Wreck of torpedoed World War I warship found in ‘amazing’ condition

For more than 100 years, the otherworldly wreck of a British warship sat lost on the seabed, covered in barnacles and seaweed, after it was torpedoed by a German U-boat during World War I.

Now, specialist divers working with Lost In Waters Deep say they believe they have found the wreck of the HMS Hawke, which sank on October 15, 1914, off the coast of Scotland, the organization posted on Facebook on Monday.

“She’s lying on her starboard side and under there … seems to be quite intact,” Will Schwarz, one of the divers, told CNN in a phone interview on Friday. “The guns look as if they’re still active, they’re so highly polished it’s unbelievable … I’ve never seen guns like that in such amazing condition, it’s absolutely beautiful. But, we’re very aware that 524 lads lost their lives on it.”

It took just seven minutes for the warship to slip beneath the waves once it had been hit, Schwarz said, adding that historians believe the ship’s magazine, where ammunition was stored, exploded.

As a result, 524 sailors lost their lives, including many cadets who were younger than 18 years old. The youngest to die in the shipwreck was a 14-year-old cadet, Schwarz said

To identify the wreck’s location, Lost In Waters Deep and Buchan Divers, two organizations that work to identify Scottish shipwrecks, initially gathered evidence such as the logbooks from the German U-boat that fired the torpedo and ships in the area that survived the strike.

Armed with that information, the team examined the admiralty charts in the area and scanned the seabed in the local area in attempt to find the ship.