A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks

When Jacques Cousteau started demonstrating the use of modern SCUBA gear in the 1950s, a whole new dimension of human history opened up—underwater archaeology. Unlike many terrestrial sites, which have been built over or looted in antiquity, the seafloor holds countless numbers of undisturbed shipwrecks. Their durable parts and cargo still perfectly preserved in the frigid depths, each one is an immensely detailed time capsule of the world at the moment it sunk. Gibbins started his career as a diver and a marine archaeologist in the 1970s, inspired by Cousteau, and his book tells the story of the most amazing shipwrecks that have come to light since the field began. He's both an academic and a popular fiction writer, so each chapter is a serious dive into a period of world history, but it's a page-turner, too. We start in prehistory, examining an ancient Bronze Age vessel on the British coast, and finish 4000 years later, touring a steamship torpedoed and sunk during World War II. Along the way, we learn a great deal about ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, Byzantium, China, the Viking era, King Henry VIII’s England, the Dutch Golden Age, 18th-century piracy, and 19th-century exploration. Gibbins taught at Cambridge and other universities and is extremely erudite—it's hard to believe that this is his first nonfiction book and that he's better known for a series of thriller novels featuring the hard-diving and hard-loving hero Jack Howard, with titles like Atlantis (has Jack finally found the lost continent?). But who knows, maybe those are good too, and I've been missing out...