Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (46 page)

The first part was a highly classified operation off the Azores, an attempt to find the remains of the USS Scorpion, an attack submarine lost in 1969, as well as the wreck of the Soviet sub that allegedly rammed and sank her. The second part was a French-American expedition to locate the wreck of the Titanic. IFREMER, the French Oceanographic Institute, would provide one of the survey ships, Le Suroit, in addition to a number of technicians and scientists.

Le Suroit began the search while the
Knorr
was still off the Azores, but by the end of the first week of August, with her supplies running low, she hadn’t found anything, and the
Knorr
took over. Three weeks of patient sailing back and forth across the search area towing the Argo behind her, a process the crew christened “mowing the lawn,” brought the
Knorr
and her crew to the spot where, a little after 1:00 A.M. on September 1, one of the Argo’s controllers looked up and said, “Somebody better go get Bob.”

Dr. Ballard dashed to the control room, where Jean-Louis Michel played the videotape of the discovery of the boiler for him. On the live-action monitors, a litter-strewn field of wreckage was passing by. There was no doubt about it—that boiler was from the Titanic: only the boilers installed in that great trio of White Star ships had that peculiar pattern of rivets on the faces and that particular arrangement of firedoors. Ballard stood transfixed as the seemingly endless field of debris—it was later determined to be more than 600 yards long—passed under the Argo’s cameras: lumps of coal; a silver platter ; bottles of champagne; rusty bedsprings; chamber pots; leaded glass panels from the First Class Smoking Room; copper pans from one of the galleys; the corroded remains of a workman’s tool kit. Ballard looked at the clock, and unconsciously echoing Captain Smith’s words from seventy-three years before, muttered, “Oh, my God.”

That got everyone’s attention, and Ballard quickly explained, “It’s nearly two o’clock, close to the time when the Titanic went down. I don’t know about anybody else, but at twenty past two, I’ll be on the fantail.” He then turned and left the control room.

By 2:20, almost everyone had joined Ballard on the fantail, an open area at the very stern of the ship. Atypically, for Ballard is not a modest man, he didn’t make a big production out of what he had to say. Instead he spoke quietly for a few minutes, saying that each person could be alone with their thoughts, but that it would be fitting to remember the more than 1,500 people who had died that cold April night. After a short silence, Ballard urged everyone to get back to work; there was still a lot to do.

The Argo had been brought up, since “flying” it just forty feet off the sea floor ran too great a risk of having it run smack into the wreck itself. It was time for ANGUS, and before the weather forced the team to suspend operations, the camera sled was able to shoot a remarkable amount of footage, including a complete photo-montage of the wreck.

The rest of Bob Ballard’s work on the Titanic is easily summed up. In July 1986, a second expedition was launched, again under the sponsorship of the U.S. Navy, using the research ship
Atlantis II.
This time a manned submersible, the Alvin, went along and made a series of eleven dives on the wreck, taking hundreds of spectacular—and sometimes heart-breaking—pictures. On three of the dives, Ballard was able to test another of his remote-control devices, a small self-propelled camera pod called
Jason,
Jr., or
JJ.
It was only partially successful, but it did enable Ballard to go inside the wreck at some points and bring back truly memorable photos and video footage. On the last dive, the Alvin placed a bronze plaque on the stern of the wreck, a memorial to those who went down with the Titanic.

Just as had happened in 1985 when Ballard announced the discovery of the wreck of the Titanic, the 1986 expedition was front-page news all over the world. The still pictures and video footage taken by Alvin and JJ were reproduced thousands of times in newspapers and magazines and endlessly replayed on national and local news broadcasts, in almost every language. The public’s endless fascination with what Ballard called the “greatest shipwreck of all time” was further fueled by new discoveries. For more than two weeks, the Titanic, just as in 1912, dominated the news. Daily newspapers, weekly magazines (the Titanic even made the cover of Time for September 10, 1986), supermarket tabloids, local and national television news broadcasts, all vied with one another to provide the latest information about Robert Ballard’s discoveries.

What Ballard found left everyone gasping in surprise. The most startling discovery of all was finding the wreck in two pieces: even though several survivors had stated that the ship had broken in two before she sank, their testimony was inconsistent and sometimes contradictory, and expert opinion had it that she went under in one piece. Ballard came to the conclusion that the Titanic did break in two just before she took her final plunge, at a point somewhere in the Engine Room, where, he theorized, the large openings in the decks that accommodated the engines had created a weak spot in the hull. (A later study of the contents of the debris field and the wildly differing conditions of the two halves of the wreck—the bow almost intact, the stern badly smashed—would make it clear that though the ship’s structure began to fail during her amazing headstand just before she sank, the actual breakup took place partway to the bottom.)

For years, it had been an article of faith among those who studied the disaster that the iceberg had ripped a continuous, 300-foot-long gash in the
Titanic’s
side. But when Ballard took the Alvin down to the bow, he couldn’t find any sign of such a grievous wound. Admittedly, most of the bow is buried in a massive pile-up of mud, but what Ballard could make out was a series of split seams, popped rivets, and sprung plates—the result of the iceberg bumping and scraping along the side of hull. When Ballard went back to the records of the British inquiry, he found that the rate of flooding indicated an area open to the sea that totalled little more than twelve square feet. Translated into a continuous gash 300 feet in length meant that the cut could have been only about three-quarters of an inch wide—possible with an acetylene torch, but not an iceberg. Nevertheless, bent plates and open seams in the first five compartments caused by the iceberg grinding its way along the
Titanic’s
hull would have had the same effect as a long continuous gash: uncontrollable flooding.

The overall condition of the wreck was also startling. For decades oceanographers and marine archaeologists had believed that the ship was sitting in a veritable deep freeze, with the cold water (only a degree or two above freezing) and the tremendous pressure (six tons per square foot) keeping the free oxygen to very low levels and reducing the salinity of the water, retarding corrosion and rust. It was also thought that there would be a near-total absence of marine life, sparing the wood and fabric furnishings of the ship from consumption. Instead, the expedition discovered that the Titanic rests in an area where the oxygen and salinity are higher than normal for such a depth, and that wood-boring worms no one suspected lived at those depths had eaten away almost all of the wood. Instead of a near pristine ship, they found a dilapidated wreck, covered with iron stalactites running down her sides. She was slowly but inexorably decaying. As Ballard put it, “The Titanic was unlucky to the last. If she’d fallen almost anywhere else, she’d probably be in perfect condition right now. She couldn’t even sink in the right place.”

Melancholy settled over Ballard as he and his crew continued to explore the Titanic, a deep sadness brought on by the constant awareness that they were, in a sense, exploring a tomb. Ballard gave voice to the feeling at a press conference in Washington, D.C., a few days after his return. As he made his closing statement to the press in an emotional yet subdued way that most press conference statements never are, his voice quavered, then broke with barely restrained emotion.

No one could have foreseen the emotional impact the Titanic would have, not just on Ballard, but on the rest of the crew of the
Knorr,
and in 1986, the
Atlantis II.
A pall hung over them, almost as if there had been a death in the family. In 1986, when the Alvin finished its last dive, the crew knew instinctively that, for them, no one would ever go back to the wreck.

Others would visit the Titanic in the years to come. Ballard had gone on record as being opposed to any kind of salvage or recovery of anything associated with the wreck, but IFREMER already possessed the correct coordinates (which Ballard had refused to release, claiming he was trying to protect the wreck). The French were the first to return to the wreck, with expeditions in 1987 and 1993 that retrieved more than 1,800 artifacts, which included one of Purser Hugh McElroy’s safes (it was rusted out and empty), an assortment of tableware and utensils, one of the three sets of steam whistles that were once mounted on the funnels, a small leather satchel that contained a few odd bits of jewelry, a pocket watch, a small bag of coins, and a bracelet with the name Amy spelled out in diamonds.

The artifacts were taken through a careful and exacting process of preservation before being put on display in various museums around the world, where tens of thousands of people flocked to view collections of what would normally be the most ordinary objects—a crewman’s straight razor, one of Major Peuchen’s calling cards, a pair of eyeglasses, a half-dozen dollar bills, a silver coffee service. The greatest of these exhibitions would open on October 4, 1994, at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England—a display that would eventually be viewed by nearly three-quarters of a million people in its one-year exhibit.
⁴

A Canadian-Russian-American group in 1990 filmed the ship and the debris field extensively for the IMAX movie
Titanica.
Financed in part by CBS Television (which was producing a special of its own), by the National Geographic Society, and a number of Canadian business firms, the finished production, shot on 70-mm film and shown in special theaters with seven-story-tall screens, played across the United States for six months to sold-out houses. Including narrative and reminiscences by Eva Hart, whose quiet demeanor belied how deeply the disaster still affected her,
Titanica
presented the reality of the ship, her passengers, and her crew to the audience in a way that left no one who saw it unmoved.
⁵

The filmmakers had deliberately refrained from bringing back any artifacts from the wreck, but the recovery of wreckage and debris from the Titanic continued to be the subject of heated debate, and none of the salvors was more controversial than a company called RMS Titanic, Inc. The successor to Titanic Ventures, it is a New York-based salvage firm owned by George Tulloch and Arnie Geller, which commissioned IFREMER to excavate part of the wreck site in 1987, when some 800 artifacts were brought up. In 1992, a drawn-out legal battle left Titanic Ventures, now reorganized as RMS Titanic, Inc., as sole owner of all salvage rights to the Titanic. In the summers of 1993 and 1994, an intense schedule of dives resulted in nearly 4,000 items being retrieved from the debris field surrounding the ship.

Among the bits and pieces brought up were a section of one of the
Titanic’s
reciprocating engines, a lifeboat davit, three engine-room telegraphs, kitchen utensils, a megaphone that may have been Captain Smith’s, and hundreds of pieces of coal from Boiler Room No. 1. Everything that was recovered was said to have come from the debris field, as Tulloch publicly declared that his firm would never touch the wreck itself, although he had a hard time explaining the film showing his submersible, the
Nautile,
forcibly pulling the warning bell from the foremast. (The crow’s nest collapsed while the bell above it was being pulled free.) Tulloch would also go on record to say that none of the recovered artifacts would ever be made available for sale to private collectors, but would remain together as a collection available for exhibition.

It was a pledge that did not long endure, as in mid-1995, Tulloch announced that he (Geller was no longer involved) had begun the preparations for what would be touted as the greatest feat of underwater salvage in history: bringing up a section of the Titanic herself. In order to raise the money necessary for such an ambitious project (rumored to be in the neighborhood of $17,000,000, a figure never officially confirmed), RMS Titanic, Inc., would begin selling the coal that had been recovered to collectors around the world.