The Night Lives On (22 page)

None of this was especially surprising. What
was
surprising was the particular individual who led the parade. Douglas Woolley knew nothing about oceanography. He was an English workman who dyed nylon stockings in a hosiery factory. He had no scientific training, no experience in salvage, no college degree, no financial resources; but he did have an obsession about the
Titanic.
Sitting in his cluttered one-room flat in the small English town of Baldock, he whiled away the hours dreaming of finding and raising the lost liner. He also had a remarkable knack for getting his plans into the newspapers. Apparently, through some intuitive
understanding of an editor’s mind, he could regularly get coverage that would be the envy of a highly paid public relations consultant.

Starting in 1966, Woolley announced his plans for raising the
Titanic
almost annually, and every time the press would pick up his release and give it fresh treatment, as though it had never happened before. At first he made only the local papers, but by 1968 he was appearing in even the august
Times.

As reported in the press, Woolley originally planned to find the
Titanic
by means of a “bathyscaphe,” and then raise her by means of nylon balloons attached to her hull. These would be pumped full of air, letting the ship “gently rise to the surface.” How the balloons would be inflated 13,000 feet down wasn’t clear.

For a while it seemed as if something might actually come of Woolley’s dreams. Two Hungarian inventors turned up with a plan that looked, on paper at least, impressively scientific. An admittedly shadowy group of West German investors (some said three; others, ten) promised the necessary capital. A London accountant incorporated the project as the
Titanic
Salvage Company. And finally, even a boat was obtained, which Woolley thought could be turned into a practical salvage vessel.

Then all began to unravel. The Hungarians’ plan called for plastic bags to be filled with hydrogen produced by electrolysis of the seawater, and only a week had been allowed to generate the 85,000 cubic yards of hydrogen that would theoretically be needed to move the
Titanic.
A scholarly paper by an American chemistry professor showed that it might take not a week, but ten years. The West German investors never
materialized; the
Titanic
Salvage Company remained little more than a name; and even the boat turned out to be a dud. Lying at Newlyn in Cornwall, it was so old and rusty that local fishermen predicted it would never get out of the harbor. Gradually the whole project evaporated.

But Douglas Woolley did achieve one thing. He started a lot more people thinking about finding the
Titanic.
During the 1970’s at least eight different groups planned to explore the ship. Some wanted only to locate and film her; others hoped to raise her, and there was no limit to their ingenuity. One plan called for 180,000 tons of molten wax to be pumped into the vessel. When hardened, the wax would become buoyant and lift the
Titanic
to the surface. Another plan would work the same way, but with Vaseline.

Still another plan would achieve buoyancy by injecting thousands of Ping-Pong balls into the hull. Another would employ gigantic winches to crank the ship up. Yet another would encase the liner in ice. Then, like an ordinary cube in a drink, the ice would rise to the surface, bringing the
Titanic
with it.

Whatever the practicality, all the plans suffered from a common fault: they cost too much. One scheme, for instance, contemplated the use of benthos glass floats…but it turned out that the necessary number would cost $238,214,265.

Just mounting the expedition would require more than most people were willing to risk. A truly suitable vessel—and there were very few—would eat up $10,000 a day. Add to this the cost of the equipment needed, which looked like a list drawn up on another planet: a deep-tow wide-screen sonar sled, a three-axis magnetometer, a sub-bottom profiler, a depressor, and a
number of acoustic transponders…plus a payroll that covered every requirement from a top oceanographer to a decent cook. Altogether, the total outlay could easily run over a million dollars.

Nor was it a sure thing even then. The exact position of the
Titanic
remained uncertain, and the search required a calm sea in one of the roughest areas of ocean in the world. No wonder the odds-makers put the chances of finding the ship at less than 50% to 60%.

These odds were good enough for Jack Grimm, a wealthy Texas wildcat oilman, who appeared on the scene in 1980. He had already sponsored expeditions in search of Noah’s ark, the Loch Ness monster, and the legendary Big Foot. Now, when a professional expedition leader named Mike Harris suggested the
Titanic
as a new project, Grimm quickly agreed. After all, he had drilled 25 straight dry holes before he finally hit his first gusher. Compared to striking oil, the chances of finding the
Titanic
seemed almost promising. Moreover, there were the dividends: fame, publicity, adventure.

Jack Grimm gave it his best shot. He talked up the project at the Petroleum Club in his hometown, Abilene, got some of his poker-playing buddies to take a piece of the action. He hired the William Morris Agency to handle TV, movie, and serialization rights. He arranged for a book. He persuaded Orson Welles to narrate a documentary.

Above all, he won respectability. In a deal with Columbia University, Grimm gave $330,000 to the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory for a wide-sweep sonar rig, and in return got five years’ exclusive use of the equipment plus the services of the technical personnel needed to run it. Lured by the prospects, two
distinguished oceanographers also signed on: Dr. William Ryan of Columbia and Dr. Fred Spiess of the Scripps Institution in California.

July 17, 1980, the expedition set out from Port Everglades, Florida, in the research vessel
H.J.W. Fay.
They reached the search area on the 29th, and for the next three weeks plodded back and forth with no really promising results. Finally, they ran out of time and went back home.

June 29, 1981, they headed out again, this time on the research vessel
Gyre.
Reaching the search area, they spent nine days checking out possibilities suggested by their sonar the previous summer, and scanning other less likely areas. Again nothing definite, although Grimm felt sure they had located a propeller.

July 1983, they returned for one more try, now on the research vessel
Robert Conrad.
This time the cameras didn’t function properly, and they were further handicapped by high seas. After two weeks they again returned home empty-handed. An optimist in the ship’s company felt that the sonar had picked up a profile characteristic of the
Titanic
, but the world remained unconvinced. One skeptic thought that it looked more like “a computer code on a can of green beans.”

Aware of these fruitless efforts, the press paid little attention when still another group set out to find the
Titanic
in the summer of 1985. This time the sponsor was the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; the ship was the Institution’s 245-foot research vessel
Knorr
; and the leader was Dr. Robert D. Ballard, a personable 42-year-old geologist, who headed up the Institution’s Deep Submergence Laboratory. To the casual observer, the expedition appeared to be like all the others—an ungainly-looking boat loaded with mysterious hardware.

First, a stop at the Azores. Here Bob Ballard and most of his team joined the ship. There was now a total of 49 people aboard—24 scientists and 25 in the crew. Leaving Ponta Delgada on August 15, they headed not northwest for the
Titanic
, but southeast for the position of the U.S. nuclear submarine
Scorpion
, mysteriously lost with all hands in 1968. They spent the 17th taking pictures of the sunken sub, and if these photographs throw any new light on what happened to her, this could well be the most important accomplishment of the entire expedition. At the time, it went virtually unnoticed.

Then on to the search area, a 150-square mile block of sea based on the
Titanic’s
last given position. Some 80% of this area had been combed earlier in the summer by the French government’s research vessel,
Le Suroit.
She had not found anything, but her presence pointed up the fact that the expedition was a joint Franco-American venture, manned by scientists from both countries. The main American contribution was a unique video camera system built into a deep-towed vehicle called
Argo;
while the French contributed a revolutionary side-scanning sonar named SAR, which could examine the ocean floor in swaths three fifths of a mile wide—far beyond the limits of anything previously invented.

In keeping with the partnership concept, Bob Ballard had been on
Le Suroit
during July, working with her team of scientists. They had spent six weeks “mowing the lawn” (as the oceanographers put it) until
Le Suroit
finally ran out of time and had to go home. Now Jean Jarry, director of the French effort, was serving on the
Knorr
with two of his group.

Arriving on the scene August 22, the
Knorr
took over where
Le Suroit
left off. Behind her, and nearly
13,000 feet down, she towed
Argo.
Roughly the size of an automobile, it earned the newly devised video system. No less than five television cameras (pointing ahead, downward, and sideways) were packed into the unit, along with sonar, sensors, computerized timing equipment, and banks of powerful strobe lights. Overall, the contraption was virtually a robot, managed by scientists over two miles above, sitting in the relative comfort of the
Knorr’s
control room.

But even
Argo
didn’t seem able to conjure up the
Titanic.
Day after day slipped by, and the men monitoring the screens in the control room saw only the same empty seabed. Occasionally a rat-tailed fish might swim briefly into view, but for the most part it was just mile after mile of mud and sand dunes.

The night of August 31-September 1 began like all the others. The
Knorr
crept slowly along the path of the search pattern, deep-towing
Argo
as usual. In the control room a seven-man watch under Bob Ballard dutifully monitored the video screens, but there was nothing interesting to look at—just more miles of mud. At midnight Ballard’s group was relieved by the 12:00 to 4:00 watch under Jean-Louis Michel, leader of the French scientists. Ballard went below for a shower and some rest.

Shortly before 1:00, small chunks of metal debris suddenly began showing up on the screens. They were unidentifiable, but definitely not part of the natural seascape.

“You’d better go and get Bob,” Michel ordered, but the group in the control room seemed riveted to the spot, fascinated by the fast-growing trail of debris. Finally, someone persuaded the cook to go, and he
brought back Ballard in time to see a large metal cylinder appear on the video tube at 1:05.

It was clearly a boiler. Better than that, it was unmistakably a boiler from the
Titanic.
Nothing else could have that particular arrangement of three stoking doors at one end, or that particular configuration of rivets. Ballard’s team had studied pictures of those boilers for months—knew them by heart—and now they had found one.

It was only the beginning. The scientists estimated that the debris trail ran for nearly 600 yards, with a huge, shadowy, solid object at the end. But they would not find out what it was tonight. Twenty minutes had passed since the filming of the debris began, and it was now so thick that Ballard feared
Argo
might become entangled in some piece of rigging and be damaged or lost. Playing it safe, he ordered the unit to be hauled up until the bottom could be more thoroughly checked by sonar.

At 1:40 someone observed that it was close to the time of night when the
Titanic
made her final plunge. The remark gave Ballard an idea. He had always been deeply aware of the immense tragedy that lay behind this expedition; now he invited the group to join him on the fantail for a brief memorial service.

Next morning the sonar check indicated that it was safe for
Argo
to go back to work, and it soon became clear that the huge shadowy object at the end of the debris trail was the forepart of the
Titanic
herself. From what was visible, she looked in astonishingly good shape. When last seen that April night in 1912, the ship was plunging headfirst almost straight down, but now she sat upright, with just a slight list to port. The
forecastle was not crumpled, and even the anchor chains were neatly aligned, as though ready for one of Captain Smith’s Sunday inspections.

The foremast leaned against the bridge, but the crow’s nest was intact, looking exactly the way it did when Lookout Fleet phoned his famous warning, “Iceberg right ahead.” Aft of the bridge, the early camera work did not reveal very much. Two gaping holes showed where the forward funnel and the glass dome over the grand staircase had been. Beyond this point the light was too dim.

Most amazing of all was the
Titanic’s
pristine appearance. There was little of the marine growth that usually sprouts all over a sunken vessel. At 13,000 feet it was too dark and too cold for much to grow. Only a thin film of silt covered the ship—so thin that it was easy to count every rivet and trace the lines of every plank in her decks.

The clarity was so great that dozens of objects could be identified amid the debris alongside the ship: lumps of coal…luggage…beds…bottles of wine miraculously unbroken…a silver platter…a chamberpot. The sharpness of detail gave the disaster an immediacy that sobered even the excitement of discovery.

For the next five days the
Knorr
cruised back and forth over the
Titanic’s
grave, deep-towing
Argo
behind her.
Argo
videotaped the wreck, and later another deep-towed robot named
Angus
made a series of passes using cameras loaded with 35-mm colorfilm. Coverage was somewhat limited: close-ups endangered the equipment, and truly long-range shots were beyond available light. Still, they covered most of the forward end of the ship, and far enough aft to learn that the stern was missing.
Pictures taken by
Angus
on the fifth day caught debris from the missing section hundreds of feet aft of the rest of the wreck. The first and last runnels were gone too, and
Argo
had a narrow escape when it brushed against some pieces of wreckage while making a turn.