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Loading... Jacht in de diepteby Clive Cussler, Craig Dirgo (Translator), Geert van Linschoten
Work InformationThe Sea Hunters II by Clive Cussler
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Adventure The sea is there to defeat us. Plain and simple and that's what [a:Clive Cussler|18411|Clive Cussler|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1225620641p2/18411.jpg] delivers with this book...simplicity. Each wreck or incident is explained and then Cussler relates his results when he went looking for the missing ships. As the reader, I kept getting involved with the real-life people, folks who stepped on to a boat and never reached their destination. Fast forward to Cussler and his team diving to find the answers and the relics of humans now in the locker of Davy Jones. Take the S.S. Waratah, known as Australia's Titanic. This ship was on its way to England from Down Under, when she vanished before reaching Capetown. Was it a humongous rogue wave? The kind that took out the ship in The Poseidon Adventure? Referred to as an "ugly spud", the disappearance of this ship was the greatest mystery of the early 20th Century. Scientists will tell you there are no rogue waves. Right. Tell that to the Indian Ocean. The Mary Celeste. This was the Ghost Ship that was found near Gibraltar, but with no crew or passengers. What happened to them? Did they freak out and take the rowboat because they thought the ship was in trouble? In Portugal, a raft was found on a beach, with a flag and a human skeleton. Was this the last survivor of this ghostly tale? Perhaps The Flying Dutchman isn't a fairytale after all. Book Season = Summer (boat rocking, sun beating, water lapping) Like the first Sea Hunters, it's the story of several shipwrecks. In each chapter, there's first a fictionalized historical account of the ship (or boat or plane or cannon) that demonstrates why it's important and describes how it was lost. Then there's the story of NUMA's search for the wreck. Some of the wrecks are famous: the Mary Celeste, JFK's PT109, and some I'd never heard of before. The historical sections were just detailed enough to give a layperson (me, in other words) a good background in the wreck's history and significance, and because they were fictional accounts, with the emotional content necessarily absent from straight historical records, it gave me a reason to care about the wreck and about whether they would find it. Because there are 14 sections, it should be obvious at a glance that there's not going to be enough detail on any one of the wrecks to satisfy a historian or salvage expert, or a serious student of either. Instead, it's meant for people like me, who find the whole thing absolutely fascinating, but who haven't read that extensively or actually done any searching for shipwrecks. One thing I appreciated about the present-day sections is the lack of pretense. Cussler & co. can apparently be rude or juvenile, and there's no sugar-coating (or maybe there is, and they're actually worse than they sound), no attempt to make them appear all-wise, patient, kind, and infallible. Their failures are included, as is the frustration and discomfort of the time-consuming, often boring searches. no reviews | add a review
Distinctions
Biography & Autobiography.
History.
Military.
Nonfiction.
HTML:The second thrilling account of #1 New York Times bestselling author Clive Cusslers's real-life search for lost ships, planes, and other marvels that changed history. For decades, Clive Cusslerâ??s real-life NUMA®, the National Underwater and Marine Agency, has scoured rivers and seas in search of lost ships of historic significance. His teams have been inundated by tidal waves and beset by obstaclesâ??both human and naturalâ??but the results, and the stories behind them, have been dramatic. In this follow-up to their bestselling first account, The Sea Hunters, Cussler and colleague Craig Dirgo provide another extraordinary narrative of their true seagoingâ??and landâ??adventures, including their searches for the famous ghost ship Mary Celeste, found floating off the Azores in 1874 with no one on board; the Carpathia, the ship that rescued the Titanic survivors and was itself lost to U-boats six years later; and Lâ??Oiseau Blanc, the airplane that almost beat The Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic before disappearing in the Maine woods. All these, plus steamboats, ironclads, a seventeenth century flagship, a certain famous PT boat, and even a dirigible, are tantalizing targets as Cussler proves again that truth can be â??at least as fun, and sometimes stranger, than fictionâ?ť No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)930.102804History and Geography Ancient World Ancient History ArchaeologyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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