Secrets of the deep Joe MacInnis reflects on the golden era of underwater discovery

Now aged 88, the famed Canadian ocean explorer explains why shipwrecks and the cruel sea are the 'greatest of all teachers'

- Leyland Cecco TORONTO

Joe MacInnis admits there are simply too many places to begin telling the story of life in the ocean depths. At 88, the famed Canadian undersea explorer has many decades to draw on. There was the time he and a Russian explorer and deep-water pilot, Anatoly Sagalevich, were snagged by a telephone wire strung from the pilot house of the Titanic, trapping the pair 4km below the surface.

Another might be the moment he and his team stared in disbelief through a porthole window at the Edmund Fitzgerald, the 222-metre ship that vanished 50 years ago into the depths of Lake Superior, so quickly that none of the crew could issue a call for help. MacInnis and his team were the first humans to lay eyes on the wreck.

It could also be the time he led an expedition in the Canadian high Arctic, battling unforgiving ice to locate a lost British vessel.

Or, when diving off the Florida Keys "humming with history", he passed a pod of lobsters clustered in a reef that was composed entirely of 16th-century silver bars from a Spanish galleon.

But for MacInnis, a doctor, diver and writer, the place to start is simple: the shipwrecks themselves, moments when worlds were torn apart by the power of the ocean. The ships have helped him better understand the natural world and, increasingly, himself.

"In the final arc of your life, you start thinking of shipwrecks differently and they become a metaphor for understanding the forces of the world," he said from his Toronto home. "Because, above all, they help us grapple with one of the toughest things that we have to do as humans: to reckon with the reality that we're mortal.

"Death is coming for us, but it gives life an unexpected beauty and a deep sense of urgency," MacInnis added.