Whilst it was clear there was a rich debris field on the east side of the wreck facing towards Orkney, as I looked out over the seabed to the west, towards America, there appeared to be nothing at all lying on the seabed. To make sure I kicked my fins and ventured about 50 metres out over the seabed to the west, keeping the wreck in sight behind me in the glorious visibility. The seabed was clean shale with no debris at all to the west.
After another 35 minutes on the bottom, it was time for us to begin our ascent. After we and the other divers were all safely back aboard after long decompression hangs, Emily and Marjo Tynkkynen reported a stellar piece of work – they had spotted, just off the bow in the pit, a small circular artefact, about 8 inches across, that was green with verdigris and clearly non-ferrous. They had carefully photographed it with a ruler placed alongside it for scale. During our post-dive debrief, Emily and Marjo put the images of it up on the Huskyan’s saloon screens. The central part of the object had an embossed rose that was surrounded by a garland of leaves that ran right around the outside of the object. There were four screw holes in its face. At first, we were all a bit non-plussed as to what it was, but the more we looked at it, the more it became clear that what we were looking at was a brass face plate for a tampion for one of the forward 7.5-inch main battery guns. These tampions were essentially leather-covered wooden plugs that were inserted into the end of the gun barrel when not in use to keep out sea water and the elements. They usually had a colourful decorative outer plate screwed to the tampion itself, carrying a motif personal to the ship. In this case, the rose surrounded by a crown or garland of leaves was the emblem of the county of Hampshire, after which the ship was named.
The tampion plate was lying off the ship – and not directly beside either the forward A turret 7.5-inch gun, which was under the upturned fo’c’sle deck, or the port P turret 7.5-inch gun, whose open barrel protruded from debris at the side of the ship some way away, near the bridge. We talked it through and surmised that as the ship turned turtle on the surface and then sank, increasing water pressure had perhaps compressed the air in the gun barrel, driving the wooden plug up the barrel a short way and forcing the tampion plate to pop off and fall to the seabed.
During the debrief we were able to add many more features to our whiteboard recreation of the wreck – it was already starting to become a busy whiteboard.
The next day, we gathered in the saloon of Huskyan as we ran up the coast once again to the wreck site. Now that we had covered and filmed the whole wreck in overview, now that there were fixed downlines at the bow and stern, it was time to start looking at particular features in detail.
Local diving historian Kevin Heath of Sula Diving in Orkney had carried out detailed side- scan sonar mapping of the wreck site in advance of our arrival. His preliminary work proved particularly useful in identifying large objects lying off the wreck in what had transpired to be the debris field of items that had dropped from the ship as she turned turtle on the surface. Each day, pairs of divers were assigned a particular task – and using Kevin’s scans we could now take bearings from fixed points on the wreck to these objects out in the debris field, and send divers out to check them out.
Some of the divers were using diver propulsion vehicles (DPVs) and were able to cover large areas of the seabed quickly. There were some very big lumps on the seabed more than 200 metres off the wreck, and Paul Haynes and Brian Burnett were sent out on scooters to investigate those. These turned out to be large Norwegian glacial melt boulders, the size of an SUV.
Paul Toomer and Mic Watson were a very strong buddy pair who worked well together – they were tasked to go and devote a dive to filming in detail the upright 6-inch gun, impaled in the seabed, that was the furthest gun off the wreck. As they were doing this they noticed a dinner fork lying on the seabed beside the gun. Their videography was so good that when Kari Hyttinen worked on the 3D photogrammetry data processing that evening, as the gun materialised out of the point cloud data during processing, the fork could clearly be seen gleaming on the seabed beside it.
Gary and I were tasked on one dive to film the entire starboard side of the wreck – the ‘low side’. The ship was canted over, propped up on her turrets such that her port side was slightly higher. Even although the hull on the low side was sunk well into the seabed, this dive turned out to be particularly interesting.
In 1983, the wreck was dived by a commercial consortium, who obtained a licence to survey and film it from the UK MOD, using the Aberdeen oil field diving support vessel, the Stena Workhorse. The 43-ton starboard propeller was stated to have been found lying on the seabed beside the wreck. The licence precluded removing items from the wreck – but the consortium believed it did not prevent them from recovering items lying on the seabed around it. The prop and shaft was lifted and the recovery reported to the Receiver of Wreck in Aberdeen. The prop and shaft were offloaded onto the pier at Peterhead when the vessel arrived there on completion of the works, and lay there for more than a year until it was sent to Orkney where it is now on display at the Scapa Flow Visitor Centre and Museum at Lyness on the island of Hoy. We were able to locate the shaft tube, where the prop shaft had broken off – or been cut off – just as it emerged from the shaft tunnel.
Kari Hyttinen and Immi Wallin spent their days filming the wreck slowly and meticulously in hi-res for photogrammetry with Prof Chris Rowland, the Director of the 3DVisLab at Dundee University, acting as supporting light. Chris is at the leading edge of underwater imaging with the company ADUS Deep Ocean, which was brought in to image the Deep Water Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Costa Concordia. Chris would assist with the photogrammetry and go on to do the virtual reality 1:1 aspect ratio, actual-size modelling of the wreck. Emily supported Marjo Tynkkynen in taking hundreds of hi-res still images and fully cataloguing the wreck. As the days went past, so our knowledge of the wreck increased – and so Emily’s whiteboard became more and more full.
Week 2 of the expedition was soon upon us – and whereas the first week had been blessed with benign seas and awesome underwater visibility of up to 50 metres, during the second week the seas blew up and a plankton bloom closed the vis on the wreck down to a black 5 metres. This was frustrating but not a significant problem, as we had already filmed the wreck in detail and knew the wreck so well by then that we could still easily navigate our way around it to spend our time finding and mapping the smaller details.
The Daring-class Type 45 destroyer HMS Duncan was scheduled to be moored in Kirkwall for the 100th anniversary commemoration event above the site and the simultaneous ceremony at the Kitchener Memorial on Marwick Head. She is the sixth and final Type 45 destroyer to have joined the Royal Navy in 2010. She is 152 metres in length, just a little longer than the 144-metre long Hampshire. Despite being slightly longer, the unarmoured Duncan displaces 8,000 tons as opposed to the 10,800 tons displacement of Hampshire.
As the conditions of our licence prohibited us diving on the actual 100th anniversary of the sinking, 5 June 2016, the whole team was kindly invited for a tour of Duncan the night before. The four expedition co-organisers were also invited back for lunch aboard on the 100th anniversary itself by her commander, who warmly welcomed us and was very supportive of what we were trying to do. After a very pleasant lunch in his private rooms, we were able to show him some of our underwater footage and stills photographs, and explain how our buoys were laid out on the site; he would be going out to the site that evening for the ceremony.
That evening, 5 June 2016, the 100th anniversary commemoration event took place at the Kitchener Memorial atop Marwick Head at 2045, the exact time that the Hampshire hit the fateful mine. Our whole dive team attended the ceremony – and it was particularly moving for us to see offshore in the distance, silhouetted against the late summer’s setting sun, HMS Duncan sitting above the wreck of the Hampshire. It was a powerful and moving image – and it was slightly strange to be in amongst so many interested people and officials to think that we would be diving down to the wreck the following day. Representatives of the Metropolitan Police from London were present as their man, Matthew McLoughlin, was Kitchener’s personal