Scuttling

, dedicated to ships destroyed during the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, designed by Amandus Adamson Scuttling is the act of deliberately sinking a ship by allowing water to flow into the hull, typically by its crew opening holes in its hull. 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 of self-destruction to prevent the ship from being captured by an enemy force; as a blockship to restrict navigation through a channel or within a harbor; to provide an artificial reef for divers and marine life; or to alter the flow of rivers.

, dedicated to ships destroyed during the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, designed by Amandus Adamson]] Scuttling is the act of deliberately sinking a ship by allowing water to flow into the hull, typically by its crew opening holes in its hull. 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 of self-destruction to prevent the ship from being captured by an enemy force; as a blockship to restrict navigation through a channel or within a harbor; to provide an artificial reef for divers and marine life; or to alter the flow of rivers.

Hernán Cortés (1519)

The Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, who led the expedition that resulted in the fall of the Aztec Empire, ordered his men to strip and scuttle his fleet to prevent the secretly planned return to Cuba by those loyal to Cuban Governor Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar. Their success would have halted his inland march and conquest of the Aztec Empire.

HMS Sapphire (1696)

HMS Sapphire was a 32-gun, fifth-rate sailing frigate of the Royal Navy in Newfoundland Colony to protect the English migratory fishery. The vessel was trapped in Bay 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.

HMS Endeavour (1778)

HMS Endeavour was Captain James Cook's ship upon which he travelled to Australia. After being sold into private hands, she was finally scuttled in a blockade of Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island in 1778.

Siege of Yorktown (1781)

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.

HMS Bounty (1790)

HMS Bounty, after her crew mutinied, was scuttled by the mutineers in Bounty Bay off Pitcairn Island on 23 January 1790.

Chesapeake Bay Flotilla (1814)

During the War of 1812, Commodore Joshua 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 the unsuccessful defense of Washington D.C.

Jan van Speyk (1831)

During the Belgian Revolution, Dutch gunboat commander Jan 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.

Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol (1854)

During the Crimean War, in anticipation of the siege of Sevastopol, the Russians scuttled ships of the Black 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 included Grand Duke Constantine, City of Paris (both with 120 guns), Brave, Empress Maria, and Chesme.

The Clotilda

The Clotilda (slave ship) (often misspelled Clotilde) was the last known U.S. slave ship to bring captives from Africa to the United States, arriving at Mobile Bay, in autumn 1859 or on 9 July 1860, with 110 African men, women, and children. The ship was a two-masted schooner, 86 feet (26 m) long with a beam of 23 ft (7.0 m). U.S. involvement in the Atlantic slave trade had been banned by Congress through the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves enacted on 2 March 1807 (effective 1 January 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 in Kingdom of Whydah, Dahomey. After the voyage, the ship was burned and scuttled in Mobile Bay in an attempt to destroy the evidence.

USS Merrimack/CSS Virginia (1861)

In April 1861, the United States Navy steam frigate was among several ships Union forces set afire or scuttled at the Gosport Navy Yard (now Norfolk Naval Shipyard) in Portsmouth, Virginia, to keep them from falling into Confederate hands at the outbreak of the American Civil War. The unsuccessful attempt at scuttling Merrimack enabled the Confederate States Navy to raise and rebuild her as the broadside ironclad CSS Virginia. Shortly after her famous engagement with the U.S Navy monitor in the Battle of Hampton Roads in March 1862, the Confederates scuttled Virginia to keep her from being captured by Union forces.

Peruvian fleet at El Callao (1881)

During the War of the Pacific, as Chilean troops entered Lima and El Callao, the Peruvian naval officer Germán Astete ordered the whole Peruvian fleet to be scuttled to prevent capture by Chile.

USS Merrimac (1898)

During the Spanish–American War, a volunteer crew of United States Navy personnel attempted to scuttle the collier in the entrance to the harbor at Santiago de Cuba in Cuba on the night of 2–3 June 1898 in an attempt to trap the Spanish Navy squadron of Vice Admiral Manuel 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.

German fleet at Scapa Flow (1919)

at Scapa Flow]] In 1919, over 50 warships of the German High Seas Fleet were scuttled by their crews at Scapa Flow in the north of Scotland, following the deliverance of the fleet as part of the terms of the German surrender. Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter ordered the sinkings, denying the majority of the ships to the Allies. 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 engineer Ernest Cox, a number of warships (including three battleships) remain, making the area very popular amongst undersea diving enthusiasts.

Washington Naval Treaty (1922)

Under the terms of the Washington 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 incomplete capital ships. During 1924 and 1925, the treaty resulted in the scuttling of the Royal Australian Navy battlecruiser and the incomplete Imperial Japanese Navy battleship Tosa, while four old Japanese battleships, the Royal Navy battleship , and the incomplete United States Navy battleship all were disposed of as targets.

Admiral Graf Spee (1939)

Following the Battle of the River Plate the damaged German pocket battleship sought refuge in the port of Montevideo. On 17 December 1939, with the British and Commonwealth cruisers , , and waiting in international waters outside the mouth of the Río de la Plata, Captain Hans Langsdorff sailed Graf 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.

San Giorgio at Tobruk (1941)

When British and Commonwealth land forces attacked Tobruk on 21 January 1941, the Italian cruiser San 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.

Bismarck (1941)

In 1941 the battleship Bismarck, 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 in Pursuit: the Sinking of the Bismarck, by Ludovic 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 above water, and only possible on an already sinking ship, thus further indicating that scuttling had made the final torpedoing redundant.

Coral Sea and Midway (1942)

After the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, the heavily damaged American aircraft carrier Lexington and the Japanese carriers Hiryū, Sōryū, Akagi, and Kaga were all scuttled to prevent their preservation and use by their respective enemies.

French fleet at Toulon (1942)

In November 1942, in an operation codenamed Case Anton, Nazi German forces occupied the so-called Free Zone in response to the Allied landing in North Africa. On 27 November they reached Toulon, where the majority of the French Navy was anchored. To avoid capture by the Nazis (Operation Lila) the French admirals-in-command (Laborde and Marquis) decided to scuttle the 230,000-tonne fleet, most notably, the battleships Dunkerque and Strasbourg. Eighty percent of the fleet was utterly destroyed, all of the capital ships proving impossible to repair. Legally the scuttling of the fleet was allowed under the terms of the 1940 Armistice with Germany.

Danish fleet (1943)

Anticipating a German seizure of all units of the Danish Navy as part of Operation 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 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.

Allied landing in Normandy (1944)

Old ships code-named Corn cobs were sunk to form a protective reef for the Mulberry harbours at Arromanches and Omaha Beach for the Normandy 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.

Operation Deadlight (1945–1946)

on 12 June 1945]] Of the 156 German submarines ("U-boats") surrendered to the Allies at the end of World War II, 116 were scuttled by the Royal Navy in Operation Deadlight. Plans called for them to be scuttled in three areas in the North Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland, 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.

Japanese submarines (1946)

After Japan's surrender, the United States Navy seized 24 Imperial Japanese Navy submarines, bringing them to Sasebo Bay to study them. To prevent an inspection by a Soviet team, the submarines were scuttled during Operation Road's End.

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