Byways of History: A Guest Post by David Gibbins

By David Gibbins / October 31, 2025 at 12:01 am

Expansive and rich, this is a deep dive (literally) into the fascinating archaeological discoveries in the open sea. These stories of shipwrecks and sinkings help uncover the secrets of the past. Read on for an exclusive essay from author David Gibbins on writing A History of the Word in Twelve Shipwrecks.

Paperback $20.00

A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks

By David Gibbins

In Stock Online

Paperback $20.00

From renowned underwater archaeologist David Gibbins comes an exciting and rich narrative of human history told through the archaeological discoveries of twelve shipwrecks across time.

I’ve been passionate about diving and shipwrecks from as far back as I can remember. As a child I pored over National Geographic articles on the first underwater excavations, and I was enthralled by the world of Jacques Cousteau. Growing up in Canada, I learned to dive as soon as I could and explored shipwrecks in the Great Lakes while I was still a teenager. I was fortunate to make a career of it, completing a doctorate in maritime archaeology at the University of Cambridge and carrying out many underwater excavations around the world since then.

Another thread in my story is literary. My parents were both academics and I grew up in a household full of books. I read voraciously – we didn’t have a TV until I was 15. I’d always written a lot, and I knew that one day I’d want to write books. This came to fruition in my late 30s when I decided to leave my academic job and make a second career as a novelist, writing archaeological thrillers based largely on my own experiences. This led me to write twelve novels which have sold over three million copies and been published in thirty languages.

A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks is my first non-fiction book. It represents my passion over my lifetime – I’d never stopped diving and exploring wrecks while I was writing novels. Half of the wrecks I write about are ones I’d dived on and excavated, so in that sense the book is autobiographical. More than just about wrecks, it reflects my journey as an archaeologist and historian, and the interest I have in placing these site in contexts that allow a wider historical narrative to be written.

That wider picture was always in my mind as I was researching and thinking about the book. In writing about an ancient Greek wreck, my image was of the Acropolis in Athens, and of the great thinkers – Socrates among them – who may have drunk the wine brought in ships such as that one. For a 9th century wreck off Indonesia, it was the great civilisations of China and Persia, and how artefacts on a wreck could represent the artistic and intellectual florescence of those cultures long before European seafarers entered that world.

I was led down many fascinating byways of history, often ones that had far-reaching consequences. In writing about Norse seafaring, I was amazed to discover that walrus tusk found in an excavation in Kiev had come all the way from Greenland and the Canadian Arctic, brought there by Norse traders who had come down the river Dnieper – and that overhunting of walrus to provide ivory for religious sculpture in Europe may have led to the demise of the Norse in Greenland. In writing about the disastrous Franklin expedition of 1845, I discovered that Charles Darwin made a request to one of the rescue expeditions to collect Arctic barnacles for him – part of the work that led to his breakthroughs in understanding biology.

Wrecks can connect us to individual people in a way that is not always possible from other types of archaeological site. At a rich Bronze Age wreck off Turkey, the discovery of a gold scarab with a hieroglyphic inscription of Nefertiti provides a link with a woman whose face is one of the most famous in history, preserved in a statue found in Egypt. Some 1800 years later, we can see faces in another way, through reconstructions based on the remains of sailors on board the Mary Rose, King Henry VIII’s flagship – faces of people whose lives are otherwise unrecorded.

For me, one of the most poignant discoveries was in a Second World War merchant ship torpedoed in the Atlantic. Among bags of mail found preserved in the wreck was a letter from a man in India posted to a radio and TV institute in California. He was sending the completed examination paper for a correspondence course on radio operation. It seemed to speak of the aspirations of those who would shape the world to come, in India and elsewhere. I often wonder what became of him – I hope he was able to resubmit his assignment after the war.

My books is a history of the world, not the history. It reflects much that has fascinated me since childhood, and many areas of history that I only discovered in researching the book. I hope people will enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it!