The Shipwreck Hunter

by David L. Mearns

  The second track-line was slightly more interesting than the first, with a few more targets logged but nothing remotely close to being Hood, or even part of Hood. During the turn to the start of the third line, Lindsay wanted to conduct an interview with me that would be broadcast live on the main evening news. Because what we were attempting was so technologically novel – streaming live real-time video from our ship in the North Atlantic to a news studio in London via a combination of satellite and fibre-optic cable links – it would represent a first in the history of UK television broadcasting. Lindsay understandably wanted the interview to go well and for the timing to be spot on, so we practised several run-throughs before waiting for the cue from the producer in his earpiece. We were just seconds away from going live when Lindsay shouted out in language more in keeping with a sailor than a journalist. The video link had dropped out during the producer’s countdown, leaving him with no option but to kill the segment entirely. Lindsay was furious at our bad luck, while I was left ruing the hour of sleep I had just lost.

  Lindsay had met Ted during the mobilization in Cork and was keen for me to speak in the interview about Ted’s hopes for the search. The story I would have told had the interview not been killed was how Ted wanted me to find the wreck close to the position I’d derived from the last wireless message sent from Hood. The significance of this was that the position had been worked out by the squadron’s navigating officer, Commander John Warrand. Ted could never forget Warrand stepping aside to let him leave the compass platform first as Hood sank, and believed he owed him his life as a result. Warrand’s position was the last one I found during my research, and there was a long, laborious process before I could make any sense of it. I even had to break a British navigational code similar to the German Quadrate system that I had never seen before in order to figure out Warrand’s position, which was sent at 5.43 a.m., about seventeen minutes before Hood blew up and sank. Having determined the lat/long coordinates and time of the position, I used them to project where Hood had sunk, based on the same deadreckoning track I’d calculated for the Prince of Wales. In the end I was left with a sinking position that came directly from the most senior navigator plotting his ship’s movements during the battle.

  Deriving a sinking position from Warrand’s information was a major victory in my research effort, but it did leave me with a new problem. The position was a long way — about eight nautical miles – west of where the other four positions were clustered. Incorporating it into my search box, which I felt I had to do, increased the area by about 40 per cent. I had another important piece of information, however, that bolstered my confidence in Warrand’s navigational skills. It came from HMS Malcolm, one of the destroyers that had raced to the scene after receiving Wake-Walker’s order. When Malcolm arrived at Wake-Walker’s revised sinking position nine hours after Hood had sunk, they found nothing. They proceeded to another position reported by a Sunderland flying boat that had witnessed the battle, and again found nothing. At 9.45 that evening, after conducting broad sweeps of the area within ten nautical miles of Norfolk’s position, Malcolm’s persistence finally paid off, and the crew found ‘a large patch of oil, 1 mile in diameter, covered in small bits of wreckage’. Joined by Antelope, another destroyer, Malcolm searched the area through the night but sadly found no survivors. In their finely observed report of how they scoured the sea, however, they did provide me with another vital clue.

  In the time that transpired after Hood’s loss – nearly sixteen hours – the oil and wreckage found by Malcolm would have drifted away from the sinking position, carried and pushed by a combination of current and wind. I knew that if enough information was available, I could calculate this total drift and backtrack the movement of the oil and wreckage from Malcolm’s position to where it originated – in other words, to where Hood sank. The process is called reverse drift analysis, and I learned how to do it years before finding shipwrecks for Blue Water Recoveries. Fortunately, I had the information I needed, which was good data on the average speeds of the Irminger current in the month of May and winds at the location recorded by four of the British ships, including Malcolm. When I calculated and plotted the current and leeway (the correct term for wind drift) components of the drift relative to the position where Malcolm sighted the wreckage, I was surprised and more than pleased with what I saw. The result covered a range of outcomes defined by a trapezoid on the plot, with Warrand’s position for Hood very close to the centre. The correlation between the two independent positions could hardly have been better. Commander Warrand’s position was no longer on an unexplainable outlier and there was every chance Ted would get his wish.

  The third track-line, like the first, ran east to west through the heart of my red high-probability box. We were scanning it overnight, which meant our control room would be quieter than normal. I had always preferred to work the night shift while at sea: there were fewer distractions and it seemed that the best results were always achieved then. The sonar had passed the halfway point of the line and was now imaging the flat and featureless Irminger Basin, and I was struggling to keep my eyes open as the long hours and lack of sleep caught up with me. I caught a second wind, however, and my eyes were glued to the screen as the first few pixels of a hard target emerged from its top. Another eight seconds passed, producing two more scan lines that revealed a yellow-green angular shape with a sharply defined acoustic shadow behind it. In that instant, sitting alone watching this stunning picture reveal itself in superslow-motion, I knew I was looking at the wreck of HMS Hood.

  There were no whoops of joy or back-slaps as with Bismarck and every other wreck I had found before. It was such an emotional and sad moment for me, I didn’t feel like celebrating in any way. With other shipwrecks I avoided connecting my emotions to the objective of the search, but Hood was different. In part it was because I had grown so close to the veterans and families, and of course to Ted. I knew they would all be pleased that the wreck was now found, but I was sure their first emotion too would be sadness. Even though I had no relative to mourn, I was hit hard by knowing I was looking at the grave site of so many boys and men.

  As the full devastating picture of Hood’s destruction scrolled down my screen, I knew it would be difficult for Ted to see his ship in this condition. We would need to collect high-resolution sonar images of the wreckage and debris fields, which were scattered across two kilometres of the seabed. And I also needed to get visual proof with the Magellan of what the sonar was telling me before I broke the news to him. I did have some news that would please him, though. His wish had come true: on 24 May 1941, Commander John Warrand was without question the best navigator.

  Our speedy location of Hood – thirty-nine hours from the time the sonar was launched – meant that instead of being three days behind schedule, we had caught up and were suddenly one day ahead. The extra time allowed me to collect two stunning high-resolution sonar images of Hood’s extensive wreckage field and to plan for the arrival of a very special visitor. From our earliest meetings with Ted Briggs in 1995, it was plain to both Rob White and me that Ted really wanted the chance to come out to the wreck site himself. He had carried the burden, and probably some element of guilt, of being a Hood survivor his entire adult life. It was important for him to say goodbye to his shipmates, and knowing his selfless devotion to the Hood Association, I believed he felt it was his duty to make the trip. However, it was also his chance to personally lay the ghost of Hood to rest.

  For the first ROV dive on the site, my sole objective was to film some distinctive part of the ship as conclusive proof that the wreck was indeed HMS Hood. If we were going to announce our discovery to the world, and to the many thousands of people related to Hood’s crew, I wanted visual evidence, even though in my own mind the sonar images were already 100 per cent conclusive. As the largest piece of wreckage generally provides the best features for identifying a shipwreck, I chose a path for Magellan directly to the very large sonar target that had fir
st alerted me to the wreck and that I believed was a major intact section of Hood’s hull. What I’d thought would be a fairly straightforward dive, however, turned out to be an eighteen-hour mini-marathon that ended in frustration, disappointment and nearly disaster.

  The problem we faced was that there was a very strong subsea current flowing past the wreck site that made visibility poor and flying the ROV extremely difficult for the pilots. Even when applying full thruster power they were struggling to make any forward progress against the current. The biggest upset, though, was that the large section of hull was sitting upside down on the seabed. With Hood’s main and upper decks buried in the mud, all we were able to see was the bottom of the hull and a couple of large square vents covered by a heavy grating. While these vents were a perfect match for the ones I found on a docking plan for the ship, and thus gave me the proof of identification I was after, we weren’t going to learn anything else from the underside of the ship, and were starting to reposition the Northern Horizon and the ROV when without warning our video screens flickered once and then went dark.

  Recovering an ROV when power and control has been lost is called a ‘dead vehicle recovery’, and in the best of circumstances it can be a hairy operation. In the nasty weather that had kicked up during the dive, however, it might have been downright dangerous if not for the experience of Oceaneering’s team. Like a handful of cowboys roping a runaway bull by the horns, they essentially manhandled the 1.5-ton vehicle into a safe recovery position while managing to prevent it from being sucked under the Northern Horizon and into its spinning propellers. It was only when Magellan was safely on deck that we realized just how precarious the situation had actually been. A threaded mechanical termination that physically connects the long steel cable coming off the ship to the depressor platform and the ROV, which together make up the Magellan system, had very nearly unscrewed and sent the whole rig crashing to the seabed. Unbeknownst to us, the depressor was spinning around in the strong current, causing the threaded termination to unscrew and the central cable containing the power and signal conductors to twist and ultimately snap. Of the fifteen threads holding the two ends of the termination together, twelve had unscrewed, meaning we were only three rotations from an unmitigated disaster that would have brought the expedition to an abrupt and undignified halt.

  Despite our problems, I had seen enough of the wreck to fulfil a promise I had made to Ted that he would be the first person I called once I was sure we had found the Hood. He was waiting at home, having been primed by C4 that momentous news was about to break. Despite the fact that this was a moment we had dreamt about for years, our conversation lasted a couple of minutes at most. Ted was so choked with emotion he could hardly speak. He did, however, ask me where the wreck was found, and was pleased to hear it was close to Commander Warrand’s estimated position. We were both being filmed as we spoke, but it was many months before I saw the completed documentary and the impact this news had on Ted. After saying goodbye to me, he got up from his chair and walked past the documentary team into his kitchen saying ‘yep, he’s done it, well and truly,’ his hands visibly trembling as he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe the tears from his eyes. As he stood staring out of the kitchen window into his garden, I imagined that my news had taken him back sixty years to the Denmark Strait and that haunting view of Hood’s upended bow sliding beneath the fiery sea.

  The next few days filming the wreck and preparing for Ted’s arrival went by in a blur. With the ROV diving on a continuous basis and no darkness to break up the days, it was easy to lose track of time. At one point I walked out of our darkened control room into the bright sunlight and asked one of the documentary producers how long until breakfast was served, only to be told that the next meal was supper at 6.30 p.m. I had already been up for more than a day and a half and was so absorbed in our investigation that I continued working for another twelve hours without any conscious awareness of time. I find that the concentration required to navigate around the wreckage field and to reassemble in your mind ship structures that have been blown apart forces you into a purely mental zone.

  After my initial disappointment at the state we found Hood in, my mood lightened as more recognizable sections of the ship were discovered and we began to make sense of the widely scattered fields of wreckage. Our discovery was also publicly announced on C4, and congratulations started trickling in to the ship. Julian Ware, the executive producer in charge of making the documentaries for C4, had been instrumental from a very early stage in securing Tim Gardam’s support for the project. For this and other reasons I was most proud of his brief message, especially in the way that it harked back to one of the most famous quotes in British naval history: ‘England expects, but it took an American to deliver.’

  When I was not glued to the video monitors directing the wreck investigation, I was on the phone finalizing plans for Ted’s journey out to the Northern Horizon. Because our location was too far for a helicopter, the safest and surest way for him to travel was on a reliable and sturdy Icelandic tugboat. The 500-nautical-mile round trip would take at least two days – the longest time Ted would have been at sea since retiring from the Royal Navy in 1973 – and would be an arduous journey for a man half his seventy-eight years. We were relying on good weather for his visit, otherwise it would be called off, but were blessed with the absolute best day we had had since leaving Cork.

  After completing the delicate business of transferring Ted from the tugboat to the Northern Horizon, he joined me in the lounge for a detailed review of the video we had shot of Hood’s wreckage over the previous four days. Back in London, he had caught snippets of the video during an interview with Jon Snow, the C4 news anchor. Now, however, he was about to see for the first time the full-scale destruction that had been visited on his former ship. I started by explaining the overall spread of wreckage revealed in the high-resolution sonar images. The bird’s-eye view provided by this imagery was key to understanding what had happened to Hood, and in my opinion answered the fundamental questions of why the ship sank so fast and why the loss of life was so great.

  The surprise discovery of our expedition, which hadn’t been forecast by any of the eyewitness accounts, was that Hood had apparently suffered not one but two explosions, ripping the hull apart and sending her to the bottom of the Denmark Strait so quickly that the men were unable to get clear. The main evidence for that conclusion was the two large teardrop-shaped debris fields covered with dense concentrations of wreckage. These separate and distinct fields marked the exact spots where Hood’s hull, while still afloat, broke apart. Their relative position on the seabed, approximately in line with Hood’s heading when she was hit by the shell from Bismarck’s fifth salvo, further reflected the close sequence of two separate events. The first, easily seen by anyone with their eyes on Hood at that moment, was when the 112 tons of cordite in the aft 15-inch magazine detonated within a second or two of being hit by the shell. We estimated that this explosion obliterated a seventy-metre section of the hull in the area of the aft magazines, the remains of which, including Hood’s two forward propellers with parts of the shaft still attached, and two complete stern tubes, formed the eastern debris field.

  What was left of Hood’s stern, a forty-metre section that was blown clean away from the rest of the hull when the aft magazine exploded, was also found lying in this eastern debris field. The damage to its forward end, nearest to the seat of the explosion, reflected the enormous power of the blast. I wondered what Ted would make of seeing familiar parts of his ship so utterly destroyed. As a signalman he would have mustered near the ensign staff on Hood’s quarterdeck – the longest of any warship afloat – every morning at 8 a.m. for Colours and at dusk for Sunset. He would also have remembered its bleached teak decking on more joyous occasions, like dances and receptions when Hood was in port. Now, fractured clean across from one side of the ship to the other, it bore no resemblance to how it had once looked. We could see no structure below
this part of the quarterdeck, as the bottoms of the ship had been blown away and the contents strewn throughout the eastern debris field. Near the seabed on the port side a section of shell plating I estimated to be at least fifteen metres long was peeled back like a banana skin. Everywhere we looked there was evidence of the tremendous forces that had ripped the hull apart.

  One of the only parts of Hood’s stern that had escaped damage was her port rudder, which I especially wanted Ted to see. We had found it frozen in a twenty-degree turn to port, proving that Holland had ordered this final manoeuvre, and that Hood’s crew had executed it. This was a remarkable and important discovery for our expedition. The video I was showing Ted was literally a snapshot in time of a historic moment that had been discussed and debated since the day Hood sank. Ted, who had been in earshot of Holland ordering this final turn, was able to finally see how unlucky his admiral had been that day. Had the turn been completed just thirty seconds sooner, Hood would have moved out of the shot pattern of Bismarck’s fifth salvo and probably not been hit.

  Once it was determined that the eastern debris field marked where the aft 15-inch magazine had exploded, it was possible to put into context the western debris field, whose centre was roughly 500 metres further west, or in the approximate direction Hood was travelling. In terms of time, the western debris field had to have been created as a secondary event after the initial explosion of the aft magazine. It was also about twice as large as the eastern debris field and much more densely concentrated with wreckage, which indicated that whatever cataclysm destroyed the forward part of Hood must have been on a scale greater than, or certainly no less than, the aft magazine explosion. Like the stern, Hood’s bow appeared to be just an exterior shell, with its internal structures and contents missing. We found the bow lying port side down with the anchor cable draped along the upper starboard side, its heavy links cascading over the railing to the muddy seabed below. This was where I thought Ted should lay the memorial plaque, and he readily agreed.