A diving prince, sunken treasure and snared by the Titanic: Joe MacInnis on his ‘rip-roaring’ life as an ocean adventurer | Oceans

JOe McInnis admits there are too many places to begin to tell the story of life in the deep ocean. The famous Canadian underwater explorer is 88 years old and has many decades ahead of him. In one case, he and Russian explorer and deep-sea pilot Anatoly Sagalevich were caught on a telephone wire running from the Titanic's wheelhouse, leaving the pair trapped two and a half miles below the surface.

Another might be the moment he and his crew looked out the window in disbelief at the Edmund Fitzgerald, a 222-meter (729-foot) ship that disappeared 50 years ago. into the depths of Lake Superiorso quickly that none of the crew could call for help. McInnis and his crew were the first people to see the crash site.

It may also be the time when he led an expedition into the Canadian high Arctic, battling unforgiving ice to find a lost British ship crushed by the same elements.

Or, while diving into waters off the Florida Keys “filled with history,” he passed a herd of lobsters clustered on a reef made entirely of 16th-century silver bullion from a Spanish galleon.

But for McInnis, a doctor, diver and writer, the starting point is simple: the shipwrecks themselves, the moments when worlds were torn apart by the raw power of the ocean. The ships helped him better understand the natural world and, in many ways, himself.

“At the last stage of your life, you start to think about shipwrecks differently, and they become a metaphor for understanding the forces of the world,” he says from his home in Toronto. “Because, first of all, they help us deal with one of the hardest things we have to do as humans: face the reality that we are mortal.

“Death comes for us, but it gives life an unexpected beauty and a deep sense of urgency,” McInnis adds.

Almost the entire space on the planet where life can exist found in oceans – and yet it remains the least explored part of the Earth. However, those who spend their lives in the timelessness of the oceans feel a force that motivates explorers to risk their lives for the chance to solve the smallest of its mysteries.

Among those at the forefront of discovery, few have met as many giants as McInnis, whose career coincided with the golden age of undersea exploration.

“I worked with the pioneers and saw what was possible,” he says of an era that, along with friendships with Jacques Cousteau, Robert Ballard and Buzz Aldrin, included a secret U.S. Navy project to discover whether humans could live deep underwater.

“But I have also seen the unforgiving nature of the ocean. I have seen injury and death. In the last stage of my life, I want to take what I learned from him and share it. He will always be the greatest of all teachers.”

McInnis, described in a 1971 issue of Popular Mechanics as a “roaring, exuberant young Canadian,” had long been one of Ocean's most enthusiastic students. He was the first to dive to the North Pole, and the team he led was the first to build a polar dive station. Sub-Igloo – and the first to film a narwhal, a bowhead whale and a beluga whale underwater.

He took former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau with him on an Arctic diving trip. He also accompanied King Charleswho was then 26 years old, under the ice.

McInnis was involved with a French and American team that found the Titanic's final resting place in 1985.. He later participated in a Canadian-Russian expedition to film a documentary about the shipwreck. During the final dive, he and the bathyscaphe pilot Sagalevich were momentarily trapped aboard the ship.

He remains convinced that those years of cooperation between countries in the pursuit of science were a “tiny step” towards the collapse of the Cold War and the impending destruction of the Berlin Wall.

“We were working on science together in the ocean with two Cold War enemies. And I think that reflects what shipwrecks taught me: in moments of crisis, we need each other. We're in this together; none of us are as good as all of us.”

In 1980, five years before the discovery of the Titanic, he led a Canadian expedition to search for HMS Breadalbane, one of the ships sent in 1853 to assist in the search for the Titanic. HMS Erebus And HMS Terrorlost during Sir John Franklin's doomed expedition map the Northwest Passage.

The discovery of HMS Breadalbane makes it the most northerly shipwreck ever found. MacInnis later located the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, a shipwreck preserved in the cold, clear waters of Lake Superior on the Canada-US border, and in the song of a Canadian folk hero and friend Gordon Lightfoot.

“Does anyone know where God’s love goes?” Lightfoot wrote. “When will the waves turn minutes into hours?”

Lightfoot's question in the book, which MacInnis called “the song of all shipwrecks,” reflects the intense focus of a researcher whose passion in recent years has moved away from the science and technology behind shipwrecks and toward the human psychology surrounding them.

“When the world is ripped out of you, when it's torn apart before your very eyes, how do you react? For me, the crash is always about the people who survived—or the ones who didn't. Because in our own lives, we can find ourselves trying to get to shore from time to time,” he says. “I like to say that after years of being on the ocean, I became an alpha coward with a Ph.D. in fear.”

Combining the ideas of fear, chaos and decision-making gave McInnis an outlet for his energy. His latest book is on leadership, and he has become increasingly fixated on the relationship between disaster, survival and global polycrisis – the term copied from a good friend – this reflects the problems of geopolitical chaos and climate crisis.

“I'm old and when you think about the ships, submarines and planes I've used, my carbon footprint is huge. That's why I'm now passionate about doing what I can to help.”

McInnis recently suffered a heart attack and a minor stroke, and with it came an uncomfortable look at his mortality. “My baby pink body with its 2,000 moving parts and 100,000 biochemical reactions is slowly falling apart. I don't have the edge I used to have.

“I'm desperately trying to put together my own lifeboat with the help of wonderful people. But I know that the shore lies an infinite distance from where I am. For the first time, I'm really being shipwrecked myself.”

His home contains many items from the deep sea, including a piece of foam from a submarine used and signed by James Cameron. on his historic solo dive reach the deepest place in the ocean.

“To Dr. Joe McInnis,” it says. “Legend, mentor, shipmate… friend.”

He also has a rusty anchor chain link. Almost four inches long, it is linked to the wreck of HMS Bounty – the story of a maritime disaster that captivated him as a young explorer – and he now realizes he got it wrong.

In 1789, Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian led a mutiny against Captain, Lieutenant William Bligh. Launched into the open with a few dedicated crew, the captain sailed more than 3,600 nautical miles (6,600 km) from Tonga to the safety of Timor. The mutineers eventually sailed 1,350 miles to remote Pitcairn Island and settled there.

“I thought of it as a story of mutiny. There were clear villains and heroes. And yet now, when I think about the crew and Christian traveling so far across the open ocean, I see it as an incredible story of survival and leadership,” McInnis says.

“And so there is a sense of hope that comes from the shipwreck, from the lifeboats that we find ourselves in. It's not a feeble hope; it's hope in action, doing the right thing.”

MacInnis says living alongside people who strive to push the boundaries of human performance has given him a relentless sense of optimism.

“If enough of us can come together and put the planet before ourselves, we have a chance. We really do have a chance.”