It is a strange experience to search for one thing and find something else entirely. That is especially true when what is discovered far exceeds the value of the original objective. Rarely is the miner so fortunate to begin digging for coal, only to strike gold.

In that way, it seems my luck is far better than most. While searching for shipwrecks that would serve as candidates for an exploration project in China’s coastal waters, I unknowingly stumbled into a dusty corner of British and Chinese maritime history. Thankfully for those of us who seek history not so much in...

The Irishman’s prayer ended after “evil”; Catholics did not say that last bit. He opened his eyes, raised his head, and unclasped his hands, looking around the compartment in the dim glimmer of the flashlight, hoping that his vision would adjust and allow him to see something of the other men. They stood gathered around the ladder, these men that were about to follow his orders to risk their lives, to possibly save them, and to possibly lose them.

When he joined the Royal Navy on his eighteenth birthday—St. Patrick’s Day, 1915—in his native County Cork in Ireland,...

On Tuesday, June 9, almost halfway through 1931, the developed world was suffering in the grip of the Great Depression, but life went on even as millions struggled. In the United States, the Empire State Building, the world’s tallest, had opened in New York on May 1. Farther uptown in Harlem, Cab Calloway & His Cotton Club Orchestra performed at their eponymous venue, and their song “Minnie the Moocher” was on its way to becoming one of the year’s most popular records. Less than a week before that Tuesday, America’s Public Enemy No. 1, Al Capone, had finally been indicted,...

During its time as a British colony, Weihaiwei was far from a jewel in the crown. It did not have the magnificent harbor of Hong Kong. It did not see the diverse cargo of Singapore. It was a backwater before it ever came under British control. Weihaiwei’s process of becoming a British colony illustrates the geopolitical forces at work in East Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and with them the interests of imperial powers colliding along the China coast.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, imperial Japan’s industrial edge over the rest of Asia,...

That Tuesday in June promised to be a fine late spring day for coastal Shandong Province. The air on Liu Gong Island bore a slight nip from the still-cold waters of Weihaiwei Harbor and the Gulf of Pechihli, into which it emptied. However, given the choice of the chill or the sweltering temperatures and suffocating humidity of Hong Kong or Singapore, the majority of the Fourth Submarine Flotilla’s men would have chosen the more temperate surroundings.

Poseidon’s men awoke on HMSMedway, the depot ship that served as the submariners’ home when it was not in transit or on exercise,...

The men inPoseidon’s forward torpedo compartment were lucky, and not just because they were still alive.

When the submarine came to rest on the Gulf of Pechihli’s muddy bottom, the watertight door began to leak. It took all six of the navy men to shut it, and even then water still flowed in. Reginald Clarke in particular strained to close the door, and took a few minutes to recover. A gauge said they had sunk in 126 feet (38 meters) of water. The men had only trained on the Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus (DSEA) prior to deployment in a...

Upon reaching the surface,Poseidon’s survivors were lauded as heroes, having the courage to attempt escape and the luck to succeed. But what actually happened in the torpedo room may have been different from what was presented in official reports.

There are three known, complete versions of the events in the torpedo room and subsequent escape: Patrick Willis’s, first related at the court of enquiry hearing; Edmund Holt’s, also presented in part at the court of enquiry, but in full in Robert H.Davis’s Deep Diving and Submarine Operations, seemingly included in the text as proof of the concept of...

In a time without television or the Internet, news ofPoseidon’s sinking, and commensurate media coverage, was exceptionally swift and comprehensive.

Most surprising is not the British public’s reaction to the event or the media’s interest in covering it. Instead, the surprise comes from the speed with which the story reached smaller communities in places such as the US. Just as the sinking of the Russian submarineKurskdid almost seventy years later, the loss ofPoseidonand the drama of men trapped within captured the world’s attention, if only for a short time.

To understand the speed at which...

Less than a week after the loss ofPoseidon, a court of enquiry was convened aboard the flotilla’s depot ship, HMSMedway. The three-man panel comprised Captain Geoffrey Layton of HMSSuffolk, the court’s president and a submariner of renown from World War I; Commander R. A. McIntyre, of HMSOsiris, anOdin-class submarine; and Commander Gerald P. Bowen, also of HMS Suffolk. The court sought to find answers to the following questions: What was the cause of the collision? Were all possible steps taken to keep the vessel afloat after the collision? Were all possible steps taken to save...

Although the loss ofPoseidonand subsequent court-martial proceedings had publicly damaged Galpin’s professional reputation, privately his stature as a naval officer seemed little diminished. In a message from the commander in chief in China to the Admiralty, dated July 4, his leadership of the remainingPoseidon crewwas sought once again:

I am most anxious to appoint Lt. Cdr. Galpin to command the draft of survivors returning to England and urgently request Admiralty approval. This officer with a fine record is without private resources and has wife in China whose passage home has to be paid by him. Forwarded...

I found a submarine using Google.

In late May 2005, I paid a visit to Ed Lanfranco, United Press International’s Beijing bureau chief. I had first met him in the late 1990s, when we were both interlopers in the Internet industry, he an analyst and I a reporter and entrepreneur. I first visited China in 1985 as a tour group tourist, when I already had a journalism career in mind, and it seemed like a place where one would never run out of things to write about. Almost ten years after I finally moved to Beijing, that was as true...

To Americans, London is not a real place. Of course, we know and acknowledge it as the British capital and as a world metropolis. But really, it is a city of legend and myth.

Paddington Bear waits at his eponymous railway station, as Sherlock Holmes sits and smokes his pipe and ponders his latest mystery over at 221B Baker Street. Soccer hooligans roam the streets, causing trouble regardless of whether Arsenal or Chelsea won. Harry Potter soars over London Bridge (which Tower Bridge is often mistakenly called, since why would London Bridge now be in Arizona) fighting the Death Eaters,...

The first time I visited it, Weihai was a KFC city.

While many observers find it useful to classify Chinese cities as first tier (Beijing, Shanghai) or second tier (Hangzhou, Nanjing) to describe levels of income and relative quality of life, the presence of certain fast-food outlets may be a more meaningful measure to someone unfamiliar with China’s cities. Starbucks Coffee appears only in cities where per capita income is the highest. Wander outside China’s largest metropolitan areas, especially those that do not have daily international air connections, and opportunities to enjoy expensive caffeinated beverages diminish rapidly. McDonald’s is slightly...

I went back to London later in 2006 for a simple reason: During my first visit, I did not get all the information and material that I needed.

At the risk of paraphrasing former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,¹ sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know. That is, we expect that a story will turn out one way or another, or that we need this bit of information or that, only to discover that the story is different from what we thought or that we should seek different information. As thePoseidonresearch developed, it was clear that...

The story and history of the Royal Navy submarine was recorded primarily in English despite the fact thatPoseidonsank off the coast of China. Official accounts, witness statements, court of enquiry proceedings, all of these would have been written in English, and some of them handwritten at that. Chinese sources were not at the top of my list of those I needed to consult. Chinese press accounts and archival material would add nice local color to the story but little more, I thought. Except for an interview with Ah Hai, the Chinese assistant who escaped from the torpedo room,...

Xiandai jianchuan(Modern Ships) is one of several general-interest naval magazines that are popular with younger, generally male, readers in China. Along with articles discussing the continuing development of China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLA Navy), it looks at the relative strengths of other forces. It also sometimes includes translated analyses of Chinese forces by overseas observers. Like any good fantasy magazine, it has numerous photographs and even full-color gatefolds, in this case of various ship classes, be they aircraft carriers, submarines, or cruisers, foreign, or domestic. Published in Beijing, the magazine is available readily from newspaper kiosks throughout the...

A year passed between my first visit to Weihai and my second. The initial trip had been positive but had not provided any of the answers I had hoped would lie somewhere on Liu Gong Island. There were hints—maps, vistas, and landmarks—but I ended up being little more than a determined tourist.

This time would be different. I had a very powerful new tool: the photo of Lovock’s and Winter’s headstones, which would allow me to match the locations of their graves with the coastline along the northeastern edge of Weihai Harbor. During the previous visit, I only...

Throughout thePoseidonresearch, there was something missing from the process: Despite the sinking having taken place in the twentieth century, there was no personal connection to the incident. Not only had all the survivors passed away but, in many instances, so had their children. The submarine had been salvaged and, therefore, diving on the wreck, the genesis of the search, would not be possible. World War II historians can stand on the ground or float above the places their subjects once battled, sometimes even with men or women who fought there. But neither thePoseidonnor its former crew...