Available darkness

Pat Morrissey · Issue 4, Jan 2002 · pp. 38–39

Products mentioned: Nikon F4, Nikonos V, Sea & Sea 12mm lens, Agfa Scala slide film

Scapa Flow is an almost land- locked area of water to be found at the northernmost tip of the British Isles. At the end of the First World War, while negotiations over the terms of armistice were still going on and being fine-tuned, seventy- four ships of the German Imperial Fleet lay at anchor in the Flow. Admiral Ludwig Von Reuter, relying on reports in the four day old newspapers which were his only source of information as to how the negotiations were going, came to believe that the British might well soon want to take his fleet and use them to attack his country’s defences; and so there came about what might be regarded as the most magnificently futile of naval gestures, the order to scuttle the whole German fleet where it lay, in order to deny the enemy any use or advantage of it. I had been to the Orkneys once before, and attempted in vain to wrest a few decent images from its col…