The wreck of HMS Hawke, an Edgar-class protected cruiser sunk by a German U-boat in 1914, has been discovered 360 feet down about 70 miles off Scotland’s Aberdeenshire coast, a search team announced in August. The Royal Navy confirmed the identity of the find in September.
After 110 years of repose beneath the North Sea waves, the 387-foot Hawke, one of the early Royal Navy ship losses of World War I, remains in a notable state of preservation, with much of the teak decking still intact and a host of everyday artifacts such as crockery visible in the cabins. “It’s a really remarkable time capsule,” remarked wreck diver Steve Mortimer to the BBC.
Mortimer has been working on the project with Lost in Waters Deep, a Scottish group dedicated to researching and locating “the First World War naval losses off mainland Scotland, the Western Isles, Orkney, and Shetland.” Considerable preliminary legwork by the team, combing through contemporaneous data in British and German war records, set the stage for the discovery by shipwreck searchers off the diving support vessel Clasina.
Launched in 1891, the Hawke served in the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Squadron in the 1890s in addition to various other duties. An uncanny incident in September 1911 seems, in retrospect, to have been an ominous indication of the ship’s eventual fate: Her bow was smashed in a fluke collision off Southampton with the ocean liner RMS Olympic—sister ship of the Titanic, which sank the following year.
The Hawke was deployed with the 10th Cruiser Squadron, protecting a Canadian troop convoy from German warship attacks, on 15 October 1914 when she dropped out from the patrol to pick up mail from HMS Endymion. Hastening to rejoin her now out-of-sight squadron, the Hawke was struck by a torpedo from the German submarine U-9—which less than a month earlier had mortified the British public by sinking three ships of the 7th Cruiser Squadron in one shockingly decisive encounter.
Now, U-9’s latest victim quickly burst into flames from the fatal torpedo hit. An explosion rocked her, and in less than eight minutes, HMS Hawke had gone to her final resting place. Seventy men survived, while 524, including the captain, died with their ship.
