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I went back to London later in 2006 for a simple reason: During my first visit, I did not get all the information and material that I needed. At the risk of paraphrasing former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,1 sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know. That is, we expect that a story will turn out one way or another, or that we need this bit of information or that, only to discover that the story is different from what we thought or that we should seek different information . As the Poseidon research developed, it was clear that I needed more and different material from what I had. Once again I went to the National Archives. The first time I was there, I had made a simple mistake: I had not prepared to photograph every page of every file that I had accessed. An earlier inquiry into having the two main court of enquiry and court-martial files professionally photocopied came back, the cost being about £110 (US$165). I chose to spend time rather than money. Repeating my earlier ride from central London to Kew was pleasant. When I arrived at the National Archives for the second time, I learned that my reader’s card was still valid, and as I stowed my bag in the locker room, I felt like an old hand. I was quickly reunited with the files, perhaps the first person to look at them in the nine months since I had last signed them out. I did less reading and more photographing. Turn, click. Turn, click. Dead battery. Switch, charge, repeat. Another mistake I had made during my initial visit was failing to create a sequence for the files. Although the court-martial had a table of contents, and the questions within the court of enquiry documents were numbered, there was plenty of loose material that would require a date or an order to provide context. In that sense, it was just as well to start from scratch and create an entirely new set of photographs of Chapter 13 London Again 126 Poseidon the relevant pages, “relevant” now referring to everything in the file. After a very long and rewarding morning, I left the archives, stopping by the duck pond to watch a small flock frolic for a bit before heading back to the Underground station. This trip included a new destination, a new storehouse of information to search: The British Library. The exterior of the library has a more contemporary appearance than does the archives, but the interior definitely reflects the feel of some of its most precious possessions , such as the original Magna Carta. Similar to the archives, the library requires proper identification and verification before issuing a reader pass. Entering the reader registration room, I was approached by the man in charge: He stood well over six feet tall, dressed in a gray pinstriped, three-piece suit, but those attributes were overshadowed by the ultimate British male accoutrement: a gold-framed monocle. This could only be the British Library, I thought. The library could offer resources on a number of Poseidon-related topics, but I really came in search of one man: Bernard W. Galpin. Following his sad and premature exit from the Royal Navy, the promising young officer seemed to disappear, having left the navy at the end of 1931. What does a submarine captain do when he can no longer take his boat to sea? A stray mention of a Bernard Galpin in a seemingly unrelated book2 placed him in the aviation industry, working for fledgling air transport company and British Airways forerunner Imperial Airways. This appeared implausible, except that Galpin’s elder brother, Christopher, had been a World War I pilot. Had aviation become the new Galpin family business? The British Library, and specifically the free online search access it offers of London newspaper The Times, became a launch pad for uncovering more about the Poseidon story’s two main characters: Galpin, the rising star fallen, and Patrick Willis, the working-class hero who stepped up when history came calling. The two men began to make a fascinating contrast. Both were born in 1897, Willis older by about six months. While certainly not from aristocracy or tremendous wealth, Galpin came from a respectable family, his father a canon in the Anglican Church. The Times had seemingly overlooked Willis’s birth in Ireland. In fact, it overlooked him right up until the moment he...

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