Divers visit British navy wreck
Ninety years since HMS Raleigh ran aground off coast of Labrador
Agroup of divers has pored over the remnants of a British navy vessel that ran aground 90 years ago not far from the shoreline of L’Anse Amour on the southeastern tip of Labrador.
The Royal Navy launched the HMS Raleigh in 1919. A 184metre heavy cruiser vessel with a crew of 700, the ship was on its way to Port Saunders on Aug. 8, 1922.
Travelling in heavy fog, it came upon a large iceberg, and in order to avoid the iceberg, the ship made its way into shallow water before it ran aground not far from the Point Amour Lighthouse.
Eleven people were killed as a result of the incident, while more than 680 crewmembers were forced to seek temporary shelter in nearby communities.
According to Dr. Chris Harvey-Clark, one of the volunteer divers who was in L’Anse Amour and Forteau this past week, many people in the communities took mementoes from the wreckage. Four years after it ran aground, the Royal Navy elected to destroy the vessel with explosives.
Large wreck
“The thing about the wreck is it’s vast,” said Harvey-Clark, a co-leader on the dives with Malcolm Sprague. “I mean, it was 600 feet long to start with, and the British navy were very embarrassed by the loss of the ship. … They flattened the ship down because it was 10 storeys high and visible from right across the other side — the Newfoundland side. On a sunny day you could see the Raleigh poking up.”
The divers came to L’Anse Amour from all over Canada, including Quebec, New Brunswick and British Columbia. Harvey-Clark is a veterinarian and the director of animal care services at the University of British Columbia. He has been trained in nautical archeology.
“The idea of this expedition was to do the first-ever site map of the historical wreck of the Raleigh,” said HarveyClark, who added the divers were prohibited from collecting any artifacts.
Speaking with The Telegram earlier this week, HarveyClark said he could easily imagine the sort of trouble the HMS Raleigh encountered when it ran aground.
“We were out diving on the wreck this morning in the fog, and it wasn’t hard to imagine how you could come to grief here. The current was ripping, the wind was blowing, and you couldn’t see 100 feet.
“It’s not hard to see how in the pre-radar days it might have been possible to pile a battleship up right by the lighthouse here. We couldn’t see the lighthouse, and we were about 300 metres from it.” Dives were scheduled to take place Aug. 7-10. Harvey-Clark said the weather was quite hostile early on, and given the shallow nature of the wreckage area, which is five-to-10 metres deep, conditions were not conducive for diving.
However, divers did make it out Tuesday morning, the day after they arrived in Labrador, and Harvey-Clark said one of the first items they discovered was the ship’s propeller. The divers had access to a faded, water-stained document detailing the design of the original vessel.
A wealth of brass artifacts remain in the water, including ammunition, condenser pipes, gears, wheels and many other items the divers had yet to identify. Harvey-Clark said many artifacts are strikingly pretty, as sand has polished them over time.
“There’s bits of this wreck scattered everywhere, and that’s part of what makes it very challenging. I mean, you’re talking about several football fields, and also, the original shape of the ship is gone, so you’re looking at everything kind of opened up and flattened out.”
Two boats, a diving compressor, and filming equipment were in use for the dives, and Harvey-Clark said the accumulated experience of the eight divers involved in the expedition totalled 200 years.