Five Famous Shipwrecks

Mary Rose
Built between 1509 and 1511, the Mary Rose was one of the first ships able to fire a broadside and was a firm favourite of King Henry VIII, described as, “the fairest flower of all the ships that ever sailed”. The ship marked the transition between the medieval ‘floating castles’ and the galleons of Elizabeth I's navy. On July 19 1545, King Henry VIII was at Southsea to watch the pride of his fleet sail out to engage French raiders. However, he ended up watching a disaster as the heavily laden Mary Rose heeled over in a squall of wind and rapidly capsized, water pouring into the lower gun ports. She had more than 90 guns on her decks at the time and her crew may have consisted of 700 members, of whom fewer than 40 are thought to have survived.

Salvage work started the same year the great warship sank, raising some guns, yards and sails, but was halted by 1550 - Mary Rose had partly settled into the silt which was to preserve her for future generations. It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that a concerted attempt to study the wreck was instigated by a team led by Alexander McKee. His efforts culminated in the sodden timbers of the Tudor warship breaking the surface of the Solent after more than four centuries on the seabed. In 1982, an estimated 60 million people watched the live recovery of the Mary Rose on TV. Today, the ship is still being sprayed with preservative polyethylene glycol to prevent the timber from decomposing. This is expected to be complete in 2008, and then she will undergo a slow drying process. Until then visitors to Portsmouth’s Historic Dockyard, have to content themselves with seeing her through glass screens and a preservative mist.

Titanic
The White Star liner Titanic sank, after collision with an iceberg, on 15 April 1912. She had been built by Harland and Wolff, and was registered at 46,328 gross tons. The Titanic boasted a gymnasium, swimming pools, a squash court and Turkish baths. At 11.40pm on 14 April 1912, the Titanic’s lookout rang the bell three times and said, “Iceberg right ahead”. Sadly all subsequent efforts to avoid collision came too late and a rock-hard spur of ice ripped into the ship like a giant tin opener, puncturing 250ft of the ship’s hull. With too few lifeboats on board for the number of passengers, panic started to set in. At 2.20 am on 15 April 1912, the Titanic made her final plunge into the depths of the North Atlantic - 1,503 people died.

Probably the most famous shipwreck of all time, the 2.5-mile-deep grave of the Titanic is 323 nautical miles southeast of Newfoundland. Discovered on 1 September 1985 by a team of scientists led by Captain Jean-Louis Michel and Dr. Robert Ballard, the ship had broken into two virtual halves - the bow and the stern. The bow remains relatively intact, while 2000 feet away the stern lies severely damaged and deformed. Today, you can witness the world’s most famous shipwreck onboard an M.I.R. submersible that sets off from St John’s, Canada - you can see the famous bow and the bridge where Captain E.H. Smith issued the last orders.

Lusitania
Sailing from New York to Liverpool, the pride of the Cunard fleet, Lusitania, nicknamed ‘the greyhound of the seas’, was sunk by a German torpedo off the Old Head of Kinsale, Southern Ireland on Friday 7th May, 1915. At the outbreak of war in August 1914, the Lusitania had been handed over to the Admiralty and sent to the Canada Dock, Liverpool, where she was equipped with twelve 6-inch guns. She entered the Admiralty fleet register as an armed auxiliary cruiser, and her armament gave her a heavier broadside than the Royal Navy cruisers that patrolled the English Channel. Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, visited Liverpool and surveyed the Lusitania. He made a remark that would haunt him: "To me she's just another 45,000 tons of live bait."

Shortly after 2:10 pm on Friday 7 May 1915, Lusitania – a mighty 30,396 tons - was hit without warning by a torpedo. She sank in a matter of 20 minutes and 1,201 men, women and children were lost. Of these fatalities, 128 were American citizens. The U20, the German submarine that fired the torpedo, circled the sinking ship then fled the scene, reaching its base at Wilhelmshaven on 13 May. The first discovery of the wreck site was in 1935. One of the Lusitania's quadruple screws was salvaged in 1982, and can now be seen on the quayside at the Merseyside Maritime Museum in the Albert Dock, Liverpool.

Bismarck
With a displacement of 50,000 tonnes when fully laden, a top speed of 30 knots and several batteries of heavy guns, the Bismarck was seen as the pride of the German navy. Described by Winston Churchill as, "a terrific ship and a masterpiece of naval construction," she measured 17 storeys from top to bottom and the length of three football fields. However, the maiden voyage of this German warship was short-lived. In May 1941, after an eight-day chase in the Atlantic, Bismarck succumbed to attack from the British in one of the most dramatic sea battles of the war. Crippled by such heavy enemy fire, Bismarck tumbled and slid to a halt on a steep undersea mountain. Only 115 of the 2,200 men (whose average age was 21) aboard the Bismarck survived.

In 1989, after combing an area of some 200 square miles, Dr Robert D Ballard and his team finally found Bismarck's remains. The site lies 380 miles south of Cork, Ireland, and some 15,000 feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic. Despite the effect of the heavy shell and torpedo damage the British inflicted on the battleship and the obvious effects of the sinking itself, the wreck is in surprisingly good condition. Several expeditions have been made to Bismarck, subsequent to permission being cleared with the German government – the rightful owner of the war grave. Visitors include Bismarck survivors, Heinrich Kunht and Heinz Steeg, and U.S. film director, James Cameron.

Belgrano
The sinking of the Belgrano warship is one of the most dramatic and controversial events of the Falklands War. On May 2 1982, HMS Conqueror, the British nuclear submarine, fired two torpedoes at the Argentine warship, ARA General Belgrano. Some 300 men were killed on impact. As the formidable warship began to sink, one of the most difficult marine rescue operations ever was conducted. The torpedo strike killed 323 of the Belgrano's 1093 crew, nearly half of Argentina's total war casualties.

In February 2003 the National Geographic Society, in conjunction with the Argentine navy, launched an expedition to scour the depths of the South Atlantic for the wreck. After nearly two weeks at sea, in extreme Southern Ocean weather conditions, the expedition was unable to find the ship. Despite the fact the cruiser is thought to be 4km underwater, 180km off the coast of Argentina and in notoriously rough seas, the team hoped its equipment — the same used to locate the Titanic — would quickly find the wreck.