Three Miles Down: A Hunt for Sunken Treasure

Rating:
Summary: Great storytelling about the search for gold on sunken sub
Review: "Within an hour we're under way again. The sun climbs; land falls astern and the wheeling seabirds thin to a couple of mournful die-hards following our wake. Barring the unpredicatable we shant's see land again for a least a month. We're off to give a wrecked submarine (1944) our undivided attention". Thus, Mr.Hamilton-Paterson launches the reader on an adventure that has something for everyone-lovers of lost treasure, students of science,biology, history and the dynamics of people of different nationalities, working toghether and against one another on an exploration ship bound for the coast of Africa. After finishing this one will no doubt want to read more by this author!

Rating:
Summary: Great storytelling about the search for gold on sunken sub
Review: "Within an hour we're under way again. The sun climbs; land falls astern and the wheeling seabirds thin to a couple of mournful die-hards following our wake. Barring the unpredicatable we shant's see land again for a least a month. We're off to give a wrecked submarine (1944) our undivided attention". Thus, Mr.Hamilton-Paterson launches the reader on an adventure that has something for everyone-lovers of lost treasure, students of science,biology, history and the dynamics of people of different nationalities, working toghether and against one another on an exploration ship bound for the coast of Africa. After finishing this one will no doubt want to read more by this author!

Rating:
Summary: Author in love with his style, not the story
Review: An intresting subject ruinied by over doses of the authors observations and prose. This may be due to the outcome of the search. The book starts out with an intresting premise the search for two sunken ships said to contain gold. From this premise I was subjected to an overwhealming ardous discription of the "cast of chracters" and there problems, interspersed with descriptions of there mission. My favorite parts of this book were the descriptions of the two ships; there loss; and the effort to find them. I read this book in less than one day (as I scanned by the portions I felt trivilized the story.

Rating:
Summary: Irreverent Account
Review: This book is a breezy and rather chatty account written by a worldly and irreverent Englishman who accompanied a salvage expedition attempting to locate two WWII wrecks in the Atlantic, the Japanese sub I-52 and the British liner Aurelia. The former was sunk by the Americans and was known to be carrying gold to Germany, the latter was sunk by the Italians and possibly was carrying gold from South Africa to Britain.

The expedition members, based in the U.K., chartered a Russian ship, the Keldysh, which is the mothership to a pair of deep-sea manned submersibles that can dive to deeper depths than virtually any other craft on the planet. (This ship was involved in dives on the wrecks of the Titanic and Bismarck.) Unfortunately for Orca, the salvage expedition, the Keldysh is a research vessel, and it was only because the Russians were strapped for cash that they were willing to lease out their ship and crew. The crew, composed of oceanographic scientists, took a rather dim view of Orca's mercenary intent and was constantly trying to break out of the charter to wander off and examine black smokers and other exotic underwater sites in the mid-Atlantic.

The author deliberately focuses on the personalities and the human conflicts and cultural clashes between crew and expedition, rather than the technological details of the search. This may be because ultimately, the search turned out to be rather disappointing. (A separate American expedition found one of the targets after Orca had given up on it, although as of 1999 it had not recovered any gold.) While the portrayals are for the most part sympathetic, the expedition members come off as rather flawed, as does the chief Russian scientist.

The laidback tone of the book is occasionally interupted when the author feels an abrupt and jarring need to wax literary and to proffer untranslated epigrams in foreign languages as proof of his sophistication. He also gets a little too impressed with his fabulous globe-trotting adventures and general wonderfulness.

Those flaws aside, however, the book shows a side of salvage expeditions that is not often seen, and provides some details on the little-known Italian submarine campaigns of the war. For those who enjoy reading about the discovery of sunken wrecks, this would be an acceptable choice.

Oh, by the way, the Keldysh remains active to this day, although it seems to be devoting more of its time to money-making tourist charters for dives on famous wrecks rather than pure science. Somewhere, the author of this book is weeping.