Goldfinder

Amazon.com
As a young boy, Keith Jessop dreamed of leaving the Yorkshire, England, mill town of Keighley behind to sail the seas in search of treasure. Four decades later, he found his chest of gold: 431 gold bars, to be exact, from the HMS Edinburgh, 800 feet down in the Arctic Sea. Jessop tells his rags-to-riches story in Goldfinder.

From his first snorkel dives as a Royal Marine commando and his first scuba dive--when he could very easily have died--Jessop was hooked. He began collecting equipment and spending every nonworking moment either in the water or heading to and from it. He quit his job--much to the consternation of his long-suffering wife, Mildred--and began working as a salvage diver going after nonferrous metal fittings from shipwrecks. Working his first wreck, the SS. Pollux II, "brought back memories of my childhood fantasies to me, but this was the real thing, almost as good as diving on a galleon full of pieces of eight." Later, he and his partners recovered over 200 tons of copper from the Johanna Thorden, earning themselves the nickname "The Copper Kings" in the process. Between wrecks Jessop turned to saturation diving (where divers stay in a pressurized environment for days on end) on offshore oil platforms.

Time not spent in the water was spent doing research, using both alcohol ("the research often involved nothing more than buying the local lobstermen a pint. They'd point out sites where they'd lost lobster pots, a good indicator of something unusual on the sea-bed") and archives. His research revealed plenty of surprises--such as the day he was left alone in a room with what turned out to be the cargo manifest of the Lusitania. Despite the claims of the British government, the document indicated that the Lusitania was indeed carrying a large cargo of armaments. "I was unsure if I was being leaked a story the official wished to see published or being tested on my ability to keep a secret.... I've kept my silence until now."

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Goldfinder is the story of a brave and determined man who overcomes great obstacles to win a prize, and then discovers that some prizes exact a cruel price. The book's subject is a full-time underwater salvage operator who defied all expectations and built himself into the world's most successful treasure finder. His coauthor, Neil Hanson, was the author of the critically acclaimed The Custom of the Sea. Together, they spin the tale of a fascinating man -- a tale that combines the nautical action and excitement of Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea with the true-life legal suspense of A Civil Action.

Keith Jessop was born in 1933 to a young Yorkshire girl who worked in the mills and lived at home with her parents. Life was hard in the grimy industrial towns of northern England during the Depression, and Keith's childhood was harder than most. When the boy was five, his grandparents died, and his mother moved in with a boyfriend. To escape the drinking and fighting that went on at home, Keith spent most of his time playing with his friends in the streets and moors, coming home to a lean supper of bread and drippings. Finishing school at age 15, he took up a series of low-skilled and low-paying jobs. His daily grind was relieved by bike racing, caving, rock climbing, and reading books about buried treasure. When he entered the armed forces and was stationed on Malta with the Marine commandos, Keith became passionate about diving: "I began to resent having to leave the underwater world where everything was quiet, clean, weightless and dream-like, to face the problems of the noisy, dirty, smelly place on top."

Returning to his hometown of Keighley after national service, Keith worked in the factories by day and taught diving at night. Weekends, he could be found in Scotland, diving off the Mull of Galloway. The thousands of shipwrecks around the coast of Britain spurred him to read as much as possible about the doomed ships and their sunken cargoes. He became obsessed with one particular wreck buried 800 feet below the surface of the Arctic Ocean: Sunk in 1942 while returning from Russia with payment for Allied war supplies, HMS Edinburgh was carrying ten tons of gold when she went down. While acknowledging that the gold was beyond his grasp, Keith could not shake the notion that one day he might find a way to retrieve it.

After completing some successful operations off the Scottish coast, Keith decided to quit his regular job and take up salvaging full time. The British Salvage Association offered him the rights to the Johanna Thorden, laden with 250 tons of copper and sitting 120 feet below the Pentland Firth at the northern tip of Scotland. The depth and terrible tides had discouraged anyone else from making the recovery. Keith became an expert at deep-sea diving and decompression procedures. He learned the physics of how gases change at varying depths -- nitrogen narcosis, oxygen poisoning, and the bends became life-and-death concerns. Panic could be the most deadly problem of all -- when a fellow diver lost his nerve and leaped on Keith's back, he had to pull them both to the surface, one handhold at a time.

With the perfection of diving bells, decompression chambers, and hot-water diving suits in the North Sea oil fields, Keith's old dream of retrieving the Edinburgh's gold began to seem possible. The story of how Keith Jessop and his partners plucked the gold from the Arctic depths makes for an exciting climax. In the process, Keith learned some profound lessons about greed, envy, and treachery, as well as perseverance, loyalty, and friendship.

William T. Wells lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Born a penniless Yorkshire lad seemingly destined for the mills, Keith Jessop instead became a salvage diver, becoming the world's most successful treasure finder through unyielding determination, extraordinary physical prowess, and keen intelligence. Now, with Neil Hanson, the critically acclaimed author of The Custom of the Sea, Jessop tells his marvelous rags-to-riches story and the tremendous saga at its center: his lifelong quest for the warship HMS Edinburgh, sunk in the Arctic Sea with ten tons of Russian gold. Follow the Journey: "The gold on that wreck is further away than the surface of the moon. It took the American astronauts two and a quarter days to travel back from the moon; it'll take seven days in decompression to bring you back just eight hundred feet from the floor of the ocean." Share the Danger: "We won't even be able to go back for the gold if you don't take maximum care as you work. It's stored in the bomb room, the most secure part of the ship... If the gold is still there, it'll be surrounded by unexploded shells, bombs, and ammunition." Discover the Stakes: "Like everyone else on the ship, they were working on standard terms of business for treasure divers: 'No Cure, No Pay.' They stood to gain tens of thousands of pounds each if we found the gold; if we didn't, they wouldn't get a penny."

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Jessop's energetic rags to riches to rags saga more resembles a Dickens novel than the introspective, spiritual or ironic efforts that glut the adventure-book market. Born to a poor Yorkshire mill girl and a Depression-era "spotty youth," Jessop, with coauthor Hanson (The Custom of the Sea), describes his happenstantial discovery of the pleasures of the sea and his early job salvaging scrap metal from shipwrecks. He goes from English harbors to various parts of the world during a more than 40-year career as a self-styled deep-sea diving expert ("The more I understood about the physics of diving, the more horrified I was by some of the risks I had already taken"). After he begins his own salvage company, which he often supplements with dangerous work drilling oil in the North Sea, Jessop's biggest opportunity arises when he obtains rights to salvage for more than $100 million in gold in the sunken British war vessel HMS Edinburgh. In the ensuing adventure, Jessop has to work with shady governmental types in a British-based consortium to salvage the wreck. He discovers the gold, then spends two years defending himself against groundless charges of conspiracy to defraud the same sleazy types who gave him trouble getting the operation started. The book ends with Jessop out of work, not very wealthy and separated from his wife. But his determination "that the bastards were not going to grind me down" serves as his mantra and as stitching between the various parts of this enjoyable book. 15 photos. (Mar.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

The true-life adventure story of Jessop, a deep-sea diver and salvage operator who recovered the jackpot from the warship HMS , sunk in the Arctic Sea with 10 tons of gold on board. Jessop's rags-to-riches memoir reads like a sea-going thriller as his operation battles giant salvage monopolies, traitorous partners, lawyers, and representatives of various governments, all of whom want the gold for themselves. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Kirkus Reviews

A vigorous account of modern-day treasure hunting. First-time author Jessop, writing with maritime journalist Hanson, began his career as a diver as a means of escaping the poverty of his North of England youth just after the end of WWII; hauling up sunken barges and pleasure craft and selling the wreckage for scrap, he realized, could earn him a thousand quid a year, "the sort of money that only bosses made." More important, he writes, it made him "a free man," one of the few in his grim industrial town who was not a wage slave in a mine or factory. After learning his craft in Yorkshire's murky lakes and rivers, Jessop made for the open sea, where he acquired skill and considerable renown by recovering military vessels destroyed in battle and storm, among them galleons of the Spanish Armada. His successes, he writes, were the result not only of his skill in operating diving equipment and setting explosives, but also of his ability to ferret information out of his fellow working-class fishermen, who would "point out sites where they'd lost lobster-pots, a good indicator of something unusual on the sea-bed." Jessop later turned his sights on British military craft sunk farther off the coasts of England, including the Chulmleigh, which carried a huge cargo of metal, and the Edinburgh, the grand prize, a destroyer that sank in the Barents Sea with a hold full of gold evacuated from the Soviet Union during the German advance on Moscow. Jessop eventually found both craft, finding that the Chulmleigh had already been looted but that the Edinburgh still carried its fortune. His account is full of clichéd true-adventure twists and turns, but few readers will bepreparedfor the harrowing finale of Jessop's tale of finding the Edinburgh's lost gold-one involving not sharks or swells but ravenous agents of the Inland Revenue. Entertaining as armchair adventure, and a useful primer for anyone seeking to find a fortune beneath the waves.