Ancient History From

The Sea Bed

Skin-diving, as far as we’re concerned, is strictly for the enthusiast. Skin-diving according to Gods and Little Fishes is something else again—everybody may take part in it.

[TS author, Hugh Edwards, is a journalist on a West Australian lewspaper. According to the book he s, with his bosses’ blessing allowed to ipend a great slice of his time chas ng his hobby 15,000 miles across the vorld instead of attending to the outine business of newspaper report ing.

What makes Edwards’ book dif erent from dozens of others on the lame subject is a bright and amusing tyle of writing, a commonsense ipproach to, and interest in, things >ther than the mystique of stalking he sea floor; and a story that con :erns more than brushes with big ish.

There are, of course, passages ixtolling the delights of hunting giant ;roper and shark with spears and mder-water guns; and the excitement >f dodging death and the creeping, rawling, swimming or poisonous langers of the deep.

But most of the book deals with xploring the relics of man on the ea floor —sunken ships and drowned ities.

In this respect Edwards couldn’t lave been born in a better place in yhich to begin, as the Western Australian coast is a happy-hunting ;round of ancient wrecks and is edolent of the earliest appearances if Europeans upon this continent.

For three hundred years, after Europeans learned to round the Cape if Good Hope and find their way o the Spice Islands, many ships— Portuguese, English, French and specially Dutch —left their bones on tie biggest obstacle in their path, tie wild north-western corner of the ontinent of Australia.

From WA, in 1959, Edwards went d London, got himself a job as sub ditor on a man’s fashion magazine o keep the wolf from the door, but oon was attached to the Cambridge Jniversity Underwater Archaeo 3gical Expedition for a Mediter anean summer of underwater ex iloration.

Firstly it was with an Italian Count vho had a Sicilian palace and an mpressive quantity of newspaper

clippings about his underwater activities but whose views of life in general and exploration in particular were irreconcilable with those of the earnest young Cambridge men.

Later it was to North African Libya, where the modern Arab village of Suza stands on the mound of rubble that covers the old Greek and Roman cities of Appolonia, founded six centuries before the birth of Christ. A great earthquake of about 300 BC had buried large sec tions of the ancient city beheath the Mediterranean and it was this portion that was the particular interest of the underwater team.

Edwards returned to Australia, to Dirk Hartog Island and Shark Bay, at the end of the northern summer, but was back in the Mediterranean when the sun came round again.

This quick change of sea-bed view from the new and the old worlds forms the basis for his story that blends travel, history and archaeology into a very readable whole.

But perhaps the book’s most pleasing feature is its breezy sense of adventure—a quality lacking from the lives of most people in today’s over-affluent Western society dedica ted to the great god Security,

(Gods And Little Fishes. Pub

lished by Peter Davies. 31/-.)