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.