by Brad Matsen
Among the survivors was Violet Jessop, who had also survived the sinking of Titanic. Aboard the rescue ship Carpathia, she had complained about forgetting her toothbrush when she left the doomed ocean liner.
“Oh, yes,” another survivor had said sarcastically, “never undertake a disaster without making sure of your toothbrush.”
When Jessop went into one of Britannic’s forty-four lifeboats, and then into the sea with parts of bodies mangled by the propellers floating around her, she had her toothbrush in the pocket of her smock.
After the lifeboats were away, the weight of the water flooding Britannic drove its bow into the seafloor while half of its length remained above the surface. The ship corkscrewed to the right and the hole in its starboard side opened wider. Less than an hour after it struck the mine, Britannic was on the bottom. Except for the crumpled bow, it looked like a ship that had lain down to sleep on the floor of the sea.
Chatterton had already been to Britannic. In 1998, the wreck had almost killed him when his rebreather quit inside the hull at 400 feet. The rebreather gave a diver more bottom time than ordinary scuba, but it depended on a computer and sensors to maintain the proper balance of oxygen in the air supply. Chatterton was in the firemen’s tunnel leading to the boiler rooms, hoping to see if the watertight doors were open, which might have explained why Britannic sank so quickly. He shined his light on the LED that was supposed to tell him exactly what he was breathing; it was blank. Chatterton risked a couple more breaths, not knowing if too much oxygen or too much carbon dioxide would cripple him in an instant. He swam back to his emergency air tanks and survived, but he hated having gotten so close to the watertight doors and failed.
Before Chatterton and Kohler left for Greece, Roger Long told them that what they found out about Britannic could confirm that Pirrie and Ismay had feared that Titanic was a weak ship. The two joints Andrews designed for Olympic and Titanic were disasters waiting to happen, he said. Pirrie had put three expansion joints into Britannic, but no one knew whether they were different from those on Titanic. If the expansion joints were different, it meant that not only had Pirrie and the other Harland and Wolff engineers suspected that Titanic’s hull plating was too light but that they’d also been worried that Titanic had broken on the surface because the expansion joint under the third funnel was a critically weak point in the ship. Long wanted to see videotape of at least one of Britannic’s expansion joints.
Britannic had lain undisturbed until Jacques Cousteau found it. Cousteau was using new side-scan sonar to map the seafloor off the Attica Peninsula, in southern Greece, when he came across the wreck on December 3, 1975. It was unmistakable, an enormous steel mass in 400 feet of water eight miles from where the British Admiralty chart said it was.
Cousteau’s discovery set off a squall of controversy, resurrecting German allegations that the hospital ship Britannic had been carrying fresh troops and munitions to the Turkish front, which was why German naval forces had mined the Kéa Channel. The British, according to the darkest suspicions, had intentionally marked the incorrect location of the wreck on the chart so no one would find it and prove the German accusations were right.
For Cousteau, the controversy was a gift. In the twenty years since he and Louis Malle had shot Le Monde du Silence (The Silent World), winning a medal at Cannes and forever changing the mass-audience appeal of documentary films, he had produced a steady stream of television shows, which had made him famous. His success also drove him and the crew of Calypso to come up with dozens of new and interesting stories from beneath the sea every year. The wreck of Britannic was perfect. No one knew why the double-hulled ship had gone down so quickly. The Germans had accused the British of lying to the world. Best of all, Britannic was Titanic’s sister ship.
Cousteau ran ads in British newspapers to recruit Britannic survivors for his film. He got only one response. Sheila Macbeth Mitchell, an eighty-six-year-old woman from Scotland, had been a volunteer nurse aboard the ship. She had leaped out of a lifeboat to save herself from the deadly propellers and had been rescued by a fisherman. For Cousteau’s cameras, she recalled her duties aboard Britannic as an attendant in an officers’ ward in the enclosed promenade on B Deck, port side. She denied that the hospital ship had been anything but what the British Admiralty had said it was. She had seen no signs of troops or guns. Mitchell asked Cousteau if he would return the favor of her interview by retrieving her alarm clock from her cabin on D Deck. Cousteau said he would try.
Cousteau and his divers descended in teams of three, breathing helium and oxygen mixed in oversized tanks that gave them fifteen minutes of bottom time. They ascended in stages to 130 feet, where they entered a submersible decompression chamber; the chamber was then hoisted aboard Calypso for the remaining decompression time.
After inspecting Britannic’s holds and accommodation spaces, Cousteau declared that it had carried no troops or munitions. It had been only what the British had said it was: a hospital ship on its way to pick up wounded from the Battle of Gallipoli. Cousteau said, the catastrophic damage to its bow was not the result of the detonation of hidden munitions, as the Germans had alleged. It had probably come from coal dust explosions. None of Cousteau’s divers had penetrated far enough into the hull to retrieve Sheila Mitchell’s alarm clock.
Expeditions continued over the next thirty years, using submersibles, remotely operated vehicles, and scuba gear, but none explored or photographed the interior of the hull to see whether the watertight doors were open or closed. Nobody had given any thought at all to the expansion joints.
Chatterton and Kohler had never organized anything on the scale of the expedition to Greece. Their trip to Titanic had been more expensive, but exploring Britannic would be infinitely more complex and dangerous. Very few people in the world are capable of diving to 400 feet, spending enough time on the bottom for meaningful investigation of a shipwreck, and enduring five hours of decompression on the ascent. They put together a team of fifteen, all of them friends and every one of them in the top tier of any ranking of technical shipwreck divers.
They also hired two men who knew the corridors and compartments of Britannic as well as the streets and alleys of their own neighborhoods. Englishman Simon Mills actually owned the wreck; he’d bought its salvage rights a decade earlier. Mills had written the definitive book on Britannic and had been on the Titanic expedition with Chatterton and Kohler. Parks Stephenson, a systems engineer from California and a lifelong student of the Olympic-class ships, had created an interactive computer simulation of Britannic’s bow section.
Chatterton and Kohler had three veteran divers to tend the decompression station and provide shallow support. Bill Lange and his assistant, Maryanne Moran Keith, brought their cameras. Kirk Wolfinger was there with his cameras. Petar Denoble, from the Divers Alert Network, was the expedition doctor. Titanic veteran Bob Blumberg, from the State Department, came along to help with diplomatic problems, of which there were likely to be a few. Although Mills owned Britannic, both the British and the Greek governments had final say over who could dive to the wreck and what they could do when they got there. Every expedition after Cousteau’s had been mired in bureaucratic muck.
Chatterton and Kohler decided to use their first dive to find out whether Britannic’s watertight doors were open or closed. This would be as difficult as going into the wreck to search for an expansion joint, but there was one advantage to making it their first dive: Chatterton had already been in the firemen’s tunnel.
They previewed their dive using Stephenson’s computer model of Britannic’s interior and Mills’s drawings of the ship. Their plan was to descend to the wreck on the shot line, enter the hull, swim about seventy feet through the firemen’s tunnel, go around the boilers in Boiler Room 6, see the watertight doors, and take the pictures.
Both Chatterton and Kohler had been to 400 feet before, but not many times, and they had never stayed at that depth as long as they would on Britannic. Andrea Dori
a, long the standard of qualification for an elite wreck diver, was at 250 feet. U-869 was at 230. Going to 400, and staying there for forty minutes, would be the most difficult dive Chatterton and Kohler had ever attempted together. Venturing inside the hull on their first descent was very close to foolhardy. Usually, a first dive on a deep wreck is extremely conservative, a chance to get used to the depth and the darkness and find one’s bearings on the wreck. Without the detailed briefings on the inside of the ship Stephenson and Mills had given them, and the fact that Chatterton had already been to the wreck, they would not have risked penetration on their first dive.
They used rebreathers for the return to Britannic. After a decade of evolution, these devices were far more reliable than the one that almost killed Chatterton, offering enormous advantages over ordinary scuba. With mixed gas in a conventional tank, bottom time at 400 feet was ten or twelve minutes. With a rebreather, divers could spend forty minutes on the wreck, and decompress for five hours without any support from the surface unless there was an emergency.
Suiting up for the dive took them almost an hour. Dehydration during a deep technical dive was among the culprits that would make them susceptible to the bends. For two days, Chatterton and Kohler had been drinking water constantly. The first pieces of gear they put on were condom catheters to get rid of the water through a one-way valve in their dry suits.
The alternative to a catheter was a diaper, usually used by women but occasionally by men. As they dressed for the dive to the firemen’s tunnel on the deck of the converted fishing boat Apollon, Kohler reminded Chatterton of how ridiculous he’d looked the time he tried a diaper.
The sight of you parading around in that diaper scarred me for life, J.C., Kohler said.
Scar this, Red, Chatterton said, pointing to his crotch. Kohler always dove in a red dry suit. Chatterton called him Red. Kohler reciprocated by calling him J.C. It was as close to affection as they got.
Forty-five minutes to splash. The banter between J.C. and Red was as much a part of their preparation for a dive as the methodical order in which they put on their equipment. In the water, they seemed to be able to read each other’s minds; above sea level, they were usually pissed off at each other, like squabbling brothers—especially when things went wrong, as they had on Kéa. The Greek diving supervisor had delivered defective equipment, then left the island without paying Apollon’s captain, who was threatening to quit if he didn’t get cash. People were getting sick, probably from the drinking water. One guy had gotten mugged by a taxi driver in Athens.
Chatterton and Kohler slipped into thin polypropylene diving underwear, which was enough insulation for a dive into the relatively warm Aegean Sea. Cotton was no good. They sweated while they were on the surface, and cotton wouldn’t wick away the moisture. In the water, the drying sweat would chill them, which was another way to get the bends. Over the underwear, Chatterton and Kohler put on their dry suits.
In five minutes, they were sweating as if they’d run a mile on a hot day. They strapped on two razor-sharp sheath knives, one on each thigh, within easy reach. Into the pockets of their dry suits they put two marker buoys and reels of line for sending emergency signals to the surface. The sea was calm, so the footing on Apollon’s deck was good when they bent over to put on their fins. Finally, they backed up to a bench to slip into their rebreathers, and rested for a few minutes.
Chatterton poured a bucket of seawater over Kohler’s head to cool him down. Kohler returned the favor. They switched on their rebreathers.
Kohler didn’t get throw-up scared anymore. When he was twenty years younger, and other divers were dying on the Doria, he would get so sick he felt like he was going to vomit into his mouthpiece. By the time he’d prepared himself for descending to Britannic, the fear was different. He never believed he was going to die. It was more like the fear he got on an amusement park roller coaster.
Chatterton had polished his fear into a little nut that he tucked away like a piece of gear in the pocket of his dry suit. When something went wrong, he knew there was a certain pucker factor, but he had made a lot of dives where everything didn’t go the way it was supposed to go. He knew that if he had made dives only when nothing had gone wrong, he would know how to dive only if nothing went wrong. Chatterton had been on dives when he’d lost his air, dives when a guy he was with had died, dives when his computer or his rebreather had quit. He knew how to fix problems. The key was to not overreact. To Chatterton, fear was a healthy emotion, but panic didn’t do him any good at all.
Since he had failed in his attempt to reach the watertight doors in 1998, Chatterton had been thinking about the firemen’s tunnel. Sitting on the bench on Apollon, he thought of Carl Spencer, one of the other divers who had been to the tunnel but had not made it to the doors either. While Spencer was briefing Chatterton, he had thrown his animated English lad’s face into a mask of horror. There are monsters down there, John, he’d said. Then his face had snapped back into a normal expression, as he said, I’m not kidding.
The eight-foot drop from Apollon’s rail into the sublimely cool water ended the sweltering torment on the surface and relieved them of the staggering weight of a hundred pounds of equipment. Chatterton splashed first. Bill Lange’s crew handed him the video camera. Then Kohler was in the water with him. They made eye contact, checked for obvious leaks in their rebreather loops and air bottles, swam to the shot line, and descended into the embrace of the Aegean Sea.
At 160 feet, they passed a school of hundreds of fish, three to four feet long, thirty or forty pounds each. They were there for a moment, silver against the blue background, then gone in a blink.
At 200 feet, the wreck began to emerge in the dim blue glare below them, a gigantic dark mass that extended into invisibility. A minute later, they were at 300 feet, at the end of the shot line chained to a davit on Britannic’s deck. Visibility was about 100 feet.
Chatterton and Kohler spent a minute of their precious bottom time orienting themselves. They were on the rail of the ship’s port side and could clearly see the bottom 90 feet below. Britannic lay on its starboard side, its hull draped with snagged fishing nets, covered with sponges, oysters, barnacles, and a brownish algae. In the fishing net closest to them, they could see a half dozen eight- or ten-pound lobsters tangled in the web. The entrance to the firemen’s tunnel was a four-by-eight-foot rectangle at the centerline of the ship, 45 feet below them.
They descended, reached the entrance, and saw that it was covered by a fishing net. Kohler ducked underneath the net, finding plenty of room between it and the hull. As soon as one of them kicked into the tight space, visibility behind him would drop to zero. Chatterton and the camera went first, with Kohler swimming blindly behind him.
Instantly, the diffuse blue light from above was gone. They adjusted their buoyancy to be slightly negative so they could hold themselves up from the wall of the tunnel below them and finger-walk in. There was a metal grate on their right. The steel wall above them dripped with the hard spikes of rusticles and tangled wires, which scraped the plastic shells of their rebreathers as they moved.
After 70 feet of crawling in the tunnel, they broke out into the boiler room, a cavern 45 feet up and 45 feet down, with the four boilers, each 15 feet in diameter, straight ahead of them. It looked exactly like the pictures they had seen of the same boiler room on Titanic. Every wreck dive produces a single indelible moment, and on Britannic, that was it. Neither of them had ever been in so large an enclosed space underwater.
They had to get past the boilers to see the room’s watertight door. Kohler stayed put while Chatterton descended 30 feet and disappeared into the space between the bottom two boilers. Kohler hung strobe lights at the opening into the firemen’s tunnel to mark the way out, ascended to the gap between the third and fourth boilers 30 feet above, and shined his flashlight beam between the boilers. The light coming out on the other side would guide Chatterton to his exit point. By entering low and coming out high, Chatt
erton wouldn’t have to swim through the sediment he kicked up on his way in, and he would have a well-lit course to follow in case he got disoriented.
Holding the camera in front of him, Chatterton was scraping his belly and the top of his rebreather on the boilers. Twenty feet in, the beam of his light flattened against something dead ahead of him. A piece of metal. It was a wheelbarrow wedged between the boilers. Chatterton swam to it, surrounded by a cloud of silt that had caught up with him when he’d stopped. With one hand, he held the camera to the side; with the other he pushed on the wheelbarrow. It was wedged tight. The silt around it was like concrete.
I got a problem here, Richie. Over.
Go. Over.
Obstruction. Viz going to shit. Over, Chatterton said, his voice coming in staccato bursts. Kohler recognized the danger signal.
That’s three problems, Kohler thought. He’s blocked from going ahead. He can’t see anything. He’s huffing and puffing. One problem, maybe we keep trying. Three, no way.
Abort. Abort. Abort, Kohler barked.
Roger. Abort, Chatterton said.
Back on the surface, things had turned as sour as they had in the boiler room on Britannic. The bureaucrat from the Greek Department of Antiquities assigned to the expedition as an observer was furious. During the dive to the boiler room, Bill Lange had lowered a remote-controlled camera to Britannic. As Apollon drifted away from the wreck, the camera panned over the bottom for a few hundred feet before Lange pulled it up. The guy from Antiquities claimed Lange had lowered the camera to search for other wrecks and debris, a violation of their permit, which limited exploration to only Britannic. He said they were also violating their permit by going inside the wreck.
Chatterton and Kohler knew that they had specifically asked for permission to enter Britannic’s hull, been told that the permit was in order, and figured somebody was trying to shake them down for more money. They would ignore the bureaucrat and dive to find the expansion joint the next day.
