Jean-Pierre Andrieux

Tell me more!

That will, I think, be the inevitable reaction of any reader of this book. It is, as the title implies, a compendium of shipwrecks and disasters in the waters of Newfoundland and Labrador. Given the treachery of those waters, there was obviously much material to choose from.

Too much material. Instead of focussing on a limited number of noteworthy wrecks, and giving a true story about what happens, this book includes, I suspect, several hundred tales of disasters. But it fits them into the limited space by compressing the reports almost to the point of uselessness. A few stories get a page or so, but most get no more than two or three sentences. You could get just about as much information from a bald list with ship name, date wrecked, place where wrecked, and number of casualties. At least the list could be in some sort of order, so you could find something. In this book, with no general organization and no index, you have no choice but to read through it and see if you find anything interesting. Of course, if you do find something interesting, it won't do you any good, because there aren't any details, nor are there footnotes nor lists of additional readings.

There are, at least, photos of many of the ships, some of them rare and interesting. I wish I could say the same for the book.… (meer)