Regina Palace Hotel, Alexandria
2 January 1916
My Dearest Mother
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On Thursday, 30th, just as we had gone down to lunch – I had just finished two anchovies on toast – there was a dull bang, a clatter of falling glass and a shudder through the ship… Everyone got up to fetch their life belts without any panic at all…
Just hours after he reached safety, Second Lieutenant John Lionel Miller-Hallet, “Lion” to his friends, wrote to his mother to say he was safe. On 18 December 1915, Miller-Hallet had set sail from London on the P&O steamship Persia. The liner was bound for India, carrying the Christmas mail, 185 passengers and millions of pounds’ worth of gold and silver. By 30 December, the Persia had reached the eastern Mediterranean. At 1 pm Lion and his fellow first-class passengers sat down for lunch. Five minutes later, the ship was heading for the bottom, sunk without warning by a German submarine.
The Persia was about 110 kilometres south-east of Crete when a single torpedo struck it amidships. Survivors described how the ship heeled over so quickly it was still moving forward as its funnels touched the waves. Max Valentiner, one of most notorious U-boat captains of the first world war, had notched up his first kill of the day. Of the 501 passengers and crew, only 167 survived.
Almost 90 years later, Alec Crawford, the engineering brains behind Scottish salvage company Deep Tek, sat in a hut on the deck of the Kommandor Jack, eyes glued to a video monitor as he operated the controls of a giant pair of shears 2800 metres below him. A few metres more and the shears would touch down on the deck of the Persia. Crawford and his crew were about to attempt the world’s deepest commercial salvage operation inside a wreck. What’s more, they were doing it with a pioneering piece of technology.
Crawford and his wife Moya, Deep Tek’s managing director, had spent years preparing for this moment. They specialise in retrieving lost cargoes beyond the reach of other salvors. In 1993, they had already tripled the world depth record for commercial cargo recovery to 1250 metres by retrieving copper wire-bars and cathodes from the François Vieljeux, a French vessel that sank off north-west Spain in 1979. Although ultimately successful, that operation left them in no doubt that they were pushing conventional salvage technology to its limit. They would never go deeper without a radical rethink.
The basic technique for commercial-scale recovery from wrecks has changed little since the 1930s, when Italian salvors Sorima recovered a fortune in gold from the wreck of the SS Egypt, sunk at a depth of 125 metres. To retrieve the gold, Sorima pioneered the “eye and tool” system: the eye was a man in an underwater observation chamber who directed the operation of a grab by telephone. Deep Tek works on the same principle, but with cameras as its eyes and a more sophisticated set of cutting and lifting tools. Instead of a telephone line, data cables carry images to the shipboard control cabin and Alec’s instructions to the machinery below.
There are ways to go deeper – witness the retrieval in 1987 of artefacts from the Titanic 4000 metres down. But that operation relied on submersibles, which can’t lift enough to be of use in commercial salvage. “It is theoretically possible to lift almost anything if you have a huge ship and money is no object,” says Alec. By the end of the François Vieljeux operation, however, he had designed an ingenious system that made it commercially feasible to salvage even the deepest wrecks.
The biggest difficulties stem from the most fundamental piece of gear: the cable that hangs over the back of the salvage ship. This is both hoist and umbilical cord, supplying underwater equipment with power and relaying images and signals to and from the control room. Conventional umbilicals are made by winding tough steel wire around a conducting copper core. The steel provides strength for lifting and protects the core, but at depth the weight of steel becomes a liability. The weight problem is compounded by the gradual loss of power and signals over longer cables. Beyond about 2500 metres, you need bigger, better-insulated and more heavily armoured cables, which in turn need strengthening with more steel to prevent them breaking under their own weight. It’s a vicious circle that leads to ever heavier umbilicals that are increasingly hard to handle and prohibitively expensive.
The only solution was to dispense with steel and try something completely different: a synthetic line developed in the mid-1990s by the Puget Sound Rope company of Anacortes, Washington. The company discovered it could convert fibres of ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene into something much stronger by twisting them into strands, immersing them in hot liquid and drawing them out under high tension. The process leaves the molecules straighter and the strands 80 per cent stronger. These are then braided into what the company calls Plasma rope, a deceptively soft cable as strong as steel but which floats in water. “Because it has no weight in water, its full strength can be used to lift equipment and cargo,” says Sam Bull, vice-president of the company.
That solved the weight problem, but what about power and communications? It is impossible to use fibre rope to construct a conventional umbilical because it flattens as it passes over a pulley or is wound onto a drum, crushing internal cables. Rope and cables could be lowered independently, but then each would have to support its own weight, and there would be a risk of tangling and more drag in strong currents. Alec’s answer was the Winder. “This was the brilliant part of the concept,” says Bull. As the Plasma rope unwinds from a central drum, two other drums rotate around it, simultaneously letting out the power and data cables so they wind around the rope in neat spirals. The rope takes the weight of the cables, allowing the use of higher-voltage power lines and fibre-optic cables that transmit data faster and over longer distances than copper ones. “This was the only way we reckoned we could work in deep water and lift heavy loads,” Alec says.
Now they needed a wreck on which to test the concept. “The Persia was one of very few wrecks that would justify investment in developing the technology,” Moya says. The ship had been sunk in the Hellenic Trench, one of the deepest parts of the Mediterranean, but the prize could be huge. The ship’s manifest and insurers listed bullion worth some £30 million.
In 2001, Deep Tek went looking for the Persia. With three different reports of its last position, the wreck could be anywhere in an area of almost 800 square kilometres and at a depth of between 2500 and 4500 metres. “And it wasn’t like looking for the Titanic, which is a huge ship on a flat seabed,” says Moya. “We were looking for a much smaller ship in a subduction zone where the sea floor drops away like giant steps.” Nor was the Persia the only wreck in the area. “Valentiner sank quite a few ships – two just on that one day.”
Guessing that the position in Valentiner’s log was likely to be the most accurate, the salvors started there. The first hint of a wreck came as they towed a magnetometer over the search area. “Suddenly there was a huge spike in the signal,” Moya says. Was it a ship? They searched again with sonar, and on the final day of that season’s expedition the outline of a ship appeared. Was it the Persia? Confirmation would have to wait until the next spring.
The following March, Deep Tek was back with cameras, 3400 metres of Plasma rope, the latest version of the Winder and a fibre-optic cable for sending video images to the surface. Positioning their cameras above the wreck, they began to look for features that would identify it as the Persia. “The funnels had been ripped off when she sank, but there were two holes where they should have been,” Moya says. “The domed skylight over the first-class saloon was long gone too, but there was a telltale void.” It was the Persia, sitting upright at a depth of 2800 metres. “We had a glass of wine to celebrate, then the next morning at 5 am we started a full salvage operation.”
The goal was the bullion room, a small vault between the mail and baggage rooms five decks down. From now on, everyone worked round the clock, cutting steel and moving debris from the upper decks. With cameras attached to each piece of gear, Alec could watch and precisely control every move.
Persia’s decks were steel plate, reinforced by steel beams. To begin with, it was relatively easy to pull out the rivets and lift off the plates with a grab, then cut through the beams with the giant shears. “But as we went down, there was less and less corrosion,” Alec says. “The steel was like new and the rivets not at all corroded.” He was forced to design a special crushing grab with a closing force of 1100 tonnes to twist and buckle each deck plate until even the most stubborn rivets popped. Eventually only one obstacle remained: the floor of the first-class pantry immediately above the bullion room was made of concrete 6 centimetres thick. Repeatedly smashing the concrete with a heavy weight eventually exposed the final layer of steel.
“Eventually only one obstacle remained: the floor of the first-class pantry”
By 2004, the team had cut through five decks, shifting hundreds of tonnes of decking and debris to leave a shaft big enough to manoeuvre the gear. Now it was time to send in a self-loading skip, equipped with its own thruster, three cameras and a jointed robot arm. The thruster allowed Alec to position the skip on the edge of the void one deck above the bullion room, from where the robot arm could reach down and retrieve anything of interest. With the Winder, the team could lift 3 tonnes of salvage at a time. By the end, they had removed 100 cubic metres of material from bullion, baggage and mail rooms.
As each skip came aboard, Moya sifted the contents. “Once you’ve removed the lumps of steel and concrete you’re left with gunge containing all sorts of things.” They included powerful reminders that the Persia had been full of people when it sank. Some objects had fallen in from the pantry and first-class dining saloon where Miller-Hallet had taken lunch. There were monogrammed plates and cutlery, nuts, and bottles of all sorts, from Camp coffee to champagne, some still intact. The mail room’s contents were particularly poignant. Among the 1500 tonnes of mail were letters and parcels, many containing Christmas gifts – silk socks and embroidered slippers, a home-made tie, shaving brushes, novelty pipes and diaries for 1916. “Occasionally there would be something really touching, like a pair of baby’s bootees, and that really brought home the human tragedy,” says Moya.
There was excitement when Moya began picking gems from the muck – first a garnet, then moonstones and amethysts, and a collection of rubies. There was amazement at the survival of so many newspapers and magazines in the mail room. The papers were tied in tight bundles, and while some were black and crumbling, others were pristine. “The newspapers were full of reports from the western front but there were constant reminders that despite the war everyday life went on – gossip, fashion, adverts for last-minute Christmas presents.” There were Christmas issues of comics and women’s magazines, one complete with a still usable tissue-paper pattern for a new muff and stole.
Unexpected guests
The black bundles produced a bigger surprise. In the debris, Moya had found several stiff-walled tubes a metre long, and hundreds of smaller fragments. They looked like the tubes of vestimentiferans: mouthless, gutless worms that live around hydrothermal vents and hydrocarbon seeps in the seabed, relying for nutrition on bacteria in their tissues that fix carbon dioxide using energy from the oxidation of sulphide. The worms supply the sulphide, which they absorb from sediment. In 1992, the Crawfords had discovered tubeworms on sacks of coffee beans in the François Vieljeux. Bacterial breakdown of the beans had created a sulphide-rich sediment, simulating conditions around a seep. The presence of tubeworms in the Persia’s mail room was more puzzling.
Moya consulted deep-sea biologist David Hughes at the Scottish Association for Marine Science at Dunstaffnage. From body fragments inside some of the tubes, he identified the worms as a species of Lamellibrachia. It turned out to be a recently discovered species that lives around mud volcanoes in the eastern Mediterranean. The nearest known population is about 200 kilometres west of the Persia.
Close inspection of the blackened bundles revealed fine tubes penetrating the layers of compressed paper. In the Gulf of Mexico tubeworms increase their intake of sulphide by sending fine “rootlets” into the sediment. These looked identical. To Hughes this suggested the Persia’s worms were doing the same – but with paper as their source of sulphide. “It seemed improbable. Paper is so highly processed and its organic components – lignin and cellulose – are extremely resistant to decay. They are reluctant to release anything nutritious.” Yet the bundles are so compacted that Hughes believes they could have provided the necessary oxygen-free environment for specialist anaerobic bacteria capable of breaking down cellulose. The resulting sugars support sulphate-reducing bacteria that generate sulphides as a by-product of their metabolism. In an environment where suitable places to settle are rare and far apart, tubeworm larvae seem able to exploit any suitable substrate, Hughes says. “Even paper will do if there’s enough of it and the local chemical conditions are right.”
All these finds were fascinating, but Deep Tek had come in search of gold and silver. What did they find? “The bullion room was full of material,” Moya says, “but nothing shiny.” For some reason, the bullion had been stowed elsewhere. Although the project was insured against such a contingency, it was still a bitter disappointment.
Where Deep Tek did succeed was in proving that the Winder system offers a practical and cost-effective way to reach the deep ocean – improving access for deep-sea scientists and for the oil and gas industry as it seeks to expand into deeper waters. “We didn’t find treasure but in engineering terms the operation was a huge success,” says Moya. With a Plasma rope and Winder, researchers could work from the back of a small ship – even a yacht – making deep-sea science far cheaper. For an oil industry moving into ever deeper water in search of fresh reserves, the challenge lies in installing heavy equipment on the seabed. The next generation of Winder will be able to lift 250 tonnes.
Until Deep Tek’s technology starts to pay dividends, the most valuable prize salvaged from the Persia was the handful of rubies. But when Moya consulted Scotland’s top gemmologists she discovered that two-thirds of the gems were fake. Strangely, that turned out to be good news. “Because they are some of the earliest dateable examples of synthetic rubies, they are now worth more than real ones,” she says.
As treasure goes, this was a small haul. So will Deep Tek go back for the bullion? “Yes, but only if something turns up to tell us where it was,” says Moya. “Maybe someone somewhere made a note. And maybe one day it will come to light. With wrecks, anything is possible.”
