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Lost Voyages by Bradley Sheard
Lost Voyages by Bradley Sheard
New York was once the busiest shipping port in the world, and the entry point for millions of immigrants into the New World. Accidents were inevitable as sea traffic increased, and estimates of shipwrecks in the approaches to the great harbour run into their thousands.
Author Bradley Sheard takes us from the period from the War of Independence in the 1770s up to the 1960s. He picks out some of the more interesting wrecks that litter the Long Island and New Jersey coastlines - from His Majesty's frigate Hussar, which went down in 1780 with the redcoat army's pay on board, to the pride of the Italian merchant marine, the Andrea Doria, which sank after colliding with the Swedish liner Stockholm in 1956.
From wooden warships, paddle steamers, rum runners, passenger liners, sunken submarines and torpedoed tankers to humble lightships, all can be found in this chronicle of New York shipwrecks. The tale of each sinking makes fascinating reading, and the book is full of useful line drawings and photographs to help identify the different parts of the wreck under water.
It is a good illustrated guide but, unfortunately, the book comes to a sudden halt in 1964 with the sinking as a target of the USS Spikefish, the first submarine to log 10,000 dives. Sheard was one of the first to dive the Spikefish. A few paragraphs are tacked on to the final chapter but otherwise we're left to guess what has happened over the past 35 years. With modern US technology, perhaps they don't have accidents any more! Colin Wilde |
Lost Voyages by Bradley Sheard, AquaPress (01702 462466). Softback, 216pp, £23.99
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