HMHS Britannic

Britannic was laid down as a commercial liner intended to be grander even than her sisters, but her design was overhauled after Titanic sank in 1912. She was the Olympic-class made safe.

Her beam was widened to about 94 feet to carry a full double hull along the engine and boiler rooms; six of her watertight bulkheads were raised right up to B Deck, so she could float with her first six compartments open to the sea. Most visibly, she was fitted with a set of huge gantry davits, each able to launch several boats even if the ship listed heavily — part of a lifeboat outfit sufficient for everyone aboard.

When war came in 1914, work on Britannic\'s luxury fittings slowed and then stopped. In November 1915 the Admiralty requisitioned her as a hospital ship, and she was completed not as an ocean palace but as HMHS Britannic — hull painted white with a broad green band and three great red crosses, brilliantly lit at night so no submarine could mistake her.

Fitted with over 3,000 berths and cots for the wounded, she ran between Southampton and the Aegean base at Mudros, carrying home the casualties of the Gallipoli and Salonika campaigns. She made five such voyages without incident. Her sixth would be her last.

On the morning of 21 November 1916, steaming through the Kea Channel off the Greek coast, Britannic was torn open by an underwater explosion — a mine laid by a German submarine. The damage was far worse than anything Titanic had suffered, but her improved bulkheads should still have saved her.

They might have, had the watertight doors and the open portholes not let the sea spread. She sank in just 55 minutes. Of the 1,066 aboard, all but 30 were saved — and most of those who died were killed when two lifeboats were lowered without orders and drawn into the ship\'s still-turning propellers.

Britannic went down in under an hour, yet lost barely thirty lives — the grim measure of how much the world had learned since 1912.

Among the survivors was a stewardess and nurse named Violet Jessop, whose life reads like the Olympic class in miniature. She had been aboard Olympic in 1911 when the cruiser Hawke rammed her; she had been aboard Titanic in 1912 and escaped in a lifeboat; and now she was aboard Britannic.

Thrown into the water as her lifeboat was sucked toward the propellers, she survived a blow to the head and was pulled to safety. She had lived through incidents on all three sisters — and lived on to the age of 83.

Britannic\'s wreck was found in 1975 by the French explorer Jacques Cousteau, lying on her side in about 400 feet of clear Aegean water. Because she is so shallow and so intact, she is the largest intact ocean liner on the seabed anywhere in the world — and, unlike Titanic, she can be reached and studied by divers.

The wreck passed into private hands in 1996 and remains a protected war grave and a magnet for maritime historians. Britannic is the least famous of the three sisters, but in a sense the most instructive: the ship built to be unsinkable after the unsinkable ship sank, and the proof of how many the lifeboats could have saved.