4. In Search of HMS EDINBURGH

"The ship sank in minutes ... she went stern first on to her port side, and sank very quickly, until just her turrets were visible. She paused then and just disappeared under the sea and was gone." The last moments of the HMS EDINBURGH, remembered by one of her crew. It was 2 May, 1942. The British cruiser was on her way home from Murmansk. She was carrying a rather unusual cargo in her bomb room—five and a half tons of gold bullion, payment by the Russians for American armaments.

For nearly 40 years she lay undisturbed, 800 feet down at the bottom of the Barents Sea, beneath the icy waters of the Arctic Circle. After the war she was declared a war grave. This and her depth effectively ruled out the traditional methods of salvaging her cargo. No diver could get down to work on the wreck, and no-one would be allowed to blast her open with explosives and grab what he could. So for years the HMS EDINBURGH remained a treasure infinitely desirable but always beyond reach.

Enter now Keith Jessop, who felt sure the cargo could be salvaged. A diver himself once, who had done some small-time salvage, Jessop had been doing a lot of research. He had discovered in the Public Record Office the receipt for the gold bars that confirmed that they had been loaded aboard the cruiser. He also found the secret reports informing the Admiralty that the gold was still in the bomb room when the ship sank. So he had official confirmation that this was not another old sea-dog's yarn about buried treasure. More than that, he was convinced he knew how the gold could be recovered from that depth without desecrating a war grave. The answer lay in a technique called saturation diving, developed in the North Sea and elsewhere for the oil exploration business.

After endless problems a salvage team set off from northern Norway in early May 1981. By now, the success of the operation was out of Jessop's hands. As the director of operations put it: "It's like searching London for someone in thick fog with only a torch to see with."

Undaunted, however, when they reached the search area in the Barents Sea they lowered the sonar equipment overboard to scan the seabed for likely large objects. Incredibly, on their first sweep, something large was traced out on the sonar chart. Experience suggested it was a wreck and, miraculously, it turned out to be the HMS EDINBURGH.

In many ways, the finding of the wreck was the most dramatic moment of the whole mission. A dream had turned into reality. The problem was no longer if, but how. What started as a gamble had become a hard commercial risk. The recovery of the gold was still going to be immensely difficult; indeed, the deepest salvage of its kind ever attempted. But this journey's end was now in sight.