HMS Bacchante (F69): The Frigate That Survived the Cod Wars Unscathed, Then Sank on Purpose

A Frigate Built on the Tyne

HMS Bacchante was built by Vickers-Armstrongs on the Tyne, launched on 29 February 1968 and commissioned on 17 October 1969, a Leander-class frigate fitted with the familiar combination of twin 4.5-inch guns, a Sea Cat missile launcher and a Limbo anti-submarine mortar.

The name carries one of the better stories in the Navy List. An earlier HMS Bacchante, a steam corvette, was chosen in 1879 to take two royal midshipmen round the world: Prince Albert Victor and his younger brother Prince George, accompanied by their tutor Canon John Dalton. They were away for three years, covered some forty thousand miles and rounded the Cape of Good Hope twice, and the younger of the two eventually became King George V.

And on 11 July 1881, in the middle watch, the ship's log recorded that the Flying Dutchman crossed her bows. The entry describes a strange red light, a ship apparently all aglow, with the spars, masts and sails of a brig standing out in relief against it about two hundred yards off the port bow. The lookout on the forecastle reported her, the officer of the watch saw her from the bridge, and a midshipman was sent forward to confirm it. The midshipman who wrote the entry up was Prince George. It is one of the very few sightings of the most famous ghost ship in the world recorded in an official document by a future king, which is not a sentence one gets to write often.

She joined the Standing Naval Force Atlantic in 1970, taking part in NATO exercises and port visits, and deployed to the West Indies the following year, exercising alongside HMS Ark Royal and the American carrier USS America, before serving as West Indies Guardship in 1973.

The Frigate the Cod Wars Couldn't Touch

Bacchante served with the Fishery Protection Squadron during both the Second and Third Cod Wars with Iceland, and earned a notably notable distinction in the process: she was one of only two Royal Navy frigates to emerge from the entire dispute without a single scratch, a considerable achievement given how many of her sister ships came away from the Cod Wars with dented hulls and collision damage.

Coming through both disputes unmarked is a genuine distinction, and it is worth understanding why. The Cod Wars were fought largely by deliberate collision: an Icelandic gunboat would go for a frigate that had put itself between her and a trawler, and there were thirty-five ramming incidents in the third dispute alone. HMS Andromeda was hit three times. To spend two separate deployments in the middle of that and come home without a dent takes very good ship handling and a certain amount of luck, and it is not the sort of achievement that gets a medal.

She celebrated rather more peacefully in July 1976, visiting Wilmington and New York for the United States Bicentennial celebrations.

Gibraltar Guardship in a Year of War

In 1981 she carried out a second Armilla Patrol deployment to the Persian Gulf, visiting Mogadishu and Muscat, before becoming Gibraltar Guardship in 1982, the very year the Falklands War broke out.

She deployed to the South Atlantic in the aftermath of the conflict, and her crew provided disaster recovery assistance to the islands, unglamorous but valuable work helping them recover once the fighting had stopped.

What she actually did in the South Atlantic is worth setting out, because the unglamorous half of a war is the half that lasts. The shooting stopped on 14 June 1982 and the problem did not: an Argentine air force and navy still in existence a few hundred miles away, an exclusion zone that had to be seen to be enforced, a garrison to be supplied and no airfield yet capable of taking a jet transport. That job fell to whatever the Navy had, and Bacchante took a four-month patrol of it with the other four unmodernised Leanders, in the South Atlantic winter, which is weather that makes the North Sea look civil. There was no prospect of a battle honour and no press interest whatever. Somebody had to be there, in the dark, in a gale, for four months, and it was her.

A New Zealand Wreck by Design

Bacchante was decommissioned from the Royal Navy in 1982 and sold to the Royal New Zealand Navy, recommissioned as HMNZS Wellington, going on to serve New Zealand for a further eighteen years before her own decommissioning in 2000.

The New Zealand purchase is worth setting out properly, because the war got in the way of it. On 19 October 1981 the New Zealand government announced that it would buy two Leanders, Bacchante and Dido, to replace the ageing frigates Otago and Taranaki. Bacchante was due to be handed over in July 1982. Then Argentina invaded the Falklands, the Royal Navy needed every hull it had, and she was retained in a supporting role instead. She was finally handed over and commissioned as HMNZS Wellington at Portsmouth on 1 October 1982, three months late and with a war on her record that nobody had planned for when the contract was signed.

The New Zealand career began badly and then went a very long way. She arrived, was decommissioned again almost immediately, and went into a refit that was supposed to be modest and took four years, not finishing until 1986; the Royal New Zealand Navy had bought a fifteen-year-old ship built to a 1950s design, and modernising her turned out to be harder and more expensive than anybody had allowed for. That is a common story with second-hand warships and it is worth stating plainly. What is less common is what she did with the fourteen years that followed, which was to become one of the more travelled ships in the region.

In May 1987, when Fiji had its first coup, Wellington stood off the islands with HMNZS Canterbury under Operation Wells, ready to take New Zealanders out if it came to that; it did not, which is the point of sending a frigate. In July 1990 she carried the Papua New Guinea government delegation to the Bougainville peace talks as Operation Big Talk, and provided the accommodation for officials who met the Bougainville side aboard the tanker Endeavour, which is to say that a British-built frigate served as a floating conference room in a civil war nobody in Britain had heard of. She went back to Bougainville with the peacekeeping effort in 1994. In 1995 and 1996 she made the first New Zealand deployment to the Persian Gulf, working with the Multinational Interception Force stopping and searching merchant ships under the UN sanctions on Iraq: a Leander of 1969 boarding tankers in the Gulf, twenty-six years after she was launched on the Tyne.

Her last overseas trip was to Western Samoa in May 1999 for the independence celebrations, and she decommissioned on 5 May 2000. Add it up and the arithmetic is striking: thirteen years in the Royal Navy and eighteen in the Royal New Zealand Navy, so that the larger part of her life was spent under a flag she was not built for, in an ocean she was not designed for, doing work, evacuation standby, peace talks, sanctions enforcement, that had not been invented as a naval task when she was ordered. The Cod Wars and the Flying Dutchman get the paragraphs. The Pacific got the ship.

Rather than being scrapped, she was purchased for a symbolic one dollar by the Sink F69 Trust and deliberately sunk as an artificial reef and dive attraction near Island Bay, Wellington, on 13 November 2005, a particularly fitting final act for a ship that had once made a point of coming through actual naval confrontation entirely undamaged, before finally, and quite deliberately, going down on her own terms.

Sinking a warship as a reef is a great deal more work than the phrase suggests. Before anything goes down, everything that could poison the water has to come out: fuel, lubricating oils, hydraulic fluid, batteries, refrigerants, asbestos lagging, cabling and paint containing PCBs. Then large access holes have to be cut through bulkheads and decks so that a diver who goes inside can always see a way out, and every loose fitting that could trap or fall has to be removed or welded down. Only then can she be flooded in a controlled way, on a chosen day, in a chosen depth, right way up. Bacchante went down in under two minutes in front of tens of thousands of people, and the storm that broke her in half the following February did more to make her an interesting dive than any amount of preparation could have.

Tens of thousands of spectators gathered along the bay to watch the scuttling at 3.30pm, and the 113-metre hull took under two minutes to disappear beneath the surface. A storm the following February broke her in two on the seabed, and in that state she has remained a popular dive site ever since, her keel resting around 21 metres down, close enough to shore for recreational divers to reach on standard equipment.