As divers, we often say every wreck has a story, but most of the time those stories remain vague, reduced to names and dates in dive logs. What Jennifer N. Sellitti has done in The Adriatic Affair is take one of those half-forgotten tragedies, the loss of the French steamship Le Lyonnais in 1856, and give it back its human depth.
Before picking up this book, I will admit I knew nothing about Le Lyonnais. I have spent plenty of time around wrecks, from recreational dives to sites of discovery, but this particular ship was new to me. That made the experience of reading all the more compelling. I was not retracing a familiar narrative, but encountering history in real time, as if descending on a wreck site for the first time.
Sellitti balances two intertwined threads. The first is the nineteenth-century disaster itself. Le Lyonnais collided with another vessel, sank off Nantucket, and took over a hundred lives with her. Survivors’ accounts, rumors in the press, and unanswered questions echo through the narrative. She weaves meticulous research into something far richer than dry history, painting portraits of passengers and crew with a detail that makes you feel the human weight of the loss.
The second thread is modern. It covers the decades-long effort to locate and positively identify the wreck. Here, the book moves from maritime archives to sonar traces, from fragile letters in obscure collections to long days at sea on the dive vessel Tenacious. Reading about the 2023–2024 expeditions, and the eventual confirmation that Le Lyonnais had been found, I recognized the obsessive drive that pushes wreck divers forward. As Sellitti herself admits, discovery is fleeting. It is the hunt and the pursuit that hooks you. That rang true. I have seen it in others, and if I am honest, I have felt it myself.
What struck me most is how the book bridges the divide between professional history and the visceral, salt-soaked reality of diving. Sellitti is both rigorous and personal. She shares the doubts of poring over archival scraps, the frustration of false leads, the camaraderie of divers decompressing in heavy current, the exhaustion and elation of long offshore expeditions. By the time the wreck is confirmed, you do not just understand what they found, you feel what it meant.
This is not simply a shipwreck book, and it is not just a dive log turned into prose. It is a story of obsession, collaboration, and the way the past clings to the present. The Lyonnais is not described as a pile of timbers and corroded iron, but as a survivor of sorts, still with a story to tell if we are willing to listen.
As a diver, I came away with two impressions. The first is admiration for the sheer commitment of the search team, whose years of work and risk at depth gave back a piece of history the ocean had swallowed. The second is a renewed respect for the stories wrecks hold. Even if I never dive the Lyonnais myself, I now feel a connection to her and to those who lived and died aboard her, and that will stay with me the next time I descend on a wreck site.
The Adriatic Affair is more than history, more than adventure writing. It is a reminder of why we dive wrecks in the first place. Not just to see what is there, but to uncover the layers of human experience waiting beneath the waves. For anyone who has ever felt the pull of a wreck dive, or wondered why others do, this book is well worth your time.
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