Simon
& Schuster, 1996
Price on dust jacket $24.00
Number line: 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
ISBN # 0-684-83027-2
Authors: Clive Cussler, and Craig Dirgo
The Sea Hunters True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks.
NY: His non-fiction work on some real shipwreck
hunting. From the dust jacket, A Clive Cussler is
acclaimed worldwide as the Grandmaster of Adventure,
and his series of novels starring his action hero
Dirk Pitt® now have over 70,000,000 copies in
print. Whether it's deep-sea diving, climbing mountains,
or driving classic automobiles, adventure is at
the heart of Cussler's life. As Cussler himself
writes, "Providing my readers adventure tales
base around a devil-may-care character by the name
of Dirk Pitt is only on chapter of my existence.
I'm addicted to the challenge of the search, whether
it's for lost ship-wrecks, airplanes, steam locomotives,
or people." In The Sea Hunters, his first nonfiction
book, Cussler explores the special world of undersea
adventure that inspired and has its fictional parallel
in the Dirk Pitt novels. He describes his lifelong
love for the sea and ships, and how his involvement
with the search for John Paul Jones's famous Revolutionary
War ship, the Bonhomme Richard, led to his establishing
the NUMA (National Underwater and Marine Agency)
Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to
the discovery and preservation of historic shipwrecks.
From the more than sixty shipwrecks Cussler and
his NUMA volunteers have found, he has chosen the
twelve most interesting, whether because of the
ship's history, the circumstances of its sinking,
or the trouble, frustration, and peril that were
encountered while trying to find the sunken wreck.
With the same wonderful storytelling that Cussler
brings to his novels, he describes his searches
for such ships as the Union 24-gun frigate Cumberland,
sunk during the Civil War by the Confederate ironclad
CSS Virginia (formerly the Merrimack); the Confederate
Hunley, which became the first submarine in history
to sink a warship; the U-21, a German U-boat, which
during World War 1 became the first sub to sink
a warship and escape; and the American troop transport
Leopldville, which was destroyed by a German submarine
on Christmas eve, 1944, with huge loss of life;
as well as engine #51, the lost locomotive of Kiowa
Creek, which roared off a storm-weakened high bridge
in 1878. 
The
wrecks date as far back as 1840 and span the continental
United States, the Atlantic Ocean, and the North
Sea. As he does in the Dirk Pitt novels, Cussler
opens each story with a creative dramatization of
the ship and the way she met her end, then brings
the story into the present as he describes the immense
research and careful preparation so often necessary
to find a long lost ship. For example, he describes
the tragic fate of the steamboat Lexington, which
burst into flames in the frigid winter of 1840,
causing the loss of over 150 lives - but sparing
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who missed the trip
only because he arrived at the dock seconds too
late. There's also the odd fate of the steamboat
Charleston, which became the warship Zavala and
which was so horribly damaged in a terrible Atlantic
storm in 1842 that it was abandoned in a Galveston,
Texas, marsh, and slowly sank from view. In tracing
its location, Clive Cussler finally found it - under
a parking lot! Dramatic, compelling, and personal,
Clive Cussler's The Sea Hunters is an exciting and
satisfying as the best of his Dirk Pitt novels.
...Craig Dirgo is the son of an Air Force Colonel
and spent his early years on military airfields
in the United States and England. He has been Special
Projects director on numerous NUMA expeditions since
1987 and now serves as a trustee. When not on the
water searching for shipwrecks, he writes novels
at his home in Colorado."
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