… but rather, a quick reminder for everyone who enjoys reading SearchResearch that you can get this delivered to you via email by joining the Wednesday SearchResearch Challenge group.

Here’s the link to join the SearchResearch Group.

Click on the blue “Apply” button to join the group.

When you join, you’ll get around 2 emails / week (one Challenge, one Answer), and maybe one or two more each year.

I’ll be taking this week off (more traveling), and we’ll get back to regular business NEXT week (Jan 11, 2016).

After all of the discussion of Paul Boynton in SearchResearch…

…you’d think we’d be done with him. But no–he’s far too interesting a person.

I printed out the book “The Story of Paul Boyton” and have been reading through it during idle moments over the holidays. (I highly recommend this.)

He is, without doubt, the most interesting person I’ve ever heard of… if half of his stories are true, he led an unparalleled life.

The thing that struck me this week was how much time he spent diving in the Caribbean. Yeah. This was the middle of the 19th century, and he’s diving in a hard hat, pulling up corals and “curiosities” to sell in New York and the big cities of the east coast. This proved to be very lucrative, and set the stage for much of the adventures that followed.

1873 diving dress. Copper hard hat.

This was the day of hard hat diving, enclosed in a heavy canvas suit, with heavy boots to hold you underwater. You’d put on the suit (or “dress” as it was called), and then buckle on the hard hat, trusting that the pumper above would keep manually pumping air down to you as you walked along the ocean floor.

What sights did he see as one of the first divers in the Caribbean? How wonderful was that?

Before putting on the hard hat.

See you all next week. I’ll keep reading (and doing my own bit of diving during the upcoming week.)

Search on!