The history of underwater exploration in Sri Lanka can be said to have originated with the pearl divers of the Gulf of Mannar, who several thousand years ago began trawling the bottom of the sea for oysters. In the modern era, however, the first event of significance occurred in 1864-5 when the Viennese landscape and genre painter, Eugene de Ransonnet, visited the island and used a diving-bell to sketch the coral banks off the port of Galle. These remarkable sketches are reproduced in the book Early Prints of Ceylon by R. K. de Silva (1985).
The British Navy used divers, principally to check the hulls of the ships in the bases at Colombo and Trincomalee. But it was not until the late 1930s, when face masks, snorkels and flippers arrived on the island, that the wonderfully rich and varied underwater life around it could be viewed with comparative ease, if only from the surface. During World War Two, divers were used defensively to carry out underwater patrols of the bases in case of Japanese infiltration.
In 1943, a floating dock named AFD 26, reputed to be the biggest ever built, broke its back in Trincomalee Harbour with the battleship H.M.S. Valiant berthed in her. The bows of the ship were soon suspended above the water, with her stern submerged, and to save her from breaking her own back, depth charges were dropped to settle the dock on an even keel. AFD 26, whose twisted superstructure protruded from the harbour waters for the best part of twenty-five years, was finally raised after many abortive attempts in 1968 by a team of French divers in one of the largest ever salvage operations of its type.
In the years after the war, a Sri Lankan named Rodney Jonklaas, a renowned spearfisher, pioneered scuba-diving locally. It was Jonklaas who was standing on the Colombo quayside in 1956 when the then not-so-well-known science fiction writer Arthur Clarke and his friend, a young ex-Merchant Navy diver called Mike Wilson, arrived on the island. Wilson had taught Clarke to dive, first in a London swimming pool and then in the English Channel. They had spent over a year exploring the Great Barrier Reef, and were now eager to sample what Sri Lanka had to offer.
Clarke and Wilson’s first dive in Sri Lanka was off Akurala Reef near Galle, where they discovered that the sharks were much less aggressive than those of the Great Barrier Reef. Within months they had explored six underwater wrecks, two of which had gone down off the Akurala Reef. One of these was the Earl of Shaftesbury, which sank in 1893. The other was the nearby Conch, one of the first oil tankers of the Shell Company, which sank in 1903. They also explored a Danish wreck, a cargo passenger ship called the Elsia, which had caught fire before sinking in 1939.
There were contemporary wrecks to explore as well, for in early 1956 the Greek freighter Aenos, carrying 6,000 tons of manganese, struck Rala Gala Reef north of Galle and sank. The crew was rescued by local fishermen, who then proceeded to plunder the upper parts of the ship, which remained above water. Clarke and Wilson arrived five days later to see what they could bring up from beneath the waves. In the event, however, they could only salvage several tool chests and some coffee jugs.
Parallel to such underwater exploration, Wilson and Jonklaas endeavoured, without much success, to establish a diving business known as Clarke-Wilson Associates. Their tasks were mainly mundane ones, such as the cleaning of water inlet and sewage outlet grills of ships in Colombo harbour, and morbid ones, such as the retrieval of corpses. The most demanding and perilous job they performed was at Castlereagh Dam, where they had to work in the claustrophobic confines of 40 cm wide shutter case with oxygen piped from the surface.
Jonklaas decided that his future lay in exporting tropical fish, so Wilson tried to promote what he called “submarine safaris” - underwater tours encompassing marine archaeology, exotic fishes and marine mammals, rare seas shells and corals, and unrivalled spear fishing. Despite the stirring words of the advertising - “Your Guides, the top underwater men in the East; your equipment the finest in the World; your diving grounds the most exciting Anywhere” - the idea proved ahead of its time.
Nevertheless, Wilson was undeterred, and set out to make the first underwater documentary to be shot in the seas around the island. The result, a pioneering 25-minute 16mm film called Beneath the Seas of Ceylon, was written, photographed and directed by him. It features several breathtaking scenes of Rodney Jonklaas taming some very large groupers - and then being chased by sharks! For the first time Sri Lankans - and indeed people all over the world - were able to gain an impression of the island’s underwater treasures.
These early undersea explorations and activities culminated in 1961 with Wilson’s discovery, during the filming of his underwater short film Boy Beneath the Sea, of a wreck of unknown origin on the Great Basses Reef, containing several cannon and thousands of silver Moghul rupees, all dated 1702. Following discussions with the BBC, Wilson was contracted to make a documentary on a fresh exploration of the wreck, to be mounted in 1963. The film, called Treasure of the Great Reef, turned out to be a fine example of the genre at a time when underwater photography was less common and less sophisticated. The narration for the film was done by Clarke, who also wrote a book of the same name on the subject - his only work of non-fiction concerned exclusively with Sri Lanka.
A year earlier, however, Wilson had made his debut as a feature director with Ranmuthu Duwa, which has the distinction of being the first full-length film in colour to be produced in Sri Lanka. The film predictably involves much underwater photography, in particular the discovery of sea treasure. It may not have been great art, but it proved to be a massive hit with audiences. Most importantly, the making of the film in the waters around Swami Rock, Trincomalee, was to lead to another underwater discovery by Wilson of greater cultural significance than the earlier chests of silver coins.
When Jonklaas and Wilson had first dived at this spot in 1956, the Brahmin of the Tirukonesvaram temple on the top of Swami Rock - which had been sacked and pushed into the sea by the Portuguese centuries before - had requested them to keep a special eye open for the lingam associated with their holy site. Although they made many dives at this spot, and got to know the bottom well, they found nothing. Then one day in 1962, while using the site as a film location for Ranmuthu Duwa, Wilson went for a dive to cool off during a camera break. On the bottom, he suddenly perceived a perfectly circular pillar - it was the lingam! He delivered the lingam to the temple where it was enshrined and has been worshipped ever since. (As you approach the temple, it is located in a shrine on the right hand side of the entrance.)
The discovery of the lingam was to have a great personal impact on Wilson’s life. Within a decade he had given up both diving and film-making, renounced the household life and become a swami. It was the end of the pioneering era of diving in Sri Lanka and the beginning of a new one - one which has been rightfully dominated by a generation of increasingly professional Sri Lankan divers, who undertake an array of services from salvage to marine archaeology. Nevertheless, the tales of Wilson’s dives on the aircraft carrier, H. M. S. Hermes, sunk by the Japanese in 1942 off Batticaloa, are now the stuff of legend (he kept the huge brass starboard lamp in his bedroom), and his idea of ‘submarine safaris’ lives on in style - even though he himself died in 1995.
