Sinking of HMS Jason

On 3 April 1917 the old Royal Navy ship HMS Jason was sweeping for mines in the strait between the islands of Coll and Mull in the Inner Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland. Her sister ship Circe was working with her. Not far from Arinagour, the only sizeable settlement on Coll, Jason struck a mine. Survivors spoke of a tremendous explosion. The ship went to the bottom within a few minutes, and the survivors, who could see the houses of Arinagour from the water, were picked up by the crew of Circe. Twenty-five men of a crew of about 85 were killed. The sea gave up the body of only one of them.

Jason was one of the eleven ships of the Alarm class, torpedo gunboats ordered under the British fleet expansion programme of 1889. She was built at a shipyard in Barrow-in-Furness and launched in 1892. She displaced about 810 tons and carried two 4.7-inch (120 mm) guns. Torpedo gunboats quickly gave way to destroyers, and in 1909 Jason was converted into a minesweeper. In August 1914 she joined the minesweeping force of the Grand Fleet and swept the Pentland Firth, the strait by the fleet’s base at Scapa Flow, every day. In December 1914 she helped to clear the minefield laid by German cruisers during the raid on Scarborough.

The mine she struck had been waiting for her for almost two months. In February 1917 the German submarine minelayer U-78 under Kapitänleutnant Otto Dröscher laid several small minefields on the approaches to Oban and in the waters around Mull. According to Scottish wreck researchers, on 12 February U-78 left eight mines off Arinagour. The large UE-type submarines could sail from Germany round Scotland to the west coast and lay mines there on the routes that ships took to Scottish and English ports. Clearing such minefields was the job of old warships and armed trawlers, and it was dangerous work. Since the declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare at the beginning of February, mines and torpedoes had been sinking more and more ships around the British Isles.

The date of Jason’s sinking is given differently in the sources. The British chronology of the war, the 1933 Naval Staff monograph and the uboat.net website give 3 April. Some British lists of warship losses and rolls of the dead, and many studies following them, give 7 April. Uboat.net regards the latter date as wrong. The number of dead also differs: the nominal rolls contain 25 names, while the Naval Staff monograph speaks of 30.

The wreck long remained undiscovered. Only in April 2022 did divers go down to a depth of 93 metres off Coll and identify the broken ship by the shape of her stern, her propeller, her 4.7-inch guns and crockery bearing Admiralty markings. The wreck is a war grave, and in 2026 it was given legal protection as the resting place of the fallen. The sailors of Jason are commemorated by a plaque in St John’s Episcopal Cathedral in Oban.