Scuttling is the act of deliberatelysinking a ship by allowing water to flow into the hull, typically by its crew opening holes in its hull.[1]
Scuttling may be performed to dispose of an abandoned, old, or captured vessel; to prevent the vessel from becoming a navigation hazard; as an act ofself-destruction to prevent the ship from being captured by an enemy force; as ablockship to restrict navigation through achannel or within aharbor; to provide anartificial reef for divers and marine life; or to alter the flow of rivers.
TheSkuldelev ships, fiveViking ships, were sunk to prevent attacks from the sea on the Danish city ofRoskilde. The scuttlingblocked a major waterway, redirecting ships to a smaller one that required considerable local knowledge.[2]
In 2012, acog preserved from the keel up to the decks in the silt was discovered alongside two smaller vessels in the riverIJssel in the city ofKampen, in theNetherlands.[3] The ship, dating from the early 15th century, was suspected to have been deliberately sunk into the river to influence its current.[4][5]
TheSpanishconquistadorHernán Cortés, who led the first expedition that resulted in the fall of theAztec Empire, ordered his men to strip and scuttle his fleet to prevent the secretly planned return toCuba by those loyal to Cuban GovernorDiego Velázquez de Cuéllar. Their success would have halted his inland march andconquest of the Aztec Empire.
HMSSapphire was a 32-gun,fifth-rate sailingfrigate of the Royal Navy inNewfoundland Colony to protect the English migratory fishery. The vessel was trapped inBay Bulls harbour by four French naval vessels led by Jacques-François de Brouillan. To avoid its capture, the English scuttled the vessel on 11 September 1696.
HMSEndeavour was CaptainJames Cook's ship upon which he travelled toAustralia. After being sold into private hands, she was finally scuttled in a blockade ofNarragansett Bay, Rhode Island in 1778.
The British sank one ship on 10 October 1781 to prevent it from being captured by the French fleet. Furthermore, the York River, while protected by the French Navy, also contained a few scuttled ships, which were meant to serve as a blockade should any British ships enter the river.
HMSBounty, after her crew mutinied, was scuttled by the mutineers in Bounty Bay offPitcairn Island on 23 January 1790.
During theWar of 1812, CommodoreJoshua Barney, of the U.S. Navy,Chesapeake Bay Flotilla, sank all nineteen of his fighting vessels, to prevent them from being captured by the British, as he and his men marched, inland, in theunsuccessful defense of Washington D.C.
During theBelgian Revolution, Dutch gunboat commanderJan van Speyk had his ship boarded by a mob of Antwerp labourers. When they tried to force him and his crew to surrender, he ignited a barrel of gunpowder, thereby blowing up his ship and killing himself along with most of the ship's crew and the mob. Van Speyk went on to become a national hero in the Netherlands.[citation needed]
During theCrimean War, in anticipation of thesiege of Sevastopol, the Russians scuttled ships of theBlack Sea Fleet to protect the harbour, to use their naval cannon as additional artillery, and to free up the ships' crews as marines. Those ships that were deliberately sunk includedGrand Duke Constantine,City of Paris (both with120 guns),Brave,Empress Maria, andChesme.
TheClotilda (slave ship) (often misspelled Clotilde) was the last known U.S.slave ship to bring captives from Africa to the United States, arriving atMobile Bay, in autumn 1859 or on July 9, 1860, with 110 African men, women, and children. The ship was a two-mastedschooner, 86 feet (26 m) long with a beam of 23 ft (7.0 m).U.S. involvement in theAtlantic slave trade had been banned by Congress through theAct Prohibiting Importation of Slaves enacted on March 2, 1807 (effective January 1, 1808), but the practice continued illegally, especially through slave traders based in New York in the 1850s and early 1860. In the case of the Clotilda, the voyage's sponsors were based in the South and planned to buy Africans inKingdom of Whydah,Dahomey. After the voyage, the ship was burned and scuttled in Mobile Bay in an attempt to destroy the evidence.
In April 1861, theUnited States NavysteamfrigateUSS Merrimack was among several shipsUnion forces set afire or scuttled at the Gosport Navy Yard (nowNorfolk Naval Shipyard) inPortsmouth, Virginia, to keep them from falling intoConfederate hands at the outbreak of theAmerican Civil War. The unsuccessful attempt at scuttlingMerrimack enabled theConfederate States Navy to raise and rebuild her as thebroadside ironcladCSSVirginia. Shortly after her famous engagement with the U.S NavymonitorUSS Monitor in theBattle of Hampton Roads in March 1862, the Confederates scuttledVirginia to keep her from being captured by Union forces.
In December 1861 and January 1862,Union forces scuttled a number of formerwhalers and othermerchant ships in an attempt to block access to Confederate ports during theAmerican Civil War. Loaded with stone before being scuttled, the scuttled ships were known as the "Stone Fleet". Those scuttled in December 1861 sometimes are called the "First Stone Fleet", while those sunk in January 1862 sometimes are termed the "Second Stone Fleet".
During theWar of the Pacific, as Chilean troops enteredLima andEl Callao, the Peruvian naval officerGermán Astete ordered the whole Peruvian fleet to be scuttled to prevent capture by Chile.
During theSpanish–American War, a volunteer crew ofUnited States Navy personnel attempted to scuttle thecollierUSS Merrimac in the entrance to the harbor atSantiago de Cuba inCuba on the night of 2–3 June 1898 in an attempt to trap theSpanish Navysquadron ofVice AdmiralManuel de la Cámara y Libermoore in port there. The attempt failed when she came under fire by Spanish ships and fortifications and sank without blocking the entrance.
In 1904, during theRusso-Japanese War, theImperial Japanese Navy made three attempts to block the entrance to theImperial Russian Navy base atPort Arthur,Manchuria,China, by scuttlingtransports. Although the Japanese scuttled five transports on 23 February, four on 27 March, and eight on 3 May, none of the attacks succeeded in blocking the entrance.[6] The Russians also scuttled foursteamers at the entrance in March 1904 in an attempt to defend the harbor from Japanese intrusion.[7]
During thesiege of Port Arthur, the Russians scuttled the surviving ships of theirPacific Squadron that were trapped in port at Port Arthur in late 1904 and early January 1905 to prevent their capture intact by the Japanese.
In December 1914,SMS Dresden was the only German warship to escape destruction in theBattle of the Falkland Islands. She eluded her British pursuers for several more months, until she put intoMás a Tierra in March 1915. Her engines were worn out and she had almost no coal left for her boilers. There, she was trapped by British cruisers, which violated Chilean neutrality and opened fire on the ship.Dresden's Executive Officer – the future AdmiralWilhelm Canaris – negotiated with the British and bought time for his crew to scuttle theDresden.
TheZeebrugge Raid involved three outdated British cruisers chosen to serve asblockships in the German-held Belgianport of Bruges-Zeebrugge from which GermanU-boat operations threatened British shipping.Thetis,Intrepid andIphigenia were filled with concrete then sent to block a critical canal. Heavy defensive fire caused theThetis to scuttle prematurely; the other two cruisers sank themselves successfully in the narrowest part of the canal. Within three days, however, the Germans had broken through the western bank of the canal to create a shallow detour for their submarines to move past the blockships at high tide.
In 1919, over 50 warships of theGerman High Seas Fleet were scuttled by their crews atScapa Flow in the north ofScotland, following the deliverance of the fleet as part of the terms of the German surrender. Rear AdmiralLudwig von Reuter ordered the sinkings, denying the majority of the ships to theAllies. Von Reuter was made a prisoner-of-war in Britain but his act of defiance was celebrated in Germany. Though most of the fleet was subsequently salvaged by engineerErnest Cox, a number of warships (including three battleships) remain, making the area very popular amongst undersea diving enthusiasts.
Under the terms of theWashington Naval Treaty of 1922, the great naval powers were required to limit the size of their battlefleets, resulting in the disposal of some older or incompletecapital ships. During 1924 and 1925, the treaty resulted in the scuttling of theRoyal Australian NavybattlecruiserHMAS Australia and the incompleteImperial Japanese NavybattleshipTosa, while four old Japanese battleships, theRoyal Navy battleshipHMS Monarch, and the incompleteUnited States Navy battleshipUSS Washington (BB-47) all were disposed of astargets.
Following theBattle of the River Plate the damaged Germanpocket battleshipAdmiral Graf Spee sought refuge in the port ofMontevideo. On 17 December 1939, with theBritish andCommonwealth cruisersHMS Ajax,HMS Cumberland, andHMNZS Achilles waiting in international waters outside the mouth of theRío de la Plata, CaptainHans Langsdorff sailedGraf Spee just outside the harbour and scuttled the vessel to avoid risking the lives of his crew in what he expected would be a losing battle. Langsdorff shot himself three days later.
When British and Commonwealth land forces attackedTobruk on 21 January 1941, the Italian cruiserSan Giorgio turned its guns against the attacking force, repelling an attack by tanks. As British forces were entering Tobruk,San Giorgio was scuttled at 4:15 AM on 22 January.San Giorgio was awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valor for her actions in the defence of Tobruk. The ship was salvaged in 1952, but while being towed to Italy, her tow rope failed and she sank in heavy seas.
As the Allies advanced towardEritrea during theirEast African Campaign inWorld War II,Mario Bonetti—the Italian commander of theRed Sea Flotilla based atMassawa—realized that the British would overrun his harbor. In the first week of April 1941, he began to destroy the harbor's facilities and ruin its usefulness to the Allies. Bonetti ordered the sinking of two largefloating dry docks and supervised the calculated scuttling of eighteen large commercial ships in the mouths of the north Naval Harbor, the central Commercial Harbor and the main South Harbor. This blocked navigation in and out. He also had a large floating crane scuttled. These actions rendered the harbor useless by 8 April 1941, when Bonetti surrendered it to the British. Scuttled ships included the German steamersLiebenfels,Frauenfels,Lichtenfels,Crefeld,Gera andOliva. Also scuttled were the Italian steamersAdua,Brenta,Arabia,Romolo Gessi,Vesuvio,XXIII Marzo,Antonia C.,Riva Ligure,Clelia Campenella,Prometeo and the Italian tankerGiove. The largest scuttled vessel was the 11,760-tonColombo, an Italian steamer. Thirteen coastal steamers and small naval vessels were also scuttled.[8][9][10]
The British seized the harbor and initiatedmarine salvage operations under CommanderJoseph Stenhouse to restore navigation in and out. Stenhouse was slowed byheat exhaustion but his team refloated the oil tankerGiove; he died in September 1941 when the salvage tugTai Koo bearing him as a passenger was sunk by a naval mine in the Red Sea.[11] His death left a civilian contractor to open a channel, but this crew made no progress. It was not until a year later that headway was made in the effort to return Massawa to military duties. U.S. Navy CommanderEdward Ellsberg arrived in April 1942 with a salvage crew and a small collection of specialized tools and began methodically correcting the damage. His salvage efforts yielded significant results in just 5½ weeks. American divers sealed the hulls underwater, and air was pumped in to float the hulls. The divers defused abooby trap inBrenta, which contained an armednaval mine sitting on three torpedo warheads in thehold. Another danger wasRegia Marina minelayerOstia, which had been sunk by theRoyal Air Force with several of its mines still racked. On 8 May 1942, SSKoritza, an armed Greek steamer, had drydocked for cleaning and minor hull repairs. Massawa's first major surface fleet "customer" wasHMS Dido, which needed repairs to a heavily damaged stern in mid-August 1942, the beginning of a repair and maintenance period for the war-weary15th Cruiser Squadron.[12] Many of the harbor's sunken ships were patched by Ellsberg's divers, refloated, repaired and taken into service.[13]Ostia andBrenta were successfully salvaged, despite their armed mines. All of this occurred while the British civil contractor struggled and failed to refloat one ship.[9]
In 1941, the battleshipBismarck, heavily damaged by the Royal Navy, leaking fuel,listing, unable to steer and with no effective weapons, but still afloat and with engines running, was scuttled by its crew to avoid capture. This was supported by survivors' reports inPursuit: the Sinking of the Bismarck, byLudovic Kennedy, 1974 and by a later examination of the wreck itself by Dr.Robert Ballard in 1989. A later, more advanced examination found torpedoes had penetrated the second deck, normally always above water and only possible on an already sinking ship, thus further supporting that scuttling had made the final torpedoing redundant.[14]
After the Battles of theCoral Sea andMidway, the heavily damaged Americanaircraft carrierLexington and the Japanese carriersHiryū,Sōryū,Akagi, andKaga were all scuttled to prevent their preservation and use by their respective enemies.
In November 1942, in an operation codenamedCase Anton, Nazi German forces occupied the so-called "Free Zone" in response to the Allied landing in North Africa. On 27 November they reachedToulon, where the majority of theFrench Navy was anchored. To avoid capture by the Nazis (Operation Lila), the French admirals-in-command (Laborde andMarquis) decided toscuttle the 230,000 tonne fleet, most notably, the battleshipsDunkerque andStrasbourg. Eighty percent of the fleet was utterly destroyed, all of thecapital ships proving impossible to repair. Legally, the scuttling of the fleet was allowed under the terms of the1940 Armistice with Germany.
Anticipating a German seizure of all units of the Danish Navy as part ofOperation Safari, mostly in Copenhagen but also at other harbours and at sea in Danish waters, the Danish Admiralty had instructed its captains to resist, short of outright fighting, any German attempts to assume control over their vessels, by scuttling if escape to Sweden was not possible and suitable preparations were made. Of the fifty-two vessels[15] in the Danish Navy on 29 August, two were in Greenland, thirty-two were scuttled, four reached Sweden and fourteen were taken undamaged by the Germans. Nine Danish sailors lost their lives and ten were wounded. Subsequently, major parts of the Naval personnel were interned for a period.
Old ships code-named "Corn cobs" were sunk to form a protective reef for theMulberry harbours atArromanches andOmaha Beach for theNormandy landings. The sheltered waters created by these scuttled ships were called "Gooseberries" and protected the harbours so transport ships could unload without being hampered by waves.
Of the 156 Germansubmarines ("U-boats") surrendered to theAllies at the end ofWorld War II, 116 were scuttled by theRoyal Navy inOperation Deadlight. Plans called for them to be scuttled in three areas in theNorth Atlantic Ocean west ofIreland, but 56 of the submarines sank before reaching the designated areas due to their poor material condition. Most of the submarines were sunk by gunfire rather than with explosive charges. The first sinking took place on 17 November 1945 and the last on 11 February 1946.[16][17]
After Japan's surrender, the United States Navy seized 24 Imperial Japanese Navy submarines, bringing them toSasebo Bay to study them. To prevent a inspection by a Soviet team, the submarines were scuttled duringOperation Road's End.[18]
Today, ships (and other objects of similar size) are sometimes sunk to help formartificial reefs, as was done with the formerUSS Oriskany in 2006. It is also common formilitary organizations to use old ships astargets, inwar games, or for various other experiments. As an example, the decommissionedaircraft carrierUSS America was subjected to surface and underwater explosions in 2005 as part of classified research to help design the next generation of carriers (theGerald R. Ford class), before being sunk with demolition charges.
Ships are increasingly being scuttled as a method of disposal. The economic benefit of scuttling a ship includes removal of ongoing operational expense to keep the vessel seaworthy. Controversy surrounds the practice. TheUSSOriskany was scuttled with 700 pounds ofPCBs remaining on board as a component in cable insulation,[19] contravening theStockholm Convention on safe disposal ofpersistent organic pollutants, which has zero tolerance for PCB dumping in marine environments. The planned scuttling of the Australian frigateHMAS Adelaide atAvoca Beach, New South Wales in March 2010 was placed on hold afterresident action groups aired concerns about possible impact on the area's tides and that the removal of dangerous substances from the ship was not thorough enough.[20] Further cleanup work on the hulk was ordered, and despite further attempts to delay,Adelaide was scuttled on 13 April 2011.[21][22]
Scuttled ships have been used as conveyance for dangerous materials. In the late 1960s, theUnited States Army scuttled SSCorporal Eric G. Gibson and SSMormactern withVX nerve gas rockets aboard as part ofOperation CHASE — "CHASE" being Pentagon shorthand for "Cut Holes and Sink 'Em." Other ships have been "chased" containingmustard agents,bombs,land mines, andradioactive waste.[23]
In Somalian waters,pirate ships captured are scuttled. Most nations have little interest in prosecuting the pirates, thus this is usually the only repercussion.[citation needed]
In March 2022, Ukraine scuttled theUkrainian frigate Hetman Sahaidachny, a Krivak-class frigate, due to encroaching Russian offensive operations that threatened to capture the frigate.[24]
In February 2023, theBrazilian Navy scuttled thedecommissionedaircraft carrierSão Paulo into theAtlantic Ocean, following the rejections ofinjunctions from theMinistry of the Environment and theFederal Public Ministry.[25]
The term "scuttling" is also used inscience fiction to describe intentionally destroying aspacecraft. For example, inThe Expanse, this is done by intentionally overloading the ship'sfusion reactor.[26]
In the 13th episode ofBob's Burgers 12th season, Teddy and the family attend a scuttling ceremony for the fictional USSGertrude Stein, the ship Teddy worked on during his Navy service.