HMS Curlew was launched in 1917 from the Vickers shipyard in Barrow-in-Furness, one of the Ceres sub-class of C-class light cruisers designed for the Royal Navy during the First World War. At 450 feet long with a beam of 43 feet, she displaced about 4,190 tons and could make 29 knots on her twin Parsons steam turbines. Her original armament included five 6-inch guns on the centreline and eight 21-inch torpedo tubes. She was a fast, versatile warship built for fleet screening and patrol work. But Curlew's first war ended before she saw heavy action, and by the 1930s the Admiralty had other plans for her. Between 1935 and 1936, she was stripped of her torpedo tubes and most of her main guns and rearmed as an anti-aircraft cruiser -- a floating shield against the new threat that air power posed to the fleet.

Before her transformation, Curlew served on the America and West Indies Station, based at the Royal Naval Dockyard in Bermuda. In October 1926, a powerful hurricane struck the island while Curlew rode at anchor offshore, outside Bermuda's encircling reef. Inside the dockyard, HMS Calcutta -- the station flagship -- was torn from the wharf after all forty hawsers holding her snapped in winds that hit 138 mph before destroying the anemometer. Sub-lieutenants from two ships swam through the storm to secure new lines and save Calcutta from running aground. Meanwhile, Curlew weathered the storm in open water, sustaining damage to her forecastle deck, losing both whalers and three Carley floats. When the dockyard managed to reach her by signal, she was ordered to search for HMS Valerian, a sloop that had gone down south of Gibbs Hill. The frantic wireless exchanges that followed -- conflicting orders, desperate SOS calls from the sinking merchant ship Eastway -- paint a picture of chaos in the aftermath of a Category 4 storm.

When war came again in 1939, Curlew joined the Home Fleet in her new role as an anti-aircraft cruiser. By the spring of 1940, she was operating off northern Norway as the Allies scrambled to contest the German invasion. The Norwegian Campaign was a grinding, costly affair fought in fjords and mountain passes, and naval vessels operating close to shore were desperately vulnerable to air attack. On 26 May, Curlew was in Lavangsfjord -- part of the Ofotfjord system near Narvik -- when bombers from Kampfgeschwader 30, a Luftwaffe unit specializing in anti-shipping strikes, found her. The Junkers Ju 88s came in fast. Despite her anti-aircraft armament, the ship could not defend herself against a determined attack in the confined waters of the fjord. She sank with nine of her crew.

Lavangsfjord is quiet now, a narrow arm of water flanked by birch-clad hills and the occasional fishing village. The mountains above the fjord still carry snow into June, and the light in late May -- the time Curlew went down -- is the long, low Arctic light that never quite becomes night. The wreck sits in waters that have been explored by divers, though the depth and cold limit access. Curlew was one of several warships lost in the waters around Narvik during those desperate weeks in 1940, part of a campaign that saw some of the fiercest naval engagements of the entire war. The Battles of Narvik -- two naval clashes in April 1940 -- had already scattered wrecks across these fjords before Curlew arrived. Her loss, three weeks before the Allied withdrawal from Norway, underscored a hard truth that the campaign had been teaching from the start: without air superiority, surface ships in narrow waters were targets, not defenders.