J. Richard “Dick” Steffy stood inside the limestone hall of the Crusader castle in Cyprus and looked at the wood fragments arrayed before him. They were old beyond belief. For more than two millennia they had remained on the sea floor, eaten by worms and soaking up seawater until they had the consistency of wet cardboard. There were some 6,000 pieces in all, and Steffy’s job was to put them all … all back together in their original shape like some massive, ancient jigsaw puzzle.
He had volunteered for the job even though he had no qualifications for it. For twenty-five years he’d been an electrician in a small, land-locked town in Pennsylvania. He held no advanced degrees–his understanding of ships was entirely self-taught. Yet he would find himself half a world away from his home town, planning to reassemble a ship that last sailed during the reign of Alexander the Great, and he planned to do it using mathematical formulas and modeling techniques that he’d developed in his basement as a hobby.
The first person ever to reconstruct an ancient ship from its sunken fragments, Steffy said ships spoke to him. Steffy joined a team, including friend and fellow scholar George Bass, that laid a foundation for the field of nautical archaeology. Eventually moving to Texas A&M University, his lack of the usual academic credentials caused him to be initially viewed with skepticism by the university’s administration. However, his impressive record of publications and his skilled teaching eventually led to his being named a full professor. During the next thirty years of study, reconstruction, and modeling of submerged wrecks, Steffy would win a prestigious MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and would train most of the preeminent scholars in the emerging field of nautical archaeology.
Richard Steffy’s son Loren, an accomplished journalist, has mined family memories, archives at Texas A&M and elsewhere, his father’s papers, and interviews with former colleagues to craft not only a professional biography and adventure story of the highest caliber, but also the first history of a field that continues to harvest important new discoveries from the depths of the world’s oceans.
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I absolutely loved reading “The Man Who Thought Like a Ship.” Once I started reading it I knew it was going to devour it. I actually became so enthralled with the story of Dick Steffy that I read the whole book in a day then felt so overwhelmed I read the book a second time over the next two days so I could take my time and feel the history. It was a great book and the story of Dick Steffy is tremendous.
I loved reading about the nautical archaelogy and it’s creation as an accepted field of study. I love history, especially ancient history, so this was a very pleasant book for me. I am sure I will read it many more times and it has also caused me to take to the internet to Google the Kyrenia ship and other ships that Dick Steffy worked on just to find pictures and more information.
I won this book as a giveaway on GoodReads and it is no doubt the best giveaway book I have ever received. If you have any interest whatsoever in history or ships this book has to go on the must-read list.
t is such a pleasure to read a book where the writer combines his considerable talent for narrative with a story that is close to his heart. I had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Loren Steffy of this book at the Houston Maritime Museum. The presentation prepared me for the book and as result it was an easy read. It’s not a nail biter or a flash of lightning, it is very much well grounded in reality. The story of Richard “Dick” Steffy, an electrician by trade but a pioneer Nautical Archaeologist by night and weekends, is a story of how a man, solely through the passion of his non-mainstream “hobby”, a man who followed the road less traveled, a man whose brain worked in such a way that it found it’s true purpose through, perseverance, talent, passion, plain hard work, and sacrifice while still raising a family. It is also the story of a wife who allowed and worked with her husband to achieve not a dream of fame or fortune, but of making a contribution to the culture of civilization. The fact that Loren Steffy is so darn proud of his father and has the talent to express it makes this book a pleasant read, a feel good story that shows that if one applies themselves with passion and hard work they do not have to take a second seat to anyone in a particular field of study or work, that the “degree” does not make a person better, it can make things easier, but it is not a requirement to gaining knowledge and truth, even in an academic sense. Richard Steffy, through his determined accomplishment, broke through the barrier culture of academia that is so pervasive in stuffing out so many nascent dreams. There are never guarantees of success and Steffy could have given up before he started, but his thirst for knowledge kept him going. While the Archaeological subject and the exotic locale in the book is quite interesting, it is more of a background of how a man succeeded in finding his purpose in the grand scheme of things, not by the raw talent/exposure and easy exploitation by others for “fifteen minutes of fame” which seems to be the current “American Dream”, but hard work stimulated by great passion for a subject, and with inner growth that spanned decades. Steffy was not out to make money, he was out to broaden our understanding of our past and he proved the right man at the right time in the right place…and he put himself there. You don’t have to like ships to like this book. I give this book five stars for the quality of the writing and the originality of subject.