Читать книгу Deeper into the Darkness онлайн

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We spent the dive as planned around the bow, filming the debris area of the missing keel. I swam over to the starboard side of the wreck and spotted the beam torpedo tube mouthpiece lying on the seabed. Nearby a complete torpedo body lay parallel and up against the side of the ship, partly obscured by a fallen piece of plating. Why was this torpedo outside the ship on the seabed, unlike the others which were inside?

Whilst it was clear there was a rich debris field on the east side of the wreck facing towards Orkney, as I looked out over the seabed to the west, towards America, there appeared to be nothing at all lying on the seabed. To make sure I kicked my fins and ventured about 50 metres out over the seabed to the west, keeping the wreck in sight behind me in the glorious visibility. The seabed was clean shale with no debris at all to the west.

After another 35 minutes on the bottom, it was time for us to begin our ascent. After we and the other divers were all safely back aboard after long decompression hangs, Emily and Marjo Tynkkynen reported a stellar piece of work – they had spotted, just off the bow in the pit, a small circular artefact, about 8 inches across, that was green with verdigris and clearly non-ferrous. They had carefully photographed it with a ruler placed alongside it for scale. During our post-dive debrief, Emily and Marjo put the images of it up on the Huskyan’s saloon screens. The central part of the object had an embossed rose that was surrounded by a garland of leaves that ran right around the outside of the object. There were four screw holes in its face. At first, we were all a bit non-plussed as to what it was, but the more we looked at it, the more it became clear that what we were looking at was a brass face plate for a tampion for one of the forward 7.5-inch main battery guns. These tampions were essentially leather-covered wooden plugs that were inserted into the end of the gun barrel when not in use to keep out sea water and the elements. They usually had a colourful decorative outer plate screwed to the tampion itself, carrying a motif personal to the ship. In this case, the rose surrounded by a crown or garland of leaves was the emblem of the county of Hampshire, after which the ship was named.