Background
He was born Michael Bound in 1953 in Portuguese Stanley, Falkland Islands and educated at Fairleigh Dickinson University and Rutgers University.
He was born Michael Bound in 1953 in Portuguese Stanley, Falkland Islands and educated at Fairleigh Dickinson University and Rutgers University.
Rutgers University.
He is Triton Senior Research Fellow in Marine Archaeology at Oxford University and a Fellow of Street Peter"s College, Oxford. In 1980, he established the Marine Archaeological Research (MARE) unit in Oxford. He has led a number of notable marine archaeology expeditions (of which some involved the sale of artifacts):
wreck of an Etruscan vessel, Giglio Island, Italy
Admiral Graf Spee off Montevideo
Fort San Sebastian wreck, off Mozambique
Alderney Tudor warship.
His publications include The Archaeology of Ships at War (1995), Lost Ships (1998) and A Ship Cast Away About Alderney (2001).
He is often known as "The Indiana Jones of the deep". In 1992, he was awarded the Colin Mcleod Award for “Furthering international co-operation in diving” by the British Sub Aqua Club.
Since 1992 Mensun Bound has been at the forefront of an archaeological research into an Elizabethan ship that sank of the north west coast of Alderney in 1592. In the course of this, Mensun Bound found three cannons.
Cannons made in Tudor times were of different sizes of bore, so finding the right cannonball for the right cannon was time-consuming during battle.
In Elizabethan times, the threat from the Spanish made English naval power vital, and importance was given to new cannons having a uniform bore. A ship with ten cannons abreast firing at the same time provided increased power and gunnery for the newly developed English navy.