These pictures were taken during my first ice dive, at Elora Quarry, near Guelph, Ontario, Canada, on 3 March 1979, when I was 16 …
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PYRAMID: Akhenaten in the Ashmolean
You don’t have to go to Egypt to see spectacular artefacts from the 14th century BC reign of the pharaoh Akhenaten – if you’re in England you can go to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and see a beautiful display of material from Akhenaten’s capital at Tell el-Amarna, excavated by the British archaeologist Flinders Petrie and his successors from the late 19th century. The display is small and intimate and yet contains some of the most famous Akhenaten artefacts ...
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A Merchant Navy gun crew in action, Part 1: the gun and its crew, 1940-1
This photo above was taken in 1940-1 on board SS Clan Murdoch, a British merchant ship that brought essential goods from Africa and India to ports in Britain during the Second World War. The man second from left is my grandfather, Captain Lawrance Wilfred Gibbins, who was the ship’s Second Officer and Gunnery Officer …
Read MorePYRAMID: the sarcophagus of Menkaure and the wreck of the Beatrice
One of the greatest real-life mysteries to feature in my novel Pyramid is the whereabouts of the ancient Egyptian sarcophagus of Menkaure, lost in a shipwreck in the 19th century as it was being transported to England. In both Pyramid and my previous novel Pharaoh, Jack Howard and his team dive deep into the Mediterranean in the search for the wreck and its treasures ...
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'Rheinfels' by H.J. Gibbins (watercolour, approx. 22 by 29 cm).
Henry James Gibbins (1803-1877), perfumer and watercolourist
The painting above is by Henry James Gibbins, a prolific amateur watercolourist who exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1871. In his professional life Henry was a hairdresser, perfumer and purveyor of European fabrics and other finery, operating for many years from 7 King Street, St James, London, adjacent to the auction house Christie’s ...
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PYRAMID: excerpt from the novel (the wreck of the Beatrice)
In my novel Pyramid, Jack and Costas revisit the wreck of the Beatrice - discovered in my previous novel, Pharaoh - in order to examine the ancient Egyptian sarcophagus of Menkaure for further clues to Akhenaten's lost 'City of Light'. To find out more about the real-life wreck and the sarcophagus, click here. After a horrifying accident with Costas' submersible, Jack has to make a snap decision ...
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A 1770 Indenture of Matthias Gale, merchant, of London, Whitehaven and Maryland
This indenture of 28 June 1770, never previously published, contains an agreement between Matthias Gale of London, merchant, and John Hasill, mariner, regarding the ownership of a property in Workington, a town in Cumbria on the north-west coast of England near the port of Whitehaven. Matthias, whose elder brother John was my ancestor, was one of an extensive family in Whitehaven who had prospered in trade with the American colonies ...
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The rendering of the Israel hieroglyphs that appears in my novel. The two kneeling figures signify a people or tribe, and the other symbols were read by Petrie's philologist Wilhelm Spiegelberg as I.si.ri.ar.
PYRAMID: Sir Flinders Petrie and the discovery of the Israel Stele
My novel PYRAMID features the group of hieroglyphs shown above as an illustration dividing the Parts of the text. They’re not just decorative – they’re among the most famous hieroglyphs ever discovered in Egypt, a find that set the world alight at the very end of the Victorian era and gave scholars of the Old Testament something tangible to set alongside the Biblical narrative. In my novel, fictional Egyptologist Maurice Hiebermeyer discovers the hieroglyphs again in another context that makes their association with the Biblical Exodus indisputable ...
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THE SWORD OF ATTILA: read the Prologue
Diving on the wreck of the Charles P. Minch (1898), Tobermory, Canada
These pictures show my daughter in August 2014 on the wreck of the Charles P. Minch, a wooden schooner that went down in 1898 …
Read MoreBlending fact with fiction: David Gibbins on wreck diving
Clan Macnair in the Mersey off Liverpool, photographed before the war.
SS Clan Macnair, convoy SL-74 and the sinking of the Bismarck, May 1941: Captain Lawrance Wilfred Gibbins
When the German battleship Bismarck put to sea on 19 May 1941 on her one and only offensive mission, ‘Operation Rheinubung’, she carried a boosted complement of sailors to provide prize crews for the many Allied merchant ships she was expected to capture. The naval action that followed, the most momentous of the war against Nazi Germany, is remembered for the relentless determination of the Royal Navy to pursue and sink Bismarck at whatever cost ...
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THE SWORD OF ATTILA: Hun Blitzkrieg
M.V. Empire Elaine and Operation Bullfrog, the cancelled 1944 seaborne assault on Burma: Captain Lawrance Wilfred Gibbins
This is my fourth blog on the British assault ship Empire Elaine and my grandfather’s experience as her Second Officer under Combined Operations, the British naval command responsible for seaborne landings during the Second World War. Empire Elaine had been designed for the Ministry of War Transport (M/T) as an L.S.C. (Landing Ship Carrier), one of few heavy-lift ships purpose-built to carry L.C.M.s (Landing Craft Mechanised). Despite her military role, the crew of Empire Elaine ...
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Audiobooks: the complete series, ATLANTIS to PHARAOH
Here's the complete series of CD Audiobooks of my novels from Atlantis to Pharaoh, read by James Langton. All are available from Amazon.com.
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MV Empire Elaine, convoy KMS 18B and Operation Husky, 10 July 1943
This blog, revised on 21 January 2024, is one of several detailing the experiences of my grandfather, Captain Lawrance Wilfred Gibbins, while he was Second Officer of the British assault ship MV Empire Elaine between November 1942 and November 1944 …
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The assault ship Empire Elaine on the Cyde in 1943 during her refit in preparation for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily in July of that year.
M.V. Empire Elaine and Operation Dragoon, 15 August 1944: Captain Lawrance Wilfred Gibbins
'Operation Dragoon' was the codename for the Allied landings in the south of France on 15 August 1944, a massive naval and airborne assault that served as the counterpart to the Normandy landings a little over two months earlier. The assault was primarily a US operation, with most of the troops landed around Cavalaire Bay being from three US divisions, but many of the assault and supply ships and their escorts were British ...
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Video: a dive on the wreck of the SS Grip (1897), Cornwall, England
PYRAMID: free preview of the Prologue
The extraordinary wartime voyage of M.V. Empire Elaine, 1943-4: Captain Lawrance Wilfred Gibbins
The official history of the Clan Line during the Second World War, In Danger’s Hour by Gordon Holman (Hodder and Stoughton, 1948), contains many accounts of courage and loss among the Merchant Navy crews who provided a lifeline for Britain as well as support for Allied military operations in every theatre of the war. We are used to images of ships on Atlantic convoys, their crews enduring the constant threat of U-boat attack, but an oft-overlooked role of merchant seamen was the huge part they played in seaborne assaults and the dangers they faced there as well. Just what this involved is shown in the remarkable voyage of one of these ships ...
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