Scuttling

[1] Scuttling may be performed to dispose of an abandoned, old, or captured vessel; to prevent the vessel from becoming a navigation hazard; as an act of self-destruction to prevent the ship from being captured by an enemy force; as a blockship to restrict navigation through a channel or within a harbor; to provide an artificial reef for divers and marine life; or to alter the flow of rivers.

[2] In 2012, a cog preserved from the keel up to the decks in the silt was discovered alongside two smaller vessels in the river IJssel in the city of Kampen, in the Netherlands.

[4][5] The Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, who led the first expedition that resulted in the fall of the Aztec Empire, ordered his men to strip and scuttle his fleet to prevent the secretly planned return to Cuba by those loyal to Cuban Governor Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar.

HMS Sapphire was a 32-gun, fifth-rate sailing frigate of the Royal Navy in Newfoundland Colony to protect the English migratory fishery.

During the War of 1812, Commodore Joshua Barney, of the U.S. Navy, Chesapeake Bay Flotilla, sank all nineteen of his fighting vessels, to prevent them from being captured by the British, as he and his men marched, inland, in the unsuccessful defense of Washington D.C. During the Belgian war of independence, Dutch gunboat commander Jan van Speijk came under attack from a mob of Antwerp labourers.

Those ships that were deliberately sunk included Grand Duke Constantine, City of Paris (both with 120 guns), Brave, Empress Maria, and Chesme.

The unsuccessful attempt at scuttling Merrimack enabled the Confederate States Navy to raise and rebuild her as the broadside ironclad CSS Virginia.

In December 1861 and January 1862, Union forces scuttled a number of former whalers and other merchant ships in an attempt to block access to Confederate ports during the American Civil War.

During the Spanish–American War, a volunteer crew of United States Navy personnel attempted to scuttle the collier USS Merrimac in the entrance to the harbor at Santiago de Cuba in Cuba on the night of 2–3 June 1898 in an attempt to trap the Spanish Navy squadron of Vice Admiral Manuel de la Cámara y Libermoore in port there.

Heavy defensive fire caused the Thetis to scuttle prematurely; the other two cruisers sank themselves successfully in the narrowest part of the canal.

Within three days, however, the Germans had broken through the western bank of the canal to create a shallow detour for their submarines to move past the blockships at high tide.

Though most of the fleet was subsequently salvaged by engineer Ernest Cox, a number of warships (including three battleships) remain, making the area very popular amongst undersea diving enthusiasts.

Following the Battle of the River Plate the damaged German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee sought refuge in the port of Montevideo.

On 17 December 1939, with the British and Commonwealth cruisers HMS Ajax, HMS Cumberland, and HMNZS Achilles waiting in international waters outside the mouth of the Río de la Plata, Captain Hans Langsdorff sailed Graf Spee just outside the harbour and scuttled the vessel to avoid risking the lives of his crew in what he expected would be a losing battle.

As the Allies advanced toward Eritrea during their East African Campaign in World War II, Mario Bonetti—the Italian commander of the Red Sea Flotilla based at Massawa—realized that the British would overrun his harbor.

Stenhouse was slowed by heat exhaustion but his team refloated the oil tanker Giove; he died in September 1941 when the salvage tug Tai Koo bearing him as a passenger was sunk by a naval mine in the Red Sea.

U.S. Navy Commander Edward Ellsberg arrived in April 1942 with a salvage crew and a small collection of specialized tools and began methodically correcting the damage.

[9] In 1941, the battleship Bismarck, heavily damaged by the Royal Navy, leaking fuel, listing, unable to steer and with no effective weapons, but still afloat and with engines running, was scuttled by its crew to avoid capture.

In November 1942, in an operation codenamed Case Anton, Nazi German forces occupied the so-called "Free Zone" in response to the Allied landing in North Africa.

To avoid capture by the Nazis (Operation Lila), the French admirals-in-command (Laborde and Marquis) decided to scuttle the 230,000 tonne fleet, most notably, the battleships Dunkerque and Strasbourg.

Of the fifty-two vessels[15] in the Danish Navy on 29 August, two were in Greenland, thirty-two were scuttled, four reached Sweden and fourteen were taken undamaged by the Germans.

Old ships code-named "Corn cobs" were sunk to form a protective reef for the Mulberry harbours at Arromanches and Omaha Beach for the Normandy landings.

Of the 156 German submarines ("U-boats") surrendered to the Allies at the end of World War II, 116 were scuttled by the Royal Navy in Operation Deadlight.

The USS Oriskany was scuttled with 700 pounds of PCBs remaining on board as a component in cable insulation,[18] contravening the Stockholm Convention on safe disposal of persistent organic pollutants, which has zero tolerance for PCB dumping in marine environments.

The planned scuttling of the Australian frigate HMAS Adelaide at Avoca Beach, New South Wales in March 2010 was placed on hold after resident action groups aired concerns about possible impact on the area's tides and that the removal of dangerous substances from the ship was not thorough enough.