SMS Konig, Scapa Flow

Stromness · Orkney Islands · United Kingdom

SMS Konig was a 25,000-tonne dreadnought battleship, the lead ship of her class and a veteran of the Battle of Jutland. On a midsummer day in 1919, her skeleton crew opened the seacocks and flooding valves, and she rolled over and sank into the sheltered waters of Scapa Flow along with most of the interned German High Seas Fleet. She has lain there ever since, inverted on the seabed, her massive keel rising to within 20 metres of the surface while her crushed superstructure and gun turrets are buried in the silt below at nearly 40 metres. I rolled off the dive boat on an overcast June morning, the green hills of Hoy visible across the Flow. The shotline ran straight down to the hull, and I followed it through clear, cold water that darkened from green to grey as I descended. The keel appeared first, a long, curving ridge of riveted steel plates stretching in both directions further than visibility allowed me to see. The scale is immediately overwhelming. This is not a freighter or a patrol boat. This is a weapon of war built to slug it out with the Royal Navy, and even inverted and encrusted with a century of marine growth, she radiates power. I swam along the port bilge keel, running my light over the hull plating. The rivets march in perfect lines, each one the diameter of a fist, holding together armour plate that was designed to resist twelve-inch shells. Below the curve of the hull the superstructure is visible as a compressed mass of steel, the masts and funnels crushed flat by the weight of the inverted ship. In places the hull has corroded through, creating windows into the dark interior where deck beams, ladders, and unidentifiable machinery are visible in a tangle of collapsed steel.