While the book is a reasonable overview of the subject, and the discovery of the wreck is fairly interesting, it is difficult to find many positive things to say about it. It fails as an historical text for several reasons. Firstly it is almost impossible to keep track of complex military manoeuvres without maps, and yet there is only one in the entire book - and this bears very little relevance to the action described! There are quite a few photos, but not many are of the Ark in action, and some do not have captions. At one point Rossiter describes a photo of the Ark with oil spilling from it, but for some reason does not include it. The tiny computer images of the survey are unexplained and rather meaningless, and the handful of photos of the wreck is rather miserly considering the book is nearly 400 pages long. Rossiter does not refer to dates and times enough for the reader to be certain of chronology. He is also rather vague sometimes. On page 54 he describes the battle of Jutland in 1916 as inconclusive. This is true to the extent that losses were fairly even, but he fails to acknowledge that the German High Seas Fleet did not leave port again, and it mutinied when ordered to do so. On the pages leading up to 78 Rossiter describes the engagement with two U-Boats, the U-30 which was damaged but escaped to port, and the U-39 which was sunk. But he then mentions that the crews involved in the sinking of the U-30 assembled for inspection by the First Lord of the Admiralty....the U-30? Then later, on page 149 he finishes a chapter on the action of the Ark in the Mediterranean by stating that the first shots in Britain's war with Germany had been fired. So what was that about the U-Boats? It all left me wondering how much of Rossiter's text I could trust. Rossiter does not make much use of primary sources, apart from the five former crew members he meets during his survey and the odd letter from Admiral Sommerville to his wife. The text reads as though he has read a few history books and from these has compiled a new narrative, rather than starting from the original accounts. The print is also very large, and gives the impression that someone has tried to pad it out a bit. The book provides a narrative, and even though the prose was bland, the operations it describes are staggering in their daring and conduction. They are also stories that need to be told, as a number of these people are still alive, unrecognised. But on its own merit, this is not a book I would recommend.