Gibraltar. The contract went to another reigning champ. H e also conducted stunts, diver with Lake Erie experience, John E. such as walking across the bottom of the Gowen, who succeeded and gained inter- Detroit River to Windsor. national recognition. The way the book is organized can In the coming years Lake Erie offered make it difficult to track the lives of the diving and salvage opportunities, as the divers. Some moved from the Lakes, like some of the great palace steamers sank with James Eads, who earned his fa me on the considerable loss of life and property. The Mississippi River; or John Gowen, who G .P. Griffith burned in 1850, followed by went to work for the Russians and other the City ofOswego and the Atlantic, which European states while living in Paris. The sank due to collisions in 1852 . Kuntz pro- people that surrounded the divers receive poses that the propeller steamer City of some attention, such as Daniel C hapin, a Oswego lies at the heart of the history of metal dowser and treasure hunter who diving in Lake Erie. Her fatal collision with claimed he could find things through his the steamer America sent her to the bottom special powers. C h apin encouraged the in minutes, taking with her two dozen or belief that sunken treasure was at hand, so passengers and crew, including the wife and organized a spate of underwater expeand child of one John B. Green. Green ditions to recover lost fortunes. This insurvived and, after the ordeal, trai ned as a cluded Captain Kidd's repo rted treasure diver. H e would visit the wreck site many under the waters of the Hudson River. times. He also dived the G. P. Griffith, Erie, Each underwater expedition during and most notoriously the steamer Atlantic. this era required divers brave enough to John Green was a tough m an, who face the cold, dark depths without fully developed skills and diving abilities understanding the effects it wo uld have on m atched by few. He dived m any places their health. Some divers co ntributed to using Taylor's submarine armor and hel- the improvement of submarine armor, even meted diving suits to reach great depths, designing their own diving suits and hellong before the invention of SCUBA. The mets. But as Kuntz rightly points out, it is Atlantic was a great challenge at 160 feet, the daring of these pioneers that is the real but it had a safe aboard that contained story. $3 0,000 and Green was driven to recover TIMOTHY J. RUNYAN, PHD Greenville, North Carolina it. He would pay a steep price when decompression sickness crippled him , but he eventually returned to the site with other The Larchmont Disaster offBlock Island: divers to complete the job of recovering Rhode Island's Titanic by Joseph P. Soares the safe he had previously located. They and Janice Soares (History Press, C harleswere unable to reach the depths where ton, SC, 2015, 128pp, biblio, index, ISBN there was no visibility. Disgusted , Green 978-1-62619-794-7; $19.99pb) then put on the diving armor and made On a frigid February night in 1907, the dive himself, only to discover that the the Joy Line's 252-foot paddlewheeler safe was gone! Other divers had beat him Larchmont passed down Narragansett Bay to it. On surfacing he became paralyzed , on its way to New York C ity. Met by a but later made some recovery. The safe had strong gale and blizzard conditions as it been recovered by Elliot Harrington and reached the open ocean, the ship pushed a dive tea m, who split the money with the onward but soon met a tragic fate when, in American Express Company, which had a severely reduced visibility, she was struck claim on the wreck. on the port side by the coal schooner HarGreen recovered and went on a lecture ry Knowlton. Amidst confusion intensified tour and completed his autobiography. H ar- by darkness, passengers and crew attemptrington completed several sa lvage projects ed to save themselves and others, seemfor the Union during the Civil War, and in gly in that order. An estimated 143 even proposed the construction of a sub- people perished, while just nineteen were m arine to the US Navy. In his 4 0s, he be- saved-ten crew members and nine pascame fascinated by sport and took up "col- sengers. The authors open the story with the lar and elbow" wrestling. He was strong and did well, until he met the much larger collision and build the narrative outward SEAHISTORY 157, WINTER2016- 17
from there. A major foc us is placed on the days immediately following the incident, as fingers pointed, bodies washed ashore on Block Island, and the media increasin gly teased out the story, highlighting heroes and admonishing perceived villains. 1he opening pages of the book include graphic images of the aftermath, including one harrowing scene inside a life-saving station where bodies, frozen in twisted positions, are laid out, awaiting identification and ultimate removal. The authors conclude the book with examinations of the Joy Line and the steamers that carried its flag, the histories of the local lifesaving stations, a survey of similar disasters on the New En gland coast, and a review of the prominent vacation spots along the Rhode Island shore in the late Victorian Age. These final sections are illustrated with imagery representative of the era. While the statistics and drama of the Larchmont disaster may not live up to the hyperbolic subtitle of this book in comparing it to the Titanic, it is nonetheless a riveting tale well told. JOH N GALLUZZO Hanover, Massachusetts
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