A closer look
The ocean is the world’s most effective, and terrifying, museum curator. The SS Thistlegorm was a British armed merchant ship loaded with a massive arsenal of wartime supplies meant for Allied forces in Egypt. Two German Heinkel He 111 bombers found it, striking the ammo hold and blowing the ship completely in half. Discovered in the 1950s by Jacques Cousteau, the wreck now sits upright at 100 feet deep. Divers can swim directly into the cargo holds to examine rows of rusting Bedford trucks, Norton motorcycles, and Lee-Enfield rifles, all eerily frozen in time and slowly being consumed by aggressive coral reefs.
