Historical diving is hardly a passion of mine, so I was pleasantly surprised to be swept along by John Bevan's boy's-own narrative about John Deane, his unstable brother Charles and their diving adventures in the early 19th century.
Between them, the battling brothers from Whitstable invented the surface-fed diving suit, and had enough wreck-diving exploits to make me wonder whether the author had considered the possibility of writing a screenplay.
Fearless John Deane was born to dive, and took to it naturally. Charles invented a suit for fire-fighting on which John's diving dress was loosely based, but he wasn't a natural diver, and seems to have spent most of his time bigging himself up at modest John's expense.
John went on to retrieve cannon from the Royal George, was the first to identify and recover guns and other artefacts from Henry VIII's famed flagship Mary Rose, became the master of the underwater explosion, and spawned a whole generation of divers renowned for their prowess.
Vicious rivalries keep surfacing throughout the book, notably the repeated interference of a pantomime villain from the Royal Navy, Charles Pasley, whose consuming hatred of John Deane appeared to be out of all proportion to common sense.
The story even has a made-for-the-movies climax, as John becomes a hero of the
Crimean War, with the assistance of Florence Nightingale among familiar characters. William Russell, the first war correspondent, dubbed Deane "The Infernal Diver".
John Deane stuck with his open-helmet design throughout his career, preferring the risk of flooding to the seriously unpleasant fate that could result from using the closed-helmet alternative. The latter was developed from the Deane diving dress by other divers.
Manufacturer Augustus Siebe, who made the first closed-helmet model, was also the original maker of the Deane brothers' open-helmet design - but the myth that Siebe was
in fact its inventor was propagated by his son, and has since become gospel.
John Bevan has made it his mission with The First Treasure Divers to put the record straight on John Deane's behalf. Who knows, as a result of his work perhaps we'll see justice done in future encyclopaedia entries.
And if they do make the film, I'd lay odds that John will insist on Catherine Zeta-Jones being cast as John Deane's wife!
Steve Weinman
Aquapress
ISBN: 9781905492169
Softback, 224pp, £12.99
