That sinking feeling

On a dark and stormy night in 1842 a brig broke up below the Cornish village of Morwenstow. The parish priest, Robert Hawker, later claimed in his unreliable memoirs that he had found the sole survivor, a Jerseyman called Edward Le Dain, and buried what was left of his shipmates in his graveyard.

Jeremy Seal was drawn to their journey's end when he spotted the Caledonia's white wooden figurehead which still stands as a memorial in the churchyard today. The female warrior - complete with tamoshanter, sporran and cutlass - aroused his curiosity. His investigation of the disaster soon uncovers the mysterious joy of wrecks.

"There are ships all down my father's line," says Seal, who proves to be equally happy whether messing about in boats or books. The Wreck at Sharpnose Point details his attempts to piece together the history of the Caledonia as he explores the "moody milieu" of north Cornwall and wades through dusty back issues of such publications as Lloyd's Register of Ships.

Unfortunately, his boyish hopes of a romantic tale of buried treasure and evil natives - local yokels known as wreckers were once supposed to lure ships on to the rocks so they could loot them - are dashed against a reef of mundane truths. Seal may be in Jamaica Inn territory but he is no Daphne du Maurier. In fact, he turns out to be something of a Cornish patsy.

Readers of Seal's previous two travel books - A Fez of the Heart and The Snakebite Survivor's Club - will be aware of his self-deprecating humour and vivid way with words. Here, for example, Morwenstow is said to be surrounded by "narrow lanes where grass grew high down the centre, Mohican-style". However, although this work involves several voyages, it is not only a travelogue. It is rather, as Polonius might have said, a historical-autobiographical-fiction.

The historical element is the most straightforward. The Caledonia, like the majority of its crew, came from Arbroath: cue disquisitions on Scottish shipbuilding, ship portraiture and ship figureheads. Its cargoes included coffee and corn: cue crash courses in market forces and the Corn Laws. The autobiographical element is the most awkward. Of course a travel writer must say what he sees but, whereas Seal's discovery of his great-great-great-grandfather's name in Lloyd's List is both fortuitous and fitting, the description of his father's fatal heart attack, even if it did occur in Cornwall, is upsetting and out of place. It unbalances the narrative and should have been saved for another kind of work.

The whole book is dangerously overloaded. It is as if Seal is determined not to waste any of his findings. He splices the slices of research with lashings of local colour. He cannot even get an atlas out of the boot of his car without itemising "the jumble of empty plastic water bottles, jump leads, and a chewed children's toy, all lightly downed with dog hair". This is perilously close to self-parody.

Then there is the fiction. Since posterity refuses to grant him a satisfying "maritime yarn", Seal uses the clues - "a cook's death at Falmouth ... a broken barometer ... marriages never made, a notorious shore, and a vicar's lies ... logreckoners of brass in a drowned captain's hands ... and, finally, a tortoise" - to recreate the Caledonia's last days. These ingenious chapters certainly bring home the emotional impact of the crew's watery deaths but they go against the flow of the rest of the book. Nor do they provide the dramatic resolution that Seal's own story lacks. The reader is simply left with a sinking feeling.