Lost Ships: The Discovery and Exploration of the Ocean's Sunken Treasures

This book focuses on the underwater archeological investigations of three ships: the Mehdia (an ancient trading vessel in the Mediterranean), the Aegammemnon (Lord Nelson's first command), and the Graf Spee (German Pocket Battleship). The section on the Mehdia is well-researched, but a little slow. The sections on Nelson's ship and the Graf Spee were riveting and hard to put down. The author weaves the history of the ship with the story of the modern search and investigative efforts in a very readable fashion. Not a lot of interesting modern day photos and certainly not a lot of artifact photos as these wrecks are located in low visibility water conditions. However, each page has some kind of photos and graphics that help illustrate the story. I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it to you.

I got this book mostly because of Bund's coverage of the wreck of the Graf Spee, which interested me as a wreck diver. The book is well written and does a good job of telling the story of the Graf Spee and the British Navy's devilishly clever way of getting the captain of this pocket battleship to blow up his own ship. Unfortunately, although the book is well illustrated, I quickly found out why I hadn't seen any pictures of the wreck site before -- sedimentation in the River Plate is so heavy that little can be seen of the ship, particularly when compared with WWII wrecks in the Pacific. Overall, it was worth reading, and I enjoyed the coverage of the other wreck sites as well.