What a Billion-Dollar Shipwreck Can Teach You About Relentlessly Chasing Your Big Idea

Résumé détaillé

Bestselling author Julian Sancton dives into his new book, "Neptune's Fortune," the story of a legendary sunken treasure, the man who found it and what entrepreneurs can learn from his tireless quest.

Every entrepreneur knows what it means to chase something nobody else can see yet — there’s self-doubt, exhaustion, and long stretches where the only result you’re seeing is money going out the door. But still, you press on.

That pursuit is at the heart of Neptune’s Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire, historian Julian Sancton’s account of one man’s relentless hunt for a legendary sunken Spanish galleon.

The book, named one of Barnes & Noble’s Best Books of 2026, tells the story of the San José, a Spanish galleon loaded with gold and silver that sank off the coast of Colombia in 1708 during a battle with a British squadron. Centuries later, Roger Dooley, a mostly self-taught underwater archaeologist born in New Jersey and raised in Cuba, dove deeply into Spanish archives, found maps that pointed where nobody else was looking, rounded up his own investors and, in 2015, located the wreck 2,000 feet below the surface. His reward? Getting left out of Colombia’s national celebration and an avalanche of lawsuits that have stalled efforts to raise the ship.

This incredible adventure story, Sancton’s follow-up to his New York Times bestselling book Madhouse at the End of the Earth, is a must-read for anyone who has chased a big idea and refused to take no for an answer. I spoke with the author about the book and the countless hours of work that went into writing it, which, as it turns out, has a lot in common with treasure hunting. Here are some highlights of our conversation, edited for length.

Writing a book like this takes years and untold hours of research. Where did it all start?After Madhouse at the End of the Earth, I was looking for my second book, and I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a writer of harrowing nautical stories. But there was one story that would not let me go. I remembered this almost fairy-tale-like headline about a sunken galleon containing billions of dollars’ worth of gold and silver.

So I got it commissioned as…

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