There are rumours of shipwrecks buried hundreds of metres below where I was pitched, and tales of Vikings turning their ships in a nearby bay to redouble their efforts at invading Britain.
There are 30 abandoned shipwrecks on our shores and all tell a tale of destruction, of villages destroyed, people displaced".
Shipwrecks are dotted around this coast, including the Royal Charter, which was broken up on the rocks in 1859 with the loss of more than 400 lives.
The research behind Fatal Journeys, which runs to more than 200 pages, began with the October 2013 tragedy when more than 400 migrants died in two shipwrecks near the Italian island of Lampedusa.
Several hundred have died in shipwrecks attempting the journey.
An estimated 1,800 people have died in shipwrecks in the Mediterranean this year.
Despite the high volume of barely seaworthy boats leaving Libya, there were no reported shipwrecks over the weekend.
A blustery boat ride a few hours earlier had brought me across that very channel, littered with shipwrecks new and old.
THE few people who live in Alaska's Aleutian Islands have long been accustomed to shipwrecks.
It is not just that the silting continues: now, pieces of earlier shipwrecks are shifting perilously close to the channel.
This, and any other shipwrecks found, will be subject to an analysis similar to that which Dr Foley and his colleagues Katerina Dellaporta, of Greece's ministry of culture, and Dimitris Sakellariou, of the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research in Anavyssos, applied to his previous target, a cargo vessel that had sunk off the island port of Chios, in water 70 metres deep.
