DEEPWRECKDIVING
Inside the Britannic
SCUBA presents an excerpt from Simon Mill’ s new book, Inside the Britannic, focussing on the site deemed to be the Holy Grail of the deep wreck world. In this passage, historian Simon Mills addresses early attempts to document the wreck, years after Jacques Cousteau discovered its position in the Kea Channel, Greece. He also discusses his subsequent ownership of the wreck and theories about what exactly caused its sinking
The refusal of permission to go inside the wreck was a disappointment, for it effectively meant that we could not enter the Britannic’ s cargo holds to look for any signs of the alleged munitions, but even when we were over the wreck, numerous technical glitches with the ROVs also cut short the planned operations on the first couple of days. Fortunately, the NR-1 * functioned flawlessly, and before long the sub’ s state-of-the-art military sonar equipment had scanned the entire wreck site in the sort of detail that Cousteau would have found to be inconceivable. The 1995 satnav data also detected a slight discrepancy with the Calypso’ s 1975 coordinates, revising the position slightly to 37 ° 42.37’ N, 24 ° 16.74’ E. Another interesting revelation was that the wreck lay on a heading of 253 degrees, which would have put the Britannic’ s final heading on a south-westerly course, taking her back in the direction from which she originally came.
A diver returns safely to the top of the forward entrance
While the lack of any internal imagery was a disappointment, at least our closer examination of the forward part of the wreck settled once and for all the myth of an internal explosion. The British report into the sinking had always stated categorically that there was one explosion only, yet for 20 years the visions of Cousteau’ s huge 150-foot hole on the wreck had been used to support evidence of a secondary explosion of the illicit munitions cargo.
The 1995 survey conclusively proves that no such feature ever existed on the wreck, the visible evidence instead indicating that the hull structure beneath the forward well deck, already weakened by the explosion of the mine, had actually collapsed due to the weight of the ship being concentrated in this area as the bow was forced deeper into the seabed. Practically all of the hull structure beneath the forward well deck
* Deep Submergence Vessel NR-1 was a US Navy nuclear-powered ocean engineering and research submarine, built by the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics at Groton, Connecticut.
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