A passion for total wrecks
The ocean floor is a vast, gloomy museum of more than a million sunken ships. “Sea hunting” in this sepulchral realm is a gutsy obsession calling for high-tech dry-land research, underwater moxie and a canny ability to stay one jump ahead of looters.
Marine archeologist James P. Delgado plunges in with an enthusiastic, you-are-there yarn-spinner.
He pokes into 16 spooky wrecks, including warships sunk by atomic tests at Bikini Atoll; the carcass of RMS Carpathia, the ship that rescued the Titanic’s survivors; and the Vrouw Maria, a perfectly preserved Dutch cargo ship sunk in 1771 in the Baltic, packed with crates of long-lost Old Masters belonging to Russia’s Catherine the Great. In Japan he dives an ancient hull, one of an attacking fleet of warships sent by Kublai Khan in 1271.
Most harrowing of all, he squeezes into the flooded tunnels of an underground concentration camp where Nazis forced prisoners to assemble V-2 rockets fired on Britain.
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Susan Dworski
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