The protracted disaster at Gallipoli developed from April 25, 1915, through January 29, 1916. A young lord of the British Admiralty named Winston Churchill sent Australian and New Zealander soldiers into one of the worst killing fields since Gettysburg. Much as Charles Lightoller of the Titanic was yet to develop into a legendary hero of the Battle of Dunkirk in World War II, Churchill during the campaign in Turkey was, by every measure of both promise and blunder, the Admiralty’s Lightoller.
In 1916, Albert Moss was headed for his third shipwreck, and David Vartanian, who had survived boat A’s Armageddon at sea, was coming to terms with what sometimes seemed a worse ordeaclass="underline" his comforters. Though well-meaning, perhaps, they advised him to give up and finally accept the certainty that his beloved wife, Mary, was now a casualty of the war that had spread like a horrible spasm through the Ottoman Empire and erased his hometown as though by a tsunami. David Vartanian firmly resolved never to give up, and so did Mary.
Mary Vartanian was still alive, but during the complete breakdown of communication that accompanied the start of the war, she was told only that the Titanic had sunk with almost every man from third class and she must accept that David was among the lost. Friends and relatives advised her to consider remarriage, but David and Mary each refused to count the other among the dead.
After years of seeking out every clue that could be filtered through the haze of war and rumor, the man who in the United States became known as “Titanic David,” prospering and (in most people’s minds) an eligible bachelor, remained faithful to a presumably dead woman. Then, one day—in a miracle, according to his comforters—he found Mary alive. He took her to their new home, where they had a daughter named Rose.
Meanwhile, Jessop sailed into “too much history” (as she put it) again. When she joined the Britannic, the thin interior bulkheads about which naval architect Edward Wilding had been so evasive at the British inquiry were thickened and provided with stronger bracing so that a bulkhead collapse between boiler rooms could never happen again.
Few people, anywhere or anytime, had more cause to utter the words “Oh, no, not again,” than Jessop. She had completed her field medical training while the Titanic’s twin was being converted into the world’s fastest and largest hospital ship but which was instead fated to become the largest ship sunk during World War I.
The heating problems that had compelled Jack Thayer, Norman Chambers, and so many others aboard the Titanic to open their portholes were evidently not addressed during the construction of the Britannic, beyond the installation of electric fans in every overheated cabin. All of the design improvements to strengthen the hull and the bulkheads and to prevent floods, which were meant to preclude a repeat of the iceberg scenario and the boiler room number 5 collapse, would be like using bandages to stop a heart attack if excessive boiler room heat, seeping and radiating into the decks above, could be relieved only by the wholesale opening of portholes.
Still, there were defenses in place to prevent the Britannic from becoming another Titanic. Captain Charles Bartlett had a reputation for being, if anything, overly cautious. He was also considered an added layer of protection for the Britannic because of his proven ability to detect the earthy smell of icebergs and because of his policy of taking long detours and being willing to arrive behind schedule to avoid ice fields.
Unfortunately, the precautions set in place for ice fields did not apply to minefields. The evidence of this was visible all along the hull’s open ports in 1995, when Robert Ballard sent Ken Marschall down for a landing on the Britannic’s portside hull, aboard the nuclear-powered submersible NR-1.
Marschall’s photos showed the windows of the firemen’s galley and mess hall levered open. On November 21, 1916, just before the impact of a mine on the forward starboard side, just before the 8:15 a.m. flood, someone had chosen how far to open those windows. The open ports gave Marschall a connection with the people and with a leading accelerant in the tragedy.
After the ship shook, Jessop could feel, in the deck plates beneath her feet, that the Britannic appeared to be drawing in water even faster than the Titanic had, as though much more of the ship were open to the sea. It seemed that way because it was. Excessive heat within the ship’s cabins, combined with the lingering odors of gangrene and death from the last rescue run as well as unseasonably calm and warm weather, had created a lapse of judgment in which the crew had left many of the forward portholes on E deck and F deck propped open. Captain Bartlett had allowed the airing-out of the ship, apparently without any troubling thoughts. After all, like Maude Slocomb’s friend Iago Smith, Bartlett could smell ice.
During the first two minutes after the blast, water was already entering boiler room number 6, and the Britannic began listing down toward starboard just as the Titanic had done. Bartlett swung the bow toward the Greek Isle of Kea, about six miles away, and ordered the engines full ahead, hoping to beach his ship with plenty of time to spare.
Aboard the NR-1, Marschall could understand why Bartlett must have believed he had all the time in the world. The Britannic’s watertight compartments were stronger, and some of them came all the way up to B deck; it was a more rugged ship than the Titanic. Bartlett had only six miles to go, and its sister ship had floated for two hours and forty minutes. Yet, there the Britannic was, lying beneath the NR-1 on its starboard side, brought down by open portholes, still with miles to go before it reached Kea.
Marschall saw only occasional blemishes on the rails, davits, and other deck structures. Entire deckhouses were remarkably intact, marred only by a slight fouling under tiny stands of sponges and other sedentary organisms. What was regarded as fouling from a deep-water archaeologist’s perspective, however, was rare beauty to the Roy Cullimores and Lori Johnstons of Marschall’s world—especially when a new variety of rusticle awaited discovery inside the Britannic’s bow.
The “icing on the cake,” for Marschall, was to glide slowly aft along the portside propeller bossing, watching it protrude more and more winglike from the rest of the hull until “there it was: the massive, twenty-foot, nine-inch-diameter propeller itself.”
The Britannic had not yet been steaming ten minutes toward the Isle of Kea and was only about three miles nearer to land when Jessop emerged onto the port side of the boat deck amid a crowd of officers and sailors. An officer looked at her in surprise, as though to ask, “What are you still doing here?”
The first lifeboats had already been filled and had launched on the new electric davits, carrying most of the nurses and the doctors. An officer instructed Jessop that she must take a seat in the next lifeboat on the davits, boat 4.
As she climbed in, a strange sound reached Jessop’s ears. The front of the well deck was beginning to flood, and the increasing tilt to starboard was lifting the tip of the portside propeller out of the water. The moment it began breaking the surface, the decreased resistance offered by air (relative to water), caused it to spin faster. By the time someone called for boat 4 to stop lowering and for the bridge to stop the engines, it was already too late. The two previous boats, one after the other, were drawn directly into the violent churning, hundreds of feet back. “Though hands were lowering the boats,” Jessop reported, “eyes were looking with unexpected horror at the debris and the red streaks all over the water.” Jessop, became the sole survivor of her lifeboat. Boat 4 shot straight through the rising propellers and exploded into shreds of wood and flesh, somehow allowing Jessop to escape with only torn clothing and a dizzying blow to the head.