eight years after he left England. He also brought home a small fortune from his years with Rogers. Selkirk’s adventures were first recounted in Rogers’s account of A Cruzing Voyage Round the World in 1712, and then again in 1713 in a short article by journalist Richard Steele in a magazine called The Englishman. But the story took on even greater fame in 1719, when author Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, based in part on Selkirk’s adventures. The book was an immediate success; three hundred years later, it remains the second-most published book in the world, next only to the Bible, translated into most languages and available in nearly every country. Robinson Crusoe and the real-life Selkirk have also been the inspiration for other literary endeavors, paintings and movies— and, in time, for the decision by the Chilean government, in the 1960s, to change the name Mas a Tierra to Isla Robinson Crusoe.
DIVING DRESDEN Dresden rests beneath the waters of Cumberland Bay off Isla Robinson Crusoe. Every day, we load up one of Valdivia’s launches with dive gear and position ourselves over the wreck. Working with Willi Kramer and me, master diver Mike Fletcher breathes a complex mix of gases and descends to make the first survey the warship, relaying what he sees by video camera to the surface as we guide him through the ruined ship in the deep blue twilight below. It is far more difficult than this simple explanation — Mike is working hard, pulling 330 feet of heavy hose and electrical lines, clearing himself when they snag or catch on wreckage, and all the while using his eyes and experience along with ours to find and identify important areas of the ship, searching for clues about what happened in the final hours.
The dives are limited to 30 minutes, and then Mike has to decompress for more than twice that time to eliminate the deadly gas bubbles in his blood caused by the depth. In a series of later dives, Willi and I join Mike in surveying the wreck, slowly investigating the cruiser from bow to stern. Mike’s son Warren is also diving, filming the scene from a distance to capture as much of the wreck and the survey action as he can. Dresden lies as she sank, pointing almost due north and towards the beach, resting on the starboard (right) side. The funnels and masts have fallen away and lie on the seabed. Some of the guns have ripped free of the deck and also lie on the bottom.
The bow is heavily damaged, and the severed end of it rests upright on the seabed. One of our first conclusions is that Dresden sank heavily by the bow, hitting the bottom of the bay with enough force to break off the huge steel ram at the bow. As the ship twisted and sank, the hull cracked and the decks opened up. But the damage is so severe that we wonder if hitting the bottom was responsible for all of it. Gradually, it becomes clear that the split decks and the ripped-out hull near the bow are the result of the massive internal explosions when the Germans’ scuttling charges detonated. Despite the damage, one anchor remains on the deck, at the ready. A long string of anchor chain trails off the bow and heads off into the gloom of deeper water, where the anchor that held Dresden in place when the cruiser sank remains set in the sand.
The bridge is gone but the wood decking remains in place under the debris of broken steel, torn wiring, machinery and loose fittings. The stub of the aft mast rises up out of the deck, and the broken mainmast, lying in two pieces, rests on the deck at an angle. We see three empty cartridge shells, and I am tempted by the thought that they might just be from those three shots that Dresden’s crew managed to fire before the ship sank. But an even more interesting discovery awaits us. Nearby, still in place, is the cruiser’s auxiliary steering station, a paired set of steering wheels that stops Mike in his tracks as we all admire them.
A 4-inch gun, possibly hit by British shellfire, angles inward and points at Dresden’s deck. I count three perfectly spaced shell holes, one after the other, along the ship’s hull towards the casemate, which is partially collapsed. At least it is still here. Its partner, the forward casemate on the port side, is gone — gun, thick armor and all — disintegrated by the scuttling explosions. The level of damage is greater than we had expected. Accounts of the battle emphasize that after a few hits on the stern and on the deck guns, Dresden sank intact when the crew set off a scuttling charge deep in the hull. But what we are finding is evidence of a sustained shelling and at least two massive internal explosions. The entire aft section is heavily damaged, with the main deck gone, shell holes in the steel plates that lie inside the ship’s exposed interior, and plates bent out near the aft port casemate from an internal explosion.
Lying amidst the wreckage is a German sailor’s boot. Willi Kramer believes it to be the evidence of a dead man. Fifteen of Dresden’s crew died, thirteen in the battle and two who succumbed later from their wounds. Willi reminds us that as floating men die, their bodies relax and their boots fall off. Hundreds of boots lie around the Second World War wreck of the German battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic, grim testimony to the majority of the crew who perished while bobbing in the cold, oil-stained waters. This solitary shoe on the deck of Dresden is a reminder of the individual cost of war, just as the broken hulk of the cruiser is a reminder of the larger costs and waste of war.
Our survey of the wreck indicates that the history books have not told the complete story. It is evident that many shots went into Dresden, even as she sank. The British cruiser commanders had orders to sink Dresden, and they made sure they did just that. The extent of the damage makes us wonder just how close they came to the German cruiser. Historical accounts and maps of the battle show Glasgow, Kent and Orama outside of Cumberland Bay, firing at Dresden from a distance of 9,000 yards, but what we are seeing argues against that. Willi and I, with John Davis, decide to go ashore and search the cliffs for some of the shells fired during the battle and which, according to the locals, are still here.
Moving along the beach, outside of town and past the cemetery with its monument to three of Dresden’s dead crew, we find our first shell hole. It is nearly perfectly round and has bored 3 feet into the cliff. Buried inside, we find the steel base of an unexploded shell. We wonder if this is one of Dresden’s, so we measure it — at 6 inches it is too big to be from Dresden, whose largest guns fired a 4-inch projectile. This is a British 6-inch shell that missed. Imbedded in the cliffs soft volcanic rock and mud, it is more than a relic of the battle. It is a piece of forensic evidence that we are using to reconstruct what happened. Plotting the angle that the shell came from, we line it up with the cape at the entrance to the bay, just where a ship would turn to enter the anchorage. This could be one of the first shots fired at 8:40 on the morning of March 14, 1914, as the British sailed into range and opened up with their guns. We find five other hits, closely spaced as if from a salvo of rapidly fired shots. One hole retains its shell; the others are empty, shells tumbled out by erosion or pulled free by souvenir hunters not realizing what a deadly trophy they had in an unexploded live shell.
Back on board Valdivia, we work with the ship’s officers to add the location of the shells to our survey map of the bay and the wreck. We also plot the range and bearing of the shellfire, based on the position and angle of the shell holes. The last five holes we found must have come from shells fired near the end of the battle, because our plots show that the British cruiser that fired them was very close to the sinking Dresden—in fact, just about where we are anchored in Valdivia, 800 feet off Dresden’s port side and just 2,500 feet away from the cliff. These last shell holes indicate that one of the cruisers sailed into the bay, broadside to Dresden, and opened up a final salvo or series of salvoes that ripped into the foundering German ship. The shots that missed drove deep into the cliff, where we found them.
The next day, we journey to the other side of the bay to search the cliffs there. We are rewarded with the discovery of more shell holes and unexploded shells, indicating that the British cruisers engaged in a deadly crossfire. In a brilliant but brutal tactical maneuver, Glasgow circled Dresden and pumped lethal rounds into the anchored German warship. Captain Luce of Glasgow had orders to sink Dresden, and he took no chances, firing at point-blank range even after the last Germans abandoned their ship.
Dresden is a ruin. Some of the destruction was caused by the shelling, some of it by the deep internal explosions caused by the scuttling charges — but some of it appears to be from a much later attempt to blast open the sunken cruiser’s stern. This damage puzzles us, because history records no attempt to salvage Dresden. Indeed, for many years, the cruiser’s decks were beyond the reach of divers. What happened to the stern — which is intact in photographs of the sinking cruiser — remains a mystery. Later, Willi Kramer finds a formerly top-secret document in the German naval archives that suggests Dresden was carrying gold coin pulled out of Germany’s Tsingtao bank accounts by von
