Adventures of a Sea Hunter (27 page)

ships in vain, seeking more coal to help them escape. But he also knew that as a last resort he could land his crew and intern them with the ship for the duration of the war.

The British intercepted one of
Dresden’s
radio calls for coal on March 13 and raced for Mas a Tierra. At 8:40 the next morning,
Kent
and
Glasgow
, along with the auxiliary cruiser (Drama, sighted
Dresden
at anchor in Cumberland Bay and opened fire, despite the fact that they were violating Chile’s neutrality and breaking international law. Less than three hours later,
Dresden
, shattered and burning, sank. Most of the crew had made it ashore and survived the final battle. They remained in Chile until 1919 as unwilling guests of the Chileans, interned in accord with the international agreements that the British had ignored. Some of the German officers escaped and made their way home to fight again in a war that would continue for three more years. But the sinking
of Dresden
, following the earlier destruction of
Emden
in the Indian Ocean, brought an end to the naval war in the Pacific. The last of the proud East Asia Squadron of the Reichsgraf von Spec lay rusting in the deep, a legacy for the future when explorers and archeologists would venture into the sea to reconstruct her final hours.

The empty sea surrounds our ship for as far as the eye can see, nearly 500 miles off the coast of Chile. Our ship gently rolls in the swell as we drive west at 16 knots. The Armada de Chile (Chilean Navy) ship
Valdivia
, an amphibious landing ship, is a day out from Valparaiso, en route to the Archipelago de Juan Fernandez and an island with a romantic name and a famous history, Isla Robinson Crusoe (also known as Mas a Tierra). The island is one of the world’s most inaccessible and remote places, home to some five hundred people and host to only a few hundred more each year. The tourists are mainly Chileans who come to visit the island’s unique ecosystem or who are drawn, like others before them, by one of literature’s most famous castaways, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

In addition to her other duties,
Valdivia
makes two trips to Isla Robinson Crusoe each year. The ship carries 177 passengers, as well as their baggage and other items and equipment that have no other way of reaching this isolated Chilean colony. Our
Sea Hunters
crew of eleven hauls tons of dive equipment, cameras and other gear into the large tank bay below the main deck and into our berths. Our team has come to dive and film an episode about the Imperial German Navy’s small cruiser
Dresden
, eighty-eight years after she sank. We will be the first to dive down and return with detailed images and extensive footage of the wrecked warship in her grave 180 feet below the surface.

Our team includes Dr. Willi Kramer, the first German official to visit the wreck and the graves of some
of Dresden’s
sailors, who are buried ashore. Willi’s professional expertise is Viking and medieval sites, but he now finds himself drawn around the world to document the legacy of the First World War.

After twenty-eight hours at sea, we catch our first glimpse of Isla Robinson Crusoe, rising faintly out of the mist on the horizon. As we approach the island, the ship rolling in the swell, we’re struck by how small it is. Only 36 square miles in area and 2,800 feet above sea level at its highest peak, this island has, for all its isolation, long been a part of the world’s consciousness. It is a storied island that features in tales of explorers, pirates and privateers, buried treasure, shipwrecks, castaways and sea battles. One nineteenth-century visitor, the writer Richard Henry Dana, called it “the most romantic spot of earth” because of its unique history and its association with the fabled Crusoe.

If this is an island of dreams and romance, it is because of the three-hundred-year-old tale of Robinson Crusoe and his real-life inspiration, Alexander Selkirk. A native of Largo, which is north of Edinburgh on the rugged Fife coast, Selkirk was a troubled lad who ran away from the censure of his village and found a haven in a life at sea. He fared well, advancing in rank from ship’s boy to officer over the next several years. The lure of adventure and riches led him in 1703 to join a privateering venture into the Pacific led by William Dampier.

One man’s privateer is another man’s pirate, and Dampier’s ships and crews faced the wrath of Spain, which controlled the Pacific to the extent that the ocean was known as a “Spanish lake.” Thanks to Dampier’s incompetence, the venture ended badly, with very little gained and a number of men lost. One of Dampier’s ships, the privateer
Cinque Ports
, anchored at Mas a Tierra in October 1704, leaking and in bad condition. Her captain, Thomas Stradling, wanted to repro-vision before heading south and trying for home. Selkirk, his sailing master (mate), was convinced that the ship would never reach a safe port and decided that he would rather stay on the island than take his chances at sea.

The captain was more than happy to leave the quarrelsome, headstrong Selkirk behind and so set him ashore with a few tools, his gun and bedding, and his Bible. As the ship’s boat pulled away from the island, Selkirk regretted his decision and dashed into the surf, begging them to return. Stradling reportedly yelled back, “Stay where you are and may you starve!” Thus began a lonely exile that lasted four years and four months, until another English privateer, Woodes Rogers, landed for provisions. Rogers reported that “Immediately our pinnace return’d from the shore, and brought abundance of Craw-fish, with a man Cloth’d in Goat Skins, who look’d wilder than the first owners of them.”

Selkirk sailed with Rogers and returned to a life of privateering in the Pacific before reaching London in 1711, eight years after he left England. He also brought home a small fortune from his years with Rogers. Selkirk’s adventures were first recounted in Rogers’s account of A Cruzing
Voyage Round the World
in 1712, and then again in 1713 in a short article by journalist Richard Steele in a magazine called
The Englishman.
But the story took on even greater fame in 1719, when author Daniel Defoe published
Robinson Crusoe
, based in part on Selkirk’s adventures. The book was an immediate success; three hundred years later, it remains the second-most published book in the world, next only to the Bible, translated into most languages and available in nearly every country. Robinson Crusoe and the real-life Selkirk have also been the inspiration for other literary endeavors, paintings and movies—
and, in time, for the decision by the Chilean government, in the 1960s, to change the name Mas a Tierra to Isla Robinson Crusoe.

Dresden
rests beneath the waters of Cumberland Bay off Isla Robinson Crusoe. Every day, we load up one of
Valdivia’s
launches with dive gear and position ourselves over the wreck. Working with Willi Kramer and me, master diver Mike Fletcher breathes a complex mix of gases and descends to make the first survey the warship, relaying what he sees by video camera to the surface as we guide him through the ruined ship in the deep blue twilight below. It is far more difficult than this simple explanation—Mike is working hard, pulling 330 feet of heavy hose and electrical lines, clearing himself when they snag or catch on wreckage, and all the while using his eyes and experience along with ours to find and identify important areas of the ship, searching for clues about what happened in the final hours.

The dives are limited to 30 minutes, and then Mike has to decompress for more than twice that time to eliminate the deadly gas bubbles in his blood caused by the depth. In a series of later dives, Willi and I join Mike in surveying the wreck, slowly investigating the cruiser from bow to stern. Mike’s son Warren is also diving, filming the scene from a distance to capture as much of the wreck and the survey action as he can.
Dresden
lies as she sank, pointing almost due north and towards the beach, resting on the starboard (right) side. The funnels and masts have fallen away and lie on the seabed. Some of the guns have ripped free of the deck and also lie on the bottom.

The bow is heavily damaged, and the severed end of it rests upright on the seabed. One of our first conclusions is that
Dresden
sank heavily by the bow, hitting the bottom of the bay with enough force to break off the huge steel ram at the bow. As the ship twisted and sank, the hull cracked and the decks opened up. But the damage is so severe that we wonder if hitting the bottom was responsible for all of it. Gradually, it becomes clear that the split decks and the ripped-out hull
near the bow are the result of the massive internal explosions when the Germans’ scuttling charges detonated. Despite the damage, one anchor remains on the deck, at the ready. A long string of anchor chain trails off the bow and heads off into the gloom of deeper water, where the anchor that held
Dresden
in place when the cruiser sank remains set in the sand.

The bridge is gone but the wood decking remains in place under the debris of broken steel, torn wiring, machinery and loose fittings. The stub of the aft mast rises up out of the deck, and the broken mainmast, lying in two pieces, rests on the deck at an angle. We see three empty cartridge shells, and I am tempted by the thought that they might just be from those three shots that
Dresden’s
crew managed to fire before the ship sank. But an even more interesting discovery awaits us. Nearby, still in place, is the cruiser’s auxiliary steering station, a paired set of steering wheels that stops Mike in his tracks as we all admire them.

A 4-inch gun, possibly hit by British shellfire, angles inward and points at
Dresden’s
deck. I count three perfectly spaced shell holes, one after the other, along the ship’s hull towards the casemate, which is partially collapsed. At least it is still here. Its partner, the forward casemate on the port side, is gone—gun, thick armor and all—disintegrated by the scuttling explosions. The level of damage is greater than we had expected. Accounts of the battle emphasize that after a few hits on the stern and on the deck guns,
Dresden
sank intact when the crew set off a scuttling charge deep in the hull. But what we are finding is evidence of a sustained shelling and at least two massive internal explosions. The entire aft section is heavily damaged, with the main deck gone, shell holes in the steel plates that lie inside the ship’s exposed interior, and plates bent out near the aft port casemate from an internal explosion.

Lying amidst the wreckage is a German sailor’s boot. Willi Kramer believes it to be the evidence of a dead man. Fifteen
of Dresden’s
crew died, thirteen in the battle and two who succumbed later from their wounds. Willi reminds us that as floating men die, their bodies relax and their boots fall off. Hundreds of boots lie around the Second
World War wreck of the German battleship
Bismarck
in the North Atlantic, grim testimony to the majority of the crew who perished while bobbing in the cold, oil-stained waters. This solitary shoe on the deck of
Dresden
is a reminder of the individual cost of war, just as the broken hulk of the cruiser is a reminder of the larger costs and waste of war.

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.