Man has had to sharpen his ingenuity in the face of the need to practice scuba diving, so over the years he has developed different techniques that allow him to carry out the activity. In the beginning, when the advances that there are now did not exist, the diver had to apply the technique of apnea.
Apnea, the faithful ally of the Greeks in the battle of Artemis
Already in the year 484 BC, Herodotus in his story about the battle of Artemis between the Greeks and the Persians, tells how a couple of Greeks were in charge of recovering objects shipwrecks. The protagonists were Scyllias and his daughter, Cyana, who, taking advantage of the night, dived to the Persian ships of Xerxes I and cut their moorings during a storm. The final purpose was for them to crash and as a consequence, this fact was decisive in the victory of the Greeks.
This fact went down in the history of diving, because just a few years later, the Greek commander and historian Thucydides (460 - 395 BC) described the war actions of combat swimmers in the Peloponnesian War (431 - 404 BC).
But not only in the Mediterranean have indications of the practice of diving been found, according to some research, as early as 2000 BC. C. apnea was practiced on the coast of Peru.
And it is amazing to know how for two thousand years, in the Western Pacific, there has been a traditional exploitation of marine resources, carried out exclusively by women. These women are called "ama" and are Japanese and Korean divers in charge of collecting sponges, mollusks (mainly oysters, for trade of pearls) and corals.
Since they were little, they undergo a harsh discipline that allows them, when they are adults, to descend with weights to the depths of the sea at more than thirty meters.
An ancient military technique
Aristotle was the Greek thinker and writer, who wrote different stories about the development of different battles and conquests where the use, for military purposes, of these devices is mentioned where they were used to sabotage enemy ships, escape underwater or avoid sites of war. cities and fortresses in order to obtain food and weapons.
- Utricular
In the armies of Alexander the Great there were soldiers who were divers and swimmers who were in charge of underwater military missions of utmost importance in naval battles.
During the conquest of Asia Minor by the Greek general army, a group of soldiers called "utricular" stood out, who were in charge of building boats from branches daubed with bitumen and platforms on air skins, for combat and naval transport.
An ancient Greek myth tells that Alexander the Great was so curious to know the secrets that were hidden under the waters that he ordered the manufacture of a large oak chest obtained from the Quasimiyeh Valley, inlaid with colorless glass and transparent with bronze reinforcements. This ship, which was built in the city of TIro and sent to the Eritrean Sea, had dimensions that reached 3.5m wide by 2.5m high.
In this device, which he called "Skaphê andros" (etymology of the word diving suit), he entered along with his lieutenant Nearchus and, later, it was sealed with bitumen, descending on a fund of fourteen "orgies" (one orgye = 1.85 m) for hours, contemplating how "great sea beasts" circled around him.
- The Romans
Later, it was the Romans, experts in strategy and the "art of war," who incorporated units of combat divers, called "urinatores," into their ranks. These men were excellent swimmers and apnea divers. Their job was to access enemy ships through the sea and sink them or sabotage their defenses. In the same way as today's specialized military commands, they attacked the defenses of enemy ports and were in charge of supplying and mailing the located fortifications.
As an example of the importance of the "urinatores", we can cite two historical episodes: the blockade of the Adriatic port of Orique, caused by Pompey's ships in the year 49 BC. C. The "urinatores" of Julius Caesar's troops were vitally important in his liberation. At night, they attacked the enemy ships by diving to them and managed to tow them to land with grappling hooks, where the rest of the troops defeated them.
The Roman ships of Emperor Septimius Severus (194-196 AD) were destroyed by Byzantine soldiers after their divers tied ropes to the hull of the invading ships and dragged them ashore to attack them.
Centuries later, specifically in the year 1547, the military importance of the diver in attacking ships with the use of explosives was proven for the first time. A fleet of warships of the Turkish sultan Suleiman the Magnificent traveled along the blue Mediterranean coast, attacking and robbing all along the coast.
In an Italian town, they kidnapped a woman, a fiancée of a young man named Paolo di Cassia. He sailed in a small sailboat to the island where the fleet was anchored and dived all night until he reached the ships with the intention of setting fire to a gunpowder warehouse that was on one of them. Taking advantage of the confusion to free his fiancée and thus manage to escape by swimming while the Turkish ships burned.
The first professional divers
During the splendor of Byzantium, in the absence of major military campaigns, men capable of entering below the surface continued with the work of recovering objects from shipwrecks and worked on the construction of ports and small ship repairs. underwater. With quite rudimentary means, they carried out their first tasks as professional divers.
