Honour of a lifetime as shipwreck hunter from Midhurst wins OBE

David Mearns, OBE, is an American-born shipwreck hunter with an illustrious, accolade-studded career spanning decades. The 66-year-old holds five world records, including one for the deepest shipwreck ever found, helped find Ernest Shackleton’s last ship – the Quest – off the coast of Newfoundland last year, was made an honorary OAM for his contributions to Oceanography and helped unearth the Nau Esmerelda, one of the earliest known ships from Europe’s Age of Discovery. But, he says, it’s hard not to see OBE as his biggest achievement yet.

"I think it’s fair to say this is the most important award. England is my home. This is my 30th year here, I’m a naturalised citizen. My children are English, my business is here, everything is here. But I lived in America half my life, and we don’t have anything like this. Being an American, royal awards are foreign to us. We don’t grow up with them. And even though I live here now, it’s both satisfying but also very surreal, to be sitting here today, with both an OBE and an honorary OAM from Australia, which is something I would never have dreamt of.

"I had no inkling, no suspicion that this would ever happen. There was not a scintilla of thought at any time in my mind that I would ever have anything like that. And then to have both, to be honoured by these two countries – one’s your adopted country and the other you feel very close to – is kind of a surreal situation.

Though he could easily call time on his days as a shipwreck hunter, Mr Mearns says the OBE is a source of renewed inspiration, a spur, pushing him on to bigger and better things.

"I feel newly inspired by it. I’ve been working on the Empire Windrush for a number of years, and I’ve got new motivation to make that happen, and I want to use this award in a positive way; to bring attention to the cause, and open the right doors.