STORY: :: Divers believe this is the lost shipwreck of a boat
torpedoed during World War One off the coast of Scotland
:: August 11, 2024
:: Paul Downs / Lost in Waters Deep
:: Steven John Mortimer, Diver, Lost in Waters Deep
“We think we found the wreck of HMS Hawke. Now, Hawke was a cruiser that was torpedoed by a German submarine U9 on the 15th of October 1914 with huge loss of life. 525 sailors and Royal Marines died that day, so a real catastrophe for the Navy.”
:: August 16, 2024
:: Fraserburgh, Scotland
:: MORTIMER: “Hawke had stopped to exchange mail with a number of other Royal Navy cruisers, and they weren’t sunk. So we’re looking at their logbooks. We could actually see where they were and where the mail exchange had happened. And by a process of deduction, we were then able to say, well, we think this is our search area. And within that search area, Scottish fisheries in the 1980s had found an obstruction. It hadn’t been investigated. We thought we’d have a look at it. There was nothing there, actually. But a kilometer away from that, we found a big ship wreck, and we thought, we know what this could be.”
:: The shipwreck is expected to be
formally identified by the Royal Navy
The discovery was made off the coast of Aberdeenshire, approximately 70 miles east of Fraserburgh.
The team said they were surprised at how little marine growth was on brass components on some of the wreckage.