On 25 August 1914, the newly designated HMS Oceanic departed Southampton to patrol the waters from the North Scottish mainland to Faroe.

In the late 1890s the White Star Line's existing flagship ocean liners Teutonic and Majestic both launched in 1889, had become outmoded due to rapid advances in marine technology: Their competitors, the Cunard Line, had introduced the Campania and Lucania in 1893, and from 1897 the German Norddeutscher Lloyd began introducing four new Kaiser-class ocean liners beginning with Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse.

[2] The RMS Oceanic was built at Harland and Wolff’s Queen's Island yard at Belfast, as was the tradition with White Star Line ships, and her keel was laid down in 1897.

At 17,272 gross register tons, the future "Queen of the Ocean" cost one million pounds sterling[a] and required 1,500 shipwrights to complete.

However, Oceanic was not designed to be the fastest ship afloat or compete for the Blue Riband, as it was the White Star Line's policy to focus on size and comfort rather than speed.

[6] The architect Richard Norman Shaw was employed as the consultant for the design of much of the interiors of the ship, which were lavishly decorated in the first-class sections.

A separate deckhouse at the aft end of the superstructure provided both open and closed promenade decks and housed a library and smoke room which were scaled-down versions of their First Class counterparts.

This allowed for a more open layout which was far less crowded, complete with long tables and wooden benches where male passengers were served their meals.

As was seen aboard Teutonic and Majestic, as well as the newly completed Cymric, there were a limited number of two-berth and four-berth cabins, these were strictly reserved for married couples and families with children.

Following her fitting out and sea trials, she left Belfast for Liverpool on the 26 August that year, and when she arrived she was opened to the public and press where she was received with great fanfare.

One disappointing feature which soon became apparent in service was the tendency for the ship to experience excessive vibration at full speed, due in part to her long and narrow design.

[2] On 7 August 1901 in a heavy fog, near Tuskar Rock, Ireland, Oceanic was involved in a collision with the small Waterford Steamship Company Kincora, sinking the smaller vessel and killing seven.

[15] Oceanic had been built under a deal with the Admiralty, which made an annual grant toward the maintenance of any ship on the condition that it could be called upon for naval work, during times of war.

[2] Oceanic headed for Scapa Flow in Orkney, Britain's main naval anchorage, with easy access to the North Sea and the Atlantic.

While everyone on the bridge thought they were well to the southwest of the Isle of Foula, they were in fact an estimated thirteen to fourteen miles (21 to 23 km) farther north than they believed and to the east of the island instead of the west.

This put them directly on course for a reef, the notorious Shaalds of Foula (also known as the Hoevdi Grund and so marked on charts), which poses a major threat to shipping, coming within a few feet of the surface, and in calm weather giving no warning sign whatsoever.

[2] The ship ran aground on the Shaalds on the morning of 8 September, approximately 2.5 nautical miles (4.6 km; 2.9 mi) east of Foula's southern tip.

[16] The Aberdeen trawler Glenogil was the first vessel on the scene, and although she attempted to pull off the massive ship, it proved an impossible task, and with the hull already ruptured, Oceanic would not have stayed afloat long in open waters.

The 573-ton Admiralty salvage vessel Lyons was dispatched to the scene hurriedly, and in the words of the Laird of Foula, Professor Ian Holbourn, writing about the disaster in his book The Isle of Foula: The launch of the Lyons, a salvage boat which hurried to the scene, was capable of a speed of ten knots, yet was unable to make any headway against the tide although she tried for fifteen minutes.

One of the Foula men, wise to the full power and fury of a Shetland storm, is said to have muttered with a cynicism not unknown in those parts "I‘ll give her two weeks".

The disaster was covered up at the time, since it was felt that it would have been embarrassing to make public how a world-famous liner had run aground in friendly waters in good weather within a fortnight of beginning its service as a naval vessel.

A similar charge was made against Commander Smith at a second court-martial; the evidence for the prosecution was the same as in the previous case, but witnesses were cross-examined with a view to showing that the position of the accused on Oceanic was not clearly defined by the naval authorities, and that he was understood to be acting solely in an advisory capacity.

[19] Over the next six years, Simon Martin and Alec Crawford, with wet-suits and Scuba gear, and initially working from an inflatable dinghy, recovered more than 200 tonnes of non-ferrous metal.