Adventures of a Sea Hunter: In Search of Famous Shipwrecks

by James Delgado

  Our survey of the wreck indicates that the history books have not told the complete story. It is evident that many shots went into Dresden, even as she sank. The British cruiser commanders had orders to sink Dresden, and they made sure they did just that. The extent of the damage makes us wonder just how close they came to the German cruiser. Historical accounts and maps of the battle show Glasgow, Kent and Orama outside of Cumberland Bay, firing at Dresden from a distance of 9,000 yards, but what we are seeing argues against that. Willi and I, with John Davis, decide to go ashore and search the cliffs for some of the shells fired during the battle and which, according to the locals, are still here.

  Moving along the beach, outside of town and past the cemetery with its monument to three of Dresden’s dead crew, we find our first shell hole. It is nearly perfectly round and has bored 3 feet into the cliff. Buried inside, we find the steel base of an unexploded shell. We wonder if this is one of Dresden’s, so we measure it — at 6 inches it is too big to be from Dresden, whose largest guns fired a 4-inch projectile. This is a British 6-inch shell that missed. Imbedded in the cliffs soft volcanic rock and mud, it is more than a relic of the battle. It is a piece of forensic evidence that we are using to reconstruct what happened. Plotting the angle that the shell came from, we line it up with the cape at the entrance to the bay, just where a ship would turn to enter the anchorage. This could be one of the first shots fired at 8:40 on the morning of March 14, 1914, as the British sailed into range and opened up with their guns. We find five other hits, closely spaced as if from a salvo of rapidly fired shots. One hole retains its shell; the others are empty, shells tumbled out by erosion or pulled free by souvenir hunters not realizing what a deadly trophy they had in an unexploded live shell.

  Back on board Valdivia, we work with the ship’s officers to add the location of the shells to our survey map of the bay and the wreck. We also plot the range and bearing of the shellfire, based on the position and angle of the shell holes. The last five holes we found must have come from shells fired near the end of the battle, because our plots show that the British cruiser that fired them was very close to the sinking Dresden—in fact, just about where we are anchored in Valdivia, 800 feet off Dresden’s port side and just 2,500 feet away from the cliff. These last shell holes indicate that one of the cruisers sailed into the bay, broadside to Dresden, and opened up a final salvo or series of salvoes that ripped into the foundering German ship. The shots that missed drove deep into the cliff, where we found them.

  The next day, we journey to the other side of the bay to search the cliffs there. We are rewarded with the discovery of more shell holes and unexploded shells, indicating that the British cruisers engaged in a deadly crossfire. In a brilliant but brutal tactical maneuver, Glasgow circled Dresden and pumped lethal rounds into the anchored German warship. Captain Luce of Glasgow had orders to sink Dresden, and he took no chances, firing at point-blank range even after the last Germans abandoned their ship.

  Dresden is a ruin. Some of the destruction was caused by the shelling, some of it by the deep internal explosions caused by the scuttling charges — but some of it appears to be from a much later attempt to blast open the sunken cruiser’s stern. This damage puzzles us, because history records no attempt to salvage Dresden. Indeed, for many years, the cruiser’s decks were beyond the reach of divers. What happened to the stern — which is intact in photographs of the sinking cruiser — remains a mystery. Later, Willi Kramer finds a formerly top-secret document in the German naval archives that suggests Dresden was carrying gold coin pulled out of Germany’s Tsingtao bank accounts by von Spec. That would explain why we were not the first divers to explore the wreck. Someone has secretly blasted open the stern to get at the gold. We wonder when this was, and how the salvagers knew about the gold, given that the only record is a top-secret piece of paper. One possibility, shades of Raiders of the Lost Ark, is that it was the Nazis, eager to recover some of Germany’s lost riches to fund their preparations for war. We may never know.

  But what is clear is that the sea has claimed Dresden after her final battle. Slumbering in the depths, the broken hulk is an undersea museum, a war grave and an evocative relic of the destruction of war. And yet, in the middle of the debris, Mike spots a small, unbroken flower vase. It is an unexpected find, this delicate survivor. It is also a reminder of the touches of home and life ashore that often accompany sailors on warships on their distant journeys, even into death.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ARCTIC FOX

  THE HIGH ARCTIC: MAY 5, 1859

  As the sledge bumped and slid across the frozen ground of the Arctic, Lieutenant William Hobson’s eyes swept the surrounding area searching for signs of the lost expedition led by Sir John Franklin. Cakes and slabs of ice piled up along the shore separated the snow-covered land from the frozen sea. Hobson, however, kept his gaze fixed on a pile of rocks in the distance, close to the shore. No accident of nature, that rock pile was a cairn, and Hobson hoped that other explorers, perhaps even Sir John Franklin and his men, had deposited records or notes in it, the usual practice in the Arctic. For many days, Hobson had followed a faint trail of scattered relics and broken bones to this spot. Little did he realize that the quest to discover the fate of Franklin, upon which he and his captain, Francis Leopold McClintock, had embarked, was about to reach its climax.

  Pulling apart the top of the cairn, Hobson found a small tin canister. He opened it and reached inside to pull out a rolled-up sheet of yellowed, rust-stained paper. As he read it, Hobson realized that these were words from beyond the grave and that in the sparest of sentences, they told what had happened to the lost Franklin expedition:

  25th April 1848. H.M. Ships Terror and Erebus were deserted on the 22nd April, 5 leagues NNW of this, having been beset since 12th Sept. 1846. The officers & crew consisting of 105 souls under the command of Captain F.R.M. Crozier, landed here.

  Sir John Franklin died on the nth June, 1847 and the total loss by deaths in the expedition has been to this date 9 officers & 15 men.

  F.R.M. Crozier

  Captain & Senior Officer

  And start on tomorrow 26th for Back’s Fish River

  James Fitzjames

  Captain H.M.S. Erebus

  THE SEARCH FOR FRANKLIN

  In 1845, Erebus and Terror, commanded by F.R.M. Crozier and James Fitzjames, had sailed from Britain under the overall command of Captain Sir John Franklin, a veteran of three Arctic expeditions, to map the last unknown waters of the Canadian Arctic archipelago and to complete the transit of the elusive Northwest Passage, for which the English had been searching for nearly three centuries.

  Most of the Northwest Passage had been mapped by the Royal Navy and explorers from the Hudson’s Bay Company, but the last link— a blank spot on the map — remained. So what was envisioned by the British as the final Arctic expedition set sail under the experienced Franklin and his crew, many of them also veterans of Arctic forays, in two well-equipped ships, “to forge the last link.” But after entering Lancaster Sound from Baffin Bay in the summer of 1845, Erebus and Tenor were never seen or heard from again.

  For more than a decade, thirty-one expeditions, both public and private, British and American, searched in vain for Franklin. Tantalizing clues — three graves on a small Arctic beach, relics bought from the Inuit, and disturbing stories told by the Inuit of ships trapped in ice, of men struggling to march overland and dying along the way, and of cannibalism and murder — filled the years of searching, but no conclusive evidence — wrecked ships or records of the Franklin expedition— had been found. Lady Jane Franklin, wife of the missing explorer, pushed the British government to keep on looking, even after a large search expedition in 1854 ended with the loss of several ships: “The final and exhaustive search is all I seek on behalf of the first and only martyrs to Arctic discovery in modern times, and it is all I ever intend to ask.”

  An engraving of Fox trapped in the Arctic ice. Vancouver Maritime Museum.
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  But Britain had sacrificed much to search for Franklin, and now, in 1854, was caught up in an expensive war on Russia’s Crimean Peninsula. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine summed up what Britain had gained, at great cost: “No; there are no more sunny continents — no more islands of the blessed — hidden under the far horizon, tempting the dreamer over the undiscovered sea; nothing but these weird and tragic shores, whose cliffs of everlasting ice and mainlands of frozen snow, which have never produced anything to us but a late and sad discovery of depths of human heroism, patience, and bravery, such as imagination could scarcely dream of.”

  In April 1857, the British government informed Lady Franklin that they had “come, with great regret, to the conclusion that there was no prospect of saving life, [and] would not be justified… in exposing the lives of officers and men to the risk inseparable from such an enterprise.” But the determination of Lady Franklin and her years of urging on the search for her missing husband and his men touched many heartstrings. So, when the British government gave its final refusal, Lady Franklin made a public plea and raised nearly £3,000 to send out her own search expedition. She bought the steam yacht Fox, a 120-foot, Scottish-built vessel, from the estate of Sir Richard Sutton, a master of the traditional hunt who had named the ship for his favorite quarry.

  Lady Franklin placed Fox under the command of Captain Francis Leopold McClintock, a veteran of two Arctic voyages in search of Franklin. At his direction, shipyard workers stripped off the fancy fittings of the yacht, strengthened the hull with extra layers of planking to protect it from the ice, enlarged the boiler, sheathed the bow in iron “until it resembled a ponderous chisel set up edgeways” and braced the hull to keep it from being crushed when frozen in for the winter in the pack ice. McClintock explained: “Internally she was fitted up with the strictest economy in every sense, and the officers were crammed into pigeonholes, styled cabins, in order to make room for provisions and stores; our mess-room, for five persons, measured 8 feet square.”

  The Illustrated London News also described Fox: “There is very little ornament about her, but what she has is in wonderfully good condition. The Fox has three slender, rather raking masts, is of topsail schooner rig, and small poop aft. She is rather sharp forward and her bows are plated over with iron… She looks not unlike a bundle of heavy handspikes, iron pointed at each end, for fending off drift ice.”

  McClintock and his officers and crew all volunteered their services without pay. For two long years they would endure hardship, cold, near shipwreck and three deaths on their quest to find Franklin.

  Fox steamed out of Scotland on June 30, 1857, but when she reached the Canadian Arctic, was stopped in Baffin Bay by the early onset of winter and was trapped in the ice. There was nothing to do but dig in and wait, drifting with the ice pack. It was an occasionally harrowing eight-month ordeal, in which the boredom of confinement gave way to the terror of moving ice. After drifting 1,194 miles, the chance to escape came at last in late April. As Fox fought for eighteen hours to be free, ice constantly struck the hull, causing “the vessel to shake violently, the bells to ring, and almost knocked us off our legs.” McClintock commented, “I can understand how men’s hairs have turned grey in a few hours.” The ice, when it hit the stern, wrenched the rudder and stopped the propeller: “deprived of the one or the other, even for half an hour, I think our fate would have been sealed.”

  Once free of the ice, Fox headed to Greenland for more supplies. After sending letters home to explain why they would be gone longer than planned, McClintock and his crew turned west again for the Canadian Arctic. In the Arctic archipelago, McClintock explored the shores of Somerset Island and Bellot Strait before anchoring Fox near the eastern entrance to the narrow strait. With the ship frozen in for the winter, McClintock prepared to sledge west over the ice and land to reach King William Island, where a few years earlier, Hudson’s Bay Company explorer Dr. John Rae had met some Inuit who told him about men whose ships, trapped in ice, had been abandoned. The men, trekking south, were starving and many had fallen on their march. Some had resorted to cannibalism. The Inuit had a number of items belonging to the dead men that Rae bought from them, including the personal effects of several of Franklin’s officers and Franklin himself. The story, when it reached England along with the “relics,” excited great interest and horror. Now McClintock, Lieutenant William Hobson and Sailing Master Allen Young would head off in three separate parties to search the region to see what they could find.

  On his journey, McClintock learned from Inuit that two ships had been trapped by ice near King William Island, that one had sunk in deep water and that “all the white men went away to the large river, taking a boat or boats with them, and that in the following winter their bones were found there.” The Inuit had salvaged steel and wood from the doomed expedition, and as McClintock pushed farther south, he found Inuit who had in their possession silver spoons and forks “bearing the crests or initials” of Franklin and some of his officers, as well as “uniform and other buttons” and wood from a ship. They told McClintock about a ship, pushed onto shore by the ice, where they had gathered their treasures.

  McClintock continued on to King William Island, where he and his party found more relics, and finally, on May 25, “when slowly walking along a gravel ridge near the beach, which the winds kept partially bare of snow, I came upon a human skeleton, partly exposed, with here and there a few fragments of clothing appearing through the snow.” McClintock also recovered a notebook that yielded up a few sentences about abandoning the ships and ended with a scrawled: “Oh death, whare [sic] is thy sting?” He found a hairbrush and comb, and from the fragments of the uniform, deduced that it was the skeleton of a steward or officer’s servant from the Franklin expedition. As McClintock stood looking at the bones, he recalled the words of an old Inuit woman he had questioned: “They fell down and died as they walked along.”

  When McClintock headed north, back up King William Island to return to Fox, he made a last poignant discovery: a ship’s boat, laden with equipment and spare clothing, and two more skeletons, one wrapped in clothing and furs. After loading up a small quantity of items — silverware and ship’s instruments — McClintock continued his search for the wrecked ship. Instead, he found a pile of goods, stashed on the shore by the Franklin expedition. Plucking more relics from the pile, McClintock travelled back to Fox, arriving on June 19. When warm weather returned in July, McClintock reassembled the steam machinery laid up for the winter, and Fox set off for home.

  McClintock, Hobson and the crew of Fox reached England in September 1859 with relics of the doomed expedition and the “last note.” The tiny yacht, its commander and crew made headlines around the world. Parliament rewarded Fox’s crew with a payment of £5,000, and in 1860 the Queen knighted McClintock. Subsequently promoted to admiral, McClintock enjoyed a long career, serving as commander of the West Indies and the North American station for the Royal Navy and as an honored Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society before his death in 1907.

  Fox outlived McClintock by five years, a surprising fact considering that most ships have short lives, particularly those that work in the Arctic. Sold to Danish owners in 1860, the tough little steamer carried supplies up and down the Greenland coast for the next fifty-two years. The end for Fox came when she went aground on the west Greenland coast in June 1912. After getting off and returning to Qeqertarsuaq (Disko Island), the damaged Fox was discovered by surveyors to be beyond repair. And so the famous ship, stripped of her fittings, was beached in a small cove near the harbor entrance. There, lying half submerged on the starboard side, the hulk slowly deteriorated.

  Even in death, however, Fox attracted visitors drawn by the vessel’s fame. Arctic explorer Donald MacMillan photographed the wreck in 1926, dismasted but still solid, though the local Inuit had been salvaging loose wood from the hull. Accounts of visitors to Qeqertarsuaq mentioned the wreck through the 1930s, but in 1931 and 1934, visiting naturalist Tom Lon
gstaff boarded the hulk to find it breaking apart. He pulled two oak treenails from the hull as souvenirs. In 1940, Fox finally broke apart when a spring storm swept into the harbor and smashed up the deteriorated hull, leaving, one account reported, “only parts of the metal engine” behind.

  FOX AT QEQERTARSUAQ

  The cold spume of the sea sprays over the deck as the bow of Mary West buries itself in a wave. The wind whips around, chilling us to the bone, as we stand clustered on the small deck of the fishing boat. We’re two hours out of Aasiaat, a mainland port, making our way to Qeqertarsuaq, sailing across the waters of Disko Bugt, a bay that cuts into the western coast of Greenland above the 69th parallel. Icebergs, large and small, fill the sea, most of them towering above our deck. It is the height of the brief Arctic summer, and yet the temperature hovers just above 30° F.

  Qeqertarsuaq, a small port community of a thousand, is more than two hundred years old. Founded by Danish traders and whalers, it was named Gødhavn, or “good harbor,” by them. Later known as Lievely, it became a major port of call for Danish, British and American whalers working in Arctic waters. Now known by its original name of Qeqertarsuaq, the settlement survives on fishing, hunting, tourism and the presence of the Arktisk Station — the Danish Polar Scientific Station of the University of Copenhagen. Founded in 1906, it remains a center for Arctic research, hosting two hundred visiting scientists a year. It will be our home for the next week as we venture out to find and dive on the wreck of Fox.