I

Many must have had the fantasy of the sea vanishing and leaving its bed open to inspection, though the imaginative leap may be accompanied by uneasiness about the sea’s sudden return, catching the fantasist out in the middle, bent over something of interest. (The ominously rising breeze, the horrid realisation that the low strip of dark cloud on the horizon is actually an onrushing wall of water hundreds of feet high.) Treasure hunters, especially, must all have entertained the fancy of strolling offshore among the wrecks and hulks drying in the sunshine, scattered as far as the eye can reach. The image is likely to be sanitised, based on pictures of stranded fishing boats canted over in the deserts of Kazakhstan where the retreating waters of the ruined Aral Sea have left them. The reality would be one of draped and stenching putrefaction.

Wrecks have a particular fascination because they act as foci for so many preoccupations: death, loss, things being hidden and disappearing, things being discovered and reappearing, hoards of wealth. Irony is added in that wrecks and their contents are frequently quite close to their searchers. They may be no more than a few hundred feet away but the marine universe into which they have passed makes them as inaccessible as if they were miles distant or on the Moon. If one were to classify them, wrecks would conveniently fit into four categories: tombs, time capsules, gold mines and time bombs.

*

On Pier 40 of Honolulu Port, from which the Farnella sailed, stood a huge warehouse, practically empty. I learned from the security guard that until recently it had been used as a dump for impounded contraband and, indeed, below the wharf on the side opposite the ship were moored various oceangoing yachts and catamarans, all of which had belonged to drug runners now behind bars. Their craft were waiting to be auctioned off by US Customs. Before that, the warehouse had contained one of the largest collections of aluminium coffins in the world.

Honolulu, and especially Waikiki, strikes many visitors as moronic in its empty-headedness. It is exactly the sort of place disgraced dictators would choose to go into exile, live in a tropical wedding cake of a villa and die protesting their innocence, all of which ex-President Marcos did. But the island of Oahu has long had a grimmer aspect, one which runs reassuringly beneath the sun-and-surf package tourism. Only a few miles along the coast from Waikiki is Pearl Harbor, while the air base of Wheeler Field at the island’s centre has been associated with death ever since World War II. For nearly forty years it was the stopover for American KIAs from the Philippines, the Marshalls and Solomons, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and the rest of Indochina. Those killed in action in every Pacific and South-East Asian theatre of war passed through Oahu, and it was here that bodies returned by the Vietnamese government came for identification. Hence the coffins. The bulk of them are now stored elsewhere; but 100 yards away from the warehouse, on the far side of rows of dusty new Japanese cars awaiting Customs clearance, was a barbed-wire compound and in this were still a few stacks of the silver boxes, slightly corroded from the salt air and with tufts of weeds growing round the bottom.

It is a positive relief for the visitor to Honolulu to be reminded of war, of anything serious and historic to set against a local culture which is so aggressively frivolous. The dignity of the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor is a profound contrast. The Arizona, which had served with the Atlantic Fleet towards the end of World War I, was one of eight battleships sunk or damaged in the surprise Japanese air attack on 7 December, 1941. When the attack began a few minutes before eight on a Sunday morning the Arizona had aboard 1,447 of her full complement of officers and men. When she sank, 1,177 had died on the ship, including the division commander and the ship’s captain. Some 800 are still there. It was decided to turn her into a National War Grave together with a second battleship, the USS Utah, which lies half submerged on the other side of Ford Island from the Arizona and still has fifty-eight bodies on board.

The memorial attracts something like 1.5 million visitors a year. What might have degenerated into just another attraction is remarkably sombre. The effect is achieved by an organisation which suggests that visitors have temporarily passed out of the indulgent cajolery of civilian guided tours and into the gaze of military discipline. One is ushered into a cinema by a trooper who introduces a short film with some background information about what was happening in the world in 1941. The film then shows the attack itself, grainy, jumpy, tilting pictures of hectic black-and-white action intercut with modern underwater footage of the ship as she is now: rusty chains and barnacled capstans. At the end, suitably subdued, the group is led out through another door straight on to a wharf and aboard a launch which heads out towards the Arizona’s resting place. In this way no ordinary visitor can see the ship without first entering its solemn context.

From a distance one sees the white, perforated memorial building, half bridge and half observation platform, which spans the sunken ship. The guide emphasises that at no point does this building touch the Arizona. (It was clear from the underwater footage that the ship may only be looked at, never touched. No gloved diver’s hand had reached out to wipe away rust from a hatchway or algae from a porthole.) If anything, this launch trip intensifies the solemnity, not least because the tourist’s prerogative of continuous smoking and eating and drinking is forbidden. Once at the memorial the group wanders reflectively around, not talking very much. The older they are, the quieter. There are the ship’s bell and a marble wall inscribed with all the names of the dead (as always, men may be sent carelessly to their deaths in wartime but their names are meticulously recorded); yet it is the sunken ship herself which commands attention. The memorial straddles the hulk and on both sides the ship tapers away, its ends marked by distant orange buoys. A few chunks of corroded steel poke up above the surface, notably a great circular drum, the barbette of a gun turret. Otherwise, the Arizona remains shadowy, bluish, submerged. Schools of damsel fish nose around the coral growths which have taken hold on her decks, looking for plankton. They are familiar black-and-yellow-striped sergeant majors, though I thought I saw another variety as well, Abudefduf. The flitting of these creatures between the observers’ eyes and the object of their reflection did not have the same effect as of pigeons circling a cenotaph. They were not tokens of a natural world blithely indifferent to human pieties, but drew attention to the medium into which the victims had passed. The skeletons, the events of 1941 and the fish now inhabited the same world, no part of which had been retrieved for the redemption of daylight and the upper air. We who stood looking down through the fish arranged ourselves in the relaxed, slightly unfocused attitudes of those who musingly watch golden carp in a pond – a quite different posture from the stiff upward gaze of someone confronting a monument.

And herein lies the USS Arizona’s unique effect. We are accustomed to look downwards at gravestones but never downwards at public monuments. This sunken battleship is probably the only example of a monument which is viewed from above. The bowed head is at once a gesture of private grief, public respect and national mourning.

On the journey back in the launch our escort told us that the slight oil slick we might notice came from the two or so gallons of fuel oil which still leak daily from the Arizona. Legend has it that it will stop seeping on the day the last survivor from the ship is buried. ‘I guess the ship is weeping,’ said a fellow traveller on the bench next to me. He was a man in his fifties with a moustache, who told me he had come because he had been a boy at the time of Pearl Harbor and remembered it partly for the emotion and partly because no one at home in Connecticut had known where it was. He had not expected to be so moved, he said, but he retained a sound middle-aged asperity, remarking on the irony of our guide’s homeward commentary being full of platitudes about peace, friendship and the lessons of war when only the previous day the UN Security Council had passed a resolution which President Bush was interpreting as giving him leave to go to war in the Persian Gulf.*

Back on land I visited the nearby submarine museum. Dotted around outside on concrete plinths and pedestals was a display of missiles, all of which looked oddly small and rudimentary. There were very few visitors and the place had a pleasantly mournful air. There was also a large black ‘Kaiten’-class Japanese one-man suicide torpedo. Apparently this was never a successful weapon, proving temperamental and difficult to control. Essentially a huge bomb with a little seat in it, it sat on its cement bed and bled rust from rivet heads. A notice said that one successful ‘Kaiten’ pilot had gone to his death wearing a white bandanna and with the urn containing the ashes of his friend killed in training jammed into the cockpit with him.

The centrepiece of this display was still afloat: a submarine moored to the quay, USS Bowfin. She last sailed in training in the early 1970s and the interior looked as though it had been kept polished by use as much as for exhibition. She had survived the last war with a distinguished record of ‘kills’. From inside, even moored submarines give a powerful impression of being on the seabed, an effect only partly to do with the way daylight is rationed by a tiny hatch or two. It is one thing to go down into the depths in a bathysphere of one’s own free will, like William Beebe, but surely quite another to go into combat in that blind tube crammed with men and machinery. There was in the Bowfin an air of menace greater than could be explained merely by the ever-present pressure of the sea beyond the curving steel sides. Other men’s fear as well as extremes of discomfort, perhaps. In the engine room with the four huge diesels going for surface running it must have been hot even with the hatches open. When the submarine dived the engines were stopped and she went down under electrical power. In the already hot, confined space the four diesels went on giving up their heat. The engineers were naked but for shorts. Dehydration was a serious problem; men passed out.

The Bowfin produced a quite different effect from that of the Arizona. Although both ships had been in combat some half a century ago, the Arizona had felt as if she belonged even further back, to another epoch. In the museum were old photos of cocky Bowfin ratings lolling and smoking in port, draped around the very machine-gun up on deck against which I had just been leaning. Young in their 1940s hairstyles, they had none of the remoteness attending the marble names fixed above several tons of bones out in the harbour. For the real subject of Pearl Harbor is time, no matter how well it has been displaced on to trenchant exhibits. This at once became clear in the matter of gunsights. It was possible not only on Bowfin but also in the shore display to look through various gunsights, ranging devices, binoculars, periscopes and so on. Unlike much else these had not been maintained in working order. Since being given over to the public their focusing and other adjustments had become frozen or disconnected. At most there was a speckly view in one eye. Looking through a periscope towards the distant Arizona Memorial across the harbour I half expected to see a grainy, black-and-white clip from the film we had just been shown, as in the M. R. James ghost story about the pair of binoculars through which one could see only violent and desolating scenes from the past.* Indeed, I would swear I saw no colour through any of those eyepieces.

So the Arizona lies out there for all foreseeable time on the far side of a strip of water which is really too thin as insulation. Crossed as it is by a precise succession of launches bearing (among others) parties of faintly triumphant Japanese pretending to be from Taiwan, it scarcely cordons off the present. It all feels far too close, that nearby coastal strip, the freeways, used-car lots, dune buggies and ‘All the Ribs You Can Eat for $5’ joints. That, roaring by in its oblivion, does not feel like a ransomed world but one which has no use for the past in any other form than in national shrines.

It was at Pearl Harbor I first appreciated how, once it swallowed something, the sea washes it over less with water than with time, so whatever it engulfs becomes ancient almost immediately. It has something to do with being shut off from the continuity of vision, but in a way which is more powerful than mere burial on land. It felt as though the 800 skeletons contained by the still-leaking hulk of the Arizona had been borne back and out of history until they and the Titanic’s victims and those of the Mary Rose or any Phoenician galley were coeval.

With its polished metal and ruthlessly closing watertight doors, the Bowfin pulled me back to an event in childhood. When I was between eight and ten years old there was a terrifying disaster involving a submarine. That is, what I remember is my own version in which I imagined what it was like to be a sailor trapped on the seabed in a metal coffin, eyes raised in silence to the curved ceiling in hourly expectation of the first sounds of rescue. I could not remember the submarine’s name, where it went down, or even the year.

What I am sure I recalled were the solemn tones of the BBC’s news bulletins: the grave, Home Service accents coming through the varnished wooden slats of our old EkCo wireless. Why the submarine had failed to surface was unclear. It was one of ‘ours’, in home waters, lying on the bottom intact but unable to come up and breathe. Memory has stretched the whole affair over many days, during which I invented everything we were not told. I had the impression of maybe 100 ratings being informed by a level-voiced captain that if everyone kept as still as possible, breathing as slowly and shallowly as they could while all unnecessary heating and power were turned off, the oxygen could be eked out for maybe four or five days, even a week. Certainly long enough for rescue to arrive. Were not their comrades in the Royal Navy (up there in the sunlight) the most intrepid in the world? With the most advanced rescue techniques? Sit tight, the captain said; help is on its way. And – yes – pray, of course. More things are wrought by prayer / Than this world dreams of. …

So we huddled over the wireless and kept pace with the rescue attempt as it grew ever more protracted and the BBC’s voice ever more solemn. There was, we were told, a plentiful supply of ‘oxygen candles’ on board. These could be used at intervals to release fresh quantities of the life-sustaining gas. What these candles really gave off was time, of course: the extra minutes and hours fuming up as the men lay side by side in their bunks in the dim glow of emergency lighting, their whole world canted at an angle and with drops of condensation falling from the ceiling. Only a couple of inches of steel held back the press of black water outside. Some wrote letters home, others played quiet games of chess. Everyone was in good spirits, patient. No one wanted to be the first to say that although their prison was achingly cold, it was also becoming unbearably stuffy.

Until finally, after many days, we up there in the bright sunshine were told there was now no further hope for the crew of the lost submarine. The searchers knew where she lay but she was too deep. Or she was at the wrong angle. Or the special cutting equipment was still on its way from Rosyth. And somewhere hidden away in the black and icy depths the captain, his breathing now painfully laboured but his voice still level, would hand round to every man on board a little black capsule. The bulletins stopped abruptly and other news displaced the lost submarine. Ignored, it now lay in silence except for an occasional creaking as it stirred gently to a deep current. After another few days (but how long? Weeks, even?) and in the absence of a living hand to turn it off, the emergency lighting faded to a red glow and finally winked out. Only then did utter darkness cover the dead crew lying in orderly fashion in their bunks, with here or there an outflung arm or scattered chess set to betray a final struggle.

This was how, as a haunted pre-adolescent, I had imagined the drama to which the whole nation was made privy. Even now, some fifty years later, I can recapture an elusive wraith of the original terror and sadness I carried about at the time, and visiting the Arizona and the Bowfin jolted my memory still further. An atmosphere at once solemn and filmic inhabits one’s contemplations of all sunken tombs, airless but watertight as they might variously be.

I also remember wanting to know the real details. What happened to the bodies? In the absence of oxygen and in the near-zero temperature, how much would they decay? Would the submarine eventually fill with water from the combined seepages of hatchways and torpedo tubes and sprung plates? Before that would the batteries split, leaking acid to react with whatever seawater had pooled in the bilges and release chlorine? And would that in turn arrest any further bacterial activity, just as in tiny concentrations it could sterilise whole swimming pools?

Or maybe they had finally salvaged the submarine so that one morning it resurfaced, streaked with rust and shaggy with weed? Perhaps they had been advised to use caution as they released the steel dogs securing the main hatch and, as the last one was thrown, the heavy slab was hurled back on its hinges while a roar of putrid gases blew a column of rotting papers, naval caps and pocket chess sets high into the air. And once this dreadful pressure cooker had been opened, the first brave men wearing breathing apparatus and carrying flashlights would descend. … Was that how it had been?

So many and efficient are the ways of deferring or obliterating curiosity in adulthood that it was not until visiting Pearl Harbor that I realised I still really wanted to know the answers. The nameless demanded to be named. I decided to track down this doomed submarine, to discover how much I and my friends had embroidered. For instance, it was inconceivable that the BBC would have described a submarine commander having a supply of suicide pills he could dole out when he judged a crisis hopeless enough, as if his men had been spies. After some research I narrowed down a handful of possibilities to a sinking which fitted all the criteria. In April 1951, HMS Affray went down in nearly 300 feet of water off the Isle of Wight. Aboard her were seventy-five ratings and officers. She also, according to a contemporary newspaper report, carried ‘a large quantity of oxygen candles’.

The Affray had sailed from Portsmouth on the evening of 16 April on a training exercise, part of which was to involve putting four Royal Marine commandos ashore on the Cornish coast. She was last heard of at 21.16 that evening, diving south of the Isle of Wight. Her commander, Lt. Com. John Blackburn, had been ordered to report daily between 0800 and 0900 hours. At 10 am on the 17th, having heard nothing, the radio room at Fort Blockhouse, Portsmouth, alerted the authorities with the executive ‘Subsunk’ code. An hour later a search was under way which over the next two days would involve Royal Navy, US Navy, Belgian and French craft as well as the RAF. It was thought there was enough oxygen on board Affray to support the crew for three days, barring damage to the system. There was a suit of Davis escape gear for each man which included breathing apparatus and immersion suits.

That night other submarines reported asdic contacts and Admiral Sir Arthur John Power, Commander-in-Chief Portsmouth, announced ‘Affray has been located on the bottom 35 miles southwest of St Catherine’s Point in just over 30 fathoms of water.’ At daybreak an aircraft dropped small explosive charges to tell the submarine’s crew she had been found and that ships were standing by to pick up anyone who came to the surface. Nobody came. Several of the searching submarines reported hearing faint, distorted signals and sounds which might have been made by someone tapping on a hull, but nobody managed to get a reliable bearing. In the afternoon the asdic room of HMS Ambush picked up the code letters which meant ‘We are trapped on the bottom.’ By this time thirty-four ships were taking part in a search which was becoming desperate.

Next morning hopes were raised again when an RAF Coastal Command aircraft spotted oil and dropped a smoke canister which was mistaken by another plane for a marker buoy from Affray. That evening, sixty-nine hours after she had dived, the submarine was officially given up for lost.

Because the Affray was only one of sixteen ‘A’-class submarines it was vital that the reason for her sinking be ascertained. For the next eight weeks the search continued under Captain W. O. Shelford. By early May she still had not been found, and Shelford was reluctantly driven to take notice of the large number of letters and phone calls being received at Portsmouth from members of the public who claimed to know where she was. He plotted these alleged positions on a chart and found to his surprise that they mostly fell within a small area outside the main search zone.* Shelford told Admiral Power, somewhat hesitantly, and a ship was dispatched to investigate. When it arrived at the location it at once obtained a strong asdic echo; yet as it turned out it was not the Affray at all, nor any other wreck or rock.

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 wreck 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 washed 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’.

* I was referring here to President George Bush and the Gulf War of 1991.

* M. R. James, ‘A View From a Hill’. The field-glasses were filled with black ichor distilled from a corpse, and to look through them was ‘seeing through a dead man’s eyes’.

* For this and many other details of the sinking of Affray I am indebted to the Captain’s own account in W. O. Shelford, ‘Subsunk’(London, 1960).

* Quoted in Warren Armstrong, Sea Phantoms (London, 1956) and Edwyn Gray, Few Survived (London, 1986).

* See Chapter 5, p. 189.

† Brassey’s Naval Annual (1952).

* Since I wrote this paragraph Robert Ballard’s expressed hope that ‘world opinion’ would respect this noble graveyard and foil any plans to exploit the wreck has been shown as vain. Titanic has since been thoroughly disturbed by wholesale salvage, scientific sampling and tourist trips. Recently, the methodical looting has been further legitimised since the timely announcement that the wreck is fast decaying. Salvage (especially of the ship’s safe, when it is found) can now be presented as a race against time. This gives the registered salvors, RMS Titanic, carte blanche to strip it in the name of ‘archaeology’, even though the ship is not yet a century old and most of the objects retrieved so far are the sort of junk we threw out of our grandparents’ attic when they died.

* Joseph Conrad, The Shadow-Line (1916).

* Some twenty years after the collision, a death toll of 5,000 is now generally accepted. Some maintain it was still higher, including the parents of the two boys who are this book’s co-dedicatees.

* Manila Bulletin, 20 December 1987, et seq., passim.