As the watch brand lands on site, we take a look at diving legend Mr Carl Brashear – and the timepiece he inspired .

There’s a moment in Men Of Honor, the 2000 biopic of Mr Carl Brashear, the US Navy’s first black master diver, which showcases both the daunting odds he faced in achieving his feat, and the tenacity with which he overcame them. As his brutal diving instructor Mr Billy Sunday, Mr Robert De Niro launches into a dyspeptic tirade against Mr Brashear: “Think you deserve to be here, don’t ya? Fraternising among Navy men? Think you’re as good as they are? How ’bout me, cookie? You better than me?” As Mr Brashear, Mr Cuba Gooding Jnr assumes his best grace-under-pressure expression, and replies evenly: “You’re damn right I am.”

It wasn’t only institutional racism that Mr Brashear had to stare down to become a diving legend. There were also the not-insignificant matters of a poverty-stricken background and threadbare education, and a shipboard accident in the mid-1960s that resulted in the amputation of his left leg below the knee. Through all these tribulations, Mr Brashear recalled, he would remember the words of his sharecropper father: “You get back in there, Carl, and you fight! You do your best!” Reading his story, the only wonder is that Hollywood took so long in getting round to telling it.

Among the many tributes paid to Mr Brashear since his death in 2006, aged 75 – the movie, the naming of a US Navy cargo ship after him – perhaps the most befitting is the launch by Oris of a Mr Carl Brashear Limited Edition diving watch, available on MR PORTER in the UK and US. The first Oris watch to be made in bronze – echoing the material used in the helmet of the Mark V deep sea helium suit worn by Mr Brashear in the 1950s and 1960s, which came in at 290lb, a weight equivalent to six armchairs – it will darken as its copper content reacts with carbon dioxide and moisture, meaning that each of the run of 2,000 pieces will develop a unique patina over time. It’s water-resistant to 100m – the depth to which Mr Brashear regularly dived – and its stainless steel case back is engraved with Mr Brashear’s Mark V helmet and his oft-stated claim: “It’s not a sin to get knocked down, it’s a sin to stay down.”

Mr Brashear knew whereof he spoke. Kentucky-born, the sixth of eight children, he left school after seventh grade to help his father work the land, but dreamed of a life beyond the cotton bolls. He enlisted in the US Navy in February 1948, just four months before the military was officially desegregated. He was assigned to the stewards’ branch, preparing meals for white officers, but discovered his vocation when, serving on the aircraft carrier Palau in 1950, he watched a diver disappear below the ocean surface to recover an aeroplane that had rolled overboard. He wrote more than 100 letters of application to the Navy diving school before he was accepted: “Apparently,” he would wryly recount, “all those letters of mine kept getting lost.”

Following his admittance in 1954, Mr Brashear dealt sanguinely with the racial epithets he’d often find tacked to his bunk, and studied strenuously for a decade in order to pass the deep-sea diving course. But his toughest test came in 1966, when he was on a salvage ship helping to recover a hydrogen bomb that had sunk in the Mediterranean; as he supervised, a line broke, sending a huge steel pipe hurtling toward the deck. Mr Brashear pushed his men out of the way, taking the full impact himself; his left leg was crushed, and he lost so much blood that he was declared DOA at the hospital he was evacuated to, and sent to the morgue (the timely intervention of a physician, who detected a faint heartbeat, prevented any further affronts to his ravaged person). On being told that his leg could be repaired, given several years, a battery of surgeries, and the deployment of a brace and cane, Mr Brashear was blunt: “Go ahead and amputate,” he said. “I can’t be tied up that long. I’ve got to get back to diving.”

This Mr Brashear did, but only after the Navy – which, having then never seen an amputee return to active duty, moved to discharge him – required him to prove his fitness-for-purpose by walking 12 steps unaided on his prosthetic leg while bearing 300lb barbells that simulated the onerous load of his diving equipment, a scene dramatically recreated in Men Of Honor: “If I walk these twelve steps today, reinstate me to active duty,” pleads Mr Gooding Jnr. “Give me my career back, let me finish it, and go home in peace.”

That, in essence, is what happened. Mr Brashear became a master diver in 1970, the highest designation a Navy diver can attain. He’d initially been treated as a pariah by the service; by the time of his retirement in 1979, he was respectfully referred to as “Mr Navy”. But despite his decades of sorely won achievement, Mr Brashear remained characteristically unassuming. “Not in my wildest dreams did I think this would happen,” he said in an interview with CNN after Men Of Honor’s release. “Even after I lost my leg, I was just doing my job.” He would doubtless have the same incredulous reaction to the news that a watch had been produced as a further tribute to his battling integrity. But the Oris Carl Brashear Limited Edition doesn’t just give you the chance to wear a piece of history on your wrist. As you pull it on and dive down, whether to Mr Brashear’s preferred 100m depth or less, you can reflect on some of the qualities that he embodied, and that the watch proudly commemorates: passion, bravery, and, over and above all, indomitability.

Please note: Oris watches are only available for delivery within the UK and US