shipwreck in history, and the man who found it. Julian, before we dive into this absolutely astonishing story of a shipwreck, I want to do that cliché podcast thing and say, we have to go back in time. In this case, not a few weeks or months, but 300 years. How is it that the sand Jose ended up at the bottom of the ocean to start with? For about 200 years following the Spanish conquest of the New World, there were regular fleets of ships taking gold and silver and other resources of the American continent, across the Atlantic back to Spain. Now, by the early 1700s, the Spanish Empire was starting to decline in power, starting to be eroded from within by corruption, smuggling, and a vast amount of debts. In 1701, war breaks out in Europe, a war called the War of Spanish Succession. In that time, from 1700, and in fact from slightly before that time, to 1708, there had not been a single treasure fleet coming from the Spanish main back to Spain. And so you can imagine the accumulated wealth that the Spanish king was increasingly desperate for to pay for the war, and the many debts that Spain was saddled with. The sand Jose was the flagship of the treasure fleet that came in 1708. There was 17 ships strong, but only two galleons, the sand Jose and her sister, galleon, the sand Joaquin, among the most magnificent Spanish galleons ever built. There were essentially armed cargo ships that were quite voluminous, not necessarily the most agile ship in the seas, but capable of carrying a very large amount of cargo, and theoretically protecting it. So they were the kind of the kind of seaborn equivalent of those like big trucks that drive around filling up cash machines. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they're like a bringstruck. The count of Casa Allegre, who was the 71-year-old commander of Captain General of the treasure fleet and the captain of the sand Jose, knew well that a British squadron was lurking in the Caribbean waters, specifically waiting for the fleet to make its journey from Portobello Panema, which is where the ships were loaded up with riches, to Cartagena and Colombia, the fortified city, from which it would make the beginning of its return journey to Spain. So he knew that the British squadron was waiting to ambush him, and yet he believed that the king could wait no longer for his riches. The winds were favorable, and it seemed like he was going to be able to make it, but at the very last minute, on the very last day, the winds turned, and when he was almost within sight of Cartagena, all of a sudden his progress and that of the fleet was blocked. Here come the four ships of Commodore Wager's squadron, much more agile ships, much better suited to naval combat, and at one point, at tremendous explosion, according to the expedition crew, rang out from deep within the bowels of the sand Jose, and seconds later, the sand Jose disappeared, had sunk. Well, can I ask you one question? I mean, from what you've gathered through your research for this book, what were those naval combat exchanges like? What was it like to be a sailor living through that? What could you see? What could you hear? What could you smell? You certainly would have smelled gunpowder. You would have smelled the smoke because a fire, a fire broke out on the sand Jose that engulfed the entire thing. You would have smelled salt Peter, you would have smelled blood. There would have been the sound of drums to keep up the energy and to fire up their martial spirit. It would have been pretty chaotic, especially as the smoke and the darkness made it increasingly difficult to see. Of course, you tell yourself, you can't dodge a cannonball that every time you hear something whizzed by you, you would feel that you were protected by God. But you would also know that the cannonball itself was not necessarily the most deadly thing, that the shards and fragments of bone and wood that would be hurtling in their wake were often just as deadly. Bloody hell. In your book, Julian, you say that the cargo aboard this ship was valued at over a billion pounds, a billion pounds. What was on it that was so valuable? Primarily gold and silver. Yes, there was more silver than gold, but gold is many times more valuable, and there was more gold on the sand Jose than had ever sailed in another ship because this coincided with a period of very high gold production. And so once this ship sunk, I guess it was well known, the value of the riches aborted. How soon did people start to think we need to try to get to that ship? Well, there certainly would have thought of it immediately, but it was believed that the ship had sunk in deep waters. We now know that those waters about 600 meters deep. And so even at that time, they said the treasure sank in waters where it is too deep to dive. So what was left was not treasure, but a sort of a legend that lasted for us. for centuries that the greatest treasure that ever sank was just a few miles offshore. - As the decades become centuries, things start to change in this part of the world. At some point you have a new kind of person come along, Americans, and they fancy themselves able to do things that others in the past haven't been able to do. So at what stage do Americans start investing in hunting for the San Jose? - Well, they began hunting for the San Jose probably in the late 70s. There were many attempts to gain permission to explore Columbia's waters with the emergence of scuba technology, which all of a sudden made the sea floor much more accessible. And by the late 70s, the sort of the adventurers and the fortune seekers and the sort of romantics that had populated the beginning of this golden age gave way to a new class of treasure hunter, which was a little more buttoned up and more institutional. There were people on Wall Street that were starting to invest in treasure hunts. - Well. - And the San Jose was known as the Holy Grail of Shipwrecks. And there were several attempts made to gain permission to explore the waters, but the one that got the furthest along was by a company now known as SeaSearch Armada. And in the early 80s, thanks to a elaborate operation that involved the use of a submarine, they announced that they had discovered the resting place of the San Jose was an anomaly on the side scan sonar that they later investigated with the submarine. But whatever they did is that they found was encrusted with coral. And it wasn't ever very clear what it is that they had indeed found. Douts were raised pretty much from the beginning about whether they had indeed found the San Jose. How smooth was the process of trying to find this ship for this group of privately funded US treasure hunters? - Well, it wasn't that smooth. From the beginning, they had to deal with harassment from local, but they described as local pirates. Their ship was boarded one night by machine gun wielding pirates that were trying to break in. Fortunately, the locks held. They were fired at by the banditos. And I guess the word had got out that they were looking for the San Jose and according to them, these local Colombian brigands figured that it would be probably more effective to not dive down to the San Jose, but take it from the people who did. But SeaSearch Armada never found a single gold coin from the San Jose or single artifact in my estimation. - So this privately funded expedition comes to nothing. It ruins some fortunes. It wastes a lot of people's time. When is the San Jose eventually found? - It is found in November 2015, thanks to the indefatigable, persistent, pathologically optimistic efforts of Roger Dooley. - My really interest of San Jose is to make an ecological excavation. I described him as, you know, the book begins with him in the early '80s, going to the Spanish archives. And in that time, there's photos of him and I describe him as looking like a young Don Quixote and being imbued by a similar sense of purpose. And indeed, he did. And now he looks like the real Don Quixote now that he's 81 years old. He's got a thick beard, now fully white. He's got long, flowing hair. He has a crooked nose, he has a scar in his left hand from the bite of a moray eel. And he looks, basically, exactly like he would imagine somebody who hunts shipwrecks for a living would look. - Cuba breaks. Go to all his places and talk to fishermen. So I started to go over and try to create like a national archive. I'm the first to do that. No, no, I did that. I'm talking about 1960s. - He had trained as a maritime archaeologist and had worked for Castro as essentially Castro's man under water tasked with finding lost treasurer wrecks. And when he came to the United States, he was starting from the bottom of the ladder. And Roger has that particular mindset where he just won't even acknowledge the obstacles in his way. And he had been single-mindedly obsessed with the San Jose ever since that day, 1984, when he was in the Spanish archives and chanced upon some documents containing clues to its whereabouts. - Tell me about that day in 1984, what happened? - Well, he was looking for clues or documents relating to another galleon. Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes, commonly called the Mercedes. But in looking for the Mercedes, he found in a place where you would least expect it, critical documents relating to the battle in which the San Jose sunk, which included geographically specific coordinates. Not enough to say exactly where it sank. There was no latitude or longitude, but there were sort of distances. He was able to later triangulate, which would help him establish many, many years later his search box to find the San Jose. And so that was the beginning of his obsession with the San Jose. - Oh, can I just ask you? In order to find these maps, these old documents, where is he looking? Where are those things located? - Everywhere he could find. After having been stuck in Cuba, been unable to travel to the great archives of the world. All of a sudden, Roger was like a man who'd been in the desert finding an oasis. You know, he was drinking in all the archival bounty he could find. So he was traveling to London to track down the English accounts of the battle. The English ship logs were quite detailed. More so than Spanish logs at the time. And he was able to find this ship's log from the San Jose's pilot buried in the British library. And in the early 2000s, Roger makes his way to the Library of Congress. And as was his habit, went to the maps room and looked through any maps you could find from the 18th century, probably a 30-year range around the battle that might have given him some clue. Under the fluorescent lights of the rather modern manuscripts division, the map room in the Library of Congress, he finds a series of maps that had been bought by the Library of Congress from London Antiquarian. And among them was a map by a Spanish cartography student who had spent years in what is now known as Columbia, what was then known as New Grenada. And it's this beautiful map with just in a very fine hand with little settlements painted in red. The map was a little bit yellowed. There was a drawing of what may look like a dragon out in the ocean, as we know that that's something the cartographers like to do. And what caught Roger's eye and made his heart beat faster was a feature, if four small X's off the coast of Columbia, near what is now known as the Rosari Islands. And these four X's were labeled Bajo del Almirante, which is Shoals of the Admiral. Now, this particular reef is referred to today as the Tortuguias. And before it was called something else, there is no other map in which it is called the Shoals of the Admiral. And so this map was from 1720 something when memories of the battle would still have been fresh. And Roger had the intuition that the Admiral in question would have been Charles Wager, who this Spanish referred to as the Admiral. He was certain that this reef had something to do with the battle. And in fact, they say X never marks the spot, but in this case, it may have. So then he takes his findings to, I guess, the Colombian government. What happens next? Well, this is before he found it. This is when he believed he had enough to inform an expedition. He didn't have the financing. He didn't have the technology. And most importantly, he didn't have the permission to search in Colombia's waters. He gets going. Roger starts lobbying Colombian Congress people, trying to appeal to the correct authorities, cold calling everybody. But he wasn't making any progress. And he realized, again, pathological optimist that he is, that his best shot would be to speak to the president, whom he didn't know. I think the sky's a limit for Colombia. That's Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos at the University of Miami on Monday. He's running for reelection. He attended one event. Roger was trying to went his way through the crowd to present him with a copy of this map that I mentioned to you to tell him that he knew where the San Jose was and that he was hoping to get permission to find it. That didn't work. So he crashed a cocktail party in New York during the United Nations General Assembly. And this time, was able to button whole Santos like Colbert is ancient Mariner and tell him his harrowing story. And Santos was a little baffled by this guy. He would later describe his, someone who looked like Hemingway. He also said, who was this crazy hippie, this crazy treasure hunter? But he was intrigued. And after this strange encounter with this odd, this eccentric archaeologist, He looked at the map and he found Scotch tape behind it. a letter that duly had written him asking him for permission to find the San Jose, and Santos was so, I guess, one over that he made it possible for Roger to go find the San Jose. So now Roger needed the financing, which he found, again, cold calling, an English hedge fund titan named Anthony Klake, and now he needed the technology. He appealed to the Woods Hole Ocean a graphic institute in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, which was one of the most prestigious such institutions in the world, and which had found the Titanic years before he was the ultimate hustler, you know, to learn how to hustle on the streets of Brooklyn and Havana, and here it came to fruition. That's incredible. I mean, that's like, it's gonna be a movie about this, guys. Life may be based on your book. I hope so. Yeah, and so then take me then, please, to having established this consortium of people having got permission from the Colombian government, paint for me the scene where this thing is finally, finally found up to so many years of effort, so much money, and like lives thrown at it. It consisted of several missions every day would explore a different zone of Roger's surgery area by dispatching an autonomous underwater vehicle called the Remus 6000, which is a sort of torpedo shaped robot. It would send out a side scan sonar to its left and to its right, and at the end of the day, it would return to its master, and the data it had found would be sent to an apartment on the waterfront where Roger was waiting with his survey specialist Gary Kazak, and the two of them would go over the data and see, you know, for long stretches, they would find nothing but just geology. The Colombian government had not allowed for him to search the entire area because it was afraid that if it searched along the same longitude as what sea-search armada claimed to have found years before, if the longitude of those coordinates were the same, they believe that that would complicate their case against sea-search armada, which had been ongoing, practically since the sea-search armada's announcement of a discovery of that anomaly they claimed was the San Jose. So they forbade Roger and the team from searching along that longitude. Roger convinced them that they had to come back to search the remainder of that search box area, and that they did in the fall of 2015, and on Thanksgiving day, the naval ship found evidence that looked like it just, you know, we wouldn't have noticed anything looking at the data later, but a Gary Cosack and Roger duly looking over this data later when it was brought to them in a secure lock box saw this little speck. It looked like a yellow crumb on an orange placemat. Okay, whoa, we've got something there that is, the ice spirit is an odd geologic, a spread of debris on the bottoms, scatter pattern, and they ordered the woods hull to go back this time closer, and this time with a camera affixed to it. And they took pictures, got even closer, and when finally the data was sent back to the apartment, they looked over it, and Woods Hole had cheekily put a photo. The first among the data had put a photo of three bronze cannons, and Roger, as soon as you saw that, his reaction, it's caught on video, and he looks specifically for one feature on those cannons that he knew would indicate the telltale sign that he had found the San Jose, and that was that there would be a design of a dolphin on the butt of the gun, which was a design that was abandoned shortly after the San Jose, and sure enough, those dolphins were present. He had found the San Jose. I'm curious, what is it that Roger did that others didn't do? So these wealthy Americans, everybody else who spent so much time and money looking for this, what did he do differently to them? He claims that he paid more attention to the Spanish archives and to the English archives. Well, there was a summary of all the testimony of people who was in the battle, what everybody says about the head, about the timing, about the wind direction. That gave us an area where we believe that San Jose sang. Every previous attempt was giving undue weight to the English testimony to the English accounts, and what he did was really pay more attention to the Spanish and especially to their descriptions of the coastline. He was also a sailor. He understood the sea, having studied it in the Havana Academy of Sciences, and having lived his life in the ocean, rather than in libraries. He thinks that that was a great advantage to him. But they didn't know, they didn't study the ship, the wind, the speed. If you study that, and you really, that's not possible. That's why I'll just show you. I mean, this is a 31-year campaign of his life. What do you think he thought in that moment? He was too stunned to express emotion, but his wife, who was there with him, who was Colombian, ran to him to see what the commotion was. You could see the sun camera, and all of the men around Roger are putting their hands on his shoulder, are laughing, are clapping, and she sees this, and she wraps her arms around him. She starts bawling. She starts crying almost as if she's expressing the emotion that he was too stunned to express. The absolute culmination of his life, the most glorious moment of his life, and almost immediately that glory is taken away from him. Juan Manuel Santos, the president, announced the discovery of the San Jose, announced the big press conference, and even though privately he had congratulated him and acknowledged that this was redounding to Dooley's glory, publicly he made no mention of Dooley. He only referred to him as a man who looks like Hemingway. All the secrecy around him in the initial phases allowed his detractors to paint him as a criminal. Coming up, they found the treasure, so who gets to keep it? Business is booming. Is your fulfillment ready for peak season? Switch to shipstation now and handle more volume with confidence when it counts. Shipstation connects Shopify, Amazon, TikTok, Shop, and over 200 more integrations with one platform that does it all. You can manage orders, sink inventory, track returns, all automatically. Everything your operation needs all in one place. Right now, qualified shippers get a real dedicated person to get you set up and switched over for free. So when peak season hits, you're ready to go. Switch today at shipstation.com, Code Audio. Have you found yourself confessing personal things to chat GPT, Gemini, or Claude? You're not alone. Something huge is underway that we haven't really found the words for you, a new voice in our ear, guiding what we think and feel and do, but should be trusted. I just thought what has this thing done to him? Black box, the chat box, a new podcast series from the Guardian Investigates. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. That moment where duly is robbed of the public credit is a preview of what's coming now that the San Jose has been found and that is a fight. So who are the players fighting over this find and what is it that they actually want? The players are on the one hand Spain, which appeals to a principle called the sovereign immunity. And this principle of sovereign immunity establishes that a warship that has flown under the flag of a certain nation remains the property of that nation. No matter how many centuries have passed, no matter how deep it lies, no matter whether it's even intact. However, Colombia is not a signatory to that agreement, partly because they knew they had the world's greatest treasure lying in their coasts. And so they didn't want to relinquish that to Spain. So Colombia believes that this is this wreck is theirs because it lies in their territorial waters. Then you have the backers of Roger duly, Maritime Archaeology Consultants, which is the name of the LLC formed by Anthony Clay, the hedge fund executive. And then you have other less legally defined claims, such as those by the descendants of the indigenous people who were forced to mine those, the golden silver from their ancestral homelands. So you have tribes from Bolivia, from the near the Andean silver mines that let that yielded the silver of San Jose. You have countries like Peru who historically claimed a portion of recovered Spanish treasure because it came from the vice royalty of Peru. Then you have Cesar Charmada people who claimed that they might have found at the very least [BLANK_AUDIO] portion of the San Jose. We know that the San Jose broke up and that what was found by duly is about three-quarters of the wreck. And so they claim that whatever it is that they found, see Sir Traumata in the early '80s, that that could be the missing portion. As I show in the book, the object they found is 140 feet long, and it's not even clear whether it's human made or just a geological formation. But even if it is, maritime archaeologists have described it as most likely metal rather than wooden. And if it's a portion of the ship, the entire galleon was 140 feet long. So if it's a portion of the ship, how could it also be the length of the entire galleon? It doesn't really hold up. But so nevertheless, they remain very much in this battle. And Sir Traumata has been waging a war in the courts, trying to reclaim in the courtroom when they couldn't find on the sea for a portion of the treasure. And they are, that has led to a case at the permanent court of arbitration in the hage, which is still ongoing, and we're expecting a ruling on that later this year, or early next. - Really, so all of this has gone to the hage where war crimes and so on are usually hashed out. Now they're listening to a case about this 300-year-old San Jose. - Well, it's not the war crimes tribunal, but it's still the hage. It has gotten to this. There's a lot of stake, but there's also Columbia's private stake. There's a way to change the story from what people normally associate Columbia and its military with, which is endless drug wars. This would be a way to tell a much more glorious and beautiful story. - And has Roger himself had to go to the hage to testify? And what does he make of the fact that this discovery that he played such a crucial part in is now in the hands of lawyers? - He has not gone to the hage. He's heartbroken by the fact that he's been kept out of this process. He's still in touch with the government. They know that nobody knows the galling as well as Roger Duley. So he's always there on the periphery. They've promised him that one day he would be the director of a great museum built to showcase the riches of the San Jose and yet nothing has ever happened. And he's always cast aside. And he's absolutely heartbroken, but he has not given up hope. And he's in fact started a foundation to try to remain in the picture and dedicated to the preservation of the knowledge of the San Jose and his own archives, which amount to terabytes worth of data on the San Jose. So he's 82 years old. He's more energetic than you were I. And he will remain in this fight as long as he has blood in his veins. - And what about you in the course of speaking to Roger researching this book? Have you come to a view about who this priceless treasure or one to two billion dollar treasure should really belong to? - It's easy for me to say because I don't have a vested interest in it. But I believe it belongs to humanity in general because these galleons were vectors of globalization. They led to the modern world as we know it. On the board of the San Jose were Ming Dynasty cups from China. There were natural resources from Latin America. There were objects from Europe. These key vectors in the development of the Western hemisphere. And to give a portion of that over to one party or another would be to do a disservice to humanity. And certainly I don't think any of the treasures should be sold and in order to Roger. Though he made what I would argue was a devil's bargain when he promised a portion of the treasure to Anthony Clake. But-- - Anthony Clake, the British investor. - The hedge fund investor, yes, yes, yes. But even Clake at this point just wants to be reimbursed for the cost of the expedition. I don't think he necessarily wants to sell any treasure. Then there's academics who believe that this wreck is best left in situ where it lies according to the directives of UNESCO. But I don't think that's-- because that would be the best way to preserve it. But I don't think that's necessarily doing anybody any good either because A, that C is a corrosive environment. And B, that would be depriving of all of us from a chance to commune with history. This particularly rich time capsule of history. And so what I would hope is that Columbia doesn't have the resources to excavate it on its own. Spain perhaps would want to help, but then you enter this sort of custody battle. I would hope that people would just want to contribute to the multi-million dollar, probably $70 million, it would take to excavate this correctly over many years so that we could all have a chance to admire the artifacts of the San Jose and learn the stories that it contains. - And so when you say it should belong to humanity, that that's very appealing, but what does it actually look like? - It's very pie in the sky. I think there should be a museum. What I mean by that is that it should be an internationally funded endeavor. And that wherever the museum ends up, and there are plans to build one in Cartagena, and surely it would be a touristic draw, everything should remain coherent. And we should bring in the expertise of people from around the world to illustrate and explain the story. It should be a collaboration rather than some kind of plaything of one party or another. - But I guess it feels like the dynamics that led to that fortune being amassed and then sunk, it was 300 years ago, but they're kind of universal. - That's absolutely true. - The greed and the cruelty that led to the acquisition of this treasure in the first place and to its sinking, these passions didn't just die with the sinking of the San Jose. They went dormant. And when the San Jose was found again, they were re-awakened and now all of a sudden, these 300, 400-year-old passions are back out and leading to this conflict. - Julian, it's an incredible story. The book sounds incredible too. Thank you so much for coming and talking to us about it. - Mike, thank you so much. What a pleasure to speak with you. - And that was Julian Sankton, a journalist. His book on the San Jose is called Neptune's Fortune, the billion-dollar shipwreck and the ghosts of the Spanish Empire. That is it for today. This episode was produced by Guy Zafman and Alex Atak. Sound design was by Ross Burns. The executive producer was Elizabeth Kassen. And we'll be back this afternoon with the latest. - This is The Guardian. - This is The Guardian's Fortune, the billion-dollar shipwreck. - This is The Guardian, the billion-dollar shipwreck. and investigates. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.