Inside the Britannic by Simon Mills
DEEPWRECKDIVING
technical diving that finally solved my dilemma, which is curious considering that one of the reasons I had bought the wreck in the first place had been to protect it from unwanted interference by divers. Initially, I had little thought of cooperating with‘ the enemy’, and my philanthropic cause was not helped one iota when, no sooner had Titanic’ s Lost Sister been transmitted on TV, I learned that two teams of British technical divers were already planning expeditions to the Kea Channel. My first instinct was to put a stop to it, when it suddenly dawned on me that if I was going to be the one to unlock the Britannic’ s secrets, rather than fighting the diving world, perhaps I should actually be working with it?
To be fair, the two dive team leaders, Kevin Gurr and Nick Hope, were also not at all what I had expected. They had not been at all combative in their approach; in fact, I recall receiving two very polite letters asking for permission to access the wreck, courtesy of the maritime attaché at the Greek embassy in Holland Park. On the face of it, I had absolutely nothing to lose...
The 1997 and 1998 expeditions have never really been given the credit they deserve, most likely due to the fact that, apart from some interesting imagery, they didn’ t really reveal very much about the wreck that we didn’ t already know. This is not intended as a criticism of the dive teams, as in the late Nineties, deep technical diving on a recreational basis was still very much in its infancy, but none of that seemed particularly important to me at that time. The divers still had much to learn about gas mixes and decompression tables at such depths, while my primary goal had simply been to get a better understanding of the complexities of working at depths of up to 114 metres and putting the building blocks in place for a more comprehensive survey of the wreck when the time was right. More importantly, the dive teams seemed more than happy to investigate the comprehensive individual targets that I set for them, content that they were gaining access to the largest liner on the seabed, so everyone seemed to be getting exactly what they wanted.
It was only after a third manned expedition in the autumn of 1999 by Jarrod Jablonski’ s Global Underwater Explorers team – the first to make more widespread use of the rebreather technology that was on the verge of changing everything – that I finally felt I knew enough about my wreck to take a more hands-on approach. At long last, I was finally ready to start investigating the unanswered questions about what really happened in the Kea Channel on the fateful morning of 21 November 1916. �
Book review
Inside the Britannic by Simon Mills
COST: £ 28 PURCHASE FROM: Adlard Coles Nautical ISBN 9781399414500
Subtitled‘ Uncovering the Wreck of the Titanic’ s Sister Ship’, this book is aimed at a broad readership of history enthusiasts. While diving certainly plays a big part, the author, Simon Mills is at heart a historian, and makes use of the results of diving expeditions rather than fixating on the mechanics of diving a wreck that lies at 114m.
The Olympic-Class ships were intended to be the greatest of all liners, but the Britannic sank just four years after her famous sister ship, the Titanic. By then, she had been repurposed as a hospital ship prior to striking a mine in the Kea Channel in November 1916. There were claims at the time that the Britannic had been deliberately torpedoed, and this speculation fuelled much of the ongoing investigation, described as the‘ Mount Everest of Wreck diving’.
The author even went so far as to buy the wreck in 1996, which has helped expedite the ongoing investigations. The result has been the pooling of a huge amount of information into the forensic investigation into the life, death and afterlife of a ship.
This volume is a continuation of the author’ s previous books on the same subject – Britannic – the last Titan and Hostage to Fortune. This colourful volume, with its many illustrations and photos, offers as comprehensive a look at the wreck as you will find anywhere, with an emphasis on recent investigations inside the structure. For such a deep wreck, the level of detail is incredible.
In these 288, pages Simon Mills lays out just all the established fact about a massive and historically important shipwreck. The wreck is in a state of constant change due to its age, but thanks to Mills and the various teams of divers, we now have a fuller picture of its final moments, and the nature of its deterioration at the bottom of the Aegean Sea. Simon Rogerson
45