Books : History : Archaeology : Maritime Archaeology

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Books : History : Archaeology : Maritime Archaeology

• The Sea Hunters

  Clive Cussler, Craig Dirgo

  
  
   

• Encyclopaedia of Underwater and Maritime Archaeology (Encyclopedia)

  
  
   

• The Discovery of the "Titanic"

  Robert D. Ballard, Rick Archbold

  
  
   

• Encyclopaedia of Underwater and Maritime Archaeology

  
  
   

• The Sea Hunters 2

  Clive Cussler, Craig Dirgo

  
  
   

• The Crannogs of Scotland: An Underwater Archaeology (Revealing History): An Underwater Archaeology (Revealing History (Paperback))

  Nicholas Dixon

  
  
   

• The Sea Hunters

  Clive Cussler, Craig Dirgo

  
  
   

• Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea

  Gary Kinder

  
  The facts speak for themselves. In 1857, the Central America, a sidewheel steamer ferrying passengers fresh from the gold rush of California to New York and laden with 21 tons of California gold, encountered a severe storm off the Carolina coast and sank, carrying more than 400 passengers and all her cargo with her. She then sat for 132 years, 200 miles offshore and almost two miles below the ocean's surface--a depth at which she was assumed to be unrecoverable--until 1989, when a deep-water research vessel sailed into the harbour at Norfolk, Virginia, fat with salvaged gold coins and bullion estimated to be worth $1 billion.

  Author Gary Kinder wisely lets the story of the Columbus-America Dicovery Group, led by maverick scientist and entrepreneur Tommy Thompson, unfold without hyperbole. Kinder interweaves the tale of the Central America and her passengers and crew with Thompson's own story of growing up landlocked in Ohio. An irrepressible tinkerer and explorer even in his childhood days, his progress to adulthood as a young man who always had "7 to 14" projects on the table or spinning in his head adds fascinating texture and depth to the story. One of those projects would become the unlikely recovery of the stricken steamer, and the resourcefulness and drive with which the project proceeds is contrasted poignantly in the narrative with the Central America's doomed battle to stay afloat in 1857.

  Thompson, who spent nearly a decade planning and organizing his recovery effort, emerges as one of the great unsung adventurers of these times (the technical innovations alone required for such a task produced a windfall for the scientific community and defined a new state of the art for deep-sea explorers and treasure hunters), and the story of the steamer's sinking is compelling enough to make any reader wonder why the Central America sinking hasn't achieved greater notoriety in this Titanic-dominated area.

  
   

• The Lost Ships of Robert Ballard: An Unforgettable Underwater Tour by the World's Leading Deep-sea Explorer

  Robert D. Ballard, Rick Archbold

  
  
   

• Sealed by Time: The Loss and Recovery of the "Mary Rose" (Archaeology of the "Mary Rose")

  
  
   

• "Titanic": An Illustrated History

  Don Lynch

  
  The tragedy of the Titanic has been captured in fiction, non-fiction, music, poetry, cartoons, official judicial inquiry, survivors' recollections, still photography, television shows, and film; all of the above are covered to some extent in this good and popular book. But few Titanic books match the paintings by Ken Marschall, a specialist on the subject whose work can be found in other books by the ship's discoverer, Robert Ballard, who wrote the introduction here. The photos are notable--including shots of the red-paint-stained iceberg that may have caused the sinking, the pristine ship, the sunken wreck, the people involved in the case--but Marschall's dozens of large-scale paintings really do help to dramatize and explicate moments no camera glimpsed and few eyewitnesses agree upon.

  There is much to recommend the text, too. You could make a film just about Second Officer Charles Lightoller, who helped accelerate the lifeboat-launching process, saving lives; stepped off the ship's bridge into the Atlantic; was sucked down into a ventilator taking in water, vainly swimming against its suction; and then got expelled by a blast of air, like a human cannonball in a circus, and landed next to a lifeboat that had been knocked 20 feet clear of the sinking ship's deadly whirlpool by a huge ship's funnel that crashed into the waves nearby. Lightoller was marvellously clever in his courtroom interrogation by a lawyer determined to manoeuvre him into admitting blame for the disaster. There is much more history in-between the dramatic illustrations, facts both grand and trivial--if you're bent on knowing what actually happened to the dogs aboard, the answer is in this book. Definitely one of the better titles dealing with Titanic. --Tim Appelo

  
   

• Managing the Marine Cultural Heritage: Defining, Accessing and Managing the Resource (CBA Research Reports)

  
  
   

• For Future Generations: Conservation of a Tudor Maritime Collection (Archaeology of the "Mary Rose")

  
  
   

• The Black Ship: The Quest to Recover an English Pirate Ship and Its Lost Treasure

  Barry Clifford, Paul Perry

  
  
   

• The Discovery of the "Bismarck"

  Robert D. Ballard, Rick Archbold

  
  
   

• The Black Ship: The Quest to Recover an English Pirate Ship and Its Lost Treasure

  Barry Clifford, Paul Perry

  
  
   

• How We Found the "Mary Rose"

  Alexander McKee

  
  
   

• Archaeology and the Social History of Ships

  Richard Gould

  
  
   

• Lost Patrols: Submarine Wrecks of the English Channel

  Innes McCartney

  
  
   

• Master Seafarers : The Phoenicians and the Greeks (Encyclopaedia of Underwater Archaeology Volume 2)

  Murielle Rudel, Murial Moity, Alain-Xavier Wurst