Ryan Ho Kilpatrick

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Grazzi, Malta. It’s been real.

Sicilian scenes.

HMS Hellespont is one of Malta’s many WWII shipwrecks. A familiar site in Valletta’s Grand Harbour for over 20 years, the sea rescue paddle steamer tug was sunk during an Italian air bombardment in 1942—a year that saw this little island become the most bombed place on Earth. After the war, her mangled metal body was towed several nautical miles out to sea, where she now lies under 42m of dizzyingly blue and clear water. Dropping down the water column, the temperature plummets sharply from 28 degrees to a spine-chilling 17 on the rocky seabed. As her lines slowly come into focus, you begin to notice the details that make the Hellespont feel so much realer than bigger scuttled wrecks: the eratic scatter of debris that surrounds her, the thick layers of calcium carbonate concretions built up over decades, and the splayed metal ribs of her port bow still frozen in the moment she met her violent end.

“Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home.” Written for the white whale but just as germane to the wreck-hunting ROV, our eyes in a world never before beheld by living men.

Unlike many of the wrecks that litter Malta's waters, the demise of Um El Faroud was not entirely planned. In 1995, an explosion ripped through the Libyan fuel tanker during maintainance works at the dry docks, taking the lives of nine shipyard workers. Declared beyond repair, the 120m-long hulk was towed to the south of the island and committed to the deep.

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