Working Underwater: The Story of the Commercial Diving Industry

With the world’s first practical diving gear,
the brothers made numerous successful dives,
including salvage operations on two of
England’s best-known shipwrecks, the Royal
George and the Mary Rose.
A 100-gun, first-rate ship of the line, the
Royal George had capsized off Portsmouth in
1782 with roughly 900 crew and family
members drowned. At the time, it was the
largest warship in the world. Diving on the
wreckage from 1834 to 1836, Charles Deane
recovered 28 of the ship’s cannon.
Meanwhile, after fishing boats started getting
their nets tangled in something on the bottom
of the Solent, the straits north of the Isle of
Wight, the British Admiralty hired diver Henry
Abbinett to see if he could determine what had
been snaring the nets. In June 1836 he found
that it was the wreckage of a large ship resting
on its side partially imbedded into the sea floor.
Rather than proceeding with Abbinett, the
Navy turned to Charles Deane based on his
success in working the wreck of the Royal
George. In mid-month, Dean and his partner,
William Edwards, began diving on the wreck.
They brought up some of the ship’s timbers,
weapons and other artifacts to the surface.
Based on the maker’s stamp on one of the
recovered guns, the wreck was positively
identified as the Mary Rose that August. That
warship had gone down on July 19, 1545,
during the Battle of Solent with the loss of
some four hundred lives.
Even though the Mary Rose had been
beneath the sea for nearly three hundred years,
the diving effort was more a commercial
enterprise than historical project. The
fishermen and Deane and his partner made
money off the deal, though Abbinett was denied
a share in the profits.
In 1837, Siebe introduced what came to be
called the “closed” dress as opposed to the
earlier diving jacket, which was called an
“open” dress since it was not watertight.
Deane began diving on the Mary Rose again
in 1840. This time, in another commercial
diving first, he used explosives to expose
more of the wreckage and brought up more
relics that would be offered for sale.
Left: Charles and John Deane wrote the first
diving manual in 1836.
Right: An illustration of Charles Deane
working twenty-one feet underwater off the
London commercial dock.
THE HISTORY OF COMMERCIAL DIVING
15