Richard James Vincent Larn, OBE (born 1931[1]) is a retired Chief Petty Officer in the Royal Navy, a businessman and maritime history writer who is widely regarded as one of Britain's leading historic shipwreck experts.
[4] One of the club's first major projects, initiated by Larn's extensive research into the Scilly naval disaster of 1707, was to send a team of Royal Navy divers, based on board the minesweeper HM/XSV Puttenham, to the Isles of Scilly off the coast of Cornwall to find an historic fleet of sunken Royal Navy ships, led by HMS Association, a 90-gun Second Rate Ship of the Line lost in the 1707 disaster.
The divers could only get out to the Western Rocks, but hardly around the Gilstone Ledge,[5] where a later expedition managed to locate the wreck of the Association in 1967; Larn was not present in 1967 having been given a "pier-head jump" at the last minute to HMS Bulwark in Singapore.
After two years as Works Director for Partech Electronics International Ltd, Charlestown, helping the Company to move to Cornwall from Wellyn Garden City, he then founded a commercial diving training centre Prodive Ltd. initially in the Long Store, Charlestown, then in Falmouth Docks, Cornwall,[3] which aimed at improving the training standard of professional commercial deep sea divers in the oil and gas offshore industry.
In 1982 he sold his shares in Prodive Ltd to his partner, Roger Parker, and spent the next four years treasure hunting, leading successful expeditions to recover thousands of silver Lion Daalder coins from the Dutch East India Company ship Campen, sunk off the Needles, isle of Wight, and then copper ingots, artifacts and literally millions of copper coins from the English East Indiaman Admiral Gardner, on the Goodwin Sands, Kent.
Other shipwreck projects concerned historic wrecks including the Coronation, Ramillies, Dartmouth, Schiedam, Dollar Cove, Santo Christo de Castello, and the St.Anthony.
[3] When in 2007 the council of Scilly commemorated the 300th anniversary of the great naval disaster of 1707,[9][10] Larn was among the principal organisers and also gave public lectures, as did Dava Sobel, author of Longitude, and Sir Arnold Wolfendale, the 14th Astronomer Royal.
[11] Besides receiving awards from diving and maritime history associations, Larn was made a Cornish Bard by the Gorsedd of Cornwall at Redruth in 2006, taking the Bardic name 'Gonyas an Mor' Servant of the Sea.