 | | Gregg Bemis N46 in a submarine preparing to dive to the Lusitania |
By Fabiana Montoya Scanlan
There is a warrant for his arrest in Sweden and the Irish government is on his back, but Gregg Bemis ’46 is not bothered one bit.
Bemis has garnered much press overseas due to his years of diving expertise combined with his investigative involvement of two sunken ships, the Lusitania and Estonia.
Bemis not only studies the Lusitania. He owns it.
For Bemis, obtaining the wreckage was the easy part. Everything that follows is complicated. “If you can own a car or a house, you can own a wreck,” he explained. “It’s a title passing from hand to hand.” The title was acquired by the London/Liverpool Insurance Board when they paid off Cunard, owner of the Lusitania. When the wreck was put up for bid in 1967, a former partner of Bemis acquired it for $2,400.
En route from New York to Liverpool, the British liner was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland by a German submarine in 1915. She is rumored to have been carrying weapons of war, plus paintings by Rubens, Titian and Monet in watertight containers and $6 million in gold bullion.
Bemis said he believes the Lusitania was carrying “war material, ammunition and high explosives, none of which should have been on a passenger liner,” he said. “It is a little bit like putting women and children out in front of armed militia in hopes that the other side won’t fire.”
Through a forensic evaluation, Bemis hopes to uncover what caused a second major explosion after the torpedo hit, causing the ship to sink in 18 minutes and claim 1,198 lives. Bemis also hopes to recover enough artifacts for use in museums and traveling exhibits to “draw attention to her role in world history and provide illumination regarding political leaders of that time,” he said. The sinking helped draw the United States into World War I.
Although Bemis was conceded ownership of the Lusitania by the High Court of Dublin in May 1996, following similar decisions in British and American courts, the Irish government now claims the wreck is in their territorial waters. A 1987 change in “The Law of the Sea” extended territorial waters from three to 12 miles. The Lusitania purportedly lies 11.75 miles off the Irish coast.
The Irish Government has placed an “underwater cultural heritage order” on the Lusitania, prohibiting Bemis and other divers from his prominent commercial diving school, The Ocean Corporation, from making further investigations.
Bemis had planned on producing a documentary on his findings, but progress has now slowed to a stop. He filed a suit against the Irish Government and faced them on November 18. By the time the Bulletin went to press, Bemis said that the two-day trial had extended to two weeks.
Filming the documentary “is the subject of my suit against the Irish Government since it has tried to prevent me from conducting research on my private property,” Bemis said.
His interest in the Lusitania first developed as a by-product of a business venture in deep sea research and salvage. “She was the first target,” Bemis said. “Since then, my primary concern is with the need for exposing government cover-ups which I believe took place.”
 | | Gregg Bemis N46 |
The Estonia disaster
The sinking of the Estonia on September 28, 1994 is known as Europe’s worst maritime disaster since World War II. The ship sank off the Finnish coast on its way from Tallinn, Estonia, to Stockholm, Sweden, claiming 852 lives.
Although the sinking was officially blamed on “heavy waves,” Bemis believes foul play was involved because of evidence he obtained during an investigative dive in September 2000. “If there had been no foul play involved,” Bemis said, “if the accident had actually happened as described in the official report, why would certain governments be so obsessively opposed to private resources doing legitimate and highly professional research on the sinking?”
The Estonia Agreement of 1995, created by Sweden, Finland and Estonia, and subsequently signed by Russia, Latvia, Britain and Denmark, seeks to prevent anyone from “interfering” with the wreck. No private investigation had taken place since the agreement until Bemis led an expedition. A Swedish prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Bemis, claiming he “disturbed the remains” of the Estonia when he made an unauthorized dive to the site in September 2000 with a German film producer. Bemis pointed out that access to the wreck cannot be denied since she lies in international waters.
In an article published that year, Bemis said he is “convinced that an explosion caused the tragedy and that a large hole in the ship has been hidden from the public.”
Bemis is continuing his efforts to bring to light the true cause of the sinking. “Currently, there is no law to prevent further investigation. But the costs and logistics are substantial,” he said. “I think the 852 innocent victims deserve better than to have the tragedy swept under the rug.”
A diver’s roots
As a child, Bemis spent his days sailing and swimming in Cohasset, MA. He began diving in the 1970s after becoming involved in an ocean-related venture project and attributes his accomplishments to his feeling that, “If it’s worth doing, keep after it.”
Regarding his Nobles days as a boarding student, what Bemis remembers most are Eliot Putnam being a “super headmaster,” and the “wonderful things” that happened every morning at assembly. “My years at Nobles were a great period,” he said.
After Nobles, Bemis graduated from Stanford University in 1950 with an economics major, served in Korea with the Unites States Marine Corps for two years and graduated from the Harvard Business School after his return. A relentless entrepreneur, he has since started approximately 40 companies and been in top management of three companies.
He resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife of 51 years, Lisa, and is a proud father and grandfather to six children and 11 grandchildren.
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