Canberra Times and Brisbane Courier Mail, September 2007, by Bron Sibree
Versions of this syndicated article by Bron Sibree appeared in the Canberra Times, on 1 September 2007, as 'Excavating the past for thrills', and the Brisbane Courier Mail, on 8 September 2007, as 'Antiquity reveals truth', as well as elsewhere in Australia. It appeared ahead of David's publicity tour of Australia that month and his participation in the 2007 Brisbane Writer's Festival.
Three decades into his love affair with antiquity,
marine archaeologist David Gibbins retains an adventurer’s thirst for
new horizons and a scholar’s obsession with historical detail. A world
authority on shipwrecks and sunken cities, the Canadian-born archaeologist
and bestselling author has led numerous underwater expeditions around the
world, including many seasons excavating Greek and Roman shipwrecks in the
Mediterranean and a survey of the submerged harbour of ancient Carthage.
He has never lost the thrill of connecting with the past.
'A Roman amphora sherd still gives me the same thrill now as it did when as an 18-year-old I did my first expedition into the Mediterranean, and held one of those things for the first time. I don’t have to see it with all sorts of complicated archaeological knowledge and baggage,' Gibbins says. 'I can see it just as an extraordinary revelation from the past.
It amazes me how many academic archaeologists don’t
seem to have that excitement, and I’ve never lost that.'
It was his fear that his capacity for excitement
might be 'squashed out of me', coupled with a desire to bring
archaeological authenticity to the historical high-concept thriller, that
led Gibbins to leave his position as a university academic in Britain and
turn his hand to writing fiction six years ago. 'It was a big gamble', he
admits, 'and there was a time when I’d wondered whether I’d taken a
step too far. But I really wanted to get back into doing the exploration
and excavation I’d done before I took on my teaching job, and I
calculated that I might do well enough with the fiction to be able to set
aside time and money to do that.'
His debut novel, Atlantis,
published in 30 languages, has sold more than a million copies, and is set
to be adapted into a two part television movie titled The Atlantis Factor in 2008. Add
to that the runaway success of his 2006 second novel, Crusader
Gold, which like Atlantis
has been a New York Times bestseller, and Gibbins is now close to a position
where he can fund future expeditions.
But what excites him most about writing fiction is
that he can give shape to theories about the past that he could never
voice in the academic realm. 'I felt my own imagination was being
curtailed. I’ve always wanted to keep my speculation within what is
truly possible,' he adds, 'yet within what archaeology actually shows us
about the past, there’s already this almost limitless horizon.'
His novel Atlantis,
for instance, a techno-thriller that introduces his archaeologist
protagonist Jack Howard and tells the story of his discovery of that
fabled lost city under the Black Sea, was, explains Gibbins, 'very
plausibly derived from recent actual revelations in archaeology and
geography around the Black Sea. I believe that archaeological
investigations along the Black Sea Coast, where my book is set, will one
day reveal some extraordinary sites. For many authors, the legend of
Atlantis has been way out in the realm of science fiction, but it isn’t
for me. And I think that is perfectly within the ambit of what an
archaeologist and ancient historian should be thinking about.'
Similarly, his second novel, Crusader Gold, uses historical fact and recent archaeological and
geographical discoveries to speculate on the extent of Viking exploration.
It begins in Istanbul’s harbour, where Jack Howard is diving for lost
Crusader treasure, and expands into a quest not only to find the
whereabouts of the fabled Jewish menorah and other treasures of antiquity
looted by the Romans who sacked Jerusalem in 70 AD, but to trace the final
resting place of Harald Hardrada, the legendary Norse king who was
defeated by the English king Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Stamford
Bridge a month before the English themselves were defeated by the Normans
at the 1066 Battle of Hastings. It is a murderous quest that encompasses
the last days of the Nazi regime, the darkest secrets of the modern
Vatican and the terrifying excesses of the Toltec civilization in
Mesoamerica.
Like his fictional protagonist Jack Howard, Gibbins
admits to a fascination with Harald Hardrada.
It first took hold when Gibbins was in Jerusalem, just before the
first Gulf War in 1991. 'Harald Hardrada just completely rivets me. I was
astonished by the fact that this Viking warlord was head of the Byzantine
Emperor’s bodyguard. He was
in Jerusalem in the 11th century well before the Crusaders
arrived there, where he made donations on behalf of the Emperor to the
Holy Sepulchre and pacified the land with his band of Vikings, before
returning to Constantinople where he had an extraordinary escapade with a
princess and then going back to Norway to live in opiate splendour with
his spoils from the Mediterranean. Hardada’s final flourish was his
attempt to snatch the English crown at the Battle of Stamford Bridge,
Gibbins adds, 'and there recorded history finishes and my fiction begins.'
Much of the novel grew out of knowledge gleaned over
many years during extensive travels and excavations. Having spent much of
his childhood in Canada, he knew about the scatter of Norse finds across
the Arctic, in particular those at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland,
and he had also traveled to Kiev in Ukraine, the ancient Varangian capital
of the Vikings, before Crusader Gold
settled in his mind. It was there too, in nearby Babi Yar, where the
entire Jewish population was shot in 1941, that the idea of a Nazi subplot
came to him. 'That was the first time I’d ever been to a major Nazi
atrocity site and it really made a deep impression on me.'
He had long known about the bizarre
pseudo-archaeological expeditions the Nazis conducted all over the world
trying to find evidence for a sort of predecessor civilization from which
all Aryans sprang, and about their fascination with the Vikings. 'My story
of a Viking fellowship, a felag, is derived from a number of these
fanatical cults that developed from the late 19th century into
the Nazi period, of which the SS was the final hideous culmination.'
Much like his character Jack Howard, Gibbins also
believes the centuries of accumulated silt in Istanbul’s harbour, the
Golden Horn, will eventually yield untold archaeological treasures.
'Digging through 2000 years of accumulated silt, in the middle of a busy
shipping lane in one of the most treacherous rip currents in the whole of
that part of the world, would be a major project. It hasn’t really been
done and that’s why. But it’s plausible. Certainly there would be lost
ship's guns of the 1453 siege by the Turks, as in my novel.
Whether or not there would also be ancient antiquities that were
tossed in there because they were of no interest to the Crusaders remains
to be seen, but I’m convinced they’re there.'
He is also convinced the Vikings reached the
North-West Passage, which is why he plans future expeditions into the
Arctic to hunt for Viking shipwrecks. 'That’s a great new adventure for
me, because most of my work has been in the Mediterranean.' Not that
he’s tired of his old Mediterranean haunts. He also plans future
expeditions to Tunisia to continue his study of ancient Carthage and to
Sicily to continue his investigation into the patterns of early
Mediterranean trade, but he retains a singular interest in Viking
exploration as a result of his research for Crusader Gold. 'In
future, it may well be the case that sites like L’Anse aux Meadows –
which when it was discovered was pooh-poohed as impossible – will be
discovered further south.'
Gibbins’ affinity with the ocean dates back to his
early childhood, when his parents, both scientists, took their son and his
younger brother on a sea voyage around the world, to live for four years
in the oceanside community of Nelson, New Zealand. He first began diving
on 19th-century wooden shipwrecks in the frigid waters of
Ontario’s Great Lakes as a teenager, he recalls, 'and I never really
looked back.'
He now lives and writes his novels on a 100 acre farm
in Ontario. A pioneer farm hacked out of the wilderness in the 19th
century, it fuels his interest in the very early colonial period in this
part of Canada – the subject of a novel already in progress – and
enables him to escape into forests which have been untamed by humans.
'I love walking out into the unknown, and that feeling of being on
the edge.'
But in the immediate future, he plans to put the
finishing touches on his third novel, entitled The
Last Gospel in its UK and Commonwealth editions and The Lost Tomb in the US. Set for publication early next year, the
novel is based on the possibility of future finds at the Villa of the
Papyri at Herculaneum, and deals with very early Christianity. 'It is about what archaeology can actually tell us, rather
than about hidden mysteries, rites and conspiracies within the Church,'
Gibbins says. 'I really want to sweep a lot of that aside, and look at
what it is that the church actually sprang from.'
For Gibbins, the lure of the past is intricately tied to a yearning to experience 'a kind of communality with people who lived so long ago.' Writing fiction, he says, 'is crucially important for me to sustain that fascination with archaeology and with making new discoveries that has driven me since childhood. And I've been fabulously lucky doing this at a time when it's the sort of thing people want to read,' he says. 'There's a yearning people have to find out about things in the context of a thriller. You just have to look at the History Channel to see how people are trying to latch on to the past. And I am one of those people,' he adds, 'who does believe that we desperately need to learn from the past.'
Bron Sibree is a Perth freelance journalist.