Customer Reviews

Sea Search: Lost Ships, Pirate Treasure, Sea Disasters, Salvage, Marine Mysteries

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Unfortunately, the vast sea of treasure literature often isn't very deep. There is an almost inexhaustible number of books, pamphlets, and magazine articles about buried and sunken treasure, lost mines, unfound pirate loot, etc. The number of good, accurate, reliable works on these subjects is far fewer. Again, unfortunately, this book clearly falls into the later category.

The back cover promises a "...factual accounting of lost ships." Further, "Whenever possible, every effort was made to add actual interviews with many of the survivors of these horrific sea-going tales." Why the editors bothered to state this is not at all clear, as most of the disasters recounted here happened so long ago the survivors are long gone.

First of all, there are no sources offered for any of the provided information. The re-creation of conversations forces the reader to wonder how it was possible for the author(s) to know what was said. Many of these "treasure wrecks" in fact had or no longer have any treasure - the City of Rio de Janeiro and the Brother Jonathan are two obvious examples.

Finally, the prose is remarkably bad - indeed, at times it becomes almost unreadable. Perhaps these accounts are re-written from magazine articles and in their effort to re-write them the editors managed (mangled) to make it sound like a bad translation from a difficult foreign language.

Read Potter's "Homewrecker" - The Treasure Diver's Guide. Read Capt. Bowen's remarkable books about Great Lakes' shipwrecks. Read some genuine first-hand accounts of sea disasters - there are many out there.

But there certainly is no point or purpose in reading this book.

PS: Although the cover promises tales of "Pirate Treasure" the editors forgot to include such a chapter or chapters! Typical for this effort, however.