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This time, not having the same gas constraints, I swam out from the wreck towards it. Once I got to about 10 metres away, I realised that it was one of the 6-inch guns (similar to the 6.8-metre long gun I had just seen in its 2-storey casemate) that had been demounted from the casemates and installed on the upper deck. As the ship turned turtle on the surface, like the Yarrow boiler, this gun, which weighed more than 8 tons (excluding the casemate protection) had fallen from its mount and plunged down through the water column like a dart. At least 4–5 metres of the 7-metre-long barrel had impaled itself into the seabed – I was looking at the last 1–2 metres of barrel and the breech block, all heavily encrusted in soft corals and dead man’s fingers. In the days to come we would find another 6-inch gun impaled upright in the seabed not far away, and a third that had failed to penetrate the seabed and was lying flat. The fourth 6-inch gun was found under the wreck itself.

Starboard aft shot of Hampshire showing the two-storey 6-inch gun casemate. The lower of these guns on both sides of the ship were demounted in 1916 and installed on the upper deck. (Author’s collection)