Appeared in DIVER July 2007
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Wreck of the Colossus
Scilly reaction
Many divers will have heard rumblings and grumblings from the Scilly Isles diving community in 2000 about how Todd Stevens dived in among them. He settled down there to earn his living as a qualified carpenter, while aiming to switch his main future earnings to running dive charters for the ever-increasing number of diving visitors.
The locals' original welcome changed after Stevens made his big find in June, 2001 - or rather, after his wife Carmen fanned away the seabed sand and got the first sight of a 12ft-tall wooden carved statue of an ancient warrior from the stern quarter gallery of the Colossus. The 74-gun warship had been wrecked near Samson Island on 10 December, 1798.
After that the locals refused to fill his bottles, shadowed his every move, watched him at work on the seabed and contacted the Archaelogical Diving Unit ahead of him. When the ADU people arrived on the scene, Stevens writes that they didn't seem to want to have much to do with those who had actually found the statue.
Certainly they seem to have put most of the rest of the Scillies diving community ahead of Stevens, and he ended up being banned from diving the area around the Colossus wreck for the next three years.
He was not even allowed to help with the lift of that wonderful carving, which had somehow escaped being destroyed by the Scilly storms during more than 200 years on the seabed.
It's an unhappy tale that Stevens tells in his book, but DIVER readers will find it fascinating, matching memories of their own days under water. But most of them won't, of course, have made the find of a lifetime!
Kendall McDonald
Wreck of the Colossus, The Find Of A Lifetime by Todd Stevens, Post Box Publications, ISBN 0955343011. Softback, 256pp. £15
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