The flow of histories of the world, or parts of it, in a bundle of items never ceases, 12 years after Neil MacGregor presented world history through 100 objects from the British Museum. Many of these were of unknown provenance and therefore disconnected from their original context. By contrast, world history built around shipwrecks offers the opportunity to seize precise moments in time – most often when a sudden emergency has taken a ship to the bottom of the sea in the midst of everyday activities.

In many ways, shipwrecks bring one nearer to daily life than almost any other archaeological sites. They are only surpassed by the remains of Pompeii and other cities overwhelmed by volcanic eruptions. Egyptian or Etruscan tombs may be full of precious objects and fine frescoes, but by their nature they are not images of life. Since most people in the past never travelled by sea, shipwrecks do not provide a rounded picture of daily life; but the goods found on board illuminate trade routes and connections often stretching some way inland, such as the porcelain factories deep inside China that sent millions of the famous blue and white plates and bowls across the Indian Ocean over several centuries.

The ‘Silk Route of the Sea’, linking China to Egypt, carried far more goods than the renowned Silk Road

David Gibbins is not the first person to have written a history of the world through shipwrecks. Stewart Gordon’s fine History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks was published in the United States in 2015, but it includes only one example that Gibbins examines, the exceptionally rich Uluburun wreck of about 1300 BC, found off the coast of Turkey, loaded with precious goods and plenty of copper ore. What distinguishes the two authors is Gibbins’s close involvement in the excavation of many of the ships he discusses, across a wide range of periods from the Bronze Age to modern times. Regrettably, he does not include the excavation of some of the many wrecks in the American Great Lakes, where he first learned to dive for them, and to which he has recently returned after spending most of the past 20 years writing popular thrillers about archaeology. He learned the science of underwater archaeology from the founders of the discipline, notably George Bass, the American excavator of ancient wrecks found off the Turkish coast.

By the time one has read about his work on Carthaginian, Greek and Roman wrecks, Gibbins already seems to have totted up more than the dozen of his book’s title. The number of sunken ships in the Mediterranean alone, reflecting more than 4,000 years of maritime history, is astonishing, and many more remain to be discovered. But in the book, and in life, Gibbins has been repeatedly drawn back to the treacherous coast of Cornwall. Several of the wrecks he has explored lie close together off a rocky promontory. Much of this work on wreck sites was complemented by serious research on the same ships in the National Archives and in the archives of Genoa.

Of the wrecks he describes, a few stand out. The Belitung wreck of the 9th century, found off Indonesia, was carrying at least 60,000 Chinese ceramics towards the Indian Ocean, as well as a range of high-quality artefacts such as bronze figurines. The objects on board, which must also have included a large quantity of fine silk which has now disintegrated, help demonstrate that the ‘Silk Route of the Sea’, linking China to Malaya, India, Yemen and ultimately Egypt, carried far more goods over a longer period than the better known ‘Silk Road’ across the Eurasian landmass.

Among Gibbins’s Cornish wrecks the Santo Christo de Castello, which went under in 1667, has pride of place. Setting sail from Amsterdam, bound for Cadiz and Genoa, this ship was carrying an altarpiece by Rembrandt ordered at great cost by a Genoese aristocrat. The cargo manifest of a sister ship, the Sacrificio d’Abram, indicates what other goods were being transported by the same investors on the route to Genoa: pepper, cinnamon, cloves from the Indian Ocean and beyond, Swedish iron, English lead, Russian hides, fine textiles, books, charts and, last but not least, a rat trap. Taken as a whole, these were exceptionally valuable cargoes, and the only consolation for the loss of the Santo Christo was that the other ship did arrive at its destination.

A third outstanding wreck, known in minute detail from roving cameras that have penetrated areas divers cannot reach, is HMS Terror’sof 1848, now submerged in freezing water in northern Canada. This ship, along with HMS Erebus, formed part of the ill-fated expedition of Sir John Franklin – already a national hero – in search of the North-West Passage, following in the wake of English expeditions reaching back to Frobisher in the 16th century. Gibbins vividly portrays the appalling conditions the sailors endured and the awful fate they faced, which culminated in cannibalism as they attempted to survive several winters in an environment only the local Inuit had learned to master. Information on the secret of building a successful igloo may not come in useful for most of us, but is typical of the fascinating snippets Gibbins offers in each chapter.

Unlike his American competitor, who looks at the extraordinary Bremen cog of 1380, beautifully preserved in the German Maritime Museum at Bremerhaven, Gibbins jumps over the medieval period between a discussion of the Viking longships and the history of the Mary Rose, which sank in 1545. Both wisely omit the Titanic; but no two people’s lists of a dozen important shipwrecks will be the same. Gibbins’s sentences are sometimes pulled off balance by an accretion of present participles and sub-clauses; but he offers wonderful material, well researched and placed in its wider context, illuminating the history of trade and warfare from unaccustomed angles.