Underwater explorer Philippe Cousteau is to try and solve the 150-year-old mystery of the last resting place of a Confederate ship.

Mr Cousteau — grandson of undersea exploration giant Jacques Cousteau — visited the island this month in a bid to find the wreck of the Roanoke, which was scuttled off Five Fathom Hole to the east of Fort St Catherine 1864 as part of a Travel Channel series called Caribbean Pirate Treasure.

Mr Cousteau and wife Ashlan were inspired to visit the island after lawyer Mark Diel, also a diver and owner of Dive Bermuda, wrote an article on the mystery for an American-based diving magazine.

Mr Diel said he was stunned when he got a call from the show’s producers.

He added: “It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience — my dad dived with Jacques Cousteau many years ago.”

Mr Diel said: “They’re doing a show which is to do with Caribbean wreck hunting and pirates, that sort of thing, for the Travel Channel.

“Their producers had picked up an article I had done on our search for the Roanoke, which was a Civil War ship scuttled off the east end of Bermuda.

“They were interested in whether we had found it, so we were doing a continuation of the search for the Roanoke.

“When they called me, they said they had seen an article — I’m guessing it was one in Scuba Diver Life.”

Mr Diel, whose Dive Bermuda worked with Chris Gauntlett’s Blue Water Divers on the shoot, added he could not reveal if the Cousteaus and the Bermuda team had located the long-lost ship.

But he said: “It’s worth watching — there were some interesting developments during the filming.”

The Roanoke, a Union steamer, was hijacked en route from Cuba to New York by Confederate sailors who had joined the ship in Cuba in disguise.

The Confederate seamen took over the ship after it set sail and diverted to Bermuda because it needed coal and wanted to disembark the Federal crew and passengers.

But the Governor of the day refused to resupply the ship because he regarded its seizure as an act of piracy and Bermuda, as a British territory, was neutral during the US Civil War — although Bermudians made a fortune on the sly trading with the rebel Southern states.

Confederate Lieutenant John Braine, who had assumed command of the Roanoke, put the passengers and crew in lifeboats and scuttled the ship to avoid it being reclaimed by Union forces.

Braine was tried in Bermuda for piracy, but acquitted and he and his crew were transported back to the Confederate states, which were forced to surrender to the Union only months later.