The exact location of the SS Hartdale has been a mystery for more than a century. On March 13, 1915, the German submarine U-27 attacked the British ship in the Irish Sea and mercilessly torpedoed it to send it to the bottom of the ocean, about 80 meters below the surface and 20 kilometers away from the coast. of Northern Ireland.
The remains of the cargo ship have remained there until now, intact, protected by the silence of the deep sea. A team of researchers working on the Unpath’d Waters project has established the final resting place of the nearly four-tonne ship.
The initiative led by the government organization Historic England allows scientists and historians to combine data with maritime records to efficiently identify shipwrecks in UK waters, assess their condition and predict how these sites may change over time.
Archaeologists at Bangor University identified the SS Hartadle by combining multibeam sonar data of possible wreck sites in the Irish Sea with a variety of maritime collections and historical records, many of which are available online. .
Dr Michael Roberts, who led the team of specialists, hopes that this initial discovery will be the tip of the iceberg for many more ships to emerge through the Unpath’d Waters project, which focuses on identifying historically important wrecks in the area. Irish Sea between the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland.
“This vessel is just one of many thousands of merchant vessels known to have been lost in UK waters and which continue to be listed as missing or have been incorrectly identified due to a lack of high-quality data. Without a doubt, we now have the capacity and technology to rectify this problem,” says Roberts.
The SS Hartdale was built in Stockton-on-Tees, England, in 1910 and was originally named the SS Benbrook before being sold and renamed in 1915. The ship was carrying coal from Scotland to Egypt when it was dramatically pursued by U-27 and hit by a torpedo.
Two crew members lost their lives when the ship sank, and the accounts of the survivors, as well as the German submarine’s own official war diary, provided investigators with crucial information relating to the exact location of the attack and moving accounts of the final moments of the ship.
U-27 of the Imperial German Navy was launched in July 1913 and commissioned on 8 May 1914 with Captain Bernd Wegener in command. In addition to sinking the Hartdale, she went down in Great War history for being the first submarine in history capable of sinking another when she torpedoed the British HMS E3 in the North Sea.
The German submersible race was brilliant. In just one year he had already sent 12 ships to the bottom of the sea, such as, for example, the HMS Hemes, the first aircraft carrier sunk in combat, while returning from Dunkirk. A small Spanish freighter, the Peña Castillo was the last victim of U-27.
Shortly afterwards, the HMS Baralong, an auxiliary merchant ship flying the American flag, encountered the German submarine in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and fired at it with its machine guns. It was August 19, 1915, and the crew of the Baralong took no prisoners.
He gunned down the survivors of U-27 while they were still in the water, unarmed, in contravention of the ordinances of the Hague Convention. London did not want to condemn the massacre and Germany decided that its submarines were going to torpedo all ships considered enemies without prior warning.
