14 DAY TRIAL // A private company prospecting the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea in order to plot a course for a new underwater gas pipe between Algeria and Italy has accidentally come across the Danton French battleship, which was sunk by the German navy during the First World War, in 1917. Reportedly, the ship still has numerous of its turrets still intact, and is even sitting upright below more than 1,000 meters (3,400 feet) of water. The discovery has come as a shock, mainly because everyone thought that the vessel had been torpedoed a few miles away from the place where it has been discovered.
Fugro GeoConsulting Limited, the company that was carrying out the survey, has told the French Admiralty that modern GPS systems are infinitely more accurate than the sextants sailors used to navigate by in the old days. This would explain the mileage difference. Regardless of this fact, blueprints have confirmed that the ship is indeed the Danton. It was named after a French revolutionary, and at the time represented one of the most advanced battleships in existence.
It was torpedoed by the U-64 German submarine, under the command of Lt. Cdr. Robert Moraht, on March 19th, 1917, in the Tyrrhenian Sea, at a mere distance of 30 miles south of the island of Sardinia, while it was on its way to assist the blockade of the Strait of Otranto. Although it had been navigating in zig-zag across the Mediterranean, it couldn't escape the U-64, which struck it at midday. At the moment, the Danton was carrying more people than it normally would have, by some estimates more than 1,000.
Of these, 806 were saved by sailors aboard the Massue destroyer within the 45 minutes it took the ship to go down, who were assisted by other nearby patrol boats. However, 296 members of the crew drowned, caught in the ship's undertow. Surprisingly, the German submarine managed to evade counter-attacks and escaped, leaving the French fleet to deal with a devastating blow.
“Its condition is extraordinary. After it was hit by the torpedoes, the Danton clearly turned turtle and rotated several times. You can see where it dropped some infrastructure on the way down and then impacted on the seabed. You can see where it slid along the seabed before coming to a rest,” Fugro GeoConsulting Limited project director Rob Hawkins told the BBC. The French government is currently seeking to protect the underwater grave, and the gas pipe will most likely take a small detour in the area.