For Love and Treasure
Aug 27, 2015The Life and Times of the World’s Most Successful Treasure Hunting Family
Reviewed by Amanda Silva
A riveting investigation into the nature of humans to seek, to search, and to understand by discovery.
Biographer Monty Joynes has crafted a compelling biography of an amazing family, the Fishers, combining technical content and personal anecdotes, against a larger historical and geographical backdrop. If you’ve ever wanted to hunt for treasure, or you wish to vicariously embark on a daring adventure beneath the surface of the sea, For Love and Treasure: The Life and Times of the World’s Most Successful Treasure Hunting Family awaits.
Joynes, a veteran author, provides an intimate glimpse into the lives of people like Kim and Lee Fisher who defied a conventional life in favor of uncertainty, but guaranteed adventure. With plentiful captioned photos, it is almost like reading a personal narrative and family album simultaneously.
The notion of significant simultaneous events is a phenomenon that Joynes identifies as synchronicity, an unbreakable thread connecting the members of the Fisher family and those drawn into their circle. He does this by isolating specific periods of time and devoting singular chapters to each character so that he can show what the one was doing at the same time as another, often miles away, before the two had even met. The result is an omniscient understanding of how actions, decisions, and lives ultimately intertwine, no matter where they started. Another theme that pulses through the life of this adventure is the idea introduced early on in a quote from the Fisher family: “Shipwrecks of antiquity rightly belong to those who find them, work them, and bring back their treasures in whatever form to the mainstream of human awareness. And there is no awareness without discovery.”
Yes, indeed, this is a story of discovery—the discovery of fabled wreckage, like the Fishers’ 1985 headline-grabbing success in securing treasure from the 1622 wreckage of the Spanish Nuestra Senora de Atocha.
But it is also a story of self-discovery, and the awareness needed to understand one’s own self and to live the life one has imagined, which is itself a treasure.
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