Review: Treasures, Shipwrecks and the Dawn of Red Sea Diving, by Howard Rosenstein

In the beginning… a review of Treasures, Shipwrecks and the Dawn of Red Sea Diving, by Howard Rosenstein, published by Dived Up

Review by Mark ‘Crowley’ Russell

Most people who have visited Sharm El Sheikh will be aware of its history, and many will have seen photographs on dive centre walls of the days when it was first discovered by dive tourists; early pioneers piling scuba tanks on camels and ferrying divers through the desert in army surplus jeeps – with not a hotel in sight.

There wasn’t even a proper building when Howard Rosenstein started his first scuba diving shop in Na’ama Bay – it was an old railway freight car dumped on the beach next to the Marina Sharm Motel, which was, at the time, a collection of hemispherical fibreglass ‘rooms’ arranged in a vaguely organised manner.

I first discovered Sharm as a holiday diver in 2000, when the hotels of Na’ama Bay still occupied just one side of the road, and watched the resort grow dramatically over the next four years.

I would return in 2009 to spend the best four years of my career as a dive professional in the love of my diving life – and I like to think that I caught the tail-end of that golden era.

What I wouldn’t give, however, to see the Sharm El Sheikh of the 1970s, having gazed so longingly at the photographs on my dive centre’s walls. So it was with great relish that I sat down to read through Rosenstein’s Treasures, Shipwrecks And The Dawn Of Red Sea Diving: A Pioneer’s Journey.

In just a matter of hours, I was turning the final pages.

There is something extremely endearing about the tales of the early years of Red Sea diving; a time when it seemed scuba training involved little more than a promise not to hold your breath or run out of air, and you could – as Rosenstein did – walk into the water, find sunken treasure, and sell it days later in back-street markets in a manner reminiscent of scenes from an Indiana Jones movie, but damper.

It wasn’t all innocence, as political tensions in the region were high, peaking with the violence of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, as Egypt attempted to regain control of the Sinai Peninsula from Israel.

Rosenstein found himself not just a pioneer of scuba diving but negotiating his way through the turbulent political climate, even working to help broker a peace deal between the two nations, even if it might mean that he, himself, would have to leave.

Treasures, Shipwrecks And The Dawn Of Red Sea Diving is excellently written, and captures well the author’s decision to emigrate to Israel from America at the age of 23, where he opened his first dive shop; his subsequent move to Sinai and the founding of the scuba travel business that would eventually form a significant percentage of Egypt’s GDP.

His style of writing is rather snappy – in a good way, like a fast-paced airport thriller – and often reads like a series of joined-up, well-told, deco-beer anecdotes, but with a lot more depth, a lot less beer, and many more interesting characters than the average post-dive stories.

He hobnobbed with luminaries such as Hans and Lotte Hass, Anne and David Doubilet and Eugenie ‘Shark Lady’ Clark – with whom he would become firm friends, and with a variety of famous celebrities and important political figures in a tumultuous era of modern Middle Eastern history.

Complementing the writing is a continuous stream of photographs documenting exactly what those early years were like, from candid amateur snaps never before seen in public, to some of the Doubilet’s finest.

If I were to have a criticism of the book, it is that there is not enough of it! It’s just over 200 pages long but I really could have gone another couple of hundred in the same sitting.

I would also like to have read a little more about the early years of the dive business in Sharm, although this is not so much a criticism of the book as wishful thinking on my part – it is very much Rosenstein’s story, and not all stories overlap.

With any luck, this will be remedied when some of Sharm’s other pioneers have their own memoirs published!

All in all, this was a very satisfying read – anybody who’s been scuba diving in the Red Sea will enjoy it, and it’s absolutely essential for anybody with more than a passing familiarity with Sharm El Sheikh and the trials that the place and its people endured to become what it is today.

More great book reviews

• Review: Sharkpedia, A Brief Compendium of Shark Lore by Daniel C Abel
• The High Seas, by Olive Heffernan
• Many Things Under a Rock – The Mysteries of Octopuses, by David Scheel
• The Bathysphere Book by Brad Fox
• Britain’s Living Seas, by Hannah Rudd

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