Member Profile
by Susan Jensen, October 2023
American Mensan (Edward) Lee Spence, the son of a military intelligence officer, found his first five shipwrecks in 1959. He went on to discover many more and to become a pioneer of the new field of underwater archaeology. Now 75, he is still researching and salvaging historic shipwrecks.
His father understood Lee was brilliant, despite Lee’s not talking until age four and flunking first grade. The family travelled and lived all over the world, and his dad got Lee involved in art, the out-doors, competitive swimming, and target shooting. By third grade, he was doing the family’s tax returns. Testing done in sixth grade showed he had the knowledge of a finishing college sophomore. School bored Lee so he often skipped classes.
When Lee was in fifth grade his father enrolled him in an adult, night-school computer class and, when in high school, he encouraged him to attend a summer program for gifted students at the University of Miami and another at Florida State University, both of which Lee greatly enjoyed.
At age twelve, Lee designed and built his own self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, which he laughingly says “was nothing like the kind divers use today, but served the same purpose, albeit dangerously and poorly. I used it to start finding wrecks, first in a river near Columbus, Georgia, then in France and Spain.”
While in high school, Lee made his first major discovery, the Confederate steamer Georgiana, which had been described in various nineteenth-century accounts as the most powerful Confederate cruiser.
In 1970, he found the wrecked Confederate submarine the H.L. Hunley. The Hunley was the first submarine in history to sink a ship.
In 1975, Lee received his BA in Marine Archaeology from the University of South Carolina. He also has a Doctorate of Marine Histories for Underwater Archaeology from the College of Marine Arts.
From 1991 until 1994 Lee served as Chief of Underwater Archaeology for the archipelago of Providencia Y San Andres, Colombia. He has also worked in numerous other countries, but, mostly in the private sector.
Lee has Asperger’s Syndrome which wasn’t diagnosed until he was 51. Around that time he was also diagnosed with dyslexia. He was told that his spatial memory is almost photographic but his short-term memory and ability to recognize faces is less than 10% of normal. Like many Mensans, he has an exceptionally good ability to detect patterns, so good that he was able to take a SAT sample quiz in Russian and get all ten multiple-choice answers correct despite not knowing the Cyrillic alphabet or understanding any Russian.
Lee has earned many accolades, including a NOGI in 2012 from the National Academy of Underwater Arts and Sciences. A NOGI is widely considered the most prestigious, international award in the diving community. His favorite career moment was his discovery that Margaret Mitchell’s supposedly fictional character, Rhett Butler, was largely based on George Alfred Trenholm, a tall, handsome, and brave Charleston shipping magnate and banker, who served as Secretary of the Treasury for the Confederacy during the final year of the American Civil War.
For more about Lee, visit: www.shipwrecks.com/about-spence
