How to find a billion-dollar shipwreck

In 1708, the Spanish galleon San Jose was sunk by a British warship off the coast of Colombia, vanishing beneath the waves with a treasure trove of unimaginable riches. The wreck's exact location remained a mystery for centuries until a maritime archaeologist named Roger Dooley made it his life's mission to find it. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, author and journalist Julian Sancton tells John Borkham about Dooley's extraordinary search and the personal sacrifices he made along the way. Julian, firstly, welcome to the History Extra podcast. Thank you very much.

It's a pleasure to be here. So Julian, this is a book that covers more than 300 years of history, but at its core, it's a story about one man and one man's particular obsession. Just introduce us to Roger Dooley. Who is he and how did you come to meet him? Roger Dooley is indeed the protagonist of my book.

He's a wonderfully colorful, enigmatic figure. He's an American-born Cuban maritime archaeologist who for many years worked under the Castro regime as the scientific director of a company called Carrie Sub, which was Cuba's state-sponsored treasure hunting company. As much as Roger objected to treasure hunting, Castro was desperate for treasure, desperate for cash, and he thought he could find it at the bottom of the sea by plundering old Spanish shipwrecks for gold and silver. In the course of one of these searches, in visiting the archives of the Spanish Empire in Seville in order to inform an excavation

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