While moored, she was held in place by eight heavy anchors. Winner was huge – 17,000 tonnes, like an elevated Trafalgar Square, complete with a middle derrick as tall as Nelson’s Column, her four legs the shape of castle keeps all this was borne up in the water on a pair of barge-sized pontoons – and its positioning had always been precisely controlled.

The 33-year-old rig had never moved with so little constraint. In that Atlantic storm, several thousand miles from her intended destination, Winner floated free. Within the offices of Transocean Ltd, the oil-exploration company that owned the rig, such a journey might have been described with corporate seemliness as an “end-of-life voyage” but in the saltier language heard offshore, the rig was “going for fucking razorblades” – for scrap, to be dismantled in a shipbreaking yard east of Malta. The rig was being dragged by a tugboat called Forward, the tethered vessels charting a course out of Norway that was meant to take them on a month-long journey to Malta.

I t was night, stormy, and the oil rig Transocean Winner was somewhere in the North Atlantic on 7 August 2016 when her tow-line broke.

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