This
intense look at the fierce competition in what first-time author
Pope slyly calls "the extraordinary underworld of shipwrecks"
focuses on the effort in the late 1990s to recover a hoard of
precious 15th-century porcelain from the sunken Hoi An ship in
the Dragon Sea, a stretch of "typhoon-torn" water off the coast
of Vietnam. Pope is equally adept at illuminating "the peculiarly
powerful allure of shipwrecks" that drives the Hoi An team as
he is in explaining the larger and more difficult context of modern
excavation efforts, where "maritime archeologists who were regularly
leading excavations around the world could be counted on the fingers
of one hand, but the number of looters, souvenir-seekers, and
well-equipped treasure-hunters was in the high hundreds." But
Pope's strength in detailing the Hoi An story comes from his fascinating
in-depth portraits of the main players in what became an unprecedented
and expensive recovery effort: Ong Soo Hin, a Malaysian businessman
who helped launch the project; Mensun Bound, the director of Oxford's
Maritime Archaeological unit; and Dilip Tan, the operations manager
under "nightmarish pressure" to finish the project. Pope expertly
shows how the same ocean that can terrify and enrich can also
"lay bare the very nature of man."
