The Underworld by Susan Casey

Author:Susan Casey [Casey, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

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“You see the Bajo del Almirante, the Shoal of the Admiral, 1729, right here,” Dooley said, gesturing to a copy of that same map on his living room wall. The map was drawn in sepia ink on ivory paper, and it gave off an air of antiquity, even as a replica. It depicts the waters around Cartagena, including an islet (or shoal) that had eluded other cartographers: “Twenty years later that name was not on any maps of Colombia. It disappeared.” That little inscription, written in a fountain pen’s barely legible scratching, was a big hint. “I believe that this name was given to this shoal because that’s where Admiral Wager fought,” Dooley explained. “And it was drawn not long after the battle, when the memories were still fresh.”

He stepped over to his dining room table and unfurled a modern nautical chart. “Let me show you—I have never showed this to anybody.” I examined the chart, trying to determine its orientation to Cartagena, but the scale was too large; I couldn’t see the coast. Dooley jabbed a finger on some bathymetric lines. “The people from Sea Search Armada, they say they found the wreck right here. There’s nothing there.” He traced his finger to a different part of the chart. “Where was it? It was right here.”

He paused, running a hand through his hair. “Why did I know the wreck was there? Ahhhhh, it’s a very complicated story. It’s a lot of complicated, this shipwreck. This is what happened.” Then Dooley was off and running, speed-talking about British logbooks, Spanish logbooks, survivors’ accounts, wind direction, ship positions, battle strategy, timing, the locations of various islands—channeling the logic of a seventeenth-century navigator. “You know, they don’t say, ‘The ship sank in the middle of the ocean.’ They tried to name the closest place.” He pointed to the antique map. “And when you measure from there to where the wreck is, that’s the closest place. Bajo del Almirante.”

So far, so good: Dooley had won his bet. “We owe you a debt of gratitude forever,” Santos announced when the San José was found. In 2016, Dooley returned to the wreck with a bigger ship, more robots, and sixty researchers, spent more of the investor’s millions to study the site, took 104,000 photographs, compiled a two-thousand-page report, and made an excavation plan: “We had everything ready to go.”

Instead, everything stopped. Before the work could begin, Colombia elected a new president, Iván Duque, who immediately squelched the idea of selling off “nonpatrimonial” treasure to fund the project. All of the San José, his administration declared, was patrimonial: “Not a single splinter, vase, coin, or stone—nothing that is in the wreck area—can be marketed.” But if Colombia wanted to keep every last doubloon (and cover the costs in perpetuity to insure millions of coins and house them in a vault), the country would have to pay for the excavation itself…somehow. The project was stalled. More than four years had passed since REMUS had revealed the San José’s location, and there had been no further progress in the deep.

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