Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (45 page)

“Look at it, will you?”

The Argo moved closer, and now a clearly discernible pattern of rivets appeared on the object. The watchers could see it was cylindrical, probably close to thirty feet in diameter, and then they saw it had doors, three of them, furnace doors at that. Suddenly everybody started talking at once.

“It’s a boiler!”

“A boiler?”

“LOOKS LIKE A BOILER!”

“YES! YES! FANTASTIC! IT’S A BOILER!”

“Somebody better go get Bob!”

“Bob” is Robert Ballard, Ph.D., one of the last major players to take the stage in the drama of the Titanic. The boiler seen on the television monitor was one of the twenty-nine boilers installed in the Titanic seventy-three years before—a single-ended boiler from Boiler Room 1. When the Argo found it lying on the ocean floor, it marked the culmination of an ambition that had been driving Ballard for more than ten years: he had found the
Titanic.
¹

Almost from the moment she disappeared into the depths of the North Atlantic, the Titanic was the object of wildly imaginative plans and schemes to raise the wreck. Before too long, though, it became apparent to everyone that the technology of 1912 wasn’t up to the task of even finding the ship, let alone bringing her back up. All that would be left of her were the few objects plucked by passing ships from the rapidly dispersing field of wreckage in the middle of the ocean, the photographs taken of her during her brief life, and the memories of the survivors.

For a brief time, the Olympic enjoyed a rather morbid popularity as passengers would cross the Atlantic on her and vicariously relive the disaster, pointing out to one another places on board where various incidents had taken place on the Olympic’s sister. Among the great favorites were the spot near the First Class Entrance on the Boat Deck, where the band stood as they played their last pieces of music; Lifeboat 8, which Mrs. Straus refused to enter without her husband; and Boat 2, the position from which Collapsible D had been lowered, after Edith Evans gave up her seat to Mrs. John Brown. World War I soon ended this rather bizarre pastime, and when the war was over and the great liners returned to service, the transatlantic passenger trade had changed beyond recognition. Gone were the days of the grand floating palaces: a more casual, egalitarian environment, less concerned with ostentation and more with convenience, replaced the rigid class structures and formal manners of the prewar voyages. By the standards of the 1920s, the ornate elegance of the Titanic seemed pretentious and quaint. The ship and the disaster faded into a distant recess of the public’s memory, intermittently being revived by the editor of some local newspaper on the occasion of the death of a survivor who had lived in his hometown; commemorated sometimes by the unveiling of a new monument or memorial, with ever-dwindling crowds in attendance; remembered only by an annual ceremony conducted by the U.S. Coast Guard, which every April 15 dropped a wreath at 41.46 N., 50.15 W—a tradition that continues to the present day.

The Titanic sometimes made an appearance in literature and more often in film during the years between the two world wars. The most bizarre of these was in Nazi Germany, where a lavish production entitled “
Titanic”
was released in 1938. Like most German films of that time, it was laden with heavy-handed National Socialist propaganda: the hero of the film is one of the ship’s officers (German, of course, and entirely fictitious) who pleads vainly with the arrogant and overbearing (British) captain to slow the ship down. After the Titanic strikes the iceberg, the German officer takes charge and ruthlessly decides who will and will not be allowed into the lifeboats. Obviously, Mr. and Mrs. Straus never appear in the film.

Far less deluded and far more entertaining was a 1930 movie titled “Atlantic,” a screen adaptation of a stage play loosely based on the disaster. Then came the 1932 release of “Calvacade,” Noel Coward’s paean to the British Empire, which provided one of cinema’s great moments, when the newlywed couple walks offscreen to reveal a lifering hanging on the railing behind them, bearing the legend “RMS
Titanic.”
The scene became a cliché, of course, but by virtue of the fact that Coward had done his home-work : Richard and Emily were never patterned after any specific couple, but they could easily have been any one of a dozen sets of newlyweds aboard the Titanic.

The summer of 1952 saw the release of an American production called
“Titanic,”
which starred Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck, with Richard Basehart and Robert Wagner in supporting roles. Although the movie was more fiction than fact (including a scene where the iceberg rips open the port side of the ship), there are moments of drama in it every bit as powerful and moving as the actual disaster. At one point, as Miss Stanwyck—in character—was climbing into a lifeboat after saying goodbye to her once-estranged husband, the actress was overcome by the realization that she was recreating an event that forty years earlier had been all too real. She began weeping uncontrollably. It is also interesting to note that the dilemma of the Third Class passengers who didn’t know how to reach the lifeboats is depicted with remarkable accuracy in this film, years before the plight of Third Class became a cause
célèbre
among revisionist historians.

But the real revival in the public’s interest in the Titanic began in 1955. A young lawyer-turned-author named Walter Lord produced a book about the Titanic disaster called A Night To Remember. He based much of the narrative on interviews with approximately sixty survivors, and the result was a work with such immediacy and realism that the public couldn’t get enough of it: to date A Night To Remember has never been out of print, having gone through thirty-three editions in hardcover and paperback, and has been translated into over a dozen languages. (In 1986, Lord wrote a sequel, The Night Lives On; although it was of immense interest to Titanic buffs the world over, it lacked the spark of the original.)

Two years after Walter Lord’s book appeared, a film adaption bearing the same title played to packed theaters on both sides of the Atlantic. Starring Kenneth More as Lightoller and David McCallum as Harold Bride, the movie was notable for not only its dramatic impact, which was considerable, but its historical faithfulness as well. Fourth Officer Boxhall, who along with Third Officer Pitman were the last surviving officers from the Titanic, was one of the film’s technical advisors.

A “fan club” of sorts was formed in 1962 with the rather ill-chosen name
“Titanic
Enthusiasts of America,” which was later changed to the
“Titanic
Historical Society,” which not only sounded better but was more descriptive of the organization’s function. Based in Indian Orchard, Massachusetts, the society is the repository for a great amount of information about the Titanic and her sisters, as well as all of the great Atlantic liners. The THS would eventually boast a nationwide membership of over five thousand, and similar organizations would soon appear in Great Britain, Ireland, and Canada.

Suddenly the Titanic was a frequent fixture in popular culture: the debut of the American television science-fiction series “Time Tunnel” was set aboard the doomed liner; similarly she was featured in episodes of “The Twilight Zone” and “Night Gallery.” The Titanic even put in an appearance in “Upstairs, Downstairs,” the long-running PBS series about the Edwardian period, centered around the Bellamy household, although no one expected that Lady Marjory Bellamy would be among the great liner’s victims.

While the disaster held the attention of screenwriters, a number of authors were exploring the idea of bring the ship up from the bottom of the sea. Arthur C. Clarke devoted an entire chapter of his science-fiction novel Imperial Earth to a guided tour of the recovered liner, and books as different as Donald A. Stanwood’s murder mystery, The Memory
of Eva
Ryker, and Clive Cussler’s thriller, Raise the Titanic! were centered around expeditions to salvage or recover the ship. Cussler’s book was made into a movie that was released in the summer of 1980. Starring Jason Robards and Richard Jordan, “Raise the
Titanic!”
was, at $45 million, the most expensive movie made up to that time. It was memorable for its spectacular special effects but little else, and the movie vanished almost as quickly as the liner did in 1912. Remarking on how little money the film made when compared to its cost, one observer quipped, “It would have been cheaper to lower the ocean!”
²

The common thread running through all these works was the firm conviction that the Titanic had gone to the bottom in one piece, and that the combination of extreme cold, extreme pressure, low salinity, and very little free oxygen had kept the ship in a sort of deep-sea freeze. Everyone, including oceanographers and marine salvage experts, expected that if the ship were ever found, she would be in a state akin to suspended animation, little changed from the moment she reached the bottom of the ocean on April 15, 1912. What Robert Ballard was about to discover would not only command unprecedented attention, but it would also stun the world.

The son of a NASA engineer, Bob Ballard had to overcome a fear of the water at an early age, and by his teens he was an excellent swimmer. He also discovered that the ocean was the love of his life. An undergraduate degree in physical sciences from the University of Santa Barbara, and graduate school at the University of Hawaii studying geophysics provided him with his academic credentials.

In 1967 Bob Ballard, a fresh young “nugget” (ensign) in the U.S. Navy, specializing in oceanography, joined the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, one of the leading oceanographic research centers in the country, founded in 1930. Working at WHOI was a dream come true for Ballard, who had always taken a hands-on approach to his discipline. By 1973, Ballard, now a civilian, had earned his Ph.D. in marine geology and geophysics, and was assigned to Project FAMOUS, a joint French—American project set up to map the mid-Atlantic Ridge. It was during this two-year-long project that the idea of finding the Titanic first occurred to him.

The idea gave impetus to the development of a concept that Ballard, a leader in the electronics revolution of the early 1970s, had been toying with for some time. He believed that the restrictions on “bottom time”—the time actually spent exploring by deep sea submersible—imposed by limited air supplies, battery power, and crew endurance could be eliminated by taking advantage of the new electronic systems available to the oceanographic sciences. The rapidly expanding capabilities of the various electronic systems should be able to eliminate the necessity for having human beings aboard deep-sea research vessels. Ballard wanted to control the sonars, still cameras, television cameras, and all the manned submersibles that carried and actually did most of their work from a command center aboard a ship on the surface.

After one abortive start with a very primitive form of the device he envisioned (a 1978 expedition sponsored by Alcoa Aluminum that ended in disaster when $600,000 of search equipment was accidentally lost on the ocean floor), Ballard finally received funding from the U.S. Navy, which saw that the system he proposed had real promise for applications in submarine warfare. The exploration equipment he subsequently built went by the name of ANGUS, the Acoustically Navigated Geological Underwater Survey. Essentially a heavy framework supporting equipment for several sonar units arranged along the three major axes, it also contained high-resolution still cameras that use extremely sensitive film (ASA 200,000). The biggest advantage that ANGUS offered was the ability to remain on the bottom indefinitely, being controlled remotely from a mother ship, with guidance signals passed through a cable. To Ballard, this was definitely a more efficient—not to mention more comfortable—method of exploring the ocean floor.

The capability to search the bottom of the ocean for extended periods of time gave Ballard the means to pursue his dream: using ANGUS, along with a remote-control, real-time television sled called Argo, which complemented the capabilities of ANGUS, he could conduct a search for the Titanic. Not only would the undertaking provide an extensive field test of ANGUS and Argo, as well as the feasibility of Ballard’s remote-control exploration ideas, a concept he calls “telepresence,” but the potential publicity would go a long way toward increasing public awareness of the science of oceanography. The U.S. Navy agreed to sponsor a two-part expedition to test Ballard’s equipment in the summer of 1985.