Submarine saga surfaces at lit festival

Steven Schwankert's passion for diving led him to stumble upon the story of a sunken British submarine and bring it to life in his Poseidon: China's Secret Salvage of Britain's Lost Submarine. [Photo Provided to China Daily]

US author discusses a sunken British submarine, the historic self-rescue effort and China's salvaging of the past. Matt Hodges reports in Shanghai.

It sounds like the plot of an underwater thriller: A British submarine collides with a Chinese cargo ship off Weihai, Shandong province, in 1931 and sinks, prompting some of the crew to risk a potentially suicidal dash to the surface using experimental proto-scuba gear.

Four decades later, the government orders the Shanghai salvage bureau to dig up the wreckage from the Bohai Sea for unknown reasons, a move that remains hidden from the rest of the world for the next 30 years. Weihai served as a British colonial enclave until 1930.

The full details of this gripping story are painstakingly researched and colorfully brought to life in Steven Schwankert's Poseidon: China's Secret Salvage of Britain's Lost Submarine, published in Hong Kong in 2013.

It pairs well with the 2013 documentary The Poseidon Project by British brothers Arthur and Luther Jones, which casts Schwankert and his project in a starring role.

"(The book) took me on a six- to seven-year journey, with lots of twists and turns," Schwankert says in a talk at M on the Bund as part of the Shanghai International Literary Festival.

Six of the 26 trapped crewmen survived, including one of two Chinese mates. The other, who reportedly panicked, failed to make it to the surface.

His body was never discovered.

The story made history as it was the first time downed submariners had successfully escaped using the new Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus, which led to its widespread adoption by the Royal Navy.

The old China hand, who serves as a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Asia Chapter Chair of The Explorer's Club, described how he brought the story to the attention of the British Navy en route to researching his book.

He also discussed diving submerged parts of the Great Wall - Schwankert founded SinoScuba, Beijing's first professional scuba diving operator, in 2003. He says China has a growing interest in rediscovering its underwater heritage.

"This is the dawning of a golden age of underwater discovery in China," he says. "The stuff that's going to come out of the water in the next five years is going to be amazing. There hasn't been an archeological renaissance like this anywhere in the world since the 1970s."