UK researchers have found the final resting place of a British cargo ship, missing since being torpedoed by a German U-boat during WWI.
According to Bangor University's School of Ocean Sciences, researchers working on the Unpath’d Waters project identified the missing ship by combining multibeam sonar data from wreck sites in the Irish Sea with a range of maritime collections and historical records, many of which are available online.
“The exact location of SS Hartdale has been a mystery since the vessel was attacked by U-27 in the Irish Sea on 13th March 1915 but its remains have now been identified lying at a depth of eighty metres, twelve miles off the coast of Northern Ireland,” Bangor University said in a statement.
The initiative, led by Historic England and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, is enabling scientists and historians to combine marine data with maritime records in new ways to identify shipwrecks in UK waters, assess their condition and predict how wreck sites may change over time.
Dr Michael Roberts who led the Bangor team said he hoped the discovery would be the first of many to arise through the Unpath’d Waters project, which is focused on identifying historically important wrecks in an area of the Irish Sea between the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland.
“Connecting scientific data with our disparate, diverse yet information-rich maritime record has enabled us to identify this previously unknown wreck and create a comprehensive and detailed narrative centred around the vessel that it once was and improve our understanding of UK maritime archaeology,” said Roberts.
“This vessel is just one of the many thousands of merchant ships known to have been lost in UK waters that remain listed as missing or have been incorrectly identified due to a lack of high-quality data. We certainly now have the capability and technology to able to rectify this largely overlooked issue.”
The SS Hartdale was built in Stockton-on-Tees in 1910 and was originally named the SS Benbrook, before being sold and renamed in 1915. The vessel was transporting coal from Scotland to Egypt, when it was dramatically chased down by a U-27 and sunk by torpedo.
Two crew died when the vessel sank. Survivor accounts and U-27’s own official war diary provided researchers with crucial information relating to the exact location of the attack, important descriptions of the actual torpedo strike and poignant accounts of SS Hartdale’s final moments.
Barney Sloane, Principal Investigator of Unpath’d Waters at Historic England, said the find was an “excellent example” of the “untapped potential waiting to be unleashed through the creation of a linked, accessible and sustainable national collection of the UK’s cultural and heritage archives, museums and records”.
