For nearly 70 years, historians searched for clues that would lead them to the deep-water grave of the Royal Australian naval cruiser HMAS Sydney II. Considered a menace to her foes during WWII, the ship was dealt a series of devastating artillery blows during a battle with the German raider HSK Kormoran. While the Kormoran's crew was ordered to life boats, the Sydney was last seen drifting ablaze. Her crew of 645 men perished at sea.
The Sydney's final resting place was never recorded, presenting an enduring mystery. Research was conducted. Inquiries were launched. Physical searches were undertaken. But nothing was ever found.
Her location might still be unknown were it not for the unrelenting work of David Mearns, who at 50 is arguably the finest shipwreck hunter of his generation.
With more than 20 finds to his credit, Mearns' dogged and meticulous research has given rise to the theory that anything lost can be found. His work on vessels like the HMS Hood and the Rio Grande – a find that set the record for the deepest wreck ever located – has earned him accolades.
THE FINDING SYDNEY FOUNDATION David Mearns, search director of The Finding Sydney Foundation, works at the charting table.
Any skeptics were silenced in March when he located the Sydney laying broken in the depths of the Indian Ocean – a feat that defied governments and wreck hunters for more than 60 years and made news around the globe.
And the work continues. Last month, his company, Blue Water Recoveries, was awarded a $4-million contract by the Australian government to the search for the hospital ship Centaur, which was torpedoed during WWII, taking the lives of 268 Australians.
"So many shipwrecks," says Mearns. "So little time."
SURFACING
Mearns received his formal education and training as a marine biologist and geologist. He was in his late 20s when he took a job recovering U.S. naval helicopters and airplanes lost in the ocean.
In 1990, his employer, Eastport International, a company based just outside Washington, D.C., won a contract to work on a different sort of search mission. It was hired by the Australian Criminal Courts to find the Lucona. The charterer of the vessel, Austrian industrialist Udo Proksch, claimed that the ship was carrying uranium-processing equipment when the boat went down in the Indian Ocean. The vessel foundered in less than three minutes, killing half of the 12 crewmembers on board.
Proksch filed a $20-million insurance claim to recoup his losses, but fraud was suspected. Armed with a sidescan sonar and remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) that Mearns and his colleagues fashioned from scratch in a scant six months, the search team headed out to sea accompanied by two munitions experts, a naval architect and a judge.
British Battlecruiser HMS Hood, circa 1932.
Footage of the wreck revealed that the Lucona had in fact been sunk by explosives, which were placed in the ship's hold and detonated in the southeast Arabian Sea. Proksch was prosecuted and was serving a life sentence in prison when he died in 1991.
THE SHIPWRECK BUSINESS
The discovery of the Lucona was a watershed for Mearns, who was now unexpectedly on the map in an ultra-specialized field.
"There was no way at the time, relatively new and inexperienced in that niche of finding shipwrecks, that I could have ever imagined I'd be looking for the Sydney 18 years later," Mearns says. "But I had a passion for it. I knew it was something I wanted to learn more about."
But how to proceed? There's no ready client base or marketing strategy for hunting wrecks. "You can't just knock on someone's door and say, "˜Please, may I find your shipwreck, and will you play me millions of dollars to do it?'" Mearns says. "It's a very specialized business."
Which is why several of his finds were self-generated projects intended to broaden his reach.
Like finding the German Blockade Runner Rio Grande, which was sunk in WWII. Mearns and his company located the ship at a depth of 5,762 meters (3.5 miles), setting a Guinness World Record for the deepest shipwreck found.
And the Portuguese Nau Esmerelda, which sailed with the fleet of explorer Vasco de Gama. Esmerelda was lost in 1503 in the Indian Ocean. Her discovery was a search that Mearns said his company took on to gain experience with archeological recoveries. The research took him and his team around the world before they located a letter written in 1503 by the boat's captain, the only first-hand account of the ship's sinking. Mearns traveled to Portugal's National Archives Torre de Tombo, to see the original. The letter, he discovered, had been mistranslated.
"People were searching for the wreck in the wrong country," Mearns explains with incredulity. "In a completely wrong part of the Indian Ocean."
RESEARCH FIRST
Dogged research remains the cornerstone of Mearns' efforts, the element that has repeatedly given him success where others have come up empty. While it is the high-tech sonars and ROVs, all dazzling underwater technologies, that offer the first stunning glimpses of sunken history, it is the years of research that Mearns does in advance of the hunt that makes it all possible.
For starters, he does his own work. If Mears needs a document, he insists on viewing it himself. Copies are not good enough. The key to many of his victories has been in the re-translation of archived documents, and nuance, he says, is everything, even when it comes to the scratches of a pencil lead.
