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The Holy Grail of Shipwrecks ~ Julian Sancton……

Maritime archaeologist Roger Dooley with shipwreck artifacts confiscated from Cuban fishermen in 1976.

Roger Dooley’s quest to find the San José—the 18th-century Spanish treasure galleon that would come to be called “the Holy Grail of Shipwrecks”—began in Seville, on a torrid morning in July 1984.

Tall and wiry, with deep-set eyes and a conquistador beard, the 39-year-old maritime archaeologist looked like a young Don Quixote and was imbued with a similar sense of purpose. Dooley, an American-born resident of Havana, was in Seville on Cuban government business. He was the chief archaeologist for a state entity called Carisub, formed on orders from President Fidel Castro to track down the many historic ships thought to have wrecked against the island’s treacherous shores over the centuries.

To archaeologists around the world, the organization’s emphasis on recovering treasure amounted to piracy, flouting international standards for the preservation of cultural heritage. But Dooley felt he had little choice. Castro had set his mind on claiming all the sunken treasure off his country’s coast and would brook no competition. For Dooley, who had dedicated his professional life to finding shipwrecks, Carisub was the only game in town.

When he joined the company in 1983, Dooley and his colleagues focused their efforts on finding a lost treasure galleon that was rumored to have wrecked in the shallows east of Havana in the late 17th century. Every so often, after storms, silver coins had been washing up on the beach. A year into their search, Dooley’s team of divers uncovered two enormous anchors, which the archaeologist determined could only have come from a galleon. Now he had traveled to Seville in hopes of identifying the ship, in preparation for an excavation.

Of the many galleons believed to have sunk in the Caribbean, only three had ever been found and identified, all of them ransacked by treasure hunters before they could be properly studied. If Dooley could lead the first thorough study of an untouched Spanish galleon, it could help fill in an all-important missing chapter in world history. More importantly, it would make Dooley’s name, a prize more precious to him than gold.

Since he’d begun delving into the four centuries worth of files housed in Seville’s General Archive of the Indies the previous year, Dooley had confirmed that the galleon he was after was no fiction. Its name was Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, the vice-flagship of Spain’s Caribbean treasure fleet, known as the Tierra Firme Armada. On the moonless night of March 13, 1698, its hold overflowing with silver on its journey back to Spain, the Mercedes struck a reef east of Havana and sank, according to records, “in four fathoms of water, a musket’s shot from land.”

After endless hours of reading in the suffocating heat of the archives, Dooley discovered a packet of letters that would change his life. The missives dated back to 1708, exactly 10 years after the sinking of the Mercedes. He expected to sort through and discard them quickly. But as he scanned the papers, words and phrases called out like a siren song from the deep: “galleons,” “battle,” “English warships,” “gold,” “silver,” “His Majesty’s treasure,” “everybody drowned” …

These letters were indeed about a shipwreck. But as he read further, he realized that it couldn’t have been about the Mercedes. The letters had been dispatched from Cartagena de Indias, the rich port city on the coast of what is now Colombia, to Havana just days after what appeared to have been a horrific tragedy. At the risk of getting sidetracked, Dooley couldn’t resist reading on. The story the letters told was more dramatic than any adventure novel he’d ever read. The reports, he learned, had been smuggled past a blockade of Cartagena imposed by Great Britain—one of Spain’s adversaries in the War of Spanish Succession—in a small, inconspicuous sloop with the instructions that the governor of Havana should immediately send them across the Atlantic Ocean to Spain’s Felipe V, to inform him of the loss of his ship and a literal king’s ransom in gold and silver. Dooley realized then that he had stumbled upon critical clues to the whereabouts of the most valuable shipwreck in history: the mythical San José.

The Sinking

It was sunset when the galleon San José—the 62-gun flagship of the Spanish treasure fleet—confronted the English man-of-war Expedition off the coast of Cartagena, on June 8, 1708. As soon as the two ships were abreast of one another, more than 50 cannons went off from both sides in rapid succession, seeming to tear the very fabric of the air apart.

It was an uneven fight from the beginning. Not only did the Expedition have more guns and a more agile vessel, but they also had the wind in their corner, allowing the Expedition to lead the dance. The San José’s gunners, meanwhile, struggled to keep up with the cannonade, managing to get off only two broadsides in the time it took the English to unleash six.

A fire eventually broke out on the ravaged San José, sending the Spaniards into disarray. Their surrender was all but guaranteed. The Expedition’s captain, Royal Navy officer Charles Wager, could taste victory. He would soon be hauling his prize, the richest vessel in the seas, back to Jamaica.

Then, a powerful explosion came from deep within the galleon, according to English witnesses, shaking the ship and sending a shock wave across the water. The galleon “blew up,” Wager wrote later in his journal, and “the heat of the blast came very hot upon us and several splinters of plank and timber came aboard us afire.” As English sailors hurled the burning fragments of the San José overboard, they could hear Spanish screams from beyond the smoke.

In a matter of minutes, the Spanish side went silent. When the smoke cleared, the San José had vanished. Where the galleon had been was now a field of flotsam. Of her 600 souls, fewer than 20 men were left.

“She immediately sunk with all her riches, which must be very great,” Wager wrote with a brevity that belied his profound disappointment. The treasure that he had been seeking for months was now plummeting to unknowable depths, alongside the bodies of the Spanish fleet’s admiral, the Count of Casa Alegre, and his men.

The treasure of the San José is believed to be worth several billion dollars. Its legend took especially deep root in Colombia, where generations would dream of finding the inestimable hoard of gold and silver lying on the ocean floor just off Cartagena, fantasies made sweeter by the notion of reaching back in time to reclaim riches taken by the colonial oppressor. Such reveries play a key role in Love in the Time of Cholera, by the Nobel Prize–winning Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez. The book’s lovelorn protagonist, Florentino Ariza, is stricken with “an overwhelming desire to salvage the sunken treasure so that Fermina Daza”—his beloved—“could bathe in showers of gold.”

For three centuries, the wreck lay undisturbed, deep in the Caribbean Sea. As everything decayed around them, the thousands of gold coins aboard the galleon remained as brilliant as the day they were minted. Gold never sits idly in the human imagination. Even from the bottom of the ocean, the gold of the San José cried out for an owner.

The Discovery

Poring over accounts of the battle under the vaulted ceiling of the General Archive of the Indies, Dooley forgot for a moment about the reason he had come to Seville in the first place. The San José had eclipsed the Mercedes in his eyes.

“That’s when I fell in love,” he would tell me. “What a story!”

Even more enticing, the letters sitting on his desk at the archive, which the governor of Cartagena had sent in haste to inform King Felipe of the tragedy, contained numerous clues to the final resting place of the San José. A notion began to form in his mind, as in that of García Márquez’s lovesick hero—that he could one day reach the San José. Like Florentino Ariza, he had fallen in love at first sight, and his unrequited passion would only grow over the decades. But the ship, for Dooley, was not just a vessel for an immense trove of wealth. The object of his obsession was the galleon itself. It would become his Fermina Daza, the Dulcinea to his Don Quixote.

Over the following three decades—during which time he managed to escape Cuba and build a new life in Miami—Dooley patiently collected every scrap of information he could find about the San José. He eventually mapped out a search area off the coast of Cartagena, in which he was certain the wreck of the galleon had to lie. Through obsessive persistence, he acquired the financing, the equipment, and the permission from the Colombian government to mount the search expedition of his dreams.

In November 2015, at age 71—the same age the Count of Casa Alegre had been when he went down with his ship—Dooley found the San José. Images of the wreck, a neatly contained mound of artifacts almost 2,000 feet down, were more beautiful than he could have imagined. Bronze cannons lay strewn like pickup sticks, gold coins glinted tantalizingly on the seabed.

Yet Dooley would never get the chance to touch the artifacts with his own hands. As the Colombian government took ownership of the wreck, Dooley would be written out of the story, his involvement concealed for years. In late 2025, around the 10th anniversary of the discovery, the Colombian Navy raised the first few objects from the San José to see the light of day in more than 300 years: a cannon, a Ming porcelain cup, and three gold coins.

The operation, Dooley feared, had been done in an “anti-archaeological way,” prioritizing publicity over science. He believes that, as the man who knows more about the San José than anyone alive, only he can conduct the excavation the great galleon deserves. Forty years since his serendipitous find in Seville, Roger Dooley continues to dream the impossible dream.

Court Ruling on Spanish Frigates Foils Modern-Day Treasure Hunt

By William J. Broad
July 31, 2000

During the age of the sailing ship, Spain built a global empire stretching from Havana to Potosi in the Andes to Manila -- the first empire on which the sun never set. But it paid dearly for its achievement. Thousands of Spanish ships went down over the centuries, many heavy with gold and silver, emeralds and diamonds, porcelains and fine steels.

In modern times, Spain has taken little action as treasure hunters and marine archaeologists have raised its sunken riches. It watched as Mel Fisher found the Nuestra Senora de Atocha, a galleon that sank off the Florida Keys in 1622. He eventually hauled up about $400 million in treasure, and gave Queen Sofia of Spain one of its cannons.

Now, for the first time, Spain is laying claim to its lost ships, and it has won a legal battle over the issue.

Earlier this month, a federal appeals court in Virginia ruled that Spain owned the remains of two warships lost off the Virginia coast two centuries ago. The ruling snatched the ships away from Ben Benson, a treasure hunter who had estimated that the shipwrecks bore more than a half-billion dollars in lost coins and precious metals.

The shift in Spain's stance, experts said, could mark an end to the glory days of treasure hunting and the beginning of a time when Spain oversees the recovery of its lost fleets in pursuit not only of doubloons but of cultural riches, historical insights and new respect for Spanish graves.

But Mr. Benson, president of Sea Hunt, a salvage company named after an old television show, may fight the ruling. Having spent nearly $2 million on preliminary recovery work and legal fees, he is sailing to the Bahamas, he said in an interview last week, to meditate on whether to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.

''I was shocked,'' Mr. Benson said of the ruling. ''There's no case law to support their conclusion. It's uncharted waters for the shipwreck industry as a whole.''

James A. Goold of Covington & Burling in Washington, who led Spain's legal fight, said the victory was sound and long in developing. ''I'm sure a lot of treasure hunters view this decision with alarm,'' he said, ''but they should have known it was coming.''

Spain said the victory marked the start of an aggressive effort on its part to look after its old interests and, probably, to team up for recovery work with coastal nations whose waters hold its sunken ships.

''It's a turning point,'' said Rafael Rodriguez Ponga, director of cultural affairs in the Foreign Ministry in Madrid. ''It's a very important step in the recognition of the rights of Spain all over the world.''

He added that it was hoped that Spain's recovery of vanished ships and artifacts, and their display in public museums and analysis by scholars, would illuminate and deepen appreciation of Spain's past.

David Beltran, legal adviser to the Spanish Embassy in Washington, said the victory in Virginia would have major repercussions. ''We need to fix the rules about shipwrecks all around the world,'' he said. ''This ruling sets a strong precedent.''

Over the ages, Spain lost whole armadas of tall ships to gales, mishaps and piracy because it started its conquests so early and acquired so many distant lands, especially in the Americas and the Philippines. Near the peak of its influence, from 1580 to 1640, it also ruled Portugal and that country's colonial possessions in Africa and Asia.

The recent battle over the lost ships -- La Galga (Spanish for the greyhound), which went down in 1750, and Juno, which sank in 1802 -- was joined not only by Spain but also by Britain and the United States, which sided with Spain.

Legal experts said those nations, and others with long maritime traditions, are increasingly eager to assert ownership of their old shipwrecks now that technology is fast opening the seas to exploration and recovery.

In backing Spain, the Justice Department argued that the United States owned thousands of lost vessels and sought to ensure that they were ''treated as sovereign ships and honored graves and are not subject to exploration, or exploitation.''

The appellate court, in its ruling, noted the government's stance favorably. The courts, it added, ''cannot just turn over'' sovereign wrecks to commercial salvors when all the nations involved agree that ''title to the shipwreck remains with the original owner.''

Legal scholars said the strong opinion was likely to affect shipwreck claims in many territorial seas and by nations other than Spain. It may, they added, strengthen state claims to high-seas wrecks. Previously, the traditional rule was ''finders keepers,'' as when French and American salvors laid claim to the Titanic, the sunken British luxury liner.

Based in Norfolk, Va., the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit covers Maryland, Virginia, and North and South Carolina. Its opinion weighs heavily in shipwreck law because hundreds of lost hulks lie in coastal waters off those states. The area off Cape Hatteras, N.C., is known as the graveyard of the Atlantic, so numerous are its shipwrecks.

Spanish officials estimate that Spain lost 600 ships in American waters alone.

In the Sea Hunt case, which involved dozens of lawyers, the State of Virginia sided with Sea Hunt, citing a 1987 federal law giving states jurisdiction over abandoned ships in coastal waters. Significantly, Mr. Benson had agreed to give Virginia some of the recovered loot and 25 percent of any profits from treasure that he sold.

Barry L. Clifford of Provincetown, Mass., who found a famous pirate ship off Cape Cod and helped Mr. Benson hunt for Spanish wrecks, deplored the appellate court's ruling and Spain's ownership claims.

''Every ounce of that silver and gold was stolen,'' he said, referring to theft from the indigenous peoples of Central and South America. He added that the people were ''forced into slavery'' to mine the precious metals.

If Spain recovers its lost booty, Mr. Clifford added, it will raise questions of whether it should pay compensation, just as Germany has agreed to make financial amends to victims of the Nazis.

Spain, playing down the treasure issue, portrayed the two lost ships in the case as military grave sites and avoided any hint that it was interested in lost gold, contending that Juno and La Galga at the time of their sinking carried no riches of any significance.

The case began in 1996, when Mr. Benson won Virginia permits to explore coastal waters off Assateague Island. He soon said he had found the remains of Juno, a 34-gun frigate whose sinking took more than 400 lives, and of La Galga, a 50-gun frigate, most of whose crew and passengers are said to have reached land safely.

But in 1998, Spain sued for ownership and possession, contending that it had never abandoned the ships, the issue at the heart of the case under common law. In 1999, a federal district judge, J. Calvitt Clarke Jr., awarded La Galga to Virginia and Juno to Spain. He cited distinctions in international treaties of 1763 and 1819 as legal rationales.

But writing for the appellate court, Chief Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson 3rd argued that both ships belonged to Spain because any abandonment of sovereign shipwrecks had to be explicit, not implied.

David J. Bederman, an Emory University law professor who helped represent Sea Hunt, said the court's opinion would be influential but disputatious. ''We're going to get into historical arguments over what is sovereign and private,'' he said in an interview, adding that ''the meaning of that has changed over 500 years,'' with private ships more common in modern times.

Mr. Rodriguez Ponga of the Foreign Ministry disagreed and said ownership in those days was usually unambiguous, with the crown often in charge. Spain, he said, had very good shipping records, and ownership issues would be settled case by case.

''It doesn't matter for us if there is treasure or money,'' he added. ''It's a question of sovereignty.''

A correction was made on Aug. 1, 2000: A front-page article yesterday about a ruling that awarded Spain the remains of two sunken sailing ships misstated the seat and jurisdiction of the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which issued the ruling. It is based in Richmond, Va., not Norfolk, and covers West Virginia as well as Maryland, Virginia and North and South Carolina.

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/31/us/court-ruling-on-spanish-frigates-foils-modern-day-treasure-hunt.html