The North Sea stretches for some 750,000 square kilometres from France to Norway, encompassing all of the wind-slashed waters between.

Rich in oil, fish, commerce, a highway and hunting ground for millennia.

Viking Seekings once crossed over the waves here to raid continental Europe.

Later still, ambitious merchants of the Hanseatic League made it their base

of operations, forebears of the age of capitalism to come. Most recently, during the 1800s, this great expanse of salt water became the domain

of the latest lucrative business to rear its head in Northern Europe.

Whaling.

Countless sea giants were speared and gutted on these shores.

Their bones and flesh discarded, oily innards used to light the streets of London.

Of course, through all these long millennia, fishermen made their living atop the waves.

Cod trawlers from Norway heading up to the White Sea and Svalbard.

Englishmen, Bretons and Basques,

heading all the way to Iceland and Greenland beyond.

By the early 20th century, for many Dutch fishermen, their livelihood lay much closer to home.

On a relatively shallow plateau plateau just off of East

Anglia that became known as Dogger Bank named for the Dutch word for fishermen and the

slightly higher elevation of the place compared to the seas further around.

In 1931, one of those boats, the colander,

working the waters just 25 miles east of Norfolk,

made an astonishing discovery,

one which wouldn't be satisfactorily explained for decades to come.

At the time, the fishing technique employed by trawlers such as the Kalinda was to drag their nets along the sea floor,

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