Recommendation: I loved this – the two forms of inanimate objects I get weirdly emotional about are ships and spacecraft* and as readers of this blog can attest, I am also a sucker for explorers
Where to read: If my experience is anything to go by, if you read this book in public your friends will mock you for acting like a middle-aged dad who has decided that World War II will be “his thing”. In my defence, not every shipwreck is from WWII. In their defence, I am writing this while watching a documentary on HistoryHit about the sinking of the Bismarck so…
Read with: Gosling’s Black Seal rum
In brief: Mearns has had an extraordinary career locating shipwrecks in all sorts of places and for all sorts of reasons. Some of those shipwreck hunts have been the subject of full length books (notably one about the discovery of HMAS Sydney) however this is brings it all together in a sort of highlight reel.
The Shipwreck Hunter is more collation than consistent narrative, with each chapter focusing on a particular shipwreck hunt. There are some common themes – catastrophic mechanical failures, the importance of archival research and primary sources, the key role of families in driving search projects – and some of the timelines overlap, reflecting the years taken for each project, but each stands essentially on its own so it can be easily read in sections.
The first account is a bit of a riot. The Lucona was thought to have been deliberately blown up by a notorious Austrian businessman as part of an insurance fraud. No one was meant to survive however all but six lived to tell a very suspicious story. Said businessman was eventually charged with murder and an expedition was commissioned by an Austrian court – to Mearns’ clear discomfort, the judge actually went along to monitor progress – to confirm the cause of the sinking and the true nature of the cargo. As suspected, the cargo was very much not the valuable uranium mining equipment the insurance company was asked to pay for and very much in fact worthless junk. The evidence collected at the wreck also proved that the cause of the sinking was an explosion from inside the ship and the businessman was found guilty (he apparently reacted with a Sieg Heil, make of that what you will).
Next up was the MV Derbyshire, a bulk carrier that went down with all hands off the coast of Japan during a typhoon in 1980. Its sinking was the cause of much controversy for a number of reasons, the first being that the other ships of its class were found to have serious structural weaknesses which could have caused the loss of the Derbyshire and the second being that bulk carriers were sinking in alarming numbers at the time. Finding the ship brought much needed attention to the plight of the sailors crewing these ships and the need for more rigorous maritime engineering standards. As an interesting side note, it seems there is a certain level of support now for the idea that the Derbyshire was taken down by a rogue wave (although it was already riding low due to earlier structural failures).
The emotional centerpiece of the book is the search for the “Mighty Hood”, the British battlecruiser sunk in mere minutes by the notorious German battleship Bismarck. Naturally, because Channel 4 wanted to make a documentary about the project to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the battle, Mearns set out to find both ships. That documentary is on YouTube and it is well worth watching, even if you have no interest in the more technical aspects of the search discussed in the book.
The loss of HMS Hood was dreadful – 1,415 men lost in seconds, three men somehow released from the pull as she went down – but it is the small details Mearns’ weaves in that tug the heartstrings. To create his search grid, Mearns combed through the archives for the positions reported by the relevant ships at the relevant times, including HMS Norfolk, HMS Prince of Wales and the Hood herself, although the latter was miles away from those reported by the other ships. Ted Briggs, the last survivor, credited his escape to the gallantry of Commander John Warrand, who had motioned him through the door first. It was Warrand, the most senior navigator on the Hood, who had calculated and radioed that last position and Briggs hoped he would be proven right. As it turned out, he was – to quote Mearns, ‘on 24 May 1941, Commander John Warrand was without question the best navigator’. And it was Briggs who held the controls of the ROV as it laid a memorial plaque on the wreck in memory of his fallen comrades.
From an Australian perspective, the most relevant sections might be those on the HMAS Sydney and AHS Centaur, both of which were lost during WWII. The Sydney went down with all hands following a shoot-out with the German raider Kormoran (which Mearns also found and used as a marker for the wreck of the Sydney) and for decades it was one of the great mysteries in Australian military history. The Centaur was sunk later in the war by a Japanese submarine in a blatant violation of the Geneva Convention, which barred attacks on hospital ships.
Mearns finishes the book with an ode to the ship he most wanted to find next, Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance, which he describes as the ultimate technical challenge because an icebreaker would need to penetrate deep into the pack ice in the Weddell Sea and fight against that ice to maintain position for days and weeks as the ROVs dived. In a bittersweet turn, Endurance has since been found by a 2022 expedition aided by historically thin sea ice conditions caused by climate change. I understand he has since been working on a project to find the Empire Windrush and I hope he succeeds.
*I had a lil cry about Voyager 2 losing contact, Cassini got me in the feels and Good Night Oppy destroyed me. I’m fine, leave me alone
Bookshelves & Bourbon 