In The Great Museum of the Sea: A Human History of Shipwrecks, award-winning author and maritime archaeologist James Delgado offers a history of shipwrecks worldwide, which he estimates number more than one million, each providing a unique time capsule of human history.
Because ships connected people around the world for trade, exploration, war, and colonization, Delgado writes, “ships were floating communities” and each wreck “has a story to tell.” Ships foundered largely due to human error—be it in navigation, poor charting, running aground, pushing a vessel beyond its limits, or deliberate sinking and scuttling. Only rarely is the “power of the sea” to blame, he argues, a “collision of wind and water.” Delgado divides his book into themes and within those themes he tells stories of individual ships. In the…
