Over a century since the HMHS Britannic vanished beneath the Aegean, the look-out bell of the ship rang again this time in the hands of divers who wrested it from 120 meters beneath. The retrieval, undertaken in May but made public only by Greece’s Ministry of Culture months later, is the first time artefacts have been recovered from the Titanic’s more macroscopically preserved sister ship.
The dive was spearheaded by British historian Simon Mills, a founder of the Britannic Foundation, and carried out by an 11-man team of commercial divers employing closed-circuit rebreathers. Such systems, as opposed to conventional open-circuit scuba, re-use exhaled gas via scrubbers and minute oxygen injection, greatly lengthening bottom time and minimizing the amount of gas needed for such depths. In the chilly, current-tossed waters of the Kea Channel, the divers also depended on heated underwear, high-intensity light-emitting diodes and underwater scooters to make their way through the 269-meter-long hulk.
The Britannic, hull 433 of Belfast-built Harland & Wolff, was the largest of the Olympic-class liners and the third one, with safety innovations developed in the wake of Titanic’s sinking. These comprised a double-skinned hull surrounding the engine rooms, watertight bulkheads brought up to B deck, and gigantic Welin davits strong enough to launch six lifeboats each. She was finished in late 1915, never transporting paying passengers; rather, she was taken over as a hospital ship in World War I, painted white with a green stripe and red crosses, and equipped with operating theatres in her first-class dining saloons.
On 21 November 1916, while steaming off Kea Island, she ran into a German mine that had been laid by U-73. Captain Charles Bartlett tried to run her aground, but leaks through open portholes and jammed watertight doors sealed the fate of the effort. She went down in 55 minutes, her massive propellers catching two lifeboats in the panic. Of the 1,065 on board, 30 were lost a relatively small loss for the largest ship sunk during the war.
The wreck’s location was kept secret by the Admiralty for decades until Jacques-Yves Cousteau found her in 1975. His team dived open-circuit trimix without buoyancy compensators or heated suits and could only remain on the wreck for a few minutes. Current technology permits 25–35 minutes bottom time at 118–120 meters followed by a maximum of three hours staged decompression. Advances in decompression science, gas management, and monitoring of diver physiology such as those performed during recent Britannic expeditions have revolutionized what can be achieved in deep wreck archaeology.
The May recovery had to contend with the Kea Channel’s infamous conditions: currents, poor visibility, and the constant threat of heavy shipping traffic. Artefacts recovered using lift bags were the observation bell of the ship, a navigation lamp from the port side, binoculars, silver-plated first-class trays, Turkish baths ceramic tiles, and cabin fittings from first class and second class. Once on deck, each piece was transferred to sealed containers, cleaned of marine life, and taken to the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities’ laboratories in Athens for desalination and conservation.
Not all the planned recoveries were feasible; some objects rested in impossible positions or were too delicate to survive being lifted. Those that were recovered will be part of the first displays at the new National Museum of Underwater Antiquities in Piraeus, in a gallery centered on World War I maritime history. The display will not merely display relics of Edwardian engineering and wartime service but also underscore the technical brilliance involved in working at such depths.
The Britannic’s third-century preservation is facilitated by her depth great enough to keep out casual explorers but shallow enough to allow access by human beings and by the Aegean’s relatively warm, clear waters. But time and corrosion are merciless. As with other legendary liners like Andrea Doria and Lusitania, collapse is inevitable. Every expedition is therefore a race against rot, weighed against archaeological ethics and the need to salvage artefacts before they are beyond recall.
In the words of one of the divers who first saw her towering hull rise out of the blue at 65 meters, “Wow, this is huge.” That awe, now joined by the physical recovery of her artefacts, guarantees that the story of the Britannic spanning pioneering Edwardian shipbuilding, wartime drama, and current deep-sea engineering will resonate far beyond the seabed on which she lies.
