The Shipwreck Hunter

by David L. Mearns

  © BUNDESARCHIV, IMAGE 193-04-1-26 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

  At nearly 50,000 tons fully loaded, Bismarck (along with Tirpitz) was the biggest and most powerful warship ever built by the German Navy.

  This picture of the open hatch door (U 145) through which Baron von Mullenheim-Rechberg escaped demonstrates the quality of pictures we could take at a depth of 4,900 metres.

  Others have said that Bismarck’s armour belt was impenetrable. Here is visual proof that the British guns did put holes in the side of the German battleship.

  The leather boots and jacket identify this as the remains of one of Bismarck’s engine room crew.

  I wanted to lay the plaque commemorating Bismarck’s men on the bow, but I had to settle with placing it on the upturned Admiral’s Bridge as it took us so long to finally find the hull.

  Hood’s wreckage, including the middle part of the hull, two debris fields and the conning tower (lower left sonar target) was scattered over a distance of 2.1 kilometres.

  Greeting Ted Briggs with a bear hug when I finally got him safely on board our survey vessel over the wreck of his ship – HMS Hood.

  Enjoying a toast and a cheeky whisky with Ted Briggs and other members of the production team after our successful mission to HMS Hood.

  The bell of HMS Hood is now on permanent display in the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth. When the Princess Royal rang the bell eight times to signify the change of watches, it was the first time the bell had been heard in seventy-five years.

  The plaque that Ted Briggs laid on the anchor cable of HMS Hood. The gold CD contains the Roll of Honour of all 1,415 men lost in Hood.

  A cartoon that appeared in Punch 10 days after Athenia was attacked by U-30, drawn by E.H. Shepard, who once lived in my village in West Sussex.

  © BUNDESARCHIV, BARCH, BILD lOllI-MN- 1365-27/PETER

  Karl Dönitz (right) with Fritz-Julius Lemp, Captain of U-30, in August 1940 after Lemp was awarded the Knights Cross.

  One of the many child survivors from the SS Athenia being brought ashore in Galway, Ireland.

  © JOHN F. KENNEDY LIBRARY FOUNDATION

  The twenty-two-year-old John F. Kennedy was sent by his father to meet the SS Athenia survivors that were brought into Glasgow.

  It doesn’t look like much, but this multi-beam sonar image contained all the information I needed to know it was the wreck of Athenia.

  Troops disembarking HMAS Sydney in Suda Bay, Crete in early November 1940. By this time Sydney had already earned multiple battle honours, which included sinking the Italian cruiser Bartolomeo Colleoni.

  © INTERNATIONALES MARITIMES MUSEUM, HAMBURG (PETER TAMM INSTITUTE)

  The launch of Steiermark in Kiel on 15 September 1938. The ship was converted to the auxiliary cruiser Kormoran in early 1940.

  Theodor Anton Detmers, Captain of HSK Kormoran. This photo was taken after the war as Detmers is wearing the Knights Cross he won for sinking the Sydney.

  © AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL 053869

  One of Sydney’s crew, Able Seaman Jack Davenport, with a ceremonial life ring.

  © ARGUS NEWSPAPER COLLECTION OF PHOTOGRAPHS, STATE LIBRARY OF VICTORIA

  Inside this German to English dictionary Captain Detmers hid his original ‘master’ account of the action with Sydney using tiny pencil dots under the letters. I have marked the relevant letters in red on the lower image.

  I taped the picture of Sydney’s crew above my plotting table to give me, and everyone who passed by, extra motivation to find the wreck. This is where I was working when the wreck appeared on our sonar displays.

  This shot of Sydney’s ‘B’ turret shows just how deadly effective Kormoran’s attack was. The single armour piercing 15cm shell through the front screen of the turret would have killed all 20+ men inside.

  Virtually every surface of Sydney’s upper deck was peppered with shell holes from Kormoran’ guns.

  Every watertight door on Sydney’s wreck was found in an open position, possibly indicating that the crew may have been trying to abandon ship at the last moment.

  Sydney’s main director control tower lying upside down in the debris field. The heavy corrosion marks where the paint has been burnt off by fire.

  Celebrating the location of Sydney with the directors of HMA3S, John Perryman (in white uniform) and the former premier of Western Australia, Alan Carpenter, fourth from left.

  Sister Ellen Savage, the only nurse of the twelve on board Centaur to have survived.

  © AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL 061952

  With Chris Milligan in his McGill University office where for three days we trawled through all his valuable research documents.

  At the end of many months of research I was left with a handful clues to where the wreck of Centaur might have sunk. Fortunately, Gordon Rippon’s navigation was spot-on.

  Staring at this image of Centaur’s bell, my smile says it all. I couldn’t believe how truly lucky we were to have found the bell with its name showing.

  If the bell of Centaur hadn’t ended up lodged between these two pipes it would have rolled off the deck and have been lost forever.

  One of Captain George Murray’s leather shoes at the entrance to his bedroom.

  The most remarkable discovery: an Australian Army slouch hat in the debris field next to the wreck of AHS Centaur where it had lain for 66 years.

  One of the red crosses that marked Centaur as a hospital ship protected from attack by the Geneva Convention.

  I was delighted to have received my Order of Australia Medal from the Governor-General Quentin Bryce at the Australia High Commissioner’s residence in London.

  © ACADEMIA DAS CIENCIAS DE LISBOA

  The only historical image depicting the loss of the Sodré brother’s ships. Note the name Esmeralda above the mast of Vicente’s ship.

  A painting believed to be Vasco da Gama in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon.

  Ahmed Al Siyabi of Oman’s Ministry of Heritage and Culture overlooking the beach where the Portuguese careened one of their ships to be repaired.

  This disc I found has yet to be assessed by experts, but it has features that suggest it could be associated with an early type of astrolabe, an important and rare navigation instrument.

  Esmeralda’s bell, after conservation and reconstruction. Dated 1498, this is almost certainly the oldest ship’s bell ever recovered anywhere in the world.

  The legendary Indio, the lost or ghost coin of Dom Manuel I. The original silver of the coin has been replaced by silver corrosion products, which is why the coin appears black.

  © NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

  The heavy-cruiser USS Indianapolis. She had a hand in changing history but it was her men who paid the price.

  Charles B. McVay III, the Captain of Indianapolis, who was unfairly court martialed for the loss of his ship.

  © BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

  Sir Ernest Shackleton – known to his men as ‘The Boss’. One hundred years on his example still inspires explorers of every type.

  © SCOTT POLAR RESEARCH INSTITUTE, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGe/GETTY IMAGES

  With Nick Lambert, former Captain of HMS Endurance, holding one of the ten Explorers Club flags I have carried on my expeditions.

  In the Weddell Sea of Antarctica, where I hope to return one day to find and film Shackleton’s Endurance.

  Afterword

  Whenever I am asked about the influences on my career as a shipwreck hunter I credit the 1985 discovery of Titanic by Bob Ballard and WHOI for ushering in a new age of deep ocean exploration that paved the way for other famous shipwrecks to be found. In the eyes of most people, including me, Titanic still occupies the top spot as the most famous of all shipwrecks. However, long before Titanic was ever found a group of scientists and engineers from the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) quietly set about conducting a mission of national importance that truly opened the doors to the deep ocean for the first time. Sadly, it was another catastrophic loss t
hat inspired their groundbreaking work.

  On 10 April 1963, the US nuclear submarine Thresher (SSN 593) sank in the North Atlantic while conducting deep diving tests. Thresher was the first, and worst, instance of a nuclear submarine loss at sea with all 129 of the boat’s crew killed. The magnitude of the loss was such a shock to the Navy that a plan was literally developed overnight to find the Thresher. Before then the deepest shipwreck found was less than 450 metres and the method of searching comparatively primitive, essentially dangling a man within a sealed observation chamber fitted with viewports. Thresher’s depth of 2,560 metres necessitated an entirely new towed, multi-sensor approach to searching and from this tragedy NRL’s (and the United States’) deep ocean search capability was born. Because most of NRL’s missions using the search ship Mizar were classified, the world knows very little about what they achieved and the record depths they reached.

  NRL’s pioneering development of deep tow technology, photographic techniques and search methodology in the 1960s and early 70s provided the foundation for Ballard’s and WHOI’s success in the 1980s. Ballard continued to rely on the same type of photographic search systems pioneered by NRL, and the experience he gained from his own surveys of the Thresher and Scorpion (another sunken US nuclear submarine found by NRL in 1968) wreck sites helped him refine the search for Titanic. Although Ballard’s method of finding Titanic was not very different from how NRL located the Thresher twenty-two years earlier, the worldwide interest generated by Titanic’s name and the famous story of her sinking created a game-changing moment in history. Suddenly, the entire world knew the deep ocean was accessible to man without ever realizing that the greatest ocean depths had been conquered more than two decades earlier.

  The discovery of Titanic was a watershed moment without which my own discoveries of Lucona, Derbyshire and Hood might not have happened. The companies I worked with to find those wrecks employed more modern and more efficient sonar-based search systems, but the breakthrough from NRL’s early age of deep ocean shipwreck hunting was more about a realization of what was possible. After Titanic the deep ocean was no longer the hidden and unreachable realm the majority of people presumed it was. It didn’t matter that NRL had found and filmed a wreck at 5,010 metres in 1970 (the LeBaron Russell Briggs) or that a top secret CIA project recovered parts of a Soviet ballistic missile submarine (K-129) from a depth of 5,030 metres in 1974. Because these record-setting achievements were shrouded in government secrecy, it was as if they had never happened and thus their impact beyond the world of the US Navy was virtually non-existent.

  In the same way that NRL’s groundbreaking work helped shape Ballard’s Navy-funded programme at WHOI, my career as a shipwreck hunter was also indirectly boosted by Ballard’s discovery of Titanic and Bismarck. Even as late as 2004, when I first briefed the RAN Chief about the chances of finding the Sydney, I referenced the successful location of Titanic during my presentation. As anyone who has ever tried to do something particularly challenging has probably learned, it’s a darned sight easier to get others, especially financial backers, to believe in your plan when someone before you has proved that what you’re about to attempt is actually achievable.

  I’ve been incredibly fortunate that the arc of my career has coincided with a period in history where technology has caught up with mankind’s ambition to explore the deep ocean with greater precision and capability. Having cut my teeth on one of the earliest commercially available side-scan sonar systems when image interpretation was considered more an art than a science, I am grateful to have endured long enough to see my industry mature. New technologies that were at the very early prototype stage when I started out, like autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) and multi-beam echo-sounding sonars (MBES), are already proving their potential to completely revolutionize the gathering of data at sea.

  There is however, a much broader need for these technologies beyond shipwreck hunting that, with further advancement and expansion, will have an impact on everyone’s lives. It is often said (because it is true) that we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the surface of our own planet. That’s because 71% of the earth is covered by the oceans, and the seabed that is hidden below this watery curtain has barely been surveyed or explored. Current estimates are that only 10% to 15% of the ocean floor is mapped to a resolution of 100 metres. Compare that to 98% of Venus, 100% of the moon at higher resolution and 100% of Mars with much of it at 20-metre resolution, and you start to realize how much more we know about outer space than we do about our own inner world. In a future where the world’s population will be increasingly dependent on its oceans, we can no longer afford to live in ignorance about the largest part of our planet.

  There are many aspects of the oceans that need to be measured and understood on a global scale, but experts agree that mapping the ocean floor should be made a priority. In the summer of 2016 a remarkable meeting took place in Monaco where 150 scientists, scholars and business associates endorsed the objective of comprehensively mapping the ocean floor by the year 2030. It is a bold but achievable objective (called Seafloor 2030), and a necessity if we are to continue to exploit the oceans without damaging them anymore than we already have. GEBCO, the world’s only international organization with a mandate to map the ocean floor, will be responsible for compiling the data into a global bathymetric database with the ultimate objective that the database is shared in order to ‘make the seafloor public’. AUVs and multi-beam sonars will undoubtedly be at the forefront of that data collection.

  At that same meeting in Monaco another bold challenge was laid down. This one was in the form of a cash prize – a $7,000,000 XPRIZE to be exact. The prize, sponsored primarily by Shell with a $1,000,000 bonus prize offered by the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), challenges competing teams to develop new technologies to autonomously map the deep ocean floor in high resolution at rates faster than currently possible. The competition runs for two years (up to twenty-five teams will compete in two rounds of at-sea testing) and it is hoped the end result will accelerate the innovation needed to bring forward the goal set by Seafloor 2030. As a marine scientist and explorer I am honoured to have been selected by the XPRIZE scientific advisory board to serve as one of the judges for a competition that is close to my heart.

  Some people choose their careers, but I like to think that my career chose me. It happened the moment I switched on my university’s ancient EG&G 259–4 side-scan sonar recorder for the first time and watched the geology of the West Florida shelf reveal itself as if the ocean had been drained of water. Thirty-five years later I still have that same heightened sense of expectation whenever I switch on a side-scan sonar, as my scientific training and curiosity draws me forward to the screen in the hope that I’m about to see some long-lost object or an interesting geological feature. Creating the global bathymetric database – the base map for 71% of our planet – is the closest we will all come to that experience of draining the oceans of water and revealing what lies below. Having ‘discovered’ the wreck of Athenia from the safety and comfort of an office using an on-line database like that contemplated by GEBCO and experiencing the same feeling of excitement with that discovery as if I was on a ship over the top of the wreck, I am a strong believer in their goal to democratize the seabed.

  As a kid growing up in the streets of New Jersey, in the shadow of Manhattan, I know just how lucky I’ve been to have such a passion for my life’s work. When the history of the time period covered within this book is written, I believe there is a good chance it will be called the ‘Golden Age of Shipwreck Hunting’. The evidence for that is seen in the number of shipwreck discoveries made by professional and amateur groups all around the world appearing in the news on a regular basis. I am proud to have contributed to that rich history with the wrecks I’ve found and the stories I’ve told. The adage that with improved technology anything lost in the oceans can be found regardless of the depth is certainly truer today t
han when I started out. One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is that you still need to be looking in the right place.

  Bibliography

  I MV Lucona: MURDER AND FRAUD ON THE HIGH SEAS

  Wolfgang Blum, ‘Wie wurde die Lucona versenkt?’, Die Zeit, 22 September 1995

  ‘Eastport International Solves the M/V Lucona Sinking Mystery, Waves, September-October 1991

  Peter R. Limburg, Deep-Sea Detectives, Maritime Mysteries and Forensic Science (ASJA Press/iUniverse, 2005)

  R. C. Longworth, ‘The Lucona Affair’, Chicago Tribune, 15 March 1989

  Elizabeth Nash and Geraldine Norman, ‘Ship explosion ignites political timebomb’, The Independent, 26 November 1988

  Hans Pretterebner, Der Fall Lucona (Hans Pretterebner Verlagsgesellschaft m.b.H. & Co. KG, Vienna, 1987)

  Michael Z. Wise, ‘True Confections: Baker is Guilty’, The Washington Post, 13 March 1991

  II MV Derbyshire: LOST WITHOUT TRACE

  Anon, ‘MV Derbyshire, Report of Court No. 8075, Formal Investigation’ (HMSO, London, 1989)

  ‘A report by the Rt Hon. Lord Donaldson of Lymington to the Secretary of State for Transport to assess what further work should be undertaken to identify the cause of the sinking of the MV Derbyshire (Department for Transport, 1995)