Dan Snow's History Hit - The Naval Revolution: Triumph and Disaster

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

A deafening impact, a shattered destroyer, and a legacy that completely revolutionised warfare at sea.When HMS Tiger sank beneath the waves one dark night in 1908, over half of her crew were lost to the depths, and the nation went into mourning. But this was more than a tragic, peacetime accident. It was a warning that the age of steam, steel and speed had transformed warfare faster than navies could adapt. And the sinking of HMS Tiger revealed the hidden dangers and profound upheavals of this naval revolution.Today we're joined by expert divers and wreck specialists Dan, Dave and Leo, who have just discovered the wreck of HMS Tiger, 118 years after her sinking. They tell us all about this remarkable find, and the advent of a revolutionary new class of warship - the destroyer.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.We need your help! Let us know what you want from Dan Snow's History Hit by filling in our anonymous survey here: https://forms.gle/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe. The night is. is almost completely black. Somewhere off the southern coast of the Isle of White, the ships of the Royal Navy's home fleet are moving silently through the darkness.

Every navigation light has been extinguished. The hulking battleships and cruisers are little more than shadows on the water. Their presence betrayed, perhaps by the faint glow, the churn of their propellers, leaving behind the speck of foamy water, and the sound of the deep, rhythmic beat of the steam engines propelling those thousands of tons of steel through the night.

This isn't a war, but it's meant to feel as close to one as possible. Hidden somewhere ahead are the attackers, a handful of fast agile torpedo boat destroyers. Their task is to launch one of the newest and most terrifying weapons of war at sea. They're going to slip through the fleet screen, evade detection, and launch a simulated torpedo attack and then try and escape before the heavy ships can respond. It's a dangerous game of cat and mouse, played at speed in darkness with almost no margin for error.

It matters because the future of naval warfare and perhaps the fate of Britain is at stake. Among those torpedo boat destroyers that night is the little HMS tiger. She darts with the blackness. She's one of the Royal Navy's latest weapons. She's small. she's extraordinarily fast and she's built for exactly this kind of work.

Around her, towering warships loom in and out of the darkness like cliffs. Their outlines briefly discernible before they disappear into the night. Officers strained to make out those silhouettes. Lookouts peer into the gloom searching for movement. No one dares utter a sound. Every decision has to be made in seconds. Every call-salteration carries a risk. But for the tiger, at the moment, everything appears to be going according to plan.

Tiger has penetrated deep into the British fleet. She slipped past ships many times her size. The destroyer ahead of her has launched, well, simulated a launch of its torpedoes. The exercise is almost over, but then something changes. Tiger veers off course. Why she turns, no one will ever know. Because suddenly, emerging for the darkness just a few metres away is the bow of the armored cruiser HMS bearing.

She is enormous compared to Tiger, weighing thousands of tons more, driving relentlessly forward. By the time one ship sees the other, there is no time to react. On HMS Barrick, the engine was thrown astern, but her momentum was unforgiving. The inevitable collision is devastating. Berwick's steel bow tears into Tiger amid ships with incredible force. The destroyer is cut in half. Her hulls split pretty much clean in two. Steam erupts into the night with a deafening roar, steel, buckles and screams.

Men are hurled from their feet as the deck beneath them simply disappears. The forward half of Tiger vanishes beneath the surface almost immediately. For a few desperate moments, the stern remains afloat. Survivors scramble across the twisted wreckage, some throwing themselves into freezing water, others cling to anything that will float. Around them, the darkness that concealed the fleet only moments before, now swallows up the men calling for help. Within minutes, it's over.

The sea closes over the wreck of H.M.S. Tiger. Nearly half her crew are gone. There have been no enemy, no shells fired, no torpedoes launch, just one unexplained turn in the darkness, and a tragedy that would haunt the Royal Navy for generations. But the story of HMAS Tiger is about more than just this one single tragic accident. It is the story of a revolution in war at sea. She was a new type of warship that would transform naval warfare forever.

Built to hunt tiny torpedo boats that it was thought threatened the world's battleships. She was a torpedo boat destroyer. It was one of the most important innovations of modern naval warfare. Over time, the name was shortened simply to destroyer, and these ships would go on to become a backbone of 20th century fleets. It escort convoys. they'd hunt submarines, they'd defend aircraft carriers, and they would evolve into sophisticated guided missile destroyers

that still serve in navies around the world today. So the story of HMS Tiger is really the story of how modern naval warfare came to be. It's the story of technological revolution of changing tactics, mounting international tensions and extraordinary risks that sailors were expected to accept long before the First World War ever began. And I got to learn all about those risks recently on a very special mission. I got to head out into the middle of the English Channel,

into those waters off the Isle of Wight, with wonderful maritime historians and wreck specialists. Dan McCullen, Dave Wends, and Leo Fielding. They are the trio that lead the merry band that try and find lost shipwrecks, and they set out to find the wreck of HMS Tiger. More than a century after she disappeared beneath the waves, they believe that they have identified the site of Tiger,

and I went to join them. as they went to try and take a dive on that wreck. As you know, folks, I love the sea, I love naval history. I love finding shipwrecks. This was a dream opportunity for me and team history hit. There will be a documentary on the History Hit channel coming soon. And this wreck in particular offers a remarkable connection to one of the Royal Navy's most haunting peacetime disasters. So today we're going to retrace Tiger's final hours. We're going to explore why the destroyer changed naval history. I'm going to hear from Dan and Leo, part of Project Explore, going to check them out. out. They're trying to look for shipwrecks all over the place, fantastic stuff. And Dave, about what it's

like to descend into the depths and visit a shipwreck that has lain forgotten on the seabed for more the hundred years. Enjoy. Leo, Dan and Dave, good to have you on the podcast. Good evening. Thank you. Hello. How are you? Well, guys, I'm very excited. It's great to be talking about, well, this topic. And then, of course, we're going to come to this remarkable wreck. So, lots going on in this episode. First of all, just give me a sense of this piece of this piece. period, 1885 to the start of the First World War, a lot is changing in naval history. Just to give me a sense of the new platforms, the new weapon systems, new technology that's coming into play in this period.

Yeah, sure. So the main event of this period was the development of the torpedo, of course, which posed a serious threat to the British Navy. What the British Navy was worried about was that you'd have these very small, surface craft that would be able to take on and put at risk even the largest capital ships, a bit like the kind of drone technology that we're seeing today. And so what the Navy needed was ships that could go very fast, and they could track down and catch these torpedo boats before they could put at risk

capital ships. Talk about asymmetric warfare. You mentioned drones, interesting, isn't it? Because they're about 1% the price of a battleship, but they can sink a battleship. right, whereas previously to sink a battleship, you need another battleship with big guns and thick armor and they just exchanged broadsides and that's that. Now you've got these weapon systems and they can be delivered. They don't need a big battleship to fire a torpedo. Presumably you can do it from a very small platform, can you? Yeah, exactly. Small platforms,

fast ships, ships that can attack in numbers. They can catch up to battleships, cruisers, fire their torpedoes and be away before they can be caught. So yeah, it was a major, seen as a major threat to the fleet at the time. And I guess if you're the world's biggest Navy or all the world's biggest battleships, everyone else therefore thinks, hang on, maybe we'd have to build those. Maybe we could build a whole fleet of much smaller, cheaper vessels carrying these torpedoes, and we sort of avoid the expense of trying to compete with Britain on a light for like basis. You can see how the rest of the world would have thought this was quite exciting. Yeah, absolutely. It's very appealing as a shipbuilding strategy. And it's really what triggered what you could see as an arms race,

essentially in the 1880s, 1890s, to develop both the torpedo boats themselves and the technology and the boats that could catch those torpedo boats and disable them before they did any damage. The Admiralty were very much aware of the emerging threat of these fast, agile torpedo boats because they could just zip in and out of the enemy, torpedo, a capital ship and zoom away again. So the development of a torpedo boat destroyer was to destroy the torpedo boats. So these new torpedo boat destroyers, particularly the 30 notters, had to be as agile and faster and more heavily armed in order to counter and deter the threat. And that's what we've seen now with the tiger and intercept ships came about.

It's so interesting, isn't it? So if you're in France, you think, hang on a minute, let's not build massively expensive battleships to fight the Brits. let's fill up the English channel with these fast boats that attack at night. They go extremely quickly. They're taking advantage of this new technology. And we can build loads of them. We can have absolutely loads of them. We can swarm the whole channel with them.

I mean, it must have been causing nightmares for British planners. Yeah, just following on from what Dave and Leo said as well, there was a really famous quote by Admiral Mountbatten at the time. And it was a large hole in the ship below the water line is obviously far more likely to be able to sink that ship. rather than a hole above the water line. So it sort of explains why these torpedoes at this sort of ear in warfare was so dangerous. So this fear of these torpedo boats

spawns an entirely new class of warship, one that's still with us today, fascinatingly. And what is that called? The destroyer. So that begins life as a torpedo boat destroyer, does it? Yeah, but now they're referred to merely as destroyers, but they were torpedo boat destroyers. And I think the Amblety ran about the turn of the century,

when it went about the 1890s, decided that they needed fast 30-not destroyers, and the tender went out to other shipbuilders. If you want to build any of our destroyers, they've got to achieve a speed of 30 knots. And that's where the tiger comes into it. Dave, take me through it. You're a professional mariner.

30-knots is pretty quick today, isn't it? I mean, how fast was that back in 1900? Well, it's phenomenally fast. This was powered by steam engines. Steam engines producing just over 30 knots of speed. It's incredible for the period. And the beauty of steam was that they're very quiet. You could stand next to a steam engine going at full speed and have a conversation.

Apart from the vibration of the machinery, the actual noise of the engine was quiet, contrasting with the diesel and oil engines of today. You couldn't possibly stand next to them and have a conversation. But that was a side issue, really. The main event was speed. They had to have the speed, and they had to have enough speed to outrun the torpedo boats that they were designed to attack. So just for people at home, people might have heard of HMS Warrior,

which I made several podcasts on. And the top speed of HMS Warrior in 1860-odd was about 14 knots. 40 years later, this is twice as fast as that. So it just shows how quickly technology is moving. So we got an engine, a whole thing's built around the engine, presumably. What are they carrying a board? What are the tools they've got to do their job to destroy? Yeah, so she was heavily armed to intercept these torpedo boats and chasers. Her primary armament was one 12-pounder, quick-firing, 1,200-weight gun,

which was mounted just forward of the bridge on the turtle deck. Her second armament was she had five Hotchka, six-pounders. They were staggered across the ship, so he had two directly behind the bow. next to the bridge section, and then you had one on the port and one on the starboard side near the centre section of the ship. And then you also had one in the centre line right at the stern of the ship. And then obviously, along with the main shell firing armaments, she had two 18-inch torpedo tubes which fired whitehead torpedoes. And this was all just jam-packed into the ship. As we mentioned before, the ship was incredibly fast. She was powered by four Norman boilers. She

had three funnels. She had an incredible shaft horsepower of like 6,400 and she carried a weight of coal of 86 tonnes, so the ship was literally jam-packed, full of armaments or fuel or machinery. So it can fire torpedoes as well, but it's got these pretty punchy guns on its deck as well, so it can sink any ships that it's able to overhaul. And so it sounds to me like a pretty a pretty versatile boat as well, and it will end up doing all sorts of jobs, not just chasing down torpedo boats, but it'll end up doing all sorts of jobs to the rest of the 20th century, weren't it? Yeah, so absolutely, Dan, today were used not just for chasing down torpedo boats, but also on coastal patrols, bearing in mind this is a pre-radio era, so figuring out where the enemy fleet

actually is was quite an analogue process, and having a boat that could deploy rapidly along the coast was very much part of the intel gathering process for the British fleet. They weren't very large boats, were they? How many crew might be on a destroyer? Well, the tiger had a complement of about 57 or 58 men, which was pretty well standard throughout that period, which is remarkable really. When you look at the size of the ship and the size of the machinery,

the room they had to operate in was very restricted. There wasn't much room for them to move within this confide. of the ship. They were obviously a well-oiled crew. They knew exactly what they were doing. They were skilled at their jobs and many of them died doing it. Again, so very, very small compared to the big people have heard of dreadnoughts, the super dreadnought battleships that we were built a few years later, over a thousand people on board those. So these are very, very different. They're going super fast. They're armed in different ways. Would there have been an informality aboard? Would it felt like a bit of a different navy to serving on some of those larger, very hierarchical ships?

I think that's absolutely right, Dan. I think the crews on these destroyers had a reputation for being rough and tough, as we've heard. You know, the living space was really tiny by modern standards. And it must have been an absolute hell to be crew on one of these boats. They were reputed to be extremely wet boats. They had to deal with intense heat. They had to deal with vibration. They had to deal with just the fact that these boats were not good. handling in rough weather. They had very poor seakeeping. And so this is really, I think, an example of the Navy pushing shipbuilding, both the equipment and the crew to the absolute limits of what was possible. Do we know if it's desirable to remember? What was this an exciting place to be? And they'd feel like the cutting edge? I think so. I think if you, just reading the memoirs, a lot of the senior admirals at the time, particularly during the First World War, a lot of these guys cut their teeth on destroyers. And so it was seen as being a good place to learn the trade. Just a bit more freedom. People lower down the impeccal, a bit more responsibility probably,

a bit more exciting than being on a battleship. I don't know really, when anyone enlisted in the Navy, whether they had much choice in where they served. I guess they could volunteer for certain parts of the service. But certainly, if you were allocated to be a stoker, and Leo alluded to them being a bit rough and ready. These were men that were in the stokehold attending to the boilers, shoveling coal into the boilers in order to keep the furnaces burning to provide steam for the engines. And this was a hot, sweaty job. And so, of course, they were rough and ready, because they were strong, they were used to using their muscles to keep the coal flowing into the boilers. It's a tough job. I mean, no question. And I imagine it's even tough

for a tiny little vessel like a destroyer, where you're going to feel every wave as well, They used to get battered around in the rough seas. Yeah, that's right. I think the speed was known informally. It was sort of an in-joke among engineers in the Navy at the time. The faster these ships ran on their speed trials, the more likely they were to break down or the worst their track record later on because running them at full speed actually for any period of time

would cause damage, structural damage to the hull. So these things were literally sort of falling apart the moment they were running at full pace. Listen to Dan Snow's history. We're looking for HMS Tiger, more after this. Now let's come on to the Tiger itself, because this is such an important story, and it is such an important vessel, because it's a snapshot of this whole period of time, really.

Where was she built? So she was built in Scotland at, it was the Clyde Bank Yard of JNG Thompson. So she was built over the course of about a year under an order. it was 1898, 1890, that she was ordered and then completed in June 1901. And so she enters the Navy, presumably they're serving in the channel, they're not being sent out to the far-flung corners of Britain's empire. This is a destroyer prepared to take on, well, perhaps the French, perhaps the Germans in waters around Britain.

Yeah, she did. She also operated out of Portland and Devonport, but latterly her home port was Portsmouth. And what kind of service would she have been seeing in those first few years? A lot of training, for sure. A lot of exercises. I don't think there were any wars that they got involved in as such during that period, but they were there to defend the nation and to prepare in the event of war, which, as we know, came soon after in 1914.

Tell me about the exercises that she took part in in 2008. What was the point of these exercises? So the idea was that you'd have a dozen destroyers that left Portsmouth to practice night attacks against battleships, and cruisers that were heading to Portland. So it was designed as a training exercise at night, everyone screening their lights. There's total darkness, no moon. And so the destroyers were practicing torpedo attacks on these big ships. And presumably, it's a dangerous business, not using lights. I mean, there's no GPS. There's no identify friend or foe. There's not

AIS systems. I mean, but you've got to make them as realistic as possible. That's right. And Interestingly, only a few years before Tiger had been involved in a near-miss collision, also during a simulated night attack, also with light screens to preserve stealth. So this was a dangerous exercise with lots of ships, big ships, manoeuvring in large numbers in total darkness. I think it's worth remembering as well that these guys were operating from an open bridge. They were exposed to the weather. There would have been a canvas screen around some stanchions to keep the spray off them.

But otherwise, they were completely in the open and relied totally on their eyesight and their wits and their skills. As you said, Dan, no radar, no GPS, no radio. They just had to navigate with compass sextant, although sextant wasn't a great deal of use at night, and dead reckoning. And so it's hardly surprising that there were accidents. Amazing, isn't it? Just yet worth repeating that. People will be familiar with movies of the bridge, with a bridge, screens lit up and windows, waves breaking over them. This is a bridge that is open to the elements.

Not like our boats today with a wheelhouse where you can be out of the wind and waves, so they were completely in the open. And toughness, I suppose, was the point. They believed a war was imminent. By 1908, that wars most likely can be made to the Germans. The Germans have got a very capable navy indeed. There was presumably the desire to train up the men and prepare them for that eventuality. Absolutely. Yeah. Training was absolutely essential, because when the real thing comes along. They are prepared and ready. Absolutely right. Right. Let's come back to that night, that fateful night of April 1908. So we've got a division of the Royal Navy steaming west down the English Channel south of the Alawite, about 20 miles south of the Alavite. They're heading

towards Portland, the huge important harbour at Portland. And then you've got these destroyers that are imitating really what torpedo boats. So just this attacking force of destroyers hoping to get amongst them and cause havoc. Yeah. So the torpedo boat destroyers were basically there to simulate the night attack exercise on the larger fleet, the home fleet. And they did so by using flares. So when they simulated a torpedo, it would be fired. They would use a flare to fire that up. Wow. So, okay, so the idea is you try and come up undetected

and then fire flares, meaning torpedoes away. Look at this. Look how close we are. We got you. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So it was a stealth exercise. You know, they didn't want to give it away and make it easy for everybody involved. They wanted to try and simulate this as realistic as possible. So that night you've got HMS recruit and HMS Tiger.

And they're trying to sneak in up on these bigger ships the Royal Navy, and they succeed. They do pretty well. Yes, that's right. So HMS recruit that Tiger was following, gone in amongst the big ships and fired their veris light. Tiger was supposed to be following the recruit, following her leader. But for reasons that nobody has ever explained, she didn't. So Tiger seemingly veered to port. So veered to left for everyone who's not familiar with the maritime expressions

and ended up cutting straight across the track of this line of bigger Royal Navy vessels. Is that right, Dave? Yeah, she's under orders to follow HMS recruit, the leader. And they couldn't see recruit, but they could see her wake. And they tried to follow that. My own personal view is they just didn't see the barrack coming. They couldn't have seen the bow wave, which would have shown up as white foam. It just didn't see it.

That's my own personal opinion. otherwise they wouldn't have turned directly across such a massive ship which was bearing down upon them. It was a fatal error. And as Leo said, we will never know what the real reason was. Maybe they were dazzled. Maybe they just made a miscalculation. But it's purely as guesswork. We won't know the truth.

Darren, we hear Dave talking about the massive ship HMS barrack. Give us a sense of how big that was compared to the tiger. Yeah, so I think the barrack was 10,000 tons. Is that correct? Yeah, pretty much. The tiger itself, it was 380 tons light and 425 tons fully loaded. You know, so you've got like over 20 to 25 times the size in mass. And with that such armored bow and ram on the front of the barrack,

it just literally sliced through the ship like a hot knife through butter. Yeah, and you mentioned the armament. We forget now, but that was also thought to have been potentially a futuristic weapon of war, was actually crashing into other ships, wasn't it, at close range and slicing them open? And so this bow of Berwick and this ram at the front, that was actually, it was a job that it was prepared to do. Yeah, exactly. I think it's one of the ironies,

a sort of poignant ironies about this story that Berwick had been specifically equipped with a ram bow. So we're talking here about, you know, a heavily reinforced underwater forward extension on her bow that had been designed as a weapon to sink enemy ships. And in this case, you know, it's proved lethal to a friendly ship during an accident. How long would the crew have had deaitherto? think, Dave, as a man who spent a lot of time in these waters on boats and how long do you think

the crew of the tiger would have had to respond to the barracks' bow just coming out of the darkness? Well, virtually no time. I think when the barrack first sighted the tiger, they were about 100 yards off. So seconds to react. And then you've got to try and alert all your mates below deck. It's just not enough time. They were doomed the moment they made the maneuver to cross the bows of the barrack, even though it wasn't their intention. The disaster was just inevitable. What do we know about that moment of collision? What do the sources tell us? Well, the sources say that one of the men was below decks and just became aware of a wall of steel passing in front of his face as the barracks sliced through. He watched the floor plates

buckle up. It instantly tried to escape, but found his escape hatch above his head had been distorted, but he was nevertheless able to get through. But for everybody else, down below, very difficult to try and escape. And in particular, the men in the bow section, because the vessel parted started a sink straight away. So the men in the forward part of the ship that were down below just didn't stand a chance. Dan, tell us how many men did manage to survive

and how old do you survive? A crash like that, it's extraordinary. From the initial point of collision at quarter past eight in the evening, it only took three minutes for the stern to disappear below the waves. as you can imagine, the sense of total fear would have been amongst them sailors, unfortunately, below decks. And then after the stern disappeared, there was only another one to two minutes before the bow

disappeared below the waves. And yeah, it was gone forever for 180 years. There was, in total, 35 men lost below decks, and that included Lieutenant William Middleton as well. No one from the bridge survived, right? So none of the command team, if you like. So actually, no one was ever really able to unpack exactly what happened in those last few seconds of the life of Tiger. Yeah, it's a great unanswered question. What really happened? The court-martial couldn't explain it.

The commanding officer, Lieutenant Millington, didn't make it. So he couldn't testify. None of the surviving crew members knew why the order was given. So that's why it remains a mystery to this day. This is Dan Snow's history. HMS Tiger has been found. Well, after this, don't go away. This was obviously a peacetime tragedy. How big a deal was this at the time? So this was major national news at the time. You had King Edward the 7th personally telegraphed, his sympathies, questions were asked in Parliament.

There was a lot of scrutiny about why this had happened. Again, pre- First World War, you know, national maritime tragedies on this scale, the public not accustomed to. And it was headline news for weeks. And it shows in the fact that there was this massive. massive search and salvage operation run by the Navy over several days. They sent multiple cruisers, multiple tug salvage vessels to see if they could find any sign of the wreckage. But they never found the wreck and eventually gave up and called it practically impossible.

Did those men die in vain or were they useful, I mean, sounds callous, but were their lessons learned that you think may help prevent future tragedies like this? Well, one of the developments that we've talked about is the first. fact that Admiral Fanshaw, in the aftermath of the sinking, immediately banned the use of signal flares from night exercises. So he speculated they were too brilliant, and they had dazzled the destroyer crews, and he recommended alternatives that would be visible to the target ships, but wouldn't be binding to the attackers. So there were practical reforms that we saw that were born from this tragedy. But I guess it also just highlights that these kind of destroyer operations

at night, they are dangerous and funnily enough in the Battle of Jutland, less than 10 years later during the First War when it was a very, very real shooting war at sea. There were collisions at night in much the same way. I mean, it's fascinating how this does presage the type of warfare that's going to come. Yeah, absolutely. And I think also just picking up the theme about seakeeping abilities of these boats, you know, Tiger herself had quite a checkered history in terms of engine failures, collisions with other ships, crashing into the breakwater.

at Portland and she was repaired and returned to service each time. But you get this sense that she was always living on borrowed time taking part in these exercises. These new platforms, they can be difficult for navies to absorb, I suppose. Dan, why did you want to find the wreck of Tiger? So as a project, we really wanted to find the wreck of the Tiger, not only because it was the last 30-knott torpedo boat destroyer missing in the channel, but we also felt like it was a really important target to find as well because as a project we run by three pillars, remembrance, conservation and documentation. And we felt like if we found the wreck, we would be able to do it justice by extensive documentation and also to remember the sailors that unfortunately lost the lives.

Dave, you've found more wrecks than I've had hot dinners and you've dived on them in a channel one of the biggest graveyards of ships in the world. What was it about this one in particular? Because this has been a lifelong mission for you. Yeah, I've done a lot of research on wrecks. When I'm not diving on them, I'm researching them through the winter. And I'd always known about the tiger, but didn't know exactly where it was. I knew it was offshore.

And to try and go offshore to find a wreck, it takes a lot of time, money and effort and grim determination, particularly if the weather's not favorable. And I always thought this was an important wreck to find, simply because the story is so dramatic. Loss of life was, peacetime, loss of life was absolutely appalling. And now, as we know, we found it.

Well, we have, Leo. We were out on Dave's boat the other day, and it was a very, very special day indeed. You've spent a huge amount of time in the archive. What was it like going down that shot line, that rope down to the seabed and seeing Tiger for the first time? I mean, for me, the adrenaline was incredible.

So she's 62 meters deep. which is deep enough that you're on specialist rebreather equipment. You've got a limited time available to you on the bottom. The first thing that I saw was the fourth Norman boiler on the stern, just looming out of the darkness. And at that point, I knew immediately we were on a 30-notter. We were on Tiger, and the dreadlin was just incredible. What have you learned, Dan and Leo,

what did you learn from diving? Obviously, diving is a great adventure, and you've got amazing pictures and scans. What are we able to learn that adds to our knowledge of that accident that night back in 1908? So during the dive, we managed to uncover several artefacts, which give us historical insight into actually what happened during the snapshot of time when the barracks sliced into the tiger. And one of them things was that she didn't alter speed nor course.

so on the stern telegraph, the pointer was still around to full speed ahead, so she didn't try to slow down. Also, the rudder indicator as well, which we managed to document on the bow section, that was also still pretty much straight ahead. It was a slight indication that she was going five degrees, maybe five to seven degrees to starboard at the time. However, you know, we could never be sure if that was 100% accurate. at the time. So isn't that amazing? So the engine telegraph, so that's the way that they communicated from the bridge to the engine room. People be familiar with the famous one in the Titanic movie.

You know, you ring it and it rings a bell and it can say full of stern and everything. So that was going full ahead. So they did not have any time to adjust the speed and potentially not even adjust the steering. It was that sudden. I mean, that's just terrifying, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when they did see the barrack off the starboard side, it was literally 100 to 150 yards away, so they literally had seconds to react, and I don't think they had time to react in that instance. All the chains and the cables,

which went from the controls on the bridge to the stern, would have been severed. So even if the signal had been made, it wouldn't have gone anywhere, it wouldn't have reached anyone. I think one of the engineers reported that after the ship had been cut in two, he did go back down and shut the steam off,

but in the event it made no difference. to the outcome whatsoever. Give me some of the highlights, guys. You both came up so excited from that dive, but give me some of the highlights, the things you saw down there. I think one of the highlights for me was seeing these incredibly ornate fluid compasses.

So Denton Co, London, fluid compasses, used for navigation, and they had these highly decorated 128 points cards, graduated cards, showing direction with a Flaudea Lee that was pointing north and with the name Dent visible through the glass.

And seeing those, we found four of those, so well preserved was really impressive. For me, it was some of the smaller details. For example, the rudder indicator on the helm that was inside the Conning Tower. And some of the room label tags as well. So we found a really nice brass label to the 12 pound shell room. and that was just amazing to see that in situ. It was frozen in time. Well, no one's pinned anywhere near that wreck ever.

And, I mean, talk about time capsule, totally untouched, steering wheel in place, never been looted. What an incredibly special find that is, guys. I haven't dived it myself, but the guys come up and told me there were six telegraphs on the bridge section, two or three compasses, oil lamps, portholes, steering pedestals. you know, it's staggering. And not to mention, of course, the prize find that the ship's bell was discovered. So, guys, you know you found the right wreck. It's got the name Tiger on it, has it? Yeah, so the bell itself, we were able to see the inscription HMS on the bell and later a review of the photos that we were able to gather. We believe that we can see the letters IGE as well, just below the HMS. I think we can credit you with the HMS Tiger here, guys. I feel

feels enough evidence. Dave, what's it mean to you that you've been chasing down this wreck for decades? Well, it's a culmination really of years and years and years of research and diving. And to find this particular wreck in such a fantastic condition with absolutely everything still in place, it really is quite an exceptional find. What a moment, guys. Do you take a minute to celebrate and congratulate and congratulate yourselves, or are you thinking about the next adventure? Not yet. We're going to live off this one for a while, I think. Yeah. We did when we got back on board Dave's boat. There was a lot of excitement, you know, that all the hard work, the time in the archive, the time I see scanning,

it all paid off. And we just hoped that we'd done enough because at that time we didn't have time to review the pictures or anything like that, the video footage. So, yeah, it was super exciting. But as all projects that look for records, there is always the next one. And the following week after that, we were off up to Scotland to try and find our next target. It was lovely when you got back on the boat and put your dive kit away and we're able to have a few whiskeys and celebrate your great achievement. Leo, Dan, Dave, thank you for coming on the podcast. Another huge congratulations for this. Finding this complete and stunning wreck, but one that really gives us a snapshot into this absolutely essential

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