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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
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
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.