A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (35 page)

On Lady Franklin's death in 1875 another monument was unveiled in London, this one in Westminster Abbey, with a bust of Franklin, a relief carving showing
Erebus
and
Terror
icebound with the ensign lowered for the death of the commander, and below that a verse specially written by Tennyson – himself related by marriage to Franklin, whose niece Emily was Tennyson's wife:

Not here! The white North has thy bones; and thou,

Heroic sailor-soul,

Art passing on thine happier voyage now,

Toward no earthly pole.

For years that monument seemed the last word on Franklin, consigning his memory to that most hallowed hall of British history along with kings and prime ministers, poets and scientists, generals and admirals and explorers, celebrating great achievements and occasionally heroic failure. That changed in 2014 with the discovery of
Erebus
, and two years later
Terror
. Now, the most enduring image of the Franklin expedition is no longer romanticised sculpture in alabaster and bronze, but a photograph taken by a drone over the site of
Erebus
, showing the state-of-the-art Parks Canada support vessel, divers in the water, and below that the ghostly outline of the wreck itself, lying on the bed of the Arctic Ocean – a more fitting monument to Franklin and his men than a shrine in a cathedral, and showing the huge potential of the wrecks for revealing more about one of the greatest attempts at maritime exploration in history.

The story of extraordinary human endurance in that citation is one of many that could be told of men who survived shipwreck during the Second World War. For more than five years sailors of many different nationalities pitted themselves against Nazi Germany on the Atlantic, struggling to keep open the sea lanes that provided Britain with foodstuffs, raw materials and military supplies that were essential for maintaining the war effort. In the darkest period of 1940 and 1941 an average of two merchant ships were being sunk every day, many of them by U-boats –
unterseebooten
, submarines – that hunted singly or attacked Allied convoys in ‘wolf packs'. The scale of sinkings was unprecedented – more than 3,500 British merchant ships were to be sunk by the end of the war – as were the stakes: defeat in the battle would have lost the Allies the war. Winston Churchill wrote that ‘The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.' The final wreck in this book therefore brings together two of the great themes of seafaring through history, trade and conflict, in a war that represents the ultimate confrontation at sea and shaped the world we live in today.

The place where Richard Ayres came ashore on 1 March 1941 was Caerthillian Cove, a rocky inlet on the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall near England's most southerly point. I have dived extensively off this coast – the wreck of the
Royal Anne Galley
lies only a few hundred metres away off Man O'War rock, visible from the cove – and I have stood many times on the headland trying to imagine those final moments in the lifeboat, watching the swell from the Atlantic break over the rocks and knowing how dangerous the currents are just off the cove. It was a matter of good fortune that the lifeboat was seen by three schoolgirls who happened to be walking along the cliffs that day and were able to alert a local coastguard in time for him to pull Ayres ashore. The story took on new meaning when the wreck of the
Gairsoppa
itself was discovered by Odyssey Marine Exploration in 2011, some 240 nautical miles off the coast of Ireland at a depth of 4,700 metres, with more than 17 tons of silver on board – making it one of the deepest and richest wrecks ever found. The ship had come from India, and the wreck contained a cache of letters that provides an unprecedented view of a time when India was a lifeline for Britain and many British ships such as the
Gairsoppa
included crew of Indian, Chinese and other nationalities. In combination with records of her crew and her final voyage held in The National Archives, study of the
Gairsoppa
shows how shipwrecks even of recent date can enrich our view of the past, in this case providing stark evidence of the sacrifice that was needed to win the freedoms that we enjoy today.

The SS
Gairsoppa
was a steel-hulled cargo ship launched in 1919 by Palmers Shipbuilding and Iron Company in Jarrow on the river Tyne in north-east England. Almost 2,500 British-registered merchant ships had been lost due to enemy action in the First World War, and the shipyards on the Tyne, on the Clyde in Scotland, in Belfast and elsewhere were working at maximum capacity to replace them. She was the 894th ship built by Palmers since 1856, when their first ship had been none other than HMS
Terror
– a ‘floating battery' that was the immediate successor of the ship of the Franklin expedition described in the last chapter, laid down in the year when it was known that
Terror
and
Erebus
had been lost in the Arctic. With a gross register tonnage of 5,237 and a length of 399 feet, the
Gairsoppa
– named after a village and waterfalls in western India – was characteristic of several thousand ships built to a broadly uniform design in the shipyards of Britain from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s, vessels that were the mainstay of overseas trade and supplied Britain during both world wars. They had bluff bows and a broad beam, with the bridge structure and funnel located amidships and two holds on either side, numbered one to four from bow to stern. As her ‘SS' designation shows, the
Gairsoppa
was a screw steamer, powered by a coal-fired, triple-expansion steam engine of the type that had been the mainstay of marine propulsion since the late nineteenth century.

The
Gairsoppa
was one of 103 ships owned in 1939 by the British India Steam Navigation Company, which had been founded in 1856 to carry mail between Calcutta in India and Rangoon in Burma. In 1914 British India amalgamated with the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company – P&O – to form the largest shipping company in the world, carrying freight and passengers as well as mail. Their London address, 122 Leadenhall Street, is highly evocative of the East India Company – India House, the headquarters of the company, had been located directly opposite on the present-day site of the maritime insurers Lloyds of London. From their offices in Leadenhall Street the directors of the East India Company had overseen the shipment of goods, as well as administering the territories under their control. That changed in 1858 when the British Crown took over India, but the legacy
of the East India Company survived in the shipping lines that took over where the company had once held a monopoly. These included not only British India and P&O but also the Clan Line, a Glasgow-based company that became the largest freight carrier between India and Britain and also figures in this account of the
Gairsoppa
.

At the height of the East India Company in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a distinction was made between long-distance transport carried out by ships owned or contracted by the company – the ‘East Indiamen' – and the so-called ‘country' trade around the coasts of the Arabian Sea, the sea off Ceylon and the Bay of Bengal, which was open to free enterprise. British India had a considerable role in the twentieth-century continuation of that ‘country' trade, with a number of its ships operating solely in the Indian Ocean. This was the case with the
Gairsoppa
until she was requisitioned by the British Government for war service in late 1940. Her ‘Ship Movement Card', a record required of all merchant ships from the outbreak of war, shows that from September 1939 until December 1940 she had sailed between Bombay, Cochin, Colombo, Madras, Calcutta and Rangoon, in seas that were safe from attack by U-boats and with the war with Japan still over a year away. Her last port of call was Calcutta, where she spent more than three months before departing on her final voyage on 6 December 1940.

All British merchant ships at the outbreak of war came under the control of the Ministry of Shipping, later renamed the Ministry of War Transport. Ships continued to be managed by the companies that owned them, but they could be requisitioned to carry special cargoes or as military transports. They were painted in drab warship grey, concealing the distinctive colour scheme on the funnel that had identified each company like the flag of the East India Company a century before, and were provided with armament. During the First World War it was found that a well-trained gun crew on a merchant ship could hit a surfaced U-boat, and large numbers of 4-inch and 4.7-inch guns were stored for this purpose in the event of another war. By the end of 1940 most merchant ships carried one of these guns, usually installed on the stern, and many also had a high-angle 12-pounder (3-inch) gun – the elevation allowing it to be used against aircraft, which had not posed a threat at sea in the First World War but were a major factor in the Second. The record of the convoy in which the
Gairsoppa
sailed in 1941 shows that she was armed with a 4-inch
gun and two machine guns, probably Lewis or Hotchkiss guns also of First World War vintage. To man these guns each ship normally had a Royal Marines or Royal Navy gunlayer who was assisted by seaman gunners – merchant seamen who had completed a gunnery course – and other members of the crew, under the overall charge of a gunnery officer who was usually the ship's second officer.

At Calcutta in 1940 the
Gairsoppa
loaded with 7,000 tons of pig iron, tea and other cargo, as well as the special consignment – 200 tons of silver – for which she had been requisitioned. On 2 December her crew signed on – sixteen Europeans, seventy-one Indians and one Chinese man, the carpenter. The Europeans were the Master, Captain Gerald Hyland, aged forty, the Chief Engineer, Peter Ewing Fyfe, aged forty-nine, three deck and four engineering officers, a radio officer, a purser, a cadet and two gunners. The Indians were divided into deck, engine-room and steward's departments. The large number of these men reflects the labour-intensive nature of seaborne trade and ship management at this period, with much cargo still being laden piecemeal and the shifting of coal from the bunkers and stoking of furnaces requiring many men around the clock. As we shall see, the Crew Agreement provides a rare insight into Indian seamen at this period and their places of origin. Many of the men had previously been on other ships, the officers all on British India ships and the Indian seamen on ships owned by a variety of companies, with thirteen of the Indian engine-room crew having remained with the
Gairsoppa
from her previous voyage.

The master and chief engineer were both veterans of the First World War; Gerald Hyland had survived being torpedoed in the Mediterranean when he was a cadet. The Royal Marines gunlayer, 55-year-old reservist William George Price, and the seaman gunner, twenty-year old Norman Haskell Thomas, had previously been on the SS
Jeypore
, which had arrived in Calcutta a few weeks earlier having survived one of the worst convoy attacks of 1940 during her outward voyage, when five ships were sunk and twelve damaged by Junkers 87 ‘Stuka' dive bombers and surface E-boats as the convoy left the English Channel. A number of the Indian engine room crew had also been on ships that had been in Atlantic convoys, but for most of the crew, including all of the other officers, this was to be their first experience of war at sea.

They reached Table Bay in South Africa on 1 January 1941 and
steamed up the west coast of Africa towards Freetown in Sierra Leone. While they were at sea, sinkings among merchantmen sailing to and from Britain averaged three a day. On 17 January, in one of the worst single losses of the war so far, U-96 sank the liner SS
Almeda Star
in the north Atlantic, with all 360 of her crew and passengers lost. Convoy SL 61, which set out from Freetown for the UK a week before the
Gairsoppa
left Table Bay, lost two ships on 21 January. The men on the
Gairsoppa
knew they were in danger not only from U-boats but also from long-range Focke-Wulf 200 bombers, and that the German 8-inch gun cruiser
Admiral Hipper
was still at large. Almost 800 British-registered merchantmen had been sunk over the preceding year, as well as many Dutch, Greek and Norwegian ships. As they approached Freetown in worsening weather they would have known that the next leg of their voyage – a westward arc of over 4,000 miles towards Scotland – was going to be a test of resolve, the first and only sailing in convoy for the SS
Gairsoppa
.

We last encountered the west coast of Africa when the
Royal Anne Galley
patrolled these waters for pirates in the early eighteenth century, sailing past the so-called ‘Guinea coast' and its slave-trading outposts. Ever since Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa in 1488 this had been the route taken by European ships sailing to and from the Indian Ocean, with much of the European presence along the coast being in support of that trade – including, after the advent of steamships, places to resupply with coal, which was brought out from Britain. Freetown was the best natural harbour along the coast and a staging point between the Cape of Good Hope and the western approaches to Britain. Founded in 1792 as a settlement for freed slaves, it had been a base in the nineteenth century for the British West Africa Squadron – enforcing the ban on the slave trade – and for naval operations during the First World War. With the outbreak of war again in 1939 it was deemed the furthest northerly place to which merchant ships could travel independently, especially after mid-1940 when the fall of France meant that U-boats and FW-200 aircraft could be based in western France within easy range of this coast. The Suez Canal – a quicker route to India since its opening in 1869 – was no longer an option after Italy entered the war in May 1940, with the Mediterranean being too dangerous for Allied merchant ships to pass through. West Africa was once again the main route of maritime
contact between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, not only for goods destined for Britain but also for military supply to the Middle East and North Africa, the principal focus of Allied land operations against the Germans and Italians in 1940–1.