A sunken ship from the eighteenth century that lies on the seabed off Finland and is chock full of Dutch art treasures. This Vrouw Maria is the main character about which political science professor Gerald Easter (Boston College) and travel book author Mara Voorhees wrote a very exciting book.
“A ship with gold from a fairy tale.” That is how Fin Petri Pulkkinen described the Vrouw Maria, the first time he had entered the wreck underwater. “The ship lay there undamaged and beautiful,” the diver later told the journalists present on shore. It almost looks like a scene from an adventure novel:a diver who after centuries for the first time re-enters an old ship in search of treasure.
Because there are real treasures on board. When the Lady Maria sank, priceless works of art were on board. This includes the Dutch masters Paulus Potter and Gerard Dou, painters whose coveted paintings are now worth millions.
Battle
The story of the divers is one of the many exciting pieces in the book 'The sunken art treasures of the Lady Mary' by the writer couple Voorhees and Easter. They recorded the remarkable history of this ship that left Amsterdam at the end of the eighteenth century for St. Petersburg but did not get further than the Finnish coast.
The authors describe in great detail what was on board, how the ship sank and how the treasure on the seabed has been searched since then. The book is therefore a remarkable mix of all kinds of scientific disciplines such as (art) history and maritime technology. Even political science plays a role because of the battle that erupts between Russia and Finland over who actually owns the wreckage and those art treasures. As a reader, you learn how all these fields are related. Ship archeology teaches you how to investigate such a wreck, art history teaches the importance of the works on board and political science the need to work together to be able to do anything with the Vrouw Maria at all.
Collecting rage
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But what is most striking is how Voorhees and Easter have written the book. They do this in a very visual and accessible way. They almost bring all the main characters to life with beautiful prose. This is how they describe the life of Tsarina Catharina, who had ordered the paintings. They start with her unhappy childhood, in which she is mentally abused by her selfish mother, and also mention her marriage to Tsar Peter III of Russia, which already does not go much better. The ship was on its way to her, because Catharina had an enormous urge to prove and wanted to impress the outside world with her art collection. Because the authors describe her childhood, marriage and collecting passion, the reader really gets a feel for what drives her. They do the same with the captain, an art collector, the painter Gerard Dou and a wreck hunter. The authors are very close to all of them:they meticulously describe their feelings and actions. As a result, you empathize with them and the book becomes unprecedentedly exciting.
The writers work towards a climax when the ship sinks during an arctic storm, a so-called autumn hurricane in the eighteenth century. It is as if the reader is watching the whole scene from a small boat and watching the crew members pray and tremble in fear as wind and waves beat against the ship. Finally, the Woman Maria sinks to a depth of 41 meters. The effort of divers centuries later to locate the ship has also been described in an unprecedentedly exciting way.
This book is for anyone who wants to learn more about art history, the role of ships in eighteenth-century transport and who likes to empathize with historical characters. There is really not a single boring sentence in 'The Sunken Art Treasures of the Lady Mary'. You just want to read on. That also makes you fervently hoping that the ship will be brought up. You sympathize so much with the historical figures and then with the divers that you want to know whether the art treasures are still there.
That's a clever trick from Voorhees and Easter. Because as a reader you are just as curious as they are and you want nothing more than to take a look at the wreck. Whether or not that works, I'll leave it up to you for a moment, because you have to read the book for that. Whether it is wise to invest a lot of money in retrieving a ship that has probably largely sunk is also questionable. But as a reader you don't listen to that anymore. The authors made me so curious with this unprecedentedly exciting book that while reading I wanted nothing more than to satisfy the hunger for knowledge. That is a very impressive achievement and results in one of the best popular science books of recent years.