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.)
