FROM ARCHEONAUT TO ANDRÉ MALRAUX

Sailors, divers, historians or simple lovers of the sea, this book is for you. It tells of the rescue of submerged worlds, ships caught in storms or sunk during naval battles. Passionate people spot them, analyze them, put together the most beautiful pieces. The French were pioneers of underwater archeology, a crossroads of skills and disciplines that are too little known.

It took the invention of the scuba, at the end of the 1940s, for diving to develop. Alongside octopus hunters, ancient history buffs explore the ancient hulls where amphorae reveal the trade in wines, oils and works of art across the Mediterranean. Shipbuilding specialists arrive to inventory techniques that the archives did not know. André Malraux, the flamboyant Minister of Culture of General de Gaulle, has the intuition that this area has a great future. He created an appropriate structure and passed a law for the protection of this heritage.

In this large, superbly illustrated book, some forty adventures unfold before our eyes. We perceive the emotion of the divers who discover the phantom ships dismantled by the currents, with their cargoes, their cannons, precious dishes and everyday objects. Behind the exploits - no one is safe from a stuck bubble that will force you to stay in a decompression chamber - there are the men and women heroes of these equipments. Here, they speak without language, from Albert Falco, who was Cousteau's companion on the Calypso, to Luc Long, who rises from the muddy waves of the Rhône an astonishing bust of Caesar. We meet Bernard Liou, learned decipherer of inscriptions on amphorae, Max Guérout, former member of the Royal, who brought to light moving icons of travel, in a Russian boat beached off the island of the Levant. Michel L'Hour, current director of the Department of Underwater and Underwater Archaeological Research (Drassm) which manages all these expeditions, recounts his dives in the cold waters of the Atlantic and his trips to distant seas. As off Brunei where stacks of Chinese plates awaited, or Vanikoro, in the heart of the Pacific, to authenticate the remains of the Boussole, the ship of La Perouse, sent by Louis XVI to unknown lands. The André Malraux, a new specially designed building, has just been launched to support archaeologists in their work, especially in the deep sea. For the first expedition, they aimed at La Lune, a vessel sunk in 1664 with all its crew off the islands of Hyères.

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Editor: ACTS SOUTH (25 January 2012)
• Price : €42.60