The wreck of HMS Hawke, a British Royal Navy cruiser, which was torpedoed by the German submarine U-9 on 15 October 1914 and presumed lost for over a century, has been located off the Scottish coast.
HMS Hawke, launched in 1891, was an Edgar-class protected cruiser.
HMS Hawke was discovered earlier this week after an extensive search by Lost in Waters Deep—a group that searches for WWI shipwrecks—about 70 miles off the Aberdeenshire coast. It was found to be in "remarkable" condition, lying at a depth of around 110 metres (360ft).
HMS Hawke was a cruiser of the Royal Navy known for its involvement in the early naval battles of World War I. Its sinking by U-9, marked one of the early successful attacks on British naval vessels by German submarines. The ship’s loss had a profound impact on British naval strategy and highlighted the growing threat of submarine warfare. Five hundred and twenty-four officers and men died including the ship’s captain, with only 70 survivors.
Quite intact
“She’s lying on her starboard side and under there … seems to be quite intact,” Will Schwarz, one of the divers, told CNN in a phone interview on Friday. “The guns look as if they’re still active, they’re so highly polished it’s unbelievable … I’ve never seen guns like that in such amazing condition, it’s absolutely beautiful. But, we’re very aware that 524 lads lost their lives on it.”
Steve Mortimer, a diver working alongside the Lost in Waters Deep project, told BBC Scotland that finding the location of HMS Hawke took a lot of hard work. Schwarz said the team’s research to pinpoint a search area included going through the archive records of the ships HMS Hawke was with at the time of the attack, as well as studying the German U-boat’s logs.
Armed with that information, the team examined the admiralty charts and scanned the seabed in the area in an attempt to find the ship.
Another piece of data was an “obstruction” on the seabed reported by Scottish fisheries in the 1980s. The divers investigated the obstruction site but found nothing. However, just a kilometre away, they found a large shipwreck.
