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Daily Express Friday 1st June 2007 THIS is an engrossing tale of what happens when high profit meets academic fortitude, with a liberal dose of high-octane adventure thrown in for good measure. The basic premise is simple a shipwreck full of valuable and rare Vietnamese porcelain has been identified on the bed of the South China Sea and Pope, among others, is hired to bring it to the surface. That, however, is about as simple as it gets in the treasure hunting game, as quickly becomes clear in this gripping book. Popes dry style belies the intense battle that went on among the different factions during the recovery of the Hoi An Hoard in 1999. The team knew as soon as they scraped the surface of the excavation that they had struck it big. This was not just a few pots and a couple of plates they eventually recovered more than 250,000 items and left a similar amount in place, both to protect the value of what they had and because of the enormous costs associated with raising it in the first place. The cost of the operation around £7million was the single most important factor creating tensions among the team. On one side were the money men, interested purely in getting the goods up to the surface and on to the market as quickly as possible. On the other side were the academics, in this case the archaeologist Mensun Bound, who needed to record every detail of the important historical wreck that promised to make or break his career. This was a relationship that was uneasy at best and downright hostile the rest of the time. Ong Soo Hin the man with the money needed Bound to legitimise his dig. Bound may have been hailed as the Indiana Jones of the deep but without Ongs finance, he and the Oxford Maritime Archaelogical Research department he headed would have had no dig. Throw the pair of them on to a barge the size of a football field tossing around on fixed anchors with the typhoon season approaching, and you are bound to find a few shredded nerves. And so it proved. Ong knifed Bound in the back as soon as the cargo was on dry land and the spat between the two culminated in an unseemly public showdown that threatened to devalue the entire cargo. Despite being a close friend of Bound, Pope does a marvellous job of telling this complicated story and maintaining the necessary objectivity to see it through to its uncomfortable conclusion. Bubbling under in the whole tale are the divers. A breed apart, these are not the scuba divers you see on your summer holidays but a brand of hardman that can cope with living under high pressure, breathing helium and not getting a sniff of fresh air for months on end. Incredibly, despite this they are stealing whatever they can lay their hands on in increasingly ingenious ways and the surface team have their work cut out to make sure that all the best bits of the hoard make it to the surface. In recent weeks, a secretive team called Odyssey have raised a cargo of coins off the Cornish coast. Dragon Sea offers a fantastic insight into the world of industrial treasure hunting and if its revelations are anything to go by, there will be some fireworks in the Atlantic before too long. Review by Duncan Maclay
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