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on board Valdivia, we work with the ship’s officers to add the location of the shells to our survey map of the bay and the wreck. We also plot the range and bearing of the shellfire, based on the position and angle of the shell holes. The last five holes we found must have come from shells fired near the end of the battle, because our plots show that the British cruiser that fired them was very close to the sinking Dresden—in fact, just about where we are anchored in Valdivia, 800 feet off Dresden’s port side and just 2,500 feet away from the cliff. These last shell holes indicate that one of the cruisers sailed into the bay, broadside to Dresden, and opened up a final salvo or series of salvoes that ripped into the foundering German ship. The shots that missed drove deep into the cliff, where we found them.

The next day, we journey to the other side of the bay to search the cliffs there. We are rewarded with the discovery of more shell holes and unexploded shells, indicating that the British cruisers engaged in a deadly crossfire. In a brilliant but brutal tactical maneuver, Glasgow circled Dresden and pumped lethal rounds into the anchored German warship. Captain Luce of Glasgow had orders to sink Dresden, and he took no chances, firing at point-blank range even after the last Germans abandoned their ship.

Dresden is a ruin. Some of the destruction was caused by the shelling, some of it by the deep internal explosions caused by the scuttling charges—but some of it appears to be from a much later attempt to blast open the sunken cruiser’s stern. This damage puzzles us, because history records no attempt to salvage Dresden. Indeed, for many years, the cruiser’s decks were beyond the reach of divers. What happened to the stern—which is intact in photographs of the sinking cruiser—remains a mystery. Later, Willi Kramer finds a formerly top-secret document in the German naval archives that suggests Dresden was carrying gold coin pulled out of Germany’s Tsingtao bank accounts by von Spec. That would explain why we were not the first divers to explore the wreck. Someone has secretly blasted open the stern to get at the gold. We wonder when this was, and how the salvagers knew about the gold, given that the only record is a top-secret piece of paper. One possibility, shades of Raiders of the Lost Ark, is that it was the Nazis, eager to recover some of Germany’s lost riches to fund their preparations for war. We may never know.

But what is clear is that the sea has claimed Dresden after her final battle. Slumbering in the depths, the broken hulk is an undersea museum, a war grave and an evocative relic of the destruction of war. And yet, in the middle of the debris, Mike spots a small, unbroken flower vase. It is an unexpected find, this delicate survivor. It is also a reminder of the touches of home and life ashore that often accompany sailors on warships on their distant journeys, even into death.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ARCTIC FOX

THE HIGH ARCTIC: MAY 5, 1859

As the sledge bumped and slid across the frozen ground of the Arctic, Lieutenant William Hobson’s eyes swept the surrounding area searching for signs of the lost expedition led by Sir John Franklin. Cakes and slabs of ice piled up along the shore separated the snow-covered land from the frozen sea. Hobson, however, kept his gaze fixed on a pile of rocks in the distance, close to the shore. No accident of nature, that rock pile was a cairn, and Hobson hoped that other explorers, perhaps even Sir John Franklin and his men, had deposited records or notes in it, the usual practice in the Arctic. For many days, Hobson had followed a faint trail of scattered relics and broken bones to this spot. Little did he realize that the quest to discover the fate of Franklin, upon which he and his captain, Francis Leopold McClintock, had embarked, was about to reach its climax.

Pulling apart the top of the cairn, Hobson found a small tin canister. He opened it and reached inside to pull out a rolled-up sheet of yellowed, rust-stained paper. As he read it, Hobson realized that these