OCR Text |
Show I BUG SHELL SINKS BULWARK London. Nov 26. The British battleship bat-tleship Bulwark was blown up and sunk in the estuary of the Medway river at 7-5.1 o clock this morning Between 700 and 800 men were lost, including Captain Guy Belater. her commander, ;md all her officers. Only fourteen of her crew were saved It is announced officially that the explosion ex-plosion was interior and originated , in the ship's magazine. The disaster is the most appalling the British navy has suffered in the war Ii Is even more of a shock than the loss of the boukir, Cressy and Hogue at the hands of a single submarine in the North sea, for the Bulwark was destroyed from within destroyed utterly and instantly. The men aboard her had not a fighting chance for their lives. The band was playing aboard the' Bulwark Near her were anchored seeral other ships. The morning was calm and but for the presence of the battleship swinging at her anchor an-chor chains there was nothing to suggest sug-gest anything but peace Alongside the Bulwark was a lighter. From it were being loaded over the side of the 15,000-ton battleship fresh ammunition ammuni-tion stores for her 12-inch and 6 inch guns. Suddenly a terrific explosion occurred occur-red In the bowels of the ship. A great cloud of smoke arose, enveloping the ( Bulwark and shutting her from sight I A great white flash of fire streaked i through the black veil: the smoke cloud thickened and rolled outward and upward. The great block curtain spread, and as it spread it began to lift. Win n the spot which had been the Bul-. Bul-. wark'a berth finally was visible a maelstrom of turbulent waters was all that marked the anchorage. That aud the debris that littered the surface sur-face of the stream. The Bulwark was gone with all on board except the few mangled and struggling forms in the water. She sunk in three minutes min-utes from the time of the explosion. A vice admiral and a rear admiral of the royal navy who were at Sheer-ness Sheer-ness and investigated immediately, reported it was their conviction that it was an an internal magazine ex plosion that rent the s-hlp asunder Winston Spencer Churchill, first lord of the admiralty, so announced to the house of commons where he officially of-ficially reported the disaster. There was no upheaal of water such as accompanies the detonation of a mine or ihe blowing up of a torpedo. tor-pedo. The bottom was blown out of the ship, she was broken, warped and bent. There was nothing left of her to float and she went to the bottom. It was like the Arabian Nights tale of the genie and the bottle, a puff of smoke and it was gone. The Medway river rises In Surrej county and flows through Kent in a northeasterly direction At Chatham, Just south of east .and distant about twenty miles from the outskirts or London, the river's mouth spreads In- to a navigable delta. This extends 1 for ten miles to Sheerness on the 1 Kentish coast, where the Medway i empties into the Thames. Across the I Thames six miles from Sheerness i and from twelve to fourteen miles ; from the Bulwark's anchorage lies Essex. The explosion wa6 so violent that , debris from the battleship was scat i tered over the coal fields in Essex county, littering the towns and coun- .ftrysldo. At Southend-on Sea, on th Fs5-ex eoast. the concussion of tin ) explosion was plainly felt and Hkene by the inhabitants to a severe earth quake Buildings in the vicinity 0 Sheerness were shaken to their found ations. Dense clouds of smoke floatet over the Thames estuary. In severs shipB anchored near the Bulwark sail ors were knocked senseless by th concussion Persons along the shon were found prone, stricken insensible by the furious blast. Scores were deafened and hundreds of windows v. ere shattered. Story of Syewltnes. An eyewitness who was on a ship a short distance from the ill-fated Bulwark, said: "1 was at breakfast at about 7:5fJ this morning when I heard an explosion explo-sion and went on deck. My first Im pression was that the report was pro duced by the firing of a salute by one of the ships, but the nolBe was quite exceptional. "When I got on deck I soon saw that something nwful had happened The water and the sky were obscured by dense volumes of smoke. We were ordered at once to the scene of the disaster to render what assistance we could. At first we could see nothing noth-ing but when the smoke cleared we were horrified to find that the battleship battle-ship Bulwark had gone. She seemed to have entirely vanished from sight, but a little later we detected a portion por-tion of the huge battleship showing about four feet above the water. "We kept a vigilant lookout for the unfortunate crew, but saw only two men I do not know whether the oth er boats rescued anyone. One man we saw was dead. The disaster was the result of an accident." Another eyewitness snld that when the explosion occurred a great volume of flame and smoke shot Into the air. The ship seemed to split In two and then heeled over and sank. She disappeared in less than five minutes Beresford's Oponion. Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, who formerly made the Bulwark his flagship, said in an interview today: "Persons nnturally will think of Gorman spies as an explanation of the disaster. I prefer to say nothing about that. It is certain that the magazine must have exploded, but I cannot Imagine how it happened Good cordite does not explode without with-out a detonator. "There was a fire a while ago within with-in the magazine of the battleship Revenge. Re-venge. Sailors quenched it and the magazine did not explode. The magazine of the Bulwark was in a very safe position and was protected pro-tected by every' modern device. Possibly Pos-sibly a shell or fuse was dropped, but even this ought not to have exploded he magazine." Sheerness, England, via London, Nov 27, 2:25 a. m It is believed here that the explosion of the Bulwark Bul-wark was caused by the fall and bursting of a twelve-inch lyddite shell in her magazine Paris, Nov 27, 12:lc a m. A dispatch dis-patch to the Havas agency from Athens says advices received in the Greek capital from Mltylene state that a Turkish mine layer has been torpedoed and sunk in the Bosphorus |