Take Me Under the Sea: The Dream Merchants of the Deep

By Thomas N. Burgess

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0963984004
• ISBN13: 9780963984005
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Ocean Archives
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.8" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Take Me Under the Sea

Before the first World War, when access to the ocean depths was incredibly cumbersome and decidedly dangerous, two brothers from Virginia had begun making feature-length motion pictures under the sea. By 1916, they had created a silent drama featuring untethered divers, a mechanical beast, and a submarine. It broke box office records across the country for a dozen years afterward, their little company fashioned entire undersea scenarios during the infancy of films - establishing a format for every screenplay on shipwrecks, lost treasure, and undersea perils that Hollywood would produce in the years to follow. Three decades before, in the reign of Victoria, a flamboyant, free-diving Irishman had been sketching the underwater world. By 1904, in diving helmet and suit, he was literally painting under the sea with oils on canvas and he sold his works to the wealthiest of world society. Journalists callled him "The Merman" and he was the first, from experience, to graphically record the mystical and haunting geographies of the ocean's floor. Who were these romancers of the deep? Why did they choose to spend their lives in such otherworldly enviroments? And who proceeded them in other art forms, in still photography, in poetry or in prose? How did the American Civil War help to spark an undersea novel and how did Jules Verne come to write his epic Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Seas only to have it published months after a similar book was released? This unusual undersea chronicle has been themed around the creative arts and it is expansive; the unorthodox and difficult methods of these artists mesh with the fertile periods of social history from the Romantic Era through the jazz age. The scientific and industrial revolutions are also brought alive in a totally different way as some surprising notables interact with these men in subsequent pursuits: George Sands and Alexander Dumas in the earlier portions and later on, Sarah Bernhardt and the Barrymore brothers as well as William Beebe, Harry Houdini, and Alexander Graham Bell. The book is a must for any ocean enthusiast who has a feeling for history and a love of the bizarre. --- from book's back cover