True stories: discovery / historical / scientific

Roger Dooley wasn’t looking for the San Jose. But an accidental discovery in the dusty stacks of a Spanish archive in the 1980s led him to the story of a lifetime – the journey of a ship that had gathered a mountain of riches from the New World for a long-awaited delivery to the King of Spain nearly three centuries earlier. But that ship, the galleon San Jose, never reached its destination. Instead, the Spanish treasure fleet was drawn into a pitched battle with British ships of war off the coast of Cartagena. When the smoke cleared, the San Jose had disappeared into the ocean. Though a diver at heart, Dooley was an unlikely candidate to find the San Jose. Dooley had little in the way of serious credentials, yet his tenacity and single-minded devotion to finding the San Jose led him to breakthroughs once thought impossible.