by Tom Mason

IN THE CURIOUSLY POETIC TERMINOLOGY of the Japanese military they were called kaiten – “heaven shakers.” In reality, they were manned suicide torpedoes, ridden like horses by young men who sucked their final breaths from a snorkel attached to a bottle of air. Because they lurked silently under the waves, the kaiten were never as well known as their kamikaze brethren, but they wreaked their own degree of havoc on the Allied navies in the South Pacific nonetheless.

Half a world away from the South Pacific battleground, Halifax underwater filmmaker John Davis has spent a lot of time mulling over the mysteries of the kaiten. Recently he has found an Allied ship in Micronesia that was sunk by the Japanese during World War II. He may have found a piece of the kaiten that sunk it as well. He’s not saying. Like all great television promoters he would prefer that we tune in to his weekly television show Sea Hunters to find out for sure.

As a historian, documentary filmmaker and multi-beam bathometry expert, Davis makes a living sorting through some of the world’s greatest ocean tragedies. It’s just the latest phase in a love affair with the sea that began more than three decades ago. A lobster fisherman in his youth, Davis became the owner of a south shore fish plant before the fishery downturn in the early 1990s. In 1995, he parlayed a love of scuba diving into Eco-Nova Corporation, a company that specializes in finding, exploring and documenting shipwrecks. The company’s first contract was with Parks Canada at the Fortress of Louisbourg.

To promote diving and eco-tourism in the Louisbourg area, Davis and his colleagues also began filming their undersea explorations, footage that later found its way into the documentary series Oceans of Mystery – the Eco-Nova produced show that first aired on the Discovery Channel. Oceans of Mystery was a syndication success, eventually airing in more than 130 countries around the world.

Sea Hunters came next – a lively adventure show that features an intrepid team of wreck divers who solve some of the world’s greatest shipwreck mysteries. On one episode the team discovered the Clayoquot, an ill-fated Canadian ship sunk off Halifax Harbour by a German U-boat on Christmas Eve 1944. On another, they traced out the final resting places of two of Nova Scotia’s most famous wooden ships – the Bluenose and the Marie Celeste. The Confederate submarine Hunley, the Titanic rescue ship Carpathia, even a ship from the 13th century Mongol invasion of Japan that was sunk by a huge typhoon the Japanese named “kamikaze” (the divine wind) have all been rediscovered by the sea hunters.

Occasionally the show gets really disturbing. In one episode the Eco-Nova crew dove into a series of flooded man-made caves in central Germany – the wartime lair of Dr. Werner Von Braun, who would later become the star of the U.S. space program. Using hundreds of slave laborers, Von Braun and his team developed the V1 and V2 rockets here, the ones later used against Britain. “It was a horrific slave labor camp,” Davis recalls. “A terrible place.”

Producing television shows is only part of Eco-Nova’s mandate. The company contracts its underwater search expertise, mapping techniques and state-of-the-art sonar and bathometric technology to a number of industries, including mineral exploration firms, pipeline and underwater cable companies and fisheries operations. As the country’s largest producer of underwater footage Eco-Nova also works with museums all over the world to preserve the world’s underwater heritage. And there are at least a couple of lifetimes of exploration to be done in the waters around the company’s base of operations. “There are more shipwrecks per linear kilometer in Nova Scotia than almost anywhere else on Earth,” says Davis. “Most of them are of European origin, so they provide some really interesting archeological data.”