A Digital Terrain Model of the wreck of SMS Cöln, taken at Scapa Flow in January 2017.
[Innes McCartney]

Raising hell: Discovering, and recovering, lost warships

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

“Rise again! Rise again!” Canadian folksinger Stan Rogers declares in his song The Mary Ellen Carter, the story of a sunken fishing boat forsaken by its owners, only to be salvaged by its grateful and devoted crew.

“For we couldn’t leave her there, you see, to crumble into scale,” he sings. “She’d saved our lives so many times, living through the gale.”

The nature of seafaring, the dependence on a relatively tiny refuge perpetually (hopefully) afloat on vast and volatile waters, breeds in mariners a special affection for the crafts they sail in. It is in part why seamen have always referred to their ships in the feminine— ‘she’ and ‘her’ —for, the story goes, they are motherly, womb-like, life-sustaining vessels, protecting and nurturing their crews through good times and bad.

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More from Front Lines

• Editorial cartoonist Bob Chambers and Halifax in Wartime
• Researchers identify remains of Franklin expedition skipper
• Stolen Churchill portrait coming home

ATTENTION CANADIAN MILITARY FAMILIES : Did you or a family member receive VAC disability benefits between 2003 and 2023?

On 17 January 2024 the Federal Court approved a settlement in a class action involving alleged underpayment of certain disability pension benefits administered by Veterans Affairs Canada (“VAC”) payable to members or former members of the Canadian Armed Forces (“CAF”) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (“RCMP”) and their spouses, commonlaw partners, survivors, other related individuals, and estates (the “Settlement”).

If you received any of the disability-related benefits listed below at any time between 2003 and 2023, you may be entitled to compensation under the Settlement. As the executor, estate trustee, administrator, or family member of a deceased class member who collected VAC-administered disability benefits, you may also be able to claim on behalf of the estate.

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Alexander Roberts Dunn was the first Canadian to receive the Victoria Cross. [wikimedia]

The forgotten grave of Canada’s first VC recipient Alexander Robert Dunn

STORY BY ALEX BOWERS

Canadian peacekeeper Ben Mitchell was uneasy, and not just about the mines.

“Tensions were very high for not only the Eritrea[n] and Ethiopian armies,” he recalled of the UN mission to mediate a bloody border dispute between the neighbouring East African nations in the early 2000s, “but for us as well.”

In the Eritrean city of Senafe, Mitchell and a comrade were approached by children exclaiming “Canada” and tugging at their hands to follow them. “This thing smelled of an ambush badly,” he wrote, declining to be led to the unknown.

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More from Military Milestones

• Québécois Catch-22: Roméo Dallaire and the FLQ Crisis
• The Battle of Bowmanville
• Night of the Tempest: A British-Canadian pilot versus German Zeppelin L.31

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