SS Burdigala

Burdigala's story starts as a failure. Built by Schichau at Danzig and launched in 1897 as Kaiser Friedrich for Norddeutscher Lloyd, she was meant to take the Blue Riband for the fastest Atlantic crossing and never got close, managing barely 20 knots against a contracted 22; her German owners rejected her within a year and she spent a decade mothballed in Hamburg before the French line Sud-Atlantique bought her in 1912 and renamed her Burdigala, after the Latin name for Bordeaux. War service followed fast: from 1914 she ran troops from Toulon to the Dardanelles and Thessaloniki, and in December 1915 was fitted with deck guns as an armed cruiser.

On 14 November 1916, sailing empty from Thessaloniki back to Toulon, she was hit amidships about two nautical miles off Kea. Her captain thought she had twenty minutes; a second explosion broke her in two roughly fifteen minutes after the order to abandon ship, and by most accounts only one man was lost. Her captain reported firing on a submarine periscope and always maintained she had been torpedoed, and the French government's official record agreed, but the diving team who eventually found her argued from mine-laying records that she most likely struck one of the same U-73 mines that would sink Britannic seven days later, in almost the same patch of water.

The wreck itself was lost track of for the better part of a century. In 2008 an expedition called the Kea Dive Expedition located what they initially logged only as the 'Unknown Shipwreck of Kea' and, working from her machinery and fittings, identified her as Burdigala over several further missions through 2012. She lies upright and broken across the seabed, her deck reported at 53 to 60 m depending on the source and the seabed itself near 70 m — a serious trimix dive, but a more approachable one than her neighbour, since the whole wreck sits within reach on a single set of tanks rather than needing the multi-day staging Britannic requires.