HMS Hecla (A133): The Survey Ship That Became a Falklands Ambulance

Lead Ship of Her Class

HMS Hecla was laid down at Yarrow Shipbuilders' Blythswood yard in Glasgow on 6 May 1964, launched on 21 December that year and commissioned on 9 September 1965, the lead ship of the Hecla-class ocean survey vessels, a class that also included her sister ships HMS Hecate and HMS Hydra.

She measured 260 feet 2 inches in length and displaced 2,733 long tons at full load, powered by a diesel-electric propulsion system giving her a top speed of 14 knots and a remarkably impressive range of 20,000 nautical miles at a more economical 9 knots, with a complement of 127 officers and ratings, all built around her core purpose of hydrographic and oceanographic survey work across the world's oceans.

That range figure is the one to notice. Twenty thousand miles at nine knots means a ship that can leave Plymouth, work her way to the far side of the world and come back without needing anybody's permission to refuel, which is precisely what an ocean survey ship has to be able to do; the interesting water is rarely near a friendly oiler. The Heclas were the first Royal Navy ships designed to do oceanography and hydrography together, built to merchant standards with laboratories, coring winches, stabilisers and a bow thruster so they could stop dead and hold position over a spot of seabed, and there was a hard Cold War reason for the science as well as a navigational one. What the class was for, and why the Royal Navy wanted the temperature of the ocean measured quite so carefully, is set out in the article on HMS Hecate (A137).

Thirty Years of Charting the World's Oceans

HMS Hecla spent the bulk of her long career engaged in exactly the kind of patient, unglamorous but truly essential work her design was built for, surveying coastlines and ocean depths to keep Admiralty charts accurate for the Royal Navy and merchant shipping alike, unglamorous duty that nonetheless mattered enormously to the safe navigation of vessels around the globe.

The phrase Admiralty charts hides an obligation most people never think about. Britain does not merely chart British waters; through the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office it has, for two centuries, charted a very large proportion of the world, and Admiralty charts are still carried by merchant ships of every flag in almost every sea. That began as an imperial necessity and became a habit, then an international public service, and it has to be maintained, because a coastline surveyed in 1910 by a ship with a lead line is not good enough for a tanker drawing sixty feet. Every one of those charts represents somebody in a small ship running lines back and forth for weeks. Thirty years of Hecla's working life went into that, and the reason there is almost nothing to write about it is that it worked.

An Ambulance Ship in the Falklands

HMS Hecla's steady survey career took an unexpected turn during the 1982 Falklands War, when she was reassigned to serve as an ambulance ship, ferrying wounded servicemen from the fighting out to the hospital ship SS Uganda for treatment.

The arrangement she was part of in 1982 is one of the more remarkable things about that war, and it was governed entirely by the Geneva Conventions. An area of open sea north of the Falklands was agreed between the two sides and designated a neutral zone, universally called the Red Cross Box; Uganda worked from a position in it at roughly fifty degrees fifty minutes south, fifty-eight degrees forty minutes west. Hospital ships operating there had to be declared in advance to the International Committee of the Red Cross, painted white with red crosses, lit at night, unarmed, and carrying no troops, weapons, cargo or intelligence-gathering equipment of any kind; in exchange they could not be attacked. While the fighting went on in Falkland Sound and ashore at Goose Green, four British and two Argentine ships lay in that box within sight of each other, and exchanged wounded men and medical supplies across the line. It is difficult to think of a cleaner illustration of what the laws of war are for.

The ship at the centre of it had been on an educational cruise with schoolchildren aboard three weeks earlier. SS Uganda was taken up at Alexandria, sailed to Gibraltar and converted into a hospital ship in three days by dockyard staff working around the clock: operating theatres, wards, an intensive care unit, oxygen, blood storage, and eight red crosses painted on her, two on each side of the hull, one forward on the bridge, one flat on the upper deck for aircraft and one on each side of the funnel. She was declared to the Red Cross before she sailed. Over the campaign she carried out 504 surgical operations and treated 730 casualties, of whom about 150 were Argentine, and she made four rendezvous with Argentine hospital ships. She had no capacity to hold that many people for long, which is exactly where Hecla came in.

It was a role about as far removed from her usual survey work as could be imagined, but one that made good practical sense: a well found, seaworthy vessel with a capable crew, suddenly repurposed for one of the most important and time-critical jobs of the entire campaign, getting injured men the medical care they urgently needed.

What an ambulance ship actually did was the unglamorous half of that system. Uganda could operate on a man and stabilise him, but she could not fill up with recovering patients and stay on station, so once a casualty was fit to travel he was moved to one of the three converted survey ships, which then made the thousand-mile passage north to Montevideo in neutral Uruguay, where the wounded were handed over and flown home by the RAF. Hecla, Hydra and Herald ran that shuttle between them for the length of the campaign, carrying up to a hundred non-critical patients a trip. They too were declared hospital ships, which meant they were unarmed, brightly lit and forbidden to carry so much as a signal about the enemy; a ship that broke those rules would have forfeited her protection and every other hospital ship's with it. Sailing a white, illuminated, defenceless ship through a war zone on the strength of a legal undertaking takes a particular sort of nerve.

A New Name in Ireland

HMS Hecla was finally replaced by the more modern HMS Scott in 1997, after some thirty years of service, and was subsequently sold into private hands, renamed Bligh after Vice Admiral William Bligh, the Royal Navy officer of Mutiny on the Bounty fame who was himself a noted hydrographic surveyor in his own right, a fitting choice of name for a former survey ship.

Under her new name, she went on to support hydrographic surveys of Irish waters, operating out of Waterford, a quiet continuation of the very same kind of charting work she had carried out for the Royal Navy for three decades.

The name she was given afterwards was better chosen than it looks. William Bligh is remembered for one mutiny and is rarely remembered as what he actually was, which is one of the finest navigators and surveyors the Royal Navy ever produced. He was made master of Cook's Resolution at twenty-two, learned coastal charting from Cook himself and sent surveys back to the Admiralty. When Fletcher Christian put him over the side of the Bounty in an open twenty-three foot launch with eighteen men and no chart, he navigated 3,618 miles to Timor in six weeks, and surveyed part of the north-east coast of Australia while he was doing it; the gap he found through the Great Barrier Reef is called Bligh Boat Entrance to this day. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for his work in navigation, and in 1804 he was working for the Hydrographic Office. Putting his name on a retired survey ship that went on charting Irish waters out of Waterford is one of the more appropriate renamings in the business.

HMS Scott deserves rather more than her name, because she is not a Hecla with better electronics; she is a different answer to the same question. She was ordered in 1995 for the express purpose of replacing Hecla, built at Appledore in North Devon, launched in October 1996 and commissioned in June 1997, and she displaces thirteen and a half thousand tonnes, which is roughly five times Hecla and makes her one of the largest ships in the Royal Navy. All of that size exists to carry one thing: a high resolution multi-beam sonar that sweeps a wide swathe of sea floor at once rather than running a single line under the keel.

The other half of the design is the crew arrangement, and it is quietly radical. Scott carries seventy-eight people in three watches. Two of the three are aboard at any time and the third is at home on leave or at training; when she comes alongside, one section walks off and the section ashore walks on, and she sails again almost immediately. The point of that is to keep the ship at sea for up to three hundred days a year instead of the hundred and fifty a conventionally manned ship manages. A survey ship earns her keep by being on the ground, and the limiting factor had always been the endurance of the people rather than the ship.

What she can do with it was demonstrated in February 2005, when she went to the Indian Ocean and surveyed the sea floor around the epicentre of the earthquake that had produced the Boxing Day tsunami six weeks earlier. Working in water between about a thousand and five thousand metres deep, she came back with a picture of a sea floor that the earthquake had physically rearranged, which is a thing nobody had previously been able to look at directly. Hecla's thirty years of steady line-running produced charts. Her successor's first famous job produced a scientific record of the largest earthquake anyone had measured in forty years.

Her own ending was the ordinary one. The Irish survey work did not last indefinitely, and on 10 March 2004 the former HMS Hecla arrived at Alang, on the coast of Gujarat, to be broken up. Alang is the beach that inherited the world's shipbreaking after it was pushed out of Kaohsiung around 1990, as the article on HMS Duchess (D154) sets out, and a very large proportion of the world's merchant fleet has ended there since.

It is worth holding the two images together, because they belong to the same ship. In June 1982 she was white, floodlit at night, unarmed and forbidden by treaty to carry so much as a signal about the enemy, running a thousand miles to Montevideo with a hundred wounded men aboard. Twenty-two years later she was driven up a beach in Gujarat at high water to be cut apart by hand. Almost every ship in this series ends the second way. Very few of them have earned the first.