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Shipwreck hunters in Scotland have locate the wreck of a British combat ship that was sunk by a German U - gravy holder in the North Sea nearly 110 years ago .
They said the wreckage is that of HMS Hawke , a 387 - foot - retentive ( 118 meters ) cruiser that quickly pass with 524 people on board after it was hit by a torpedo from the bomber on Oct. 15 , 1914 .
The leader of the group that found the warship says the wreck is in “remarkable” condition, considering it has been underwater for more than 100 years.
Roughly 70 of the warship ’s gang hold up by get away into lifeboats , but the passing of life was still tremendous , Kevin Heath , a investigator with the Orkney - based Lost in Waters Deep group , told Live Science .
" This was very other — the beginning of the First World War , " Heath said , adding that the British did not get laid at the time that U - boat had enough diesel fuel to reach Scotland . By the destruction of World War I , thanks to refuel in the mid - Atlantic , German U - boats had an even further scope and could strive the United States .
The Hawke was one of several British warships that had been assigned to stop the German mainland — a tactic that kept most of the Imperial German Navy in port during the war . But the new submarine engineering of the German atomic number 92 - boats allowed them to stave off the encirclement and subside several Allied combat ship and civilian ship .
The Royal Navy cruiser HMS Hawke was enforcing the blockade of the German mainland in October 1914 when it was sunk by a torpedo from a German U-boat.(Image credit: Public domain)
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U-boat threat
Heath said the Hawke was sunk by a gun from a uracil - boat designated U-9 ; it was command by Otto Weddigen , who would soon become famed in Germany . Just a few weeks before , Weddigen and U-9 had slump three British pleasure boat patrolling the North Sea , causing more than 1,400 death .
accord tohistorical accounts , the sinking trigger an outcry among the British public and damaged the report of the Royal Navy . But these attacks also boost the British Admiralty to take the threat of German atomic number 92 - boat more seriously .
Heath said the wreck of the Hawke now lies on the seafloor beneath about 360 feet ( 110 m ) of seawater and about 70 mile ( 112 kilometers ) eastward of Fraserburgh , a coastal town in northeastern Scotland .
The wreck was located and identified on Aug. 12 by members of the Lost in Waters Deep group and the Buchan Divers group, on board the search vessel Clasina.(Image credit: Charlie Comrie/Lost in Waters Deep)
His group discovered it on Aug. 12 when they were returning from a dive to a seafloor obstructer that was marked on nautical charts but turned out to be nothing . The charted obstacle may have been an early estimate of the location of the Hawke wreck made with the less - exact Decca navigation system used before the origination of GPS , Heath say .
War grave
Heath and the lose in Waters Deep mathematical group see the jolting locating of the wreck thanks to reports of the sinking feeling , including the logbook from the German U - boat .
The group has informed both the Royal Navy and the United Kingdom ’s Hydrographic Office , which produces electronic and paper nautical charts for the area , Heath said . The site of the Hawke wreck is a state of war grave and , therefore , can be protect by law of nature from preventive and perhaps from all future endeavour to plunge there , he said .
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Divers found the shipwreck on the seafloor at a depth of 360 feet in the North Sea roughly 70 miles east off the Scottish Coast.(Image credit: Simon Kay/Lost in Waters Deep)
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At the second , the only submerged images of the wreck were taken by the group ’s divers during their August expedition to the field . They show the shipwreck in " singular " term , Heath tell BBC News .
Images from a sonar system — it stands for “Sound Navigation and Ranging” and can create underwater images from the reflections of sound pulses — shows the wreck lying on the seafloor in the North Sea.(Image credit: Lost in Waters Deep)
" stacks of the decking is still in place — teakwood decking , " he enounce . Also , " there is a wonderful captain ’s walkway around the back of the unrelenting [ and ] loads of guns , because obviously she was a combat ship . "
