SummaryFor twenty-three years, Clive Cussler's NUMAŽ-the National
Underwater & Marine Agency-has scoured the rivers and seas
in search of lost ships of historic significance. His teams
have been inundated by tidal waves, and beset by the
vagaries of man and nature, but the results-and the stories
behind them-have often been dramatic: The 2000 raising of
the Confederate submarine Hunley made national headlines. Here, then, are more true tales of sea- and land-going
adventures, as Cussler and his crews set out to track down
history. The famous ghost ship Mary Celeste, found floating
off the Azores in 1872 with no one on board; the Carpathia,
the ship that rescued the Titanic survivors and was itself
lost to U-boats six years later; L'Oiseau Blanc, the
airplane that almost beat The Spirit of St. Louis across
the Atlantic before disappearing in the Maine woods-all
these, plus steamboats, ironclads, a seventeenth-century
flagship, a certain famous PT boat, and even a dirigible,
prove tantalizing targets as Cussler demonstrates again
that truth can be "at least as fun, and sometimes stranger,
than fiction" (Men's Journal).
|
