James P. Delgado

Q: Why is a book about underwater archaeology like a shipwreck?

A: Because both run the risk of having been looted of their content.

James Delgado is a trained archaeology who does most of his work investigating ships and shipwrecks, and he has produced several books on the subject -- often thematic, as when he examined the ships and sailors who searched for the Northwest Passage in the nineteenth century. Those books are often extremely interesting.

This, one of his later books, is again about underwater explorations -- but the only real theme is Delgado's presence at the sites he's explored. This is a genuine problem, because it prevents us from getting a real overview of what is going on. It's like sticking pins in a map and going there. Sometimes you'll see something great and interesting. Sometimes you'll visit -- New Jersey. (Or Toledo, or Kansas, or whatever is your personal version of The Really Boring Place.) And, because Delgado is always hopping around, you never learn much about any of the individual shipwrecks he discovers. Plus, far too much of it is about the actual task of diving -- interesting to some, maybe, but I'm in it for the history.

The result is very uneven -- although you'll probably find one or two accounts you'll find interesting (I was interested in the fate of Leopold McClintock's Fox), four or five pages later, you'll be involved in something else which is likely to be much less interesting.

If this book were four or five times as long, so that we could get all the history on each particular wreck, it might be truly fascinating. As it is, I really wanted to jump ship before it sank.… (more)