The
Man who bought a Navy
Pieced
together after much research and told for the first time in this autobiography
is the astounding story of what is regarded as the greatest achievement in the
history of marine salvage - the raising of the German Fleet at Scapa Flow.
When
the Germans sank their surrendered navy at Scapa Flow after the First World War,
top salvage experts were agreed that the work of recovering the ships was
near-impossibility.
Engineer
Ernest Cox was the one man who
defied their prediction. In
1924 he decided to buy the scuttled fleet from the Admiralty, gambling his
entire personal fortune on the colossal task of raising the German ships. Cox
was a natural-born engineering genius, and though he had never before salvaged
even a rowing-boat, the fanatical energy and tireless concentration with which
he worked during the next eight years achieved staggering results.
His
methods were unorthodox. He lifted ships that were lying upside down, turned
them the right way up, and pumped them dry. When this was impossible, he had
patches clamped over every opening in the capsized hulls and pumped compressed
air into them until they rose to the surface.
Inevitably
there were disasters. Oil-vapour explosions occured in which men were working
over 60 feet below the surface; chains and heavy gear broke; re-floated ships
sank suddenly when coroded bulkheads collapsed. Yet Cox not only weathered these
hazards but also succeeded in raising six vessels in fourteen days, a record,
and recovered the battleship Hindenberg, the biggest ship ever raised in
history.
The Man who bought a Navy has 249 pages and has over 100 photographs.