Marine Aviation Research

Most recently from landing on a deserted island to finding a A-20 Havoc aircraft lost for 80 years took five (5) minutes by Eric and his guide on foot. It started with finding a Neolithic tranchet axe head in Sweden in 1978, then an RAF bomb in Bahamas in 1980, and led to being the second and final person to persuade US Navy History & Heritage Command to reverse credit for sinking a WWII German U-boat and enter the correction into the Senate record, and re-allocating decorations as high as Distinguished Flying Cross.

Having built up databases on many hundreds of vessels and submarine movements, Eric is confident that he can trace or find yachts on the US eastern seaboard, tell you which ships and auxiliaries moved where from Halifax to Antigua to Key West in WWII, and probably who commanded them, plus every convoy and escort, every day, perhaps even hour of German U-boat patrols in that area and time, most oil spills and “places of refuge” incident in recent decades, who owned and financed most ships, which aircraft crashed where, starting in the Bahamas, and what remains of them.

He has databanks on ordinance from U-boats and much of the USN, USCG, CAP, USAAF, airships, RAF, and others dropped on USEC, Bahamas, and Bermuda, the vessel histories and bio-data of previous owners and fates of vessels, private, military, and donated/sold to the military in WWI and WWII. Finally, Eric has taken over 100,000 images and documented the working waterfront with over 100 short narrated films. In a journalistic career spanning nearly 35 years he has interviewed hundreds of people, so he can capture the oral histories of witnesses, participants, and family members.

Eric’s methods at finding the answers for clients include dogged stubbornness, a fresh way to look at the evidence, and leaving the archives for the field.

Dogged: Eric’s Swedish-American-Bahamian family had no TV, just lots of books; most of them about World War II. His mother was a national champion in tennis and hammered through the concept of never giving up. His father, a diplomat, insisted on always giving back. And his hero, Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison beseeched him to get out and test knowledge hands-on.

Since sailing professionally at age 18, Eric has been aboard over 500 vessels, operated nearly 200 of them, and boards tankers, bulkers, and car carriers on a regular basis. As someone who enjoys long solo hikes, he’s become familiar with the bush of the tropics and coasts far and wide, covering more than 85 countries and 250 islands and 250,000 miles of surface travel (total travel more than 1 million miles). In August of 2022 Eric dropped into a remote island in the Bahamas (pop. c.350), chose captains and guides, and on a budget managed to find a lost WWII aircraft 5 minutes after stepping on an uninhabited island, and hiked some 35 hours in the bush to find another four days later. He simply does not believe in giving up, and as a former record-setting swimmer he spent 3 weeks swimming daily alone to find another plane with a snorkel – in December.

Asked to find missing slaves ‘manumitted’ or ‘freed’ in the Bahamas, Eric dove in to contacts in the Triangle Trade world and found that a royal governor had both – allegedly – pocketed the reward for freeing them and then discretely helped have the poor souls sold off to the cane fields of Demerara. Having not been hired by a university or served for any government helps Eric keep an “outside the box” edge, and the ability and inclination to get out and find the objects. On a recent Friday someone mused aloud that they would like to know what happened to the yacht they owned in the 1980s. The next afternoon Eric was under the boat taking photos. Whether it’s determining who holds the note on a vessel, or what an object’s real history is, or where a boat sank and how, Eric will ferret it out for you. Projects are more than assignments, they become missions in his care.

Rest assured that the riddle you need solved, whether maritime, aviation, military, civilian, genealogical or academic, it will be in good hands with Eric. Part of this self-reliance and tenacity stems from his having spent most of his life on islands in places like Nassau, Newport, England, Singapore, and Manhattan. That and sailing on small boats for months at a time have forced him to find solutions as though one’s life depended on it.

1. U-84: led to re-allocation of credit for its sinking by the US Navy, DFC issued
2. Discovered the wrecks of 3 UK & US WWII aircraft in Bahamas in 8 months
3. Found 3 yachts from the 1989 Marion-Bermuda Race between the Gulf & Northeast
4. Between Key West, Guantanamo, Bermuda and Boston have identified and tracked the following World War II movements: 
   1. Every convoy, and each ship; c.200 of them attacked, thousands convoyed
   2. Every German & Italian submarine: hundreds of patrols
   3. Every contact between Allied military & Axis submarine
   4. Can name all but a handful of combatants and civilians killed at sea
5. Found the graves of a Norwegian in Abaco and African-American in Acklins
6. Traced remains of German, Italian and Allied KIA to various US cemeteries
7. Located the plane in which 2 RCAF pilots were KIA
8. Helped identify the wreck at the base of Paradise Island Light as SS Karnak
9. Traced the histories of over 400 vessels, 350 of them mailboats in Bahamas
10. Uncovered the fate of slaves from an 1800s slaver captured in Bahamas.