 I'm going to start out by thanking Bob for inviting me here today and for thanking all of you that are veterans for your service and those that are currently working on the job. Thank you all. Almost everyone knows the story of Titanic. They know the story of this iconic ship of dreams that sank on its maiden voyage taking 1,500 people to a watery grave. It's amazing how this story stays with us a hundred years after the sinking. I think many of us look back on the events that night and we wonder in our hearts how would we have reacted under those situations? How would we have conducted ourselves knowing that we have but hours to live and only a few lifeboats for a select few? The story has lived on in not only in the media, I mean, Cameron's recent film has revitalized interest in Titanic. I think the 1985 discovery of the wreck also brought it back into the forefront but still it tells us something about our own humanity and our mortality and how we react in a tragedy. What most people don't know is that Titanic was one of three ships. They were called the Olympians and they were named for the first ship of the class Olympic over to the left and at the right is Titanic fitting out in a graving dock for her maiden voyage. The third ship of the class was going to be Britannic and the reason why these Olympians were designed was simple business. At that time the trade bringing immigrants to the United States was the number one driving force for the building of passenger liners. White Star Line who built these ships was in direct competition with Qunard. Qunard's reputation was for the fastest greyhounds of the Atlantic, the fastest ships, the fastest crossings. No matter how hard the builders at Belfast, Harlan and Wolfe Yard tried they could not match the engineering skill of the Qunarders so rather than try to compete with them on a speed basis they figured that they would try opulence. They figured that if they could build larger more opulent ships people wouldn't mind an extra day or two of the crossing if they did so in great style. But the genius of the design wasn't just in the fact that they could get there slower and have a bigger ship with more people. The genius of the design was actually that it was going to be paid for expressly by filling third class with immigrants. When Lord Peary who was the owner of the White Star Line sat with Bruce's man in their study they smoked cigars and they drank cognac and they crafted a plan in which it would take 800 paying immigrants at a set price to pay for the coal to move these ships not only across the Atlantic but then back home. That meant that second class, first class and all of the cargo both ways was pure profit. Britannic was going to be the more opulent of the three. Each time they built the ship they wanted to be slightly different and better than the other ones so that they can attract the second and first class business and vacationing travelers to use these ships and try to get on all three of them. Each one had slight variations of design intended with Britannic being the actual largest. In light of the Titanic's disaster when she sank building slowed but never truly stopped. As a direct nod to that sinking there were major changes done not only in retrofit to the Olympic but more importantly the Britannic which was still under construction. The most notable change was the fact that there would definitely be enough lifeboats on both vessels and the next picture I'm going to show you will show how they accommodated that but more importantly a direct nod to the accident that sent Titanic to the bottom was the enlarging of the watertight bulkheads to come up above the water deck and also to create a double hull or in effect a ship within a ship. If Titanic was to have said been sunk by a death of a thousand cuts from an iceberg bouncing along the side shearing off the rivets and pushing in hull plates well a second hull on the inside would have presented this. Despite all of these wonderful changes World War II came and ruined the plans for the White Star Line. Instead of being fitted out as an opulent passenger liner Britannic was conscripted to war. One of the biggest changes that you can see in this photo are these huge gantries at the very top of the ship with stack after stack of lifeboats they weren't going to make the same mistake twice now there was more than enough lifeboats for both to be loaded on either side of the vessel with these huge gantries that could actually lean from one side of the ship to the other so depending off there was a list or there was damage they would be able to get all of the lifeboats on any side of the ship that they would need. As World War II took its excuse me as World War I took its toll on the British Empire they searched for bottoms they needed ships and so Britannic was a perfect idea for a hospital ship her sister Olympic operated as a troop ship she would make six crossings going from England to the Dardanelles picking up at times as many as three thousand wounded sailors soldiers and bringing them back to the UK she was in this capacity operating as a hospital ship and as you can see she was clearly marked as a hospital ship painted pure white with a green band three huge red crosses on either side plus a huge lit sign at the very top one four one aft two on either side of the ship so that even at night this ship was clearly a non-combatant despite all of this on November 21st 1916 while this young lady was on board the ship there was a huge explosion Britannic went to the bottom three times faster than even Titanic and in light of those changes that I had mentioned to you it seems strange the watertight doors should have been closed the double hull should have prevented the water from coming in and the explosion was only in one area of the ship the number one hold yet she listed or started to lean over and went down by the head so quickly that the captain was unable to close the three miles this island of Kia that you can see in the distance some of the crew panicked unlike on Titanic four years earlier and without waiting for orders launched three lifeboats on the port side of the ship without waiting for permission no one knew that the engines were still going and those three lifeboats were drawn into the still moving now exposed and leaning out of the water port side propeller in one of those lifeboats was the young lady I just showed you Violet Jesset Violet Jessup is a unique oddity if you will of history Violet Jessup started working for the white star line five years earlier and was first on board the Olympic as a stewardess she was on board the Olympic when it was in the harbor and it was accidentally rammed by the HMS Hawk which penetrated through the boiler room and broke into the engine room and the ship started to flood but they were able to close the watertight doors and staunch the flood and the Olympic never sank the papers never usually always allowing a good disaster to turn into popular belief that the ship would be unsinkable lauded that these vessels are nearly unsinkable Violet Jessup would do five transatlantic crossings on the Olympic and be rewarded with a promotion her promotion was to become a first stewardess on the RMS's Titanic's maiden voyage she was on board Titanic that night when it sank and was in a lifeboat being lowered when an immigrant woman rushed through the crowd and thrust into her hands a small bundle it was a child wordlessly she took the baby in her arms and the boat was lowered into the water she didn't know the mother's name she didn't know the baby's name she didn't even know their nationality the lifeboat rode away Titanic sank the next morning Carpathia appeared on the horizon lifting the lifeboat with Violet Jessup and the baby in it as she was wandering around the foredeck not knowing whose child this was the woman came out of the crowd wordlessly once again snatched the baby from Violet's arms and disappeared into the crowd most people and historians think that the reason she was wordless excuse me was because she probably didn't speak a word of English she was probably an immigrant and didn't know what to say but she knew that the woman with the white hat had her child and she found her child when the Carpathia pulled into New York City this woman found herself penniless jobless with only the clothes on her back and she went back to the United Kingdom and then tried to get a couple of small jobs until World War I broke out and she volunteered as a nurse the reason why I called her an oddity of history is because as well operating as part of the VAD or the women's contingent operating under the army as nurses she found herself once again assigned to an Olympian and was on board when this ship exploded in November 21st she had been on all three Olympians survived Titanic and now she's in one of those lifeboats that's about to be chopped into pieces on the port side as a Victorian woman she did not know how to swim and in hindsight of the experience she had had with the sinking of Titanic she wasn't about to get fooled twice when the alarm came that there was something wrong and she had heard the explosion she did not go to the lifeboat right away she went back to her cabin she had just bought a very heavy coat and although it is warm in the Aegean in November she put on her coat and filled the pockets with all of her possessions she wasn't about to wind up in another country penniless she then put on her lifeboat over that and then made her way to a lifeboat station when she saw lifeboats being launched once again she didn't hesitate she didn't wait for the order she got a lifeboat she hers was the third boat to launch and so it was the last one to be drawn into the propellers and when she heard behind her the noise and of men screaming and wood splinter and she turned to see this huge bronze propeller spinning chopping boats up behind her and she had to make a decision you stay in the boat and be chopped to pieces or as a person who doesn't know how to swim jump into the water needless to say the minute that she jumped into the water she regretted her decision to be wearing that heavy coat filled with all of her possessions because even though she had a lifeboat she was being dragged down to the bottom and she just poured out with her hands and somehow some way she was able to grab on to something which later found out to be a person's body wearing a life jacket which brought her back to the surface where she got hit in the head by flotsam later found out she had a cracked skull but she survived the sinking and as blood streamed down her hair and into her face she watched as the ship sailed away on an angle and plowed itself into the ocean when the ship sank that day there were many questions that remain unanswered the first would be what was the cause of the explosion at the time no one knew nor did they have the idea that it was possible for anyone to mine in areas that deep the area that the Britannic went down was 400 feet and so when an explosion rendered the ship and it sank the first thing was torpedo everyone thought that the hospital ship had been torpedoed in violation of law the German or Bismarck government countered we would never torpedo a hospital ship not intentionally and not in daylight the Britannic must have been carrying illegal munitions and that must have been the cause of the explosion and so the controversy whether it was an internal explosion due to illegal munitions or a torpedo would go on for the course of the war and it wouldn't be until after the war is end that Gustav cease the commander of that U-boat came forth and said no I actually laid a minefield and the reason why they never would tell anyone is you never let your enemy know a the capabilities of your weapons or the locations of your minefields and so although there were eyewitnesses who went to their grave as late as 1975 swearing that they had seen periscopes and seen a torpedo his logbook the minefield has been located by underwater explorers it is 99.9 percent that the Britannic did not be torpedoed by Gustav cease but rather struck an underwater mine but we wouldn't know these things and there are other questions that still to this day don't seem right with those yellow lines being the watertight bulkheads that were raised all the way up and the double hull that I told you about the question still remains how did Britannic with all of these additional safety features sink three times faster than Titanic when Titanic was damaged along seven or eight compartments and we know there was only an explosion in hold number one well the answer would come when our forefather of scuba diving took it upon himself to go and try and find the Britannic and in 1975 he went to the island of Kia and started looking in the area of where Britannic went down he used the British Admiralty records and he searched for nearly two weeks and could not find it so he did what most rec researchers or hunters do they go to the local fishermen because they always know where everything is and he wound up finding the rec nearly six miles away if you look at the lower photograph you can see the Admiralty chart permission position and the Britannic and the fact that the distance was six miles when it was only three miles from land and there were numerous British destroyers in the area seems to be to imply to Captain Cousteau that maybe the British didn't want the wreck found and so he launched a series of dives over the summer of 1974 160 to be exact going down and into the wreck searching in the area of hold number one specifically from munitions to see if there was any validity to the claim that it exploded because it was carrying illegal munitions he found none some people have come forward and said well because of the conditions at the time meaning that all of the portholes were open maybe after the explosion and the ship started to list the water came in through all of the open ports and that is why the ship sank so quickly well before Captain Cousteau was ever the inventor of the aqualung he was a naval engineer and it was a matter of just simple mathematics for him to say with so much freeboard from the waterline to the first open propeller excuse me a port the ship was already listing or leaning too far she was lost long before the water had ever got to the portholes there was something else that has caused this ship but with the technology and the equipment that he had in 1975 he was severely limited to talk a little bit about that Captain Cousteau although he invented the scuba diver the student what we know as basic scuba diving equipment the scuba tank and the regulator had to borrow from both commercial and military diving techniques and equipment in order to make a dive to the Britannic what he did find was that the wreck was on the seafloor and this is what it looks like the top of the hull is at 300 feet and the seafloor is at 400 feet this ship rises 10 stories and is nearly a thousand feet long the only area he ever did 160 dives on was in the forward area of the break near the epicenter of the explosion at the number one hold his divers with three huge scuba tanks were filled with what we refer to as try mix or it's a helium mix mixture that was being used by both military and commercial divers and hard hat helmets captain Cousteau was the first person to ever put it in scuba tanks and allow his free swimming divers to get down and into the wreck but with the limitations of these small scuba tanks his men only had 11 minutes to swim down 400 feet get inside the wreck film find evidence and get out that's why they had to do 160 dives over the summer of 1975 for that period of time he would spend four to six minutes in descent that leaves you only about seven minutes to get inside a ship look around and then get back out so you can understand why he was limited in trying to figure out some of the other questions that abound about the shipwreck the next person to come here was none other than the man who actually found Titanic was dr. Bob Ballard and he had to come in style he brought the US Navy's NR one and nuclear research vessel submarine designed for deep water submergence and its support vessel the MV coast and they're in the background you can see the island of Kia says again only three miles from the island and he spent two weeks on site and he brought with him noted marine artist Ken Marshall and they were able to get a much clearer picture as a matter of fact Ken Marshall painted that image that I showed you earlier what the wreck looks like but when you have 150 foot research submarine the captain of that submarine is loathed to get closer than 20 feet to anything so again as much as we learned a lot about the outside of the wreck a lot of the questions needed to be answered from the inside the wreck and you just can't do that with a 150 foot research submarine the island of Kia has one main harbor it's called Carissa and this is the harbor and for me as a technical diver I have to bring everything I want to this island there are no dive shops there are no sources for helium or oxygen you have to bring everything with you on the ferry it's a sleepy little island agrarian there's lots of sheep but then there's some small fishing boats but there's nothing else even something like a D cell battery you can't find on this island so you must bring everything so a trip to Kia for a diving expedition is quite literally an expedition in every means and means and form my first time there was while working for the history channel and I charted a Greek fishing vessel the apple on and we took almost a week to turn this into a suitable technical diving platform and because I was working for the history channel we contracted Woods Hole Oceanographic to build for us these wonderful camera systems and to give you an idea what they are there are different ones this one is a three 3d camera that would be a traditional HD and this is a 2d stereo camera now the one in the middle was nicknamed by me bumblebee and the reason for it is that when I first saw this here in Woods Hole Oceanographic and I was going to do a test dive from their dock with it I said there's no way that this thing is going to be maneuverable in 400 feet of water you know in high currents and they assured me no it'll be neutrally buoyant and what they had done as you can see they've strapped these gray pieces of what's referred to as syntactic foam it is basically a styrofoam that does not compress it depth and the reason why it's nicknamed the bumblebee is because when I got in the water with it much like the bumblebee this thing actually did fly it weighs 250 pounds and we operate it we we say that we operate it as a dope on a rope because it's a fiber optic cable so that both light balance and contrast as well as focus can be controlled from top side and the diver only has to listen to the headset and aim it where they want and if they would like him to pan slower he can redo that so that's why we are in effect a dope on a rope and so you can actually see the the bumblebee camera sister has to be launched by a crane at 250 pounds here's our director of photography my friend Evan Kovacs and this is a far cry from the system that Cousteau was using in 1975 here we are 30 years later and we're using what's called a closed circuit re-breather this is basically the same technology that our astronauts use when they EVA or go for a spacewalk captures your exhaled breath scrubs out the carbon dioxide and then adds a little bit of oxygen to replace that which metabolize so that we can speak we're wearing full face masks and the two scuba tanks that you see under our arms are just for bailout that's our an emergency system only we'd never use it unless there's an emergency I will return to the wreck again in 2009 and answer questions this time I bought a break of boat this one was the commandant for a colt which was originally a German minesweeper and now a Belgian technically and salvage dive vessel of course one of the great benefits of a bigger boat not only is can you bring more equipment but you can bring a helicopter and a helicopter provides us this wonderful aerial view of what diving operations on Britannic look like as you can see there's a commandant for colt with the island of Kia three miles distant and I don't know if you can make it out on this screen but those are not bubbles next to the two red bullies those are divers in the water the water in the Aegean is incredibly clear and from this elevation in the air we could actually look down and see the divers decompressing in this photograph 60 feet below the surface so the way that we have to conduct dive operations is this is an active shipping channel so because of the size of this particular vessel we cannot tie it in or more it to the shipwreck they're afraid that the weight of the ship would damage the shipwreck so he has to more off of the ship and then we would use a small rib to transit from the dive vessel of main dive or hard deck we call it to that ball right there and descend down to the shipwreck and the reason why the decompressing divers are on a small series of dive floats away from it with another chase boat is quite simple as an active shipping channel we've already had numerous instances where large vessels don't hail don't listen and they're bearing down on us while we have dive teams in the water and we've had to disconnect from the main line and have that small boat tow the divers out of the way of an oncoming ship to give you an idea of the conditions the we have been known to have currents up to two knots we can dive in about one and a half knots of current if you were to let go of the line during your seven-hour decompression you'll come up roughly eleven miles away so we never let go of the line we always do our decompression right next to the boat on my 2009 expedition my then mentor and 2009 team leader was Carl Spencer and Carl Spencer taught me everything that I needed to know about diving to 400 feet specifically on Britannic and him having been there first in 2003 Carl was diving a rebreather and had some kind of a problem during one of his dives we'll never know exactly what wrong because during the ascent phase he made a mistake and switched to an inappropriate gas with too much oxygen at depth and suffered a grand wall seizure the seizure itself doesn't kill you but you drown and it's impossible to resuscitate someone at 200 feet and the only option available was to send them to the surface which in effect is not really an option because he omitted six hours of decompression so even if we were able to resuscitate him at the surface the rapid decompression from a ascent from 200 feet still owing nearly six hours of decompression was enough to kill him right then and there so it was a death sentence either either way but we had no choice and Carl Spencer my friend became the first person to die and I hope the last to die diving and exploring Britannic I would not get another chance to go to try and solve this mystery until 2015 and this time I would be working with the Russian Geographical Society on their Maltese based vessel the U-boat navigator the U-boat navigator was custom built for sport and technical diving one of the unique features is you can see a diver on the small elevator that lows you into the water there is on the back a trellis to launch a three-man Triton submersible and they carry a full-size Pegasus ROV so that we have three different ways of exploring the underwater world whether it's remotely operated vehicle a three-man submersible or by man dive operations for me and my purposes of diving on Britannic this was the reason why this vessel meant the world to me this is a diving bell the diving bell had we had it with Carl's accident would have been able to us to take diver out of the water and get his head out of the water and allow him to go through his seizure and then when he recovers he would not have to have been sent to the surface to a certain death sentence instead he would be in the diving bell and then we can then conduct normal recompression procedures now there's no guarantee that he would have survived but it's a better chance than having said having sent him to the surface so using the old-fashioned way of diving this is the way that we would be in the water as you can see on the under the balls hanging on what we would call a floating starfish decompression station and you would be like this for hours on end and the new way would be in a diving bell the diving bell would man four divers not only would it carry more of our bailout but it would carry more emergency gas from those four yellow tanks it also had the ability from its umbilical to have our onboard diving or hyperbaric physician pump down any gases we needed inside and as you can see here easily two divers can stand up get out of the water eat a sandwich drink communicate in real times to the camera and conduct even much more safer diving operations and this is what it looks like when it's hanging beneath the boat it doesn't look correct to scale because of the perspective of the fish eye lens here the divers look too big but the reality is that is a four-man diving bell and that's the way I dove the wreck last year when we finally solved the mystery so one of the benefits of diving with the Russian geological society is that not only do we have the diving bell but we have the ROV that can stand guard over the dive team and help us but also we have the full-size triton submersible by the way it's a little disconcerting to be at 400 feet and see two men sitting there in their shorts eating sandwiches while you're in the ocean let you know one of the other benefits of diving with such equipment is as you can see here they light the place like you cannot believe that even though the water is incredibly clear it is a dark rich blue and it's very nice to know that we have not only an ROV with a topside crew but an in-water crew in the submarine lighting not only our shots but also there for safety and navigational purposes so what's it all about what's the mystery all about when I first went there in 2006 I wanted to try and figure that out and so one of the reasons that we believe the wreck sank so quickly was that the watertight doors didn't function as designed that's easy to say that it's easy to look at the blueprints but you've got to get inside the wreck and it's not a very hospitable thing to do wreck penetration before I bring you to the money shot as we say I'm going to give you a quick tour about the wreck so as I told you earlier it's almost 100 feet of relief this stands off the seafloor and as you can see from our side scan sonar she's incredibly intact the only area of damage is where she cracked when she hit the seafloor at nearly a thousand feet long when the bow hit the seafloor the stern was still on the surface so she actually motor herself if you will into the seafloor and you can tell how she turned up her nose when she hit the bottom and cracked at the epicenter of the explosion this is the kind of visibility that were rewarded with when we go down on the line and as you can see all of the upper structures all of the bridge all of the decking is still in place looking forward in this photograph you can actually see the lights of the submersible at the very very tip of the bow and I'm going to give you a reverse shot of this in a second that's a lateral distance of nearly 170 feet and yet we're able to see it it's deep blue but the water is incredibly clear and there's a diver heading down into the area of the break that you saw in that drawing before and as you can see from both these construction photographs and what she looks like today she's unchanged after a hundred years underwater so when we look at this Ken Marshall drawing if I bring up a photograph that we took on that you can actually see the scale that little light is a diver who's six foot tall and you're looking at almost 100 feet of vertical relief the light at the very top is a 12 foot long ROV operating as a lighting chandelier to give you some of the equipment that would be seen on the wreck the wheelhouse was all wood and was eaten a long time ago away by tornado worms okay what happened I think we may have lost batter here we go all right so here on the bridge you can see one of the engine order telegraphs hanging down you can see the remains of clock from the wood deck and also a little bit of fishing net one of the things that these wrecks do is they do capture a lot of fishing net there's the main helm wheel the wood wheel long gone and the brass ring was recovered by Jacques Cousteau in 1975 that and a sextant were the only two objects ever recovered or removed from this wreck other than that everything that sank in 1916 is still on board this ship this is one of the areas of the promenade deck and what you're seeing is that the ship of course lays down with a starboard side down report side up and this is one of the promenade deck windows and there's an overburden of coral and marine growth that's just built up at the the junction of both the the bulkhead and the deck so if I take this photograph come on don't fight me and I do a black and white photo I pull it back I think I may have to go manual on you okay I turn it on its correct perspective now you can see the promenade deck going off you could see the open window well I've also gotten the opportunity to visit her sister ship Titanic in 2005 and I took the same perspective from mere to shooting mere one and you can see it and if we take the same photograph from one of the Harlan and Wolf builders photographs you can actually see from this perspective it's almost 900 feet to the stern of the ship these are massive vessels the same intact preservation of the ship on the outside is prevalent inside and although she never was fitted as the opulent passenger liner even something as basic as this utilitarian staircase for crew this was not even for passengers this is a secret passage so that the firemen and boiler operators would never have to rub shoulders with the passengers they design this system so that they can get from the folks all all the way down to the bottom of the ship and then go underneath the cargo holes through a passage referred to adequately named as the fireman's passage and so you can see it deck after deck the staircase goes down the linoleum tiles are there and now all of a sudden it stops being a spiral staircase and it becomes a regular staircase down at the bottom and you can see all of these decks that we can swim down into the ship in order to get to the area where the explosion occurred nothing speaks about the size of the Olympians and their propellers and these images of an Olympic class liner believed to be Titanic in the dock in Belfast gives you a perfect idea of how large these propellers are but nothing prepares you for it until you're a diver and you're swimming next to it and it gives you this scale of size that is just totally breathtaking and of course there were three screws this is this the port side propeller the same one that killed all people that day on November 21st 1916 when it crashed into the lifeboats so to get back to the mystery the reason why I believed that it had sank so quickly and that Cousteau alluded to although his team never had the capability or the equipment to find out was that some of the inner doors had not closed the triangle the red triangle shows you the area of the wreck where it's cracked and it also shows you that passageway that I had mentioned you can see the staircase coming down and then a passageway referred to as the fireman's passage when we were exploring the wreck we noticed in one of the bulkheads forward of the crack you could see the well deck and then you could see where the wreck cracks there's an open door and when you look in the door you can see this passageway going all the way to the end well in 2006 I swam to the end we were able to see that there was an open door and that open door led into boiler room number six when we spoke with some of the engineering experts they said to us well even if they had lost the folks they had lost cargo hold one and then they lost the passageway and cargo hold two and even with boiler room six flooded that's not enough they'd have to be one more door open to account for the ship being able to take such a list so quickly so now what we had to do was not only just swim through a 75 foot narrow doorway now we had to figure out how to get through a 100 year old boiler room that no one had ever been in since 1916 and by the way it's laying on its side it's been filled with silt for end coal and coal dust for nearly a hundred years and someone detonated a huge weapon next to it so we had no idea what to expect so we had to study the blueprints we had to formulate a plan and then try to navigate here's a CGI image of what it looks like and that's what it looks like to us as a diver going through the span between these huge scotch boilers to find out on the other end of the door on the other end of that compartment was the watertight door into boiler room five closed like it should be here or open as shown in this picture and if I go back one you can see that these doors had three ways to be shut at the day of the sinking captain Bartlett said that he flipped the electric switch which will allow a a magnetic switch to trip and allow these doors to fall under their own power under gravity there was also a manual switch where any operator in the room if they sense flooding could go over and manually flip the switch and if all hands were dead and all the wires were cut there was a float system so that this float if water came in would come up trip the switch and then manually flip it so there was triple redundancy so these doors would have shut well as I showed you in the first photograph we know for a fact that the door leading from the fireman's tunnel into six was open allowing boiler room six to flood unchecked and now what we wanted to do was swim through this compartment and get to the other side and find out if it was open and so with my partner in 2015 we started to swim through the compartment and we started to see things that had never been seen since the day that they were built and because no one ever did any interior beauty shots of the Britannic none of these photographs exist of any of this type of equipment we were the first people to see it so we filmed everything that we could and when we got to the other side we found the answer and of course if you'd like to know the answer I'm not an underwater photographer although I use cameras most of the images that you've been seen have been the good grace of many of these folks and including the United States Navy and the Museum of Northern Ireland and although I probably went on a little longer than I should have I'd like to open up the floor to any questions if anyone has any any questions yes sir that you are getting to be unsafe to penetrate because of corrosion in the warmer water is that is that a problem at this depth the water temperature in the Aegean is a constant at the bottom of roughly about 65 degrees 68 outside 65 almost all the time inside the rack and one of the reasons why they believe the Britannic has remained so intact is not only its wrought iron riveted hull construction which is greater much stronger and it was overbuilt by design than welding would have done as a matter of fact many World War two shipwrecks that have not been down as long have already turned into piles of rust and and every iron shipwreck will biologically imploded someday so we're really surprised at how long Britannic has held up and they attribute it to its growth of coral and muscle shells that have encapsulated it if you will in a way protected it from exterior corrosion and on the inside it is a stagnant anaerobic environment meaning that all of the oxygen has been absorbed out of the water by early rust as well as the breakdown of various materials inside so all of the deterioration on the inside of the wreck as you saw in my photographs has been retarded and that allows us as wreck explorers you know short of going through the silty compartments a really first-hand view a hundred years back at ship construction and and to answer you to further answer your question a little bit more we have been working with joy con industries as well as us parks department on controlled experience both on titanic and Britannic as sister ships one sunk two and a half miles down one in the literal zone of 400 feet of water and correspondingly on World War two shipwrecks the Arizona sunk shallow in Hawaii and the U-166 a German U-boat sunk in 5000 feet of water in the Gulf of Mexico as controls to see what's going on with the different construction of steel at different times in our history and what's going on at different depths and the reason is many fold the most important one is because of the biological impact of many of these wrecks break open and release vast quantities of oil diesel fuel and the such and the ecological impact of that so these studies that we're able to contribute as divers by going inside and placing these devices which are non-destructive sampling devices checking of course temperature salinity oxygen content inside the rack and we can obviously only do that on the ones we can dive on if they can come up with the technology for me to go inside the U-166 of 5000 feet I think I would try it but because that's what I like to do yes sir if you've been on the Andrea Doria how would you compare diving on that ship as diving on the Britannic well when I first drove the Andrea Doria in 1982 and since then I've done about 126 dives I believe over 35 separate expeditions so I know the wreck very well and when I first drove the wreck in the 80s all of those upper structures the wedding cake upper decks if you will were in place unfortunately on the Andrea Doria they were constructed mostly of aluminum and with aluminum features to make them lighter but that also facilitated rapid deterioration in the saltwater environment so now if we look at the Andrea Doria she looks like a gutted out dugout canoe where all of those upper decks have fallen to the seafloor and broken free so as a kid I was able to go into a hole cut by the late Peter Gimble and go inside the rack and swim down a hallway get to the bar stop as a matter of fact they used to love bar hop and go from one bar to another go into the dining room pick up trinkets along the way and then maybe change deck levels by going down a staircase and then come out or come up the staircase and come out another way all of that's gone gone those those those memories exist in my mind and on some videotape but all of those features are now a pile of rubble on the seafloor so it is amazing that I that this rack which is a hundred years old still retains as you saw in those images the ability to go down these spiral staircases and going into these compartments and and again it's probably because of the construction the water temperature and also the Greeks are very highly protective of their shipwrecks and you can only visit these sites with a permit as I said you cannot salvage anything you cannot take any artifacts so it is a protected site whereas the Andrea Doria was an abandoned shipwreck and people can salvage it and take things from it yes sir what was the loss of life when the ship sank when the Britannic sank there was 30 lives lost and coincidentally and I'll just mention this in in in passing it's in the book as well in the makeup of the people in the lifeboats was primarily Boilerman or fireman stewards and a handful of nurses and it's amazing to think that there are the possibility exists that some of the men that may have been in the boiler room that may have been able to affect change that may have kept the ship afloat their panic that also made them launch a lifeboat without permission may have actually brought them to their own death so they're there I would never use the word cowardice I want to qualify that I've not been in combat nor would I want to be in the lowest regions of a ship when a huge explosion goes off the lights go off and water's rushing around your feet I don't know how I would react so it's not for my me to wag my finger at history I can only tell you what I see and what my observations are and what the facts are and the facts are that there were 18 Boilerman that died in those lifeboats now we don't know what compartments or what boiler rooms they were from but it would be ironic if they were from the areas of the ship where they may have been able to do something different that could have had a different outcome that day to just to justify one more thing though they were civilian the ship was conscripted by the Royal Navy as a as a hospital ship it had a Royal Navy officers but all of the sailors all of the engineering staff they were all civilians from Ireland they were Irish civilians conscripted to work and the British officers did not think much of them a direct quote from one of the commanding officers said where did we get these street sweepings they spend more of their time drunk and belligerent and it's hard to maintain a head ahead of steam that was an officer speaking about the people that were in the boiler room so that's where I come up with my suspicions I know absolutely because the death toll would have been grievous yes dear 11 there were 1100 people and of that roughly the majority of them were medical staff it only needed about 375 people crew to man the ship so the balance of that was pretty much medical crew yes many of them swim to the nearby island that's an excellent question she did sink so quickly that even with all the lifeboats many people and because of the warm water chose to jump from the ship into the water and some of the lifeboats broke free so it was a reverse rather than people getting in the lifeboat being lowered into the water people jumped in the water and then the lifeboats came to them and and pick them up out of the water and as I mentioned there were two Royal Navy destroyers in the region that came over within a half of an hour so there were no deaths attributed to exposure or drowning and depending where you were on this thousand foot ship you are going to get from survivors accounts some acts of cowardice being reported and some acts of total bravery one of the ones that I thought was really unique was on board was detachment of Boy Scouts believe it or not British Boy Scouts that were on board and acting in a capacity to help make bandages and stuff basically chipping into the war effort if you will and there was a reverend in charge of him and he said that these young men stood at attention and they were just boys and waited until they were told that they could get into a lifeboat and then okay conversely we have other reports where men were pushing nurses out of the way to get into a lifeboat so depending where you are on a thousand foot ship you're going to get different reports of how people acted that day and they only had 55 minutes from the time that it exploded and then may seem like a lot of time but I don't think it really is if you're on a ship and she's already listing and leaning over yes sir believe it or not they tried they tried to with the gantry system load them on the high side and then swing them out over the low side because it was easier for people to lean up against the bulkhead and then climb up and get in a boat and then be picked up and over rather than be on the low side where you would slide off and hit the rail and go into the water so and and I think that's also human nature no matter where you are you're going to gravitate to the highest point you're going to get away from the water and so that's where they loaded most of the boats that is correct they would load the boat on the deck and then pick it up and swing it but again because of the rapidity of the sinking they only had so many times that they could do that and then it was every man jack for himself and they jumped overboard was any sign of the boilers having exploded being subjected being high that's a great question and and having been in the boiler room I can tell you it was pretty eerie to see looking in the boil the answer to the question is no boiler rooms that I have seen are totally intact but realize there were six boiler rooms each one with five boilers so this is a huge yeah exactly these are huge rooms as a matter of fact I was told that the engine room on board the Olympians was the largest at that time internal space on any vessel built and it was not going to be countered until we built a one of our first aircraft carrier to have such a huge open expanse I just know that there were double-end Scotch boilers and the thing that was really a moment frozen in time for me was to see the rakes the doors open and just think that someone was raking the coals when the explosion occurred and and then just dropped the rake and ran so yes they were triple triple reciprocating engines on on these I don't know I don't know off the top of my head I can't answer but you got me I knew you were gonna run me till you got me yes on the exterior of the ship all of the oak deck has been eaten away by tornado worms and that what you're looking at when you see in the photographs these lines are actually the caulk that was in between it so the caulk remains in place and it gives you a visual of like what you think you see wood but you're basically seeing the the x-ray or the skeleton of wood so the decks were actually wood no they're they're steel decks with oak on top no no no well you know what honestly that they were not teak decks but there was teak intended on some of the railings and stuff like that because inside the wreck we can see some teak trim but remember she was originally designed to be in a passenger liner and then when she was slated to become a hospital ship they took all of the beautiful fittings out they actually disassembled them and put them in storage because they believe that at the end of the war she would come back and then be refitted and I actually had an opportunity to eat in a restaurant called the white swan hotel in England which is one of the fitting rooms or sitting rooms from the olympic so in a way I've I've been eating in a room that that shows you how opulent these were wood panels and just unbelievable construction anything else would she build it the same the other than the Lucentania? No no the Lucentania was a Cunard ship and this was a white star line which was built in Harlan and Wolfe we were these vessels were all built in Belfast Island at the Harlan and Wolfe shipyard so what's your next project? Great question I am actually going back I'll be back there in May for another two weeks no one has ever seen the engine rooms matter of fact the only views we have of these engine rooms are in pieces from Titanic where she's broken in half so our goal is to get inside and light with multiple divers as these expansive engines and see the beauty because even in his film Titanic Cameron had to go by other ships because there are no photographs you have to remember these were the 747s of their day they never thought them to be unique they thought that they knew they were big but they never thought anything special and so they they never really took a lot of photographs and the only photographs we have of Titanic or promotional photographs that were going to be used to solicit sales they were not for people like us that are students of history that want to know more about some things like the engines of the boiler rooms yes sir okay are you familiar with closed circuit rebreathers okay I'm I'm I usually like to dive with heliox so basically it's 8% oxygen and the balance is 92% helium but some of my team members like to squeak it or add just a little bit of nitrogen back into the mixture for those of you that don't understand diving facility physiology the reason we do this is simple at great depth high partial pressures of oxygen are deadly they can create a seizure and is exactly what killed my friend having too much oxygen is in a mixture so we lower the amount or the fraction of oxygen in our mixture now the problem with that is that if we only used air that would increase the nitrogen and nitrogen has a narcotic effect something that was referred to by Cousteau as martini's law basically at equivalent of 400 feet it would be like drinking eight martinis on an empty stomach so you can understand you don't as much as we may enjoy our martinis I don't want to be inside the ship swimming around with a belly full of martini so what we do is we add an inert gas called helium to offset the narcotic effect so you can see that we're making a balance or a cocktail if you will that will not kill us with oxygen toxicity and will not render us in able to operate because of Narcosis and we do this now with a closed circuit rebreather it's a device that captures your air and breathes it around and in an effect it gives you the perfect breathing mix at depth all the time if I was to use scuba tanks and to try and emulate the the efficiency of a rebreather I would have to carry upwards of 35 different scuba tanks just to regulate my gas mixture at various points in the water so you can understand not only is it logistically impossible to do it's not efficient a closed circuit rebreather is the only way to conduct these kind of dive operations and it gets you out of the water faster by accelerating our decompression because as I come up it keeps giving me higher partial pressures of oxygen and facilitates decompression and getting me out of the water so that's a little bit of a technical question but I think for you you appreciated the the answer correct bottom time we try to go about 45 minutes the longest I've done is 55 minutes at 400 feet and that was almost a seven and a half hour decompression runtime what are the facts have you brought to the surface nothing from this wreck we are not allowed to take anything from Britannic although I've been working with the Belfast Museum who's trying to get permission from the shipwrecks owner a man named Simon Mills who owns the rights to it and the Greek government because it is now as of this year a historic shipwreck to allow some artifacts to be recovered for the Titanic Museum in Belfast as a part of Belfast Irish heritage because obviously she was built in Ireland and they would like her to come home or pieces have her to come home to the museum so I would be part of the salvage team that if they are allowed to do it and then I would be able to tell you about some of the stuff that I was able to pick up one more anybody else oh this is totally totally totally different but given where I am I happen to mention to my host that a few years ago I was hired by the maritime Museum of Wisconsin and the U.S. sub-vets to go out and look at a wreck that had been found by British expatriates in the Gulf of Thailand it was an American submarine that the U.S. Navy sent the grapple to work with Thai Navy divers and they did confirm it was in effect the USS Legardo but what they didn't do was a forensic study to understand what had happened to the to the Legardo basically the Admiral basically told the families that it was obviously a war loss and that it went down during combat operations but nothing else so myself and the team at the request of the sub-vets and the maritime Museum went out there and spent a month in Thailand and did a forensic analysis of the wreck and came to some certain conclusions about the last minutes of the Legardo I was able to interview before his death one of the U.S. submarine captains who had been operating in concert he was on the bail he was working alongside the commander of the Legardo that night that it sank so I have a unique insight into the event and I may come back at a future time and do a presentation about that and with that I want to thank you very much I brought my book in case anyone's interested