Three Miles Down: A Hunt for Sunken Treasure - Hardcover

Somewhere on the seabed of the Atlantic Ocean lie two casualties of the Second World War: a Japanese submarine, the I-52, and the liner SS Aurelia. Separated by almost a thousand miles and sunk more than a year apart, these two vessels have one thing in common - they were both carrying several tons of gold when they went down.In 1994, aboard the Russian research ship Akademik Keldysh, the treasure-seeking team Project Orca began a harrowing search for the sunken vessels and their riches. It was a mission that would take them nearly three-quarters of a mile deeper than the resting place of the Titanic, testing the human limits of deep-water exploration.In Three Miles Down, James Hamilton-Paterson, the ship's literary stowaway, captures the journey in intimate detail. He provides a rousing tale of deception, greed, human arrogance, and courage as the international crew combs the ocean's depths, seeking an untold fortune resting at the bottom of the earth.Yet with his own oceanographic knowledge and a poet's gift for language, Hamilton-Paterson turns this into more than a tale about a hunt for "filthy lucre." He vividly describes the fascinating panoply of life that exists in the deep ocean. Ultimately, his story finds its greatest power as the MIR submersible make a three-hour descent to the floor of the Atlantic and explores the lightless depths three miles below the surface, a place seen by fewer people than have been in space. Here we get the privileged view of a primordial world full of unexpected beauty and resonance: an eerie but awe-inspiring world of shadows, at once the grave of ships and the cradle of creation. (53/4 X 81/2, 308 pages)

Writing Gerontius, his Whitbread-winning (1989) novel about composer Edward Elgar's trip down the Amazon, must have prepared Hamilton-Paterson for this outing. In 1994, the author was invited to join Project Orca, a British team determined to scavenge gold from the bottom of the Atlantic. The liner S.S. Aurelia and the I-52, a Japanese submarine, were sunk separately during WWII, each thought to have been carrying thousands of pounds of gold. To find them, Project Orca arranged a five-month rental of the Russian research ship R/V Akademik Mstislav Keldysh, and two MIR deep-sea submersibles. As the Keldysh heads toward the west coast of Africa in the winter of 1995, Hamilton-Paterson (The Great Deep: The Sea and Its Thresholds, etc.) resists being drawn into the tensions and personality conflicts engendered by poor preparation, short funds and the uncertainty of the missionAall of which he chronicles with cool wit. The book's standout section presents his minute-by-minute accounts of ocean-floor search dives: "Silence. A tiny bead containing us, sinking into night." Other chapters reconstruct the breakup of the I-52, and the intricacies of U.S.-Russian-British relations. Hamilton-Paterson quotes liberally and with erudition, offering the interjections, speculations and interpretations of a bemused bystander. And never mind that gold: the primordial oceanscape he describesAcontaining "wandering granules," "sparks and jellies" and a host of scientifically significant deep-sea lifeAare enough to grasp readers' attention and imaginations.
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