In 1967, Rex Cowan, who has died aged 97, visited the Isles of Scilly. There he saw divers exploring HMS Association, a warship that had sunk in 1707. He had already left his unsatisfying practice as a criminal law solicitor, and this experience set him on course to become a shipwreck explorer.
Doing so would be a bold move, as he and his wife Zélide (nee Teague), whom he had married in 1960, had three daughters. But it was Zélide who challenged him to go through with the idea when, in an antiquarian bookshop, she chanced upon the story of Hollandia, a Dutch East Indiaman that had disappeared near Scilly in 1743 on its maiden voyage to Indonesia, carrying an enormous cargo of silver.
While Zélide combed archives for clues about the lost ship, Cowan hired a team of divers and, not a diver himself, directed searches in the sea. He also struck a deal with the Dutch finance ministry to share the proceeds should he find the vessel. By 1971 he was almost broke, but using a proton magnetometer, a device that could detect hidden metals, enabled him to uncover the Hollandia.
The resulting archaeological project lasted for more than a decade, at the start of which Cowan had to contend with rogue divers who were also looking for the ship’s booty. Secrecy was vital. Silver coins brought up from the seabed – ultimately 60,000 – were hidden in bins in the Cowans’ bedroom. His boat was set on fire and the brake cables of his car were cut. When news of Hollandia’s discovery finally became public, he found himself at the centre of a media storm.
Cowan was not motivated merely by money. To him a shipwreck was a time capsule trapped on the seabed, much as Pompeii had been trapped in ash. So he recruited reputable archaeologists, Peter Marsden and Howard Pell, to make exhaustive records of every object brought up from Hollandia – personal possessions and ship’s fittings as well as coins. He loved the detective work that revealed human stories: a tale of disappointed love in a medallion, or a sealed jar of Dutch anchovies destined for homesick colonials across the world.
Many of Cowan’s coins were sold, prompting criticism from some archaeologists at this commodification of the past. But money was needed to finance expeditions. With each new discovery – the Prinses Maria in Scilly in 1973, the Svecia off Orkney in 1975, the Vliegend Hart near the Netherlands in 1981 – his reputation grew. His discoveries offered remarkable insights into the ships, crews and cargoes of the Dutch East India company, the greatest seaborne empire of its day. An exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, home to the paintings of the Dutch golden age in Amsterdam, was followed by a permanent gallery. In 1992 he was made a knight of the Orange order.
In the UK, Cowan served on the Advisory Committee on Historic Wrecks for more than 20 years. But his relationship with British institutions was complicated. He struggled to find museum homes for his finds, and opposed Unesco’s 2001 Convention on Underwater Cultural Heritage, which he believed marked the death knell for underwater archaeology.
His colourful style went out of fashion, although he successfully sued one newspaper for calling him a “treasure hunter”.
Born in Golders Green, north London, Rex was the son of Fay (nee Rosenbloom) and Sam Cowan, who ran a toy import company. Their own parents were Jewish émigrés from Poland.
His education at University College school was interrupted in 1940, when he and his sister, Anita, were evacuated to the US. Having crossed the Atlantic in a convoy, they lived in New York and then Hollywood with mother and daughter cousins – one a Broadway violinist, the other a writer of pulp fiction. Life was precarious, but those American years opened horizons.
After service in the RAF, Cowan studied law at King’s College London, and in 1957 won a Fulbright fellowship to study juvenile delinquency at the University of Southern California.
A strong sense of social justice marked his legal career. As a solicitor he became known for offering pro bono advice to vulnerable people. In the 60s he co-founded the Brent (later London) Youth Advisory Centre, a drop-in clinic where young people could get free counselling and sexual health support, and he was a committed magistrate, and later chairperson, in a London juvenile court. He and Zélide even turned their home in Hampstead into a refuge for single pregnant women at a time when society’s judgment was damning.
He wrote several books. A Century of Images: Photographs by the Gibson Family (1997) provides a commentary on remarkable old photos of Scilly and Cornish wrecks. The Pirate King: The Strange Adventures of Henry Avery and the Birth of the Golden Age of Piracy (2024), written with Sean Kingsley, puts forward a theory about an audacious pirate who disappeared.
He also produced TV documentaries. Chaos (1988), in Channel 4’s Equinox series, explored how seemingly chaotic events in, for instance, the weather are governed by simple principles. For the BBC, The Young Ambassadors (1989) told the story of British schoolchildren evacuated across the Atlantic during the second world war, with narration by Cowan’s fellow evacuee Claire Bloom.
Zélide died in 2018. Cowan is survived by his long-term partner, the former Channel 4 and BBC radio executive Liz Forgan, his children, Alexandra, Juliet and Annie, and his sister.
• Rex Braham Cowan, shipwreck explorer, born 16 June 1927; died 9 March 2025
