Dragon Sea: A True Tale of Treasure, Archeology, and Greed off the Coast of Vietnam

Frank Pope

ago 2014 · HarperCollins

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Frank Pope pulls back the curtain on the intensely competitive underworld of shipwrecks in this thrilling story of treasure hunting gone wrong. When Oxford archeologist Mensun Bound—dubbed the "Indiana Jones of the Deep" by the Discovery Channel—teamed up with a financier to salvage a sunken trove of fifteenth-century porcelain, it seemed a dream enterprise. The stakes were high: The Hoi An wreck lay hundreds of feet down in a typhoon-prone stretch of water off the coast of Vietnam known as the Dragon Sea. Raising its contents required saturation diving, a crew of 160, and a fleet of boats. But the potential rewards were equally high: Bound would revolutionize thinking about Vietnamese ceramics, and his partner would make a fortune auctioning off the pieces. Or so they thought. In Dragon Sea, Pope delivers an engrossing tale of danger, adventure, and ambition—a fascinating lesson in what happens when scholarship and money join forces to recover lost treasure.

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Frank Pope graduated with Honors in Zoology. He then joined Oxford University MARE, assisting on the archaeological excavations of HMS Agamemnon, Nelson's favourite flagship that sank in 1809, and the San Salvador, a Spanish troopship wrecked in 1812, before finding himself at the centre of the Hoi An Wreck drama. He has published numerous specialist articles in the press and currently lives back in Cornwall, England.