Debut
nonfiction account with all the ingredients for a rip-roaring
guy's adventure yarn: deepsea diving, big money, avarice, the
allure of medieval Oriental history. In the mid-1400s, a ship
stocked with valuable Vietnamese ceramics sank into the South
China Sea. Half a millennium later, an ingenious maritime archaeologist
and a sharp-eyed Malaysian businessman figured out a way to recover
the underwater treasure. The star of this tale is Oxford don Mensun
Bound, host of Discovery TV's Lost Ships series. Maritime excavation
is expensive, so Bound was delighted by the financial backing
of Ong Soo Hin, whose interest, of course, was in eventually selling
a portion of the recovered ceramics. (The ethical ambiguities
of exporting antiquities to other countries shadow this story.)
The author, who worked with Bound on this and numerous other projects,
here comes off as knowledgeable and ardent, but not self-indulgent.
The dive itself was historic, the deepest archaeological excavation
anyone had ever undertaken. (It was also one of the most staggeringly
expensive.) A particularly funny scene shows Bound explaining
to a diving crew used to cruder salvage operations exactly what
archaeological work entails: 12-hour shifts, in which the divers
would have to be the archaeologists' "fingers and eyes," not only
recovering as much material as possible but also noting where
in the ship each piece came from. The text's emotional energy
comes from the clash between disinterested academic research and
profit-driven commerce; midway through the trip, Bound and Ong
Soo Hin found themselves at odds. Readers will find themselves
whipping through the last 100 pages, eager to know how-or if-those
tensions were resolved. Has "make me a movie" written all over
it.
