I can’t recall how I stumbled upon this book. I do know that when I bought it, my dad forwarded me the Amazon receipt and said “I figure you got this?” Which is a fair assumption because this book is sort of perfect for me: Neptune’s Fortune tells the story of one man’s striving for greatness on the sea in the modern era.
That description does belie, I suppose, that this is an interpretation of a text with a bit more nuance than my short pitch. Sancton dedicates a fair bit of attention to the question of Roger Dooley’s credibility. Is Dooley a marine archaeologist, who worships at the temple of science and history, or a treasure hunter, seeking to corrupt our shared human heritage for fortune and fame? A journalist, Stanford professor, and friend of Dooley’s provides an apt description, one that I find myself empathizing with quite a bit:
Fagen identified an enduring quality of Dooley’s, which would come to bear in his later quest for the San José: “I think Roger acts entirely in good faith, but he wants so much to pull these things off that he brushes over details.”
Or perhaps, said a little differently, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.
There’s another quote, similar in theme, that has stuck with me from this book. It’s easy to see the stories of discovery and derring-do, the skirting of the rules and events of historic importance, in this work and wonder where they’ve gone. To that, Dooley observes:
Society in general had become more regulated, more cautious, more cognizant of the costs of adventurism.
It seems there’s a certain cadre of folks who have been pondering this question for a while. Most notably, in my mind, Gore Verbinski.