The Spanish Hawk

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The ship was lying on the bottom in ten fathoms of limpid water. She was lying on her starboard side, and her masts and funnel slanted upward at an angle of thirty degrees to the horizontal. She was a steamship of the old three-island type, a freighter of possibly five thousand tons, and it might have been imagined that she had foundered in a hurricane if it had not been for the hole in her port side where the torpedo had ripped her open.

The hole told how long she had been there: it had to be more than thirty years, because the war ended in 1945 and even before that the U-boats had drawn away from the Caribbean when the hunting in those waters became less happy.

So she had lain there for all those years and the marine creatures had made use of her as they would have made use of any natural rock formation on the floor of the sea. There were incrustations of barnacles; fishes swam in and out through the torpedo hole, exploring the engine-room as though it had been a submarine cave; shoals of them sailed like flocks of birds between the trailing strands of rigging, the airless ventilators and the silent winches, the four-inch gun at the stern and the twelve-pounder in the bows. And there she would continue to lie, this victim of man’s violence, undisturbed by any convulsion on the surface, while hidden inside her were the bones of drowned or slaughtered seamen, picked clean by underwater predators and scavengers long, long ago.

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