He may well go down in history as the Indiana Jones of the Deep, writes REG LITTLE.

When Mensun Bound arrives with his team of divers at some wild coastline, it's usually a sure sign that that the sea is about to surrender another of its treasures.

In his time the Oxford University archaeologist has groped through muddy Malaccan water to find a 400-year-old wreck and a king's ransom of silver.

His excavation of a trading vessel, which sank off Italy in 600 BC, gave the world stunning new insights into the Golden Age of Athens. More recently he salvaged one of the great cannons from Horatio Nelson's first ship of the line, the Agamemnon. And then he followed it up by raising a great gun from the German pocket battleship the Graf Spee, scuttled after the most thrilling naval chase of the century, a story immortalised in the film the Battle of the River Plate.

This week Mensun, Triton Fellow in Maritime Archaeology at St Peter's College, is heading off on his travels again. The location, the South China Seas. The mission, to excavate two 15th century ships laden with Chinese porcelain. "This will be one of the biggest things since the Mary Rose," said the professor, as he prepared to leave his home, in Horspath. "We are talking about two great large ships, in very deep water, at least 70 metres down. It will mean saturation diving, with 100 divers involved in the project.

Mensun, 45, was insistent that details of his destination were kept secret. In his line of work sharks come in many guises, and the worst feared are those who loot vulnerable sunken wrecks.

After specialising in archaeology at New York University, Mensun won a place at Oxford, from where he became involved in the Mary Rose project.

With his wife Joanna, in the 1980s he famously located and excavated the world's oldest wreck, an Etruscan vessel, which sank 2,500 years ago in the Mediterr- anean.

The team's log wonderfully captured the first view of the wreck: "It was as if the Gods had been sitting down to a banquet and then for some reason had to dash off, overturning tables in their haste and knocking down all the crockery." It was a pair of binoculars that led him to join a quest for the grave of the Graf Spee, off Montevideo.

After learning that binoculars once owned by the Graf Spee's commander were for sale, he felt compelled to go to Christie's viewing room. "I held Captain Langsdorff's binoculars in my hands. I found myself transported back some 60 years to the bridge of the Graf Spee."

More divers had died on the Graf Spee than any other wreck in South America.

He recalled that dive of two years ago: "Because of the currents and bad visibility, work on Graf Spee was very slow. She was listing heavily to starboard and was fairly deep in the mud. Our cameraman said it was like trying to understand Wembley Stadium with only a microscope to look through."

The lifting of one of the Graf Spee's guns by crane proved more harrowing than any of his dives. "As it was suspended over the deck, the whole gun jackknifed with a sickening lurch. I waited for the crash and the sight of the cannon twisted and broken upon the deck." As it is, the gun today sits proudly in a Montevideo park. But surprisingly, it is people not artifacts who continue to draw him to the bottom of treacherous seas.

"Her captains and men, no matter how celebrated in the history books, become truly known, truly real, only when I can come near to seeing what they saw and can place my hand where theirs once were."

DIVE INTO HISTORY

*1997: Four years after confirming that a wreck off the Uruguayan coast was the Agamemnon, Mensun dived down to Nelson's old ship. His team salvaged one of the guns used at Trafalgar.

*1995: Several thousand pieces of eight from the reign of the Spanish King Philip II were found during the excavation of the wreck of the Nassau, the oldest Dutch East Indiaman ever found, which sank 400 years ago off the coast of Malaysia.

*1993: Mensun "rediscovered" a treasure ship returning with the spoils of Sulla's sack of Athens in the 1st century BC, off the coast of North Africa. It had been lost after being explored by Jacques Cousteau, Mensun's hero.

Story date: Saturday 24 April

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