Description:
As a young boy, Keith Jessop dreamed of leaving the Yorkshire, England, mill town of Keighley behind to sail the seas in search of treasure. Four decades later, he found his chest of gold: 431 gold bars, to be exact, from the HMS Edinburgh, 800 feet down in the Arctic Sea. Jessop tells his rags-to-riches story in Goldfinder. From his first snorkel dives as a Royal Marine commando and his first scuba dive--when he could very easily have died--Jessop was hooked. He began collecting equipment and spending every nonworking moment either in the water or heading to and from it. He quit his job--much to the consternation of his long-suffering wife, Mildred--and began working as a salvage diver going after nonferrous metal fittings from shipwrecks. Working his first wreck, the SS. Pollux II, "brought back memories of my childhood fantasies to me, but this was the real thing, almost as good as diving on a galleon full of pieces of eight." Later, he and his partners recovered over 200 tons of copper from the Johanna Thorden, earning themselves the nickname "The Copper Kings" in the process. Between wrecks Jessop turned to saturation diving (where divers stay in a pressurized environment for days on end) on offshore oil platforms. Time not spent in the water was spent doing research, using both alcohol ("the research often involved nothing more than buying the local lobstermen a pint. They'd point out sites where they'd lost lobster pots, a good indicator of something unusual on the sea-bed") and archives. His research revealed plenty of surprises--such as the day he was left alone in a room with what turned out to be the cargo manifest of the Lusitania. Despite the claims of the British government, the document indicated that the Lusitania was indeed carrying a large cargo of armaments. "I was unsure if I was being leaked a story the official wished to see published or being tested on my ability to keep a secret.... I've kept my silence until now." Having gained decades of experience, Jessop assembled the team to go after the Edinburgh, which was sunk in 1942 while carrying 10 tons of Soviet gold. Miles of red tape later, on September 16, 1981, his dreams came true. "I cradled the bar in my hands, holding it as tenderly as a baby--a very heavy one." Recovering the gold was just the beginning, however, and Jessop recounts his later troubles in (sometimes tedious) detail. Co-written by Neil Hanson (whose book The Custom of the Sea was a 2000 Amazon.com Editor's Choice), Goldfinder makes great reading for divers and dreamers alike. --Sunny Delaney
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