WALES, UK (17 August 2007) -- Divers probing a mysterious shipwreck off the north coast of Wales have traced the origins of a bell from the sunken vessel and discovered a long-lost treasure of Canada's naval history: a 90-year-old minesweeper built by the fledgling Royal Canadian Navy during the First World War. A rare surviving symbol of this country's coming of age as a modest maritime power, the 38-metre trawler was commissioned mid-war as part of an urgent ship-construction and nation-building project aimed at taking over Canada's coastal defences from a besieged Britain. The remarkable find has also shed light on a tragic moment in the life of a north England town that lost 14 of her sons in January 1929, when the former Canadian ship - sold and refitted as the fishing boat Cartagena after the war - went down in the rough waters of the Irish Sea. For decades, the encrusted relic has been a favourite of scuba enthusiasts, who mistakenly believed it to be the wreck of the Kincorth, a similar-sized ship that sank off the Welsh coast in the 1940s. But the recent discovery in nearby waters of a wreck more likely to be the Kincorth prompted members of the Chester Sub-Aqua Club, a Liverpool-area divers group, to revisit the identity of the first ship. "There's a lot of shipwrecks out there, but to find one that had been misidentified for so long - that doesn't happen very often," club president Justin Owen told reporters yesterday. "We started putting the pieces of the puzzle together." The sleuths began with a valuable clue: in the 1980s, a bronze bell - enigmatically engraved "TR-4" - had been taken from the wreck, which lies at a depth of 35 metres about 10 kilometres north of the island of Anglesey. | | Inquiries earlier this year determined that the bell had traded hands over the years and was eventually taken to Canada and sold to a museum. Canada didn't get its own navy until 1910, and it took the outbreak of war to kickstart a serious shipbuilding program. About 45 minesweepers were built and launched at shipyards across Canada, most of them seeing duty along the East Coast or escorting supply convoys across the Atlantic. TR-4 was one of several trawlers built at Port Arthur, Ont., - present-day Thunder Bay - and a vintage Library and Archives Canada photograph of the launch of its sister ship, the inaugural Royal Canadian Navy minesweeper TR-1, shows the TR-4 in the background, still under construction. "The breakthrough was linking the TR-4 bell with the TR series built in Canada," said Owen. "From then, it was a matter of confirming all the facts - which required the documentary evidence and photographs, and then finally diving the wreck and matching her up against the photos and blueprints we had." Following the ship's paper trail, the researchers learned that TR-4 was sold after the war to a British seafood company based in Fleetwood, a fishing town north of Liverpool. It was resold in 1928 to the Brazilian government's marine ministry, and renamed the Cartagena. The ship was being delivered to South American by a crew of 14 sailors from Fleetwood when it was lost on Jan. 15, 1929. SOURCE - CanWest NewsSCUBA FORUMDISCUSS THIS TOPIC - Dive in and have your say at Scuba Forum |
