Amazon.com Review
As a young boy, Keith Jessop dreamed of leaving the Yorkshire, England, mill town of Keighley behind to sail the seas in search of treasure. Four decades later, he found his chest of gold: 431 gold bars, to be exact, from the HMS
Edinburgh, 800 feet down in the Arctic Sea. Jessop tells his rags-to-riches story in
Goldfinder.
From his first snorkel dives as a Royal Marine commando and his first scuba dive--when he could very easily have died--Jessop was hooked. He began collecting equipment and spending every nonworking moment either in the water or heading to and from it. He quit his job--much to the consternation of his long-suffering wife, Mildred--and began working as a salvage diver going after nonferrous metal fittings from shipwrecks. Working his first wreck, the SS. Pollux II, "brought back memories of my childhood fantasies to me, but this was the real thing, almost as good as diving on a galleon full of pieces of eight." Later, he and his partners recovered over 200 tons of copper from the Johanna Thorden, earning themselves the nickname "The Copper Kings" in the process. Between wrecks Jessop turned to saturation diving (where divers stay in a pressurized environment for days on end) on offshore oil platforms.
Time not spent in the water was spent doing research, using both alcohol ("the research often involved nothing more than buying the local lobstermen a pint. They'd point out sites where they'd lost lobster pots, a good indicator of something unusual on the sea-bed") and archives. His research revealed plenty of surprises--such as the day he was left alone in a room with what turned out to be the cargo manifest of the Lusitania. Despite the claims of the British government, the document indicated that the Lusitania was indeed carrying a large cargo of armaments. "I was unsure if I was being leaked a story the official wished to see published or being tested on my ability to keep a secret.... I've kept my silence until now."
Having gained decades of experience, Jessop assembled the team to go after the Edinburgh, which was sunk in 1942 while carrying 10 tons of Soviet gold. Miles of red tape later, on September 16, 1981, his dreams came true. "I cradled the bar in my hands, holding it as tenderly as a baby--a very heavy one." Recovering the gold was just the beginning, however, and Jessop recounts his later troubles in (sometimes tedious) detail. Co-written by Neil Hanson (whose book The Custom of the Sea was a 2000 Amazon.com Editor's Choice), Goldfinder makes great reading for divers and dreamers alike. --Sunny Delaney
From Publishers Weekly
Jessop's energetic rags to riches to rags saga more resembles a Dickens novel than the introspective, spiritual or ironic efforts that glut the adventure-book market. Born to a poor Yorkshire mill girl and a Depression-era "spotty youth," Jessop, with coauthor Hanson (The Custom of the Sea), describes his happenstantial discovery of the pleasures of the sea and his early job salvaging scrap metal from shipwrecks. He goes from English harbors to various parts of the world during a more than 40-year career as a self-styled deep-sea diving expert ("The more I understood about the physics of diving, the more horrified I was by some of the risks I had already taken"). After he begins his own salvage company, which he often supplements with dangerous work drilling oil in the North Sea, Jessop's biggest opportunity arises when he obtains rights to salvage for more than $100 million in gold in the sunken British war vessel HMS Edinburgh. In the ensuing adventure, Jessop has to work with shady governmental types in a British-based consortium to salvage the wreck. He discovers the gold, then spends two years defending himself against groundless charges of conspiracy to defraud the same sleazy types who gave him trouble getting the operation started. The book ends with Jessop out of work, not very wealthy and separated from his wife. But his determination "that the bastards were not going to grind me down" serves as his mantra and as stitching between the various parts of this enjoyable book. 15 photos.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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