The Shipwreck Hunter

by David L. Mearns

  After a couple of false starts due to oil leaks, the Remora III ROV touched down on the seabed just after midnight on Sunday 10 January 2010, on the ridge above the gully where Centaur’s wreck was nestled. I had the pilots stop in this location about 800 metres from the wreck in order to conduct an important test. I wanted to see just how soft the seabed was, so I had the ROV carry a steel plate about the same weight and size as the Centaur Association’s memorial plaque. When the ROV released the plate, I wasn’t surprised to see more than half of its twenty-eight inches sink into the mud and total obscurity. I was determined not to let the association’s plaque suffer the same fate.

  The ROV was back on the move, descending into the gully towards the wreck. In my hut I had a duplicate of the navigation monitor and the ROV’s sonar display, which allowed me to count down the metres to the nominal wreck position we had determined during the search. At 500 metres away I got a call from the bridge saying they had an oil leak in the starboard main engine, bringing everything to a halt. Fifteen minutes later, another call came in to say the leak was manageable and we could proceed. The Remora was now moving freely and quickly towards the target position: 400 metres, 300, 200, then 100 metres away. There were lots of individual contacts showing on the sonar display, but no obvious shipwreck. It was likely the search position was off, but by how much? The ROV was still too shallow, indicating that we needed to descend even deeper into the gully. At sixty metres away we came upon a huge boulder and my heart literally sank. For a few frightening seconds I had the worst feeling imaginable that I had got the search badly wrong. I shook my head and said to no one in particular: ‘Don’t tell me that’s what we’ve found.’

  After regaining my composure, I could see from the monitor that the seabed was falling off to our starboard side, so I asked the pilot to head in that direction. Thankfully it didn’t take long and we came across no more boulders along the way. Eight minutes later, at 2.50 a.m., the hull of a shipwreck appeared out of the darkness and we were looking at an object that hadn’t been seen for nearly sixty-seven years. As luck would have it, we came up directly upon a gaping great hole in the ship’s port side. The twisted and torn shell plating was a wound that bore all the hallmarks of a torpedo strike. And in that instant we knew that we had found not only the Centaur, but also what had caused her death.

  Because of the problem with the Seahorse Spirit’s starboard engine, we aborted the dive early after spending only an hour and forty-five minutes on the wreck. But in that brief time we filmed enough distinctive features to prove to everyone that it was indeed the Centaur. Despite the decades lying on the seabed, with all sorts of physical and chemical mechanisms trying to wash away its identity, the green band around the hull and the large red crosses on the bows showed the wreck was a hospital ship. It was a lot less apparent, but enough of the white ‘47’ still peeked through the corrosion and rust-covered paintwork to identify it specifically as the Centaur.

  True to the promise I’d made to him months earlier in return for all the assistance he’d given me, one of my first calls was to Chris Milligan in Canada. John Foley and I left the confines of our hut and stood out in the bright sunshine on the bridge wing of the Seahorse Spirit to get the best possible satellite reception. John asked if it was okay for him to break the good news to Chris, which was only right given that their partnership was the origin of the success all three of us were sharing. I am writing this now with the sad knowledge that John passed away in the summer of 2015, way too early for a man so full of energy and still in the productive years of his life. I remember him in many ways, but the moment I keep at the forefront of my memory is that conversation with Chris on the bridge wing as he regaled him with what we had seen of the shipwreck. I can hear Chris’s excited voice flowing through the handset, while John’s face beams with equal delight.

  Over the next two and a half days we made three more dives to the wreck and spent a total of twenty-six hours conducting a full visual survey of the hull and the small debris field nearby. As I had surmised from the sonar images, the wreck was leaning over towards its port side at an angle of about fifty degrees, with the bow forward of the bridge nearly severed from the rest of the hull. The torpedo and oil tank explosions surely broke the back of the ship, and in view of the extensive damage to the hull, it was no surprise that Centaur sank so quickly. In fact the damage along the starboard side was considerably worse than the port side, suggesting that the secondary oil tank explosion was the main culprit in sending her to the bottom. The partially imploded foremast, squeezed and folded like a collapsed straw, was another indication of how rapidly she sank. The only real surprise to me was that the bow somehow remained attached to the hull and did not break away during the 2,000-metre death plunge to the seabed.

  Judging by the crumpled keel, bent railings and collapsed decks, the ship hit the seabed at tremendous speed (certainly faster than her normal twelve-knot cruising speed), causing additional impact damage. Both the foremast and mainmast were down, as was the funnel, which made flying the ROV over the top of the wreck easier, as there were hardly any obstructions to concern the pilots. With the navigating bridge blown off by the explosions, and the wooden ceiling of the officer’s house stripped away by years of biological and chemical degradation, it was possible for our cameras to peer down directly into the captain’s quarters. Generally what you see in the interior of shipwrecks this age is an accumulation of grey-black detritus that makes identifying anything impossible. However, as Remora hovered above his private quarters, we caught glimpses of Captain George Murray’s former life.

  A white porcelain washbasin was the first object that caught my eye. I checked the detailed plans I had for the ship and could see that this was Murray’s bathroom. Very small movements of the ROV and the camera brought other objects into view, as Remora’s LED lights illuminated a scene that had been permanently dark for the previous sixty-six years. Next to the washbasin was Murray’s bath, partially filled with debris and a brown sea anemone whose tentacles fanned out like the rays of the sun. The ROV moved a fraction further, allowing my camera to focus on two shiny chrome bath taps, and a large black valve that John Foley thought was used for the bathroom’s hot-water supply. Opposite the bath was an open doorway that led to Murray’s toilet and bedroom. Our lights reached far enough into the next room to see a single leather shoe lying on the floor.

  Like most of those who were off duty at the time, Murray would have been asleep when the torpedo struck, and in rushing to the boat deck at the initial shock of the explosion would have had no time to put his shoes on. His priority would have been to get the lifeboats launched as quickly as possible, and knowing that every second counted, he evidently ran out barefoot. He was last seen with a group of men valiantly but unsuccessfully trying to launch lifeboat no. 2. I realised we were looking at the most private spaces of Murray’s on-board life, but there was nothing ghoulish or disrespectful about the pictures we took. In my experience it is these types of pictures that best tell the human side of a tragedy and the toll in lives lost. In this case Murray’s solitary shoe speaks to the urgency and panic that consumed the ship in the seconds after Centaur was attacked.

  According to the ship’s plans, the aft cabin on the port side of the officers’ house was reserved for Centaur’s second officer: this was Gordon Rippon’s cabin. We knew of course that Rippon had been one of those who had survived, but it was a compartment on the ship that John and I still wanted to find. Rippon featured prominently in Chris and John’s book, and I felt I owed him a huge debt for leading me to the wreck. In fact, we all owed him for his superb navigation. So as the ROV traversed down the port side of the boat deck, I asked the pilots to stop at the third doorway. The door to Rippon’s cabin, like the other two on this deck, was sprung wide open, clear evidence that it had been abandoned quickly, though the fifty-degree list of the wreck prevented us from having a close look inside. The only thing visible in the room, because it stood out against the
dark background, was a white galatheid crab perched on the threshold. This crab, a common deep-sea dweller, would have been living off the wooden structure of the wreck it had made its home.

  After documenting the damage to Centaur, our survey essentially consisted of flying around the entire ship while the video cameras recorded continuously and I took selective photographs with an independent still camera. I had a wide-screen television mounted on the wall of our hut, and had got carpenters to build a large wooden table where we laid out all the ship’s plans and drawings. This was where John and I stood for hours on end, matching every feature we filmed against the plans I found in various archives. The ROV never entered the wreck but we did use the powerful high-definition cameras to zoom inside the converted cargo holds to see what they contained. There were plenty of hospital cots jumbled on top of each other, but no sign of any illegal arms.

  Of all Centaur’s features, the one I most wanted to capture was the iconic red crosses that identified her as a hospital ship on a mission of mercy. I believed people would connect with the symbolism of the crosses if I could only photograph them the right way. The challenge was to capture their full seven-by-seven-foot size, while shining enough light on them to make out their colour, which was still vivid when the ROV was up close. We were working on the cross on the port bow, but getting the shot I wanted was proving to be impossible. With the ROV up close, there was enough light to bring out the colour, but at that distance we’d see less than half the cross. If we pulled back, we could frame the whole cross but our lights weren’t powerful enough and the red would turn to black. We tried different light combinations at different distances, but getting the perfect balance was beyond the technology we had available. Photographers all around the world will have faced similar problems with light and distance, except that in the deep ocean there is zero ambient light, and as scuba divers well know, red is the first colour absorbed in seawater to the point where it disappears. Not willing to accept total defeat, I took a series of photos of different parts of the cross close up with the colour still visible, hoping that these could be stitched together at a later date into a single coherent image.

  I was still absorbing my disappointment over the red crosses when Phoenix’s pilot asked me where I wanted him to fly next. As we hadn’t seen the mooring winches on the bow, I asked him to come up over the railing on the port side, which would bring the ROV above the bow forward of the breakwater. As the ROV gained altitude and the camera tilted down, an unmistakable shape appeared on the deck. For a split second I couldn’t believe we could be so lucky, but the glint of bronze reflecting off our lights confirmed my first impression. It was the ship’s bell, lodged upside down between two ventilation pipes. Actually, it was an amazing stroke of luck that it had fallen where it did, because if it had landed anywhere else, the fifty-degree list would have resulted in it rolling off into the mud, where it would have been lost forever.

  The ROV was too high to make out any of the bell’s details, so I asked the pilot to descend a bit in order to get a closer look. At the same time I zoomed in with my camera and began to focus on what appeared to be large block letters on the side of the bell facing our view. The letters were partly obscured by surface corrosion, and one was hidden behind the rust emanating from the base of a pipe, but we could clearly make out ‘CENTAU’ – all upside down, of course. Because the conversion into a hospital ship meant that the name of the ship was removed from where it normally appeared on the stern and bows, I had had no expectation of seeing it anywhere. Finding the bell this way was quite simply a miraculous double surprise. First that it had been caught between the pipes, and second that it had landed with the name facing up. The odds of that happening in the midst of the chaos and calamity to which the ship was subjected must be astronomical.

  I had a second motive during this survey, which for the time being I kept to myself. It was to find a permanent and visually accessible place on the wreck to deploy the Centaur Association’s plaque, a task they had entrusted to my care and which I took very seriously. Having seen the steel plate I used during the test disappear into the muddy seabed, there was no way I was going to allow that to happen to the association’s precious plaque. With the wooden officers’ house full of holes and the stern cluttered by the toppled mainmast and associated rigging, the best place appeared to be a clear area on the shelter deck starboard of the no. 1 cargo hold. Beneath the teak sheathing that was being slowly consumed by the galatheid crab and his friends, the shelter deck was made of steel, so it was permanent and clearly strong enough to support the weight of the plaque.

  My chief problem, however, was that Ed Slaughter, the maritime archaeologist and historic shipwreck officer for the Queensland museum who was acting as the on-board observer for the government, was dead set against any physical disturbance of the wreck. I understood his responsibility and I personally made sure there was no accidental interference between the ROV and the wreck during the surveys we conducted. But in my mind he was missing the bigger picture of the importance and significance of the plaque to the association and the broader group of interested parties. In a very tangible way it would serve as a gravestone for the 268 people who had perished on the Centaur. And for all those families whose personal tributes were contained on the CD incorporated into the plaque, it physically connected them to the last resting place of their relatives. Besides, there was absolutely no conceivable way that a 29 lb bronze plaque laid on the deck would cause damage to a 3,066-ton shipwreck.

  Once John and I were satisfied that we had full video and photographic coverage of the wreck, we moved out into the debris field to see what parts of the ship had landed there. Although the field was very small, it contained its own remarkable items, including hospital cots, leather boots, a teacup, a steamer trunk, and most incredibly, two army slouch hats. Of everything I photographed, it was a picture of one of these delicate felt hats lying on the seabed that prompted the biggest outpouring of emotion from the public. I’d thought the red crosses would be the image that summed up Centaur’s tragic story. Instead, it was that poignant picture of the iconic symbol of the Australian army that made people appreciate the fact that the loss of Centaur, above everything else, was a human tragedy.

  In preparation for the final dive, I was quietly busy laying the groundwork to get official approval to place the association’s plaque on the wreck, above the protestations of Ed Slaughter. Because this action would be legally seen as disturbing an historic shipwreck, which was the brand-new status of Centaur due to our discovery of its location, I had to submit an application to the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (DEWHA). Jan Thomas and Richard Jones had already canvassed the association membership and there were no objections to my proposal, while Anthony Crack was also in my corner, lining up Paul Lucas to ring Peter Garrett, the DEWHA minister, to explain the situation. At one point I was so consumed with completing the application that I actually had to suspend the ROV operations for an hour to give it my full attention.

  Ed Slaughter wasn’t too pleased with the approach I was taking. I can only assume it was because he thought I was questioning his authority, whereas I just felt the matter was so important it needed to be decided by someone higher up the chain. The breakdown in my relationship with Ed was unfortunate, but I was convinced I was doing the right thing for everyone involved, especially the Centaur Association who entrusted me with this solemn responsibility. A mere two hours after my application was submitted, I got the answer I wanted in the form of DEWHA Permit No. 14, authorizing me to place the memorial plaque on the shipwreck. If any more proof was needed that the government agreed enthusiastically with my proposal, it came from Garrett himself, who issued a statement the same day declaring that his department had approved the application in record time so as not to delay the project.

  The following morning, at 5 a.m., the Remora III ROV was on the seabed, moving into position towards the wreck with the memorial plaque secured to th
e bottom frame of the vehicle. A rope lanyard tied to two corners of the plaque was held in the jaws of Remoras twin manipulator arms. We had talked through the plan several times, so now it was just a matter of executing it. I’d even taken the extra step of lining the back of the plaque with rubber to prevent any galvanic corrosion if the bronze made contact with steel parts of the wreck.

  The delicate business of laying the plaque on the sloping foredeck was in the hands of Paul Nelson, the Phoenix supervisor, who was controlling the manipulator arms and had to release the lanyard from the jaws at exactly the right moment. When the ROV got to the spot I’d picked out, I gave the order for Paul to release and he did so expertly. Despite the steep angle of the bow, the plaque remained firmly in place and the lanyard floated up as designed. A great deal of thought had gone into creating this plaque and I knew that people were going to be very happy to see that it was now permanently in place exactly where it belonged. It was in a perfect position, with nothing nearby to detract from its simple beauty and the words and emblems carefully chosen by the Centaur Association.

  IN MEMORY OF SHIPMATES,

  RELATIVES, COLLEAGUES AND FRIENDS

  WHO PAID THE SUPREME SACRIFICE ON A

  MISSION OF MERCY, I4 MAY I943

  2/3 AHS CENTAUR ASSOCIATION

  2010

  LEST WE FORGET

  Although the loss of AHS Centaur didn’t carry the same national significance as that of HMAS Sydney, the discovery of Centaur’s wreck was a momentous event for Brisbane and for the relatives spread throughout Australia. For me personally, it was another successful discovery of an important shipwreck, and a wonderful opportunity to use my skills again to help people find their relatives and obtain some peace and comfort from answers to questions they never thought would be resolved.