Experiment complete!

And I see my Kindle subscribers will not be able to benefit from me posting newsclippings here!

Never fear, Kindle subscribers, I'll ensure you don't lose any information by it.

Anyway, the point is that Cussler, ever since his fortune was made with the sale of Raise the Titanic, has indulged in searches for shipwrecks, usually of a military nature such as those lost during the Civil War, and not necessarily for "treasure wrecks."

I was struck by his disdain for "methodology" as he recounted in his account of his search for the Cumberland and the Florida, because that kind of scientific approach to excavating is desperately needed.

I remember a few years ago I joined a scuba mailing list in which people were always talking about the "artifacts" they'd taken from various wrecks. The use of the term "artifact" fooled me (I was young and naive at the time), and it took me a few weeks to realize that when they said "artifact" what they really meant was "souvenir." They would go into all these old wrecks and remove a souvenir, probably harming the wreck in the process, so that now, any wreck found after twenty years will just be a collection of metal scrap, as anything historical that made the wreck worth diving on will long ago have disappeared into some scuba diver's living room, garage, or a landfill when he (or she) gets tired of looking at it.

Unfortunately, the damage has for the most part already been done. People's excuses are, "Well, if I don't take it someone else will," which is no more than the truth, of course.

That is one of the sad side-effects of more and more people learning how to scuba dive. It means more and more people can dive on wrecks, and, being human, they think that anything there is their's for the taking.

Sad.

Not that I'm saying that Cussler pilfered from any of the wrecks he found. No, the above was just a segue. What I'm saying is that "real" marine archoeolgists might have gotten annoyed at Cussler because his lack of methodology made their job of documenting the wreck that much harder. But...at least he found the wrecks.

In future entries in this blog I'll share more of Cussler's stories of looking for lost ships, planes and so on, as well as bios of the "real treasure hunters" like Art McKee, Robert Marx, Clifford Webb, and so on. In addition, I'll cover the people and organizations looking for aircraft wrecks, submarine wrecks, everything out there that is lost that will be found again.