Released 12.06.25

The Conversation

In this episode, Damian Le Bas talks with Sophy about his new book, The Drowned Places: Diving in Search of Atlantis. His quest isn’t without its complexities — “a sort of red flag for someone who’s on a pseudo-intellectual quest,” says Damian (referencing one of his heroes, Bruce Chatwin) — but they weren’t enough to put him off an investigation into the physical and metaphorical lure of drowned places.

The conversation ranges through broad ideas — anthropomorphism, climate activism, myth, and Atlantis as “a parable about the folly of empire”. Damian touches on the history of Atlantis — how it began with Plato, and how it has since been subverted by the Nazis, Hispanic colonists and English maritime domination. Atlantis, Damian says, has “spectral layers of culture which have encrusted it”. He describes how if you start to chase the word, “strange and wonderful” corners of the mind, history and geography reveal themselves. 

Damian’s journey leads him to the warm waters of the Mediterranean (a “sane” place to learn to dive, he says), a haunted stretch of the English Channel with its poor visibility and thousands of shipwrecks, and on to Greece, the Bay of Naples, and Port Royal in Jamaica. 

They talk about the death of Damian’s father, and how taking to the water was a move at odds with Damian’s Romany Gypsy heritage.

Damian talks about the futility of human endeavour – how “everything we build… is destined to erode.” That, he says, is one of the great lessons you learn “by spending lots of time around ruins”. But there’s a power and a magic to our interconnectedness with nature, most especially with the ocean: “The sea, in fact, is life. The sea is as full of thoughts as it is of sodium ions. You know, it's tempting to see it as this is a chemical substance. This is salt dissolved in water, and some things live there. But where does the song of the whale actually live?”

Books discussed: 

Damian Le Bas
— The Stopping Places: A Journey Through Gypsy Britain
— The Drowned Places: Diving in Search of Atlantis

John Steinbeck
— Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Jill Heinerth
— Into the Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver

Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook
— The Rest is History: History’s Most Curious Questions Answered

Plato
— Timaeus and Critias

Jules Verne
— Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Frédéric Dumas
— The Silent World