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

J.oe MacInnis admits that there are simply too many places to start telling the story of life in the deep ocean. At 88 years old, the famous Canadian underwater explorer has many decades to fall back on. There was a time when he and a Russian deep-sea explorer and pilot, Anatoly Sagalevich, were snagged by a telephone wire stretched from the Titanic’s cockpit, trapping them two and a half miles below the surface.

Another might be the moment he and his team stared in disbelief through a porthole at the Edmund Fitzgerald, the 222-meter (729-foot) ship that disappeared 50 years ago into the depths of Lake Superior, so quickly that no member of the crew could make 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 to the Canadian High Arctic, battling the unforgiving ice to find a lost British ship crushed by the same elements.

Or, while diving in the waters off the Florida Keys “buzzing with history,” he came across a group of lobsters clustered in a reef made entirely of 16th-century silver bars from a Spanish galleon.

But for MacInnis, a doctor, diver and writer, the starting point is simple: the shipwrecks themselves, those moments when worlds were torn apart by the raw power of the ocean. Ships helped him better understand the natural world and, increasingly, himself.

“In the final arc of your life, you start to think differently about shipwrecks and they become a metaphor for understanding the forces of the world,” he says from his home in Toronto. “Because, above all, they help us deal with one of the most difficult things we have to do as humans: accept the reality that we are mortal.

“Death happens to us, but it gives life an unexpected beauty and a deep sense of urgency,” adds MacInnis.

Almost all of the space on the planet where life can exist is in the oceans – and yet they remain the least explored part of the Earth. Yet those who spend their lives enveloped by the timelessness of the oceans experience a power that has persuaded explorers to risk their lives for a chance to unlock the smallest of its mysteries.

Among those at the forefront of discovery, few have encountered as many giants as MacInnis, whose career spanned a golden age of underwater exploration.

“I worked alongside pioneers and saw what was possible,” he says of an era that, in addition to his friendships with Jacques Cousteau, Robert Ballard and Buzz Aldrin, included a secret U.S. Navy project to see if humans could live deep underwater.

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

MacInnis, described in a 1971 issue of Popular Mechanics as a “roaring, life-loving young Canadian,” had long been one of the ocean’s most enthusiastic students. He was the first to dive to the North Pole and the team he led was both the first to build a polar diving station – the Sub-Igloo – and the first to film narwhals, bowhead whales and belugas underwater.

He took former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau diving in the Arctic. He also accompanied King Charles, then aged 26, under the ice.

MacInnis was part of the French and American team that located the Titanic’s final resting place in 1985. He later was part of a Canadian-Russian expedition to film a documentary about the wreck. During the final dive, he and the submersible’s pilot Sagalevich were momentarily stuck on top of the ship.

He remains convinced that these years of collaboration between nations, in the pursuit of science, constituted a “small step” towards the collapse of the Cold War and the coming collapse of the Berlin Wall.

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

In 1980, five years before the discovery of the Titanic, he led a Canadian expedition to locate HMS Breadalbane – one of the ships sent in 1853 to help search for HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, lost during Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to chart the Northwest Passage..

The discovery of HMS Breadalbane made it the most northerly wreck ever discovered. MacInnis then searched for the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, a wreck preserved by the cold, clear waters of Lake Superior on the border of Canada and the United States, as well as in the song of Canadian folk music hero and friend Gordon Lightfoot.

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

Lightfoot’s question in what MacInnis calls “the song of all wrecks” captures the intense focus of the explorer, whose passion in recent years has shifted away from the science and technology behind wrecks, and more toward the human psychology of them.

“When the world is ripped away from you, when it’s torn apart before your eyes, how do you react? For me, shipwrecks have always been about the people who survived – or the people who didn’t survive. Because in our own lives, we can sometimes find ourselves fighting to get to shore,” he says. “I like to say that after years in the ocean, I’m an alpha coward with a doctorate in fear.”

Combining the ideas of fear, chaos, and decision-making gave MacInnis an outlet for his energy. His most recent book is on leadership and he is increasingly obsessed with the relationship between wreckage, survival and global polycrisis – a term borrowed from a good friend – which reflects the challenges of geopolitical chaos and the 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 on fire right now, to do what I can to help.”

MacInnis recently suffered a heart attack and minor stroke – and with it an uncomfortable glimpse into his own mortality. “My soft pink body, with its 2,000 moving parts and 100,000 biochemical reactions, is slowly falling apart. I no longer have the sharpness I used to have.”

“I’m frantically trying to build my own lifeboat with the help of wonderful people. But I know the shore is an infinite distance from where I am. For the first time, really, I find myself in my own shipwreck.”

His house has many objects from the deep sea, including a piece of foam from the submersible used – and signed – by James Cameron during his historic solo dive to reach the deepest place in the ocean.

“To Dr. Joe MacInnis,” it reads. “Legend, mentor, shipmate… friend.”