Seven-Tenths Read online

  Probably every such sinking generates its own aura which profoundly affects not merely the public at large but those involved in the search. There is an account of a strange experience which the wife of a Rear Admiral at Portsmouth had on the night of 17 April, the first evening of the search for Affray.

  Quite suddenly, I realised that I was not alone in my room and in the half-light I recognised my visitor. He had been serving as an engineer officer in my husband’s ship, a cruiser, at a time when my husband was an Engineer-Commander, and we had often entertained him in our Channel Islands home.

  He approached me and stood still and silent; I was astonished to see him dressed in normal submariner’s uniform although I did not recognise this fact until I described his clothing to my husband later. Then he spoke quite clearly and said: ‘Tell your husband we are at the north end of the Hurd Deep, nearly seventy miles from the lighthouse at St. Catherine’s Point. It happened very suddenly and none of us expected it.’ After that the speaker vanished.*

  The lady had promptly phoned her husband, who said he had no idea this officer had even transferred to the submarine service, still less that he was aboard HMS Affray. Since the Hurd Deep was well outside the main search area, ships could hardly be diverted on the basis of a ghost story. That, of course, was while there was a chance the crew might still be alive. It was to be some weeks before Captain Shelford gave enough credence to the other seers and clairvoyants to tell his superior.

  Affray was eventually found by HMS Reclaim, using an underwater TV camera, a new technology’s first major success. She was lying in 43 fathoms of water on the edge of the Hurd Deep with a slight list to port. It was 67 miles from St Catherine’s lighthouse. At first sight she appeared undamaged. All hatches were shut and none of her indicator buoys had been released. Her hydroplanes were set to rise. Then serious damage was found to her snort tube. This was a hollow mast, 35 feet tall, through which the diesel engines could breathe, enabling the submarine to run on her surface engines while shallowly submerged. The cameras found it was almost completely snapped off at the base and the hull valve inside was open. The mast was winched up and examined. It was thought at first there might have been a collision, but it was soon found the fracture had been caused by the design not having been strong enough, combined with faulty material. Probably her commander had radioed his last message, dived, and the snort tube fractured on the way down. Even at a depth of only 40 feet, water would have poured through the open valve at a rate of three-quarters of a ton per second. It would have been impossible to have closed the valve against such a flow even if somebody had been standing by it. The water would at once have flooded the engine room and caused electrical short circuits followed by explosions, fire and the release of noxious fumes.

  So it seems after all that the Affray was overwhelmed quickly and without warning, and that by the time the alarm was raised her crew had already been dead several hours. The ‘signals’ heard during the search, the code word, the tapping, all were imagination on the part of anxious young men with headphones clamped to their ears in submarines identical to the one that had vanished. The powerful asdic return from the clairvoyants’ recommended ‘position’ was almost certainly from the DSL, or Deep Scattering Layer.* As for the Rear Admiral’s wife, her visitant had been completely accurate.

  It would just have been possible to salvage Affray, given her depth, the currents at that point and the technical capabilities of the day, but it would have been expensive and dangerous. ‘Since the cause of the disaster had been established little was to be gained from such an operation, her scrap value being no more than about £5,000. Salvage was abandoned.’† In 1990 her wreck was resurveyed. An officer in the Wrecks Department at Taunton Hydrographic Office added that he himself had been aboard one of the submarines searching for Affray and the story of messages being picked up by asdic was ‘quite without foundation’. He said the Affray had flooded instantly. ‘It was chaos out there – messages whizzing about – and no doubt some people imagined what they most wanted to hear. It was a very emotional business, of course.’ As for the ‘suicide pills’: ‘Absolute poppycock. Never been such a thing. Pure bosh.’

  Concerning the bodies themselves, my schoolchild’s fantasy had presupposed a watertight submarine. It is possible to form a few tentative theories as to what might happen in the circumstance of seventy-five people dying of oxygen starvation. Much would depend on things such as temperature and the fungi in the remaining atmosphere, though it seems likely the air scrubbers would have removed most floating yeasts. From that point of view a submarine is probably a comparatively sterile place. In any case the hypoxia and high carbon-dioxide levels would initially accelerate decomposition due to venous congestion. This would be followed by a slow process of mummification during which the skin hardens and the gaseous cavern of the stomach contracts. It is likely that adipocere would form, especially in dependent limbs. This is the condition when fat changes to an off-white, waxlike substance smelling slightly rancid or musty. Adipocere itself being preservative, this would prevent further decay in affected portions. Provided a sunken submarine remained watertight, a trip down her interior with a flashlight would probably reveal a majority of mummifying bodies, some partly decomposed, a few even skeletonised entirely. Here and there where a head had been subject to adipocere a face might be seen whose features had scarcely changed.

  In the case of sudden flooding, as in the Affray, things would be entirely different. The first, powerful inrush of water would have caused extensive injuries, including rupture of the eardrums by the rapidly increasing pressure. Since any opening, even one only 10 inches across like a snort valve, would give access to marine animals the stripping of the bodies would begin within hours. In the sea it is generally the lips, eyes and fingers which go first, being most easily seized by creatures with small mouths or pincers. Cod are especially voracious and as soon as the seawater softens the flesh the remainder will be torn off quite rapidly.

  *

  Except in terms of size, the Arizona is no more of a tomb than the Affray, but its status is quite different. It is a national shrine because it fell victim at a turning point in US history, on ‘a date which will live in infamy’, in President Roosevelt’s words. Part of her power as a symbol comes from being visible but inaccessible. One can touch a mausoleum; a relative might put flowers on an actual grave in Arlington National Cemetery and pass a musing hand over the carved name. But no relatives may touch the Arizona. Not even the memorial from which they gaze down touches her. Everything about the ship has passed out of the realm of the personal. A further part of her power derives from being monumentally a heap of junk. Most war debris is cleared away, especially if it is blocking a harbour. To have left this hulk in the face of expediency or even aesthetics (for, shorn of its symbolic value, there is nothing very beautiful about bits of rusty steel poking up above the water) is a powerfully contrary gesture. It is a solemn act, going against every urge to tidy away, clear up or edit the past. This being the case, it is hard to imagine what might happen to any blithe infidel who took it into his head to don scuba gear and loot the Arizona.

  The Affray is in a different category altogether. She was a peacetime casualty, though still a military craft. She symbolises little beyond the misfortunes of happenstance. Most of her interest lies in a collective, brief but intense involvement with the race to save her when, in fact, she was already dead. She is a tomb to seventy-five and cannot be tampered with, though without the same taboo as the Arizona. In fact, the whole issue of when undersea tombs can and cannot be touched, and to what extent, is complex. In March 1991 three men with a good deal of equipment dived on the wreck of another British submarine, the E 49. This had gone down with all hands in 1917 off the Shetland Islands and was first found by local divers in 1988. The men looted one and a half tons of assorted bronze fittings worth £1,500 and later, before a court in Lerwick, admitted to ‘theft by finding’. It was stated in court that the wrec
k belonged to the Ministry of Defence and the men pleaded guilty while claiming they did not know the items were part of a submarine. Two of them were lightly fined and the third was ‘admonished’. At no point in the newspaper reports was there any mention of the submarine’s being a tomb or a war grave.

  On the other hand, the Titanic, which sank five years before the E 49, at first acquired untouchable status though only once the technological means for touching her had been perfected. But before long a few artefacts were dredged up and shown on French television. Dr Robert Ballard, who led the 1985 expedition to film the wreck, has always made a point that nothing should be removed from it, to the extent of throwing back a piece of cable snagged and brought to the surface by an unmanned reconnaissance sled. (He has, however, added to the wreck: a bronze plaque from the Titanic Historical Society commemorating the ship’s 1,522 dead.) It remains to be seen whether others will be as scrupulous. The ship’s best defence is her depth, the secrecy of her exact coordinates and the huge expense of all exploration and salvage technology.*

  The question stands: when does a wreck pass into the gaze of archaeology enough for the numbers of dead on board to be irrelevant to investigation and salvage? Any famous wreck belonging to this century might be thought safe, on the grounds that victims’ relatives might object or sue. Yet that cannot be a hard and fast rule since several modern wrecks have been quite officially looted if they were carrying sufficiently valuable cargoes. There must be some unwritten algorithm which balances the number of bodies against bullion or lost art or artefacts, which only takes shape in words when it is already too late.

  Military wrecks fall into a separate category since in Britain, at any rate, they belong to the Ministry of Defence. This is not a claim likely to be relinquished, moreover, since in certain respects the scrap value of wrecks increases as time goes by. Some fifty years on, the Affray would assuredly be worth more than £5,000. World War I craft have an additional value in that their steel dates from the pre-atomic age and contains no radioactive isotopes such as of caesium. This is known as ‘pre-atomic’ or ‘aged’ metal and came into demand as a direct result of the numerous H-bomb tests in the 1960s. These caused atmospheric pollution in the form of short-lived nucleides which have contaminated every forging or casting made anywhere in the world since then. When scientists wanted to be able to measure very low levels of radiation in samples they were testing there seemed to be no way of making a screen to exclude normal background radiation since the steel of the screen was itself contaminated. The solution was to salvage the gun barrels of pre-atomic warships. Their advantage was that they did not require re-forging. The barrels were simply cut into lengths and the scientists could lower their samples into these massive, inert chambers. For many years demand for aged metal has been satisfied by the wrecks of the German fleet scuppered at Scapa Flow, a rich source of uncontaminated steel as well as of copper, brass and nickel-alloy armour plate, which has its own brokers. However, the need for pre-atomic metal has already begun to lessen with the decline of atmospheric nuclear testing and the decay of short-lived isotopes.

  There is obviously nothing new in the idea of bringing up valuables from wrecks. Livy mentions it, and in Rhodes there was a law of salvage which apportioned reward according to the depth from which the treasure was retrieved. In water 12 feet deep, a diver received a third of its value, at twice that depth a half. Great fortunes were made by men working with very primitive apparatus. In 1667 William Phipps used wooden diving bells to work in water up to 60 feet deep while recovering £200,000 from a galleon sunk off the coast of Spain. For this he received one-tenth, while £90,000 went to the Duke of Albemarle and the remainder was distributed to the enterprise’s other subscribers. There seems to have been no claim made by the Spanish Ministry of Defence, nor any particular respect paid to the bones of the crew.

  *

  It will be seen how readily, at certain points, three of the categories of wreck – tombs, time capsules and gold mines – elide into each other. In time almost any wreck becomes valuable. Sheer treasure will generally outweigh scruples. The perfect example of a wreck too recent to be of any real archaeological interest and too old to be thought of as anyone’s tomb is that of the SS Central America. This sank 200 miles off the coast of South Carolina in a hurricane in 1857. Of its 600 passengers, 425 went down with her; but they did not prevent the cargo of Californian gold from being raised recently. Probably the single richest treasure ever found, it was worth a billion dollars. ‘Found’ in cases like this does not mean the serendipity of just happening to stumble on a fortune. More searching can take place in libraries and record offices than on location.

  It may well be that one of the proprieties of salvage hinges on something as banal as whether or not there are any skeletons left. The action of the sea on human bones is referred to in the next chapter; in brief, much depends on salinity and especially on pressure – in other words, depth. Unloading a seemingly deserted hulk would be quite different from looting beneath the knowing, sardonic gaze of skulls. Like the Central America, the Titanic does not yet have for us the archaeological interest which made the recovery from the Solent of the Mary Rose worth undertaking when it was quite clear that, as a warship, she would not have been carrying treasure. Besides, it had been declared in advance that any artefacts found would go into museums and not sale-rooms. But before long, Titanic will be comprehensively looted. It has a mystique about it like that surrounding the tombs of ancient Egypt. What fascinates is not the possibility of finding the odd tiara so much as the retrieval of domestic objects impregnated with this mystique. To be able to eat off one of her dinner plates decorated with the shipping line’s emblem of a white star inside a red burgee would be strange until it became a commonplace. Around a century on the seabed endows an ordinary utilitarian object with a reality slightly at one remove. It ought not to be here, but it is. Yet part of it is still in the timeless realm into which it disappeared. Tutankhamun’s trumpets have been played after 3,300 years of silence, and if their haunting sound comes at us from another world entirely, so would that of – say – a trumpet belonging to one of the Titanic’s band which had last played ‘Abide with Me’ on her steeply canting deck.

  Lying off a Philippine province there is a wrecked British cargo ship of the mid-nineteenth century from which storms occasionally wash thick English crockery on to the beach. There is probably nothing of much value on board since the vessel was merely supplying the outposts of sugar companies on Negros. It is odd to see old stone beer bottles so far from home and used as oil lamps in the local huts, as it is to sip palm wine out of china mugs with ‘Staffs’ stamped on the bottom beneath the glaze. The sea seldom gives back much of what it takes and when it does, in random and haphazard fashion, the effect can be striking.

  Generally, the sea hides and dissolves, and in translating objects from the upper to the lower world, it obscures with ‘an immensity that receives no impress, preserves no memories, and keeps no reckoning of lives.’* It is into this immensity that aircraft as well as ships disappear. Somewhere under the waves are the last fragments of Amelia Earhart, Amy Johnson, Glenn Miller, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and countless others; to say nothing of the redoubtable Duchess of Bedford who was last seen heading out alone over the Wash in her De Havilland Moth in 1937, aged eighty-one.

  As for time bombs, these are usually objects which people prefer not to think about too closely. They include literal ones, like the munitions ship Richard Montgomery which sank late in World War II in the mouth of the Medway with a full cargo of bombs, shells and high explosives. It is still there, visible and clearly buoyed off Sheerness. It has been estimated that if it ever does explode it could level the town, and local MPs periodically raise the matter in parliament. Consensus expert opinion remains that the explosives have reached such an unstable condition it is as well to leave the ship alone. Time bombs of a different order are the drums of toxic chemicals such as dioxin which are frequently w
ashed off the decks of cargo vessels during storms or dumped as part of an effort at ‘waste disposal’. Radioactive waste is similarly still being dumped at sea in reinforced concrete containers. Oil tankers also go down from time to time without all their tanks rupturing, so that somewhere, conveniently hidden, lie millions of tons of crude oil waiting to escape. Entropy being what it is, and oil being lighter than water, sooner or later they will.

  Finally, there is perhaps a fifth category of wreck, one which combines the characteristics of tomb and time bomb in that for one reason or another people do not wish to investigate further. On the night of 20 December 1987 there was a collision between two ships in the Tablas Strait off Mindoro in the Philippines. The larger of the two vessels was the M/V Doña Paz, a passenger ship belonging to Sulpicio Lines. She was grossly overladen, an everyday occurrence in itself but made worse than usual by the approaching holiday. Somewhere off Dumali Point she collided with a lightless and rusty tanker, the M/T Vector, owned by Caltex. There was a huge explosion and a fireball which was seen by fishermen 40 miles away.

  From the Doña Paz, twenty-six survived: twenty-five men and a girl of eighteen. From the Vector, two. To this day nobody knows exactly how many died. Three thousand is the official estimate, but it is certain to have been many more. The passenger ship’s manifest showed only the legal maximum, of course, but that will not have been a true count even of those families listed since children under the age of ten are never included as they travel free. Possibly the dissolving bones of 3,500 people lie in over 1,500 feet of water in the Tablas Strait, but nobody wants to be reminded in too much detail of the world’s worst-ever peacetime disaster at sea.* At the time, world leaders, including the Pope, expressed ‘anguish’. President Aquino ordered an immediate ‘all-out probe’. Not until November the following year – and only after another accident involving one of its vessels (see Chapter 7) – were the shipping company’s operations briefly suspended. The captain of the Doña Paz, who did not survive, was thought to have been drunk and playing mah-jong at the time of the collision. It was said that the Vector’s bridge was completely empty, and the charge filed against Caltex was for carrying ‘a highly dangerous mix of cargo in a grossly inadequate and unseaworthy vessel’.* Meanwhile, the victims’ relatives formed an association to press for proper compensation. Nearly eighteen months later, in May 1989, Sulpicio Lines claimed ‘86% of the passengers aboard the Doña Paz have been paid for at 30,000 per victim’ (about £600). That is, 86 per cent of those listed on the manifest. The company admitted no liability for the passengers it had carried illegally and who could not now be identified. Also, of course, the affair had incited hundreds of completely fictitious claims. One way and another, it was convenient that the sea should efface the evidence and close for ever over the President’s ‘all-out probe’.