21
Explorers, Graves, and Lovers
AUGUST 17, 1996
FRENCH RESEARCH VESSEL OCEAN VOYAGER
EXPEDITION TITANIC VIII
The weight of stewardship, like the weight of a crown one did not want, grew heavier each passing year.
Robert Ballard's first robotic reconnaissance images of the debris field around the stern were grainy and often difficult to interpret despite cameras rated to four hundred thousand ASA that could see more than eight hundred feet through the dark. Geo-positioning by satellites (one of history's first applications of such technology) provided a 360-degree panoramic map of everything the robot Argo saw in 1985. By the time the Tulloch era (the artifact recovery era) of Titanic exploration began in 1987, leather suitcases and wood-framed steamer trunks that appeared to be lying perfectly intact on the bottom, but which must actually have been near the point of collapse, had occasionally caved in.
By 1996, explorers had learned that after the sealed trunks filled with water and drifted to the seabed in 1912, the oxygen in them must have been depleted quickly by deep-ocean microbes. The environment inside was thereafter dominated by reducing bacteria, which dissolved iron clasps and brass picture frames but left the pictures and the letters that were sometimes bundled near the disintegrated frames completely unharmed and still readable. Such biological cocoons were only transitory, however. Samples from the debris field had demonstrated beyond all serious dispute how, once a trunk's protective shell failed and oxygen-metabolizing microbes were given a friendly habitat, books and letters generally began to deteriorate, probably within a matter of weeks.
Had biology followed its normal course, uninterrupted, nowhere in all history would a talented young violinist named Henry Sutehall, or many among the hundreds of other anonymous figures Charles Joughin saw tossed and mauled by the descending stern, have stood much chance of being remembered, even by the scholars of the Titanic Historical Society and RMS Titanic Incorporated. Sutehall, Howard Irwin, and uncounted others would appear almost exclusively on lists naming those lost and occasionally on memorial plaques in cathedrals, their friends and loved ones yearning only for someone to remember: here was a life and not just a name. Despite such efforts, as the entire generation of the bereaved died off and as nature began in shadowy, silent secrecy to reconvert the Titanic to iron ore, of certain lives recorded only as names, there would be no remembrance forever, if nature had its way.
But time would have the final say. It always does.
• • •
Looking at the Titanic's debris was like reading Ernest Hemingway's six-word short story: “For sale: Baby's shoes. Never used.” There was so much more to each item than meets the eye, and together they told a much larger story than the mere sum of their parts.
So it was for the discovery of a soup tureen from the Titanic that landed in a strange place and became part of an archaeological nightmare. And so it was for a fragment from a child's shirt, and for Howard Irwin's steamer trunk.
The Titanic's bow section hit the bottom at approximately thirty-five knots (in the range of forty miles per hour). The stern fell with a significantly smaller surface area facing into the water through which it passed—which, in essence, rendered it more streamlined. It therefore attained a higher terminal velocity, somewhere in the vicinity of fifty knots (approximately fifty-eight miles per hour). Water jetting out from the stern carved a noticeable crater, bordered by minicanyons.
Into and around these canyons of brutality fell twisted forks (their hollow silver handles imploded by water pressure), smashed cooking pots, bedsprings, medical tools, shards of hull and glass and coal, iron paperweights, tatters of clothing, and the contents of collapsed and exploded refrigerators. Most of these artifacts were carried along in a surge cloud that radiated away from the stern, exactly like a volcano-generated surge cloud. In much the same manner as a pyroclastic flow, dust from the cloud itself tended to settle on and entomb the objects that traveled with it.
Invariably, the most rapidly buried artifacts had been trapped inside the stern when it pounded down on the deep-ocean plain. They were jetted out by rupturing hull plates and decks that collapsed like an accordion being pressed closed in only a single second. During the next two hours of that April 15 morning, objects that fell out of the Titanic's breakaway and liquefaction point, two and a half miles above, continued to arrive like a gentle fall of autumn leaves, often landing on top of the objects that had raced them to the bottom inside the stern.
A teacup landed softly on a boiler. A wooden crate of wine bottles slowly filled with water, sank, and settled near a crater; its pinewood casing and interior padding would be slowly eaten by microbes and scavenging invertebrates, leaving behind neatly stacked wine bottles. A silver soup tureen touched down upon a blanket of disrupted clay and silt that had already settled over ejected surge cloud debris.
No one would probably ever know how many human bodies became part of the ejecta-blanket—how many were actually carried down to the bottom inside the stern. During the final hour and a half before the stern broke away, almost everyone aboard was able to evacuate from the flooding bow, either into or atop the stern.
About the time that the very last lifeboats were being lowered, passenger Gus Cohen passed through the third-class general room, far back on C deck. It seemed to him that “everyone” was in the dining saloon, deep within the ship, saying prayers while the room and the after-bridge were lifted, according to Cohen, “very high above the water—abnormally high.”
Alfred White had also reported seeing people gathered in prayer, deep within the ship, along his escape route up to the fourth funnel and within minutes of the stern's breakaway. He did not mention a specific deck, only that he was climbing upward through third class, which would indicate that he was looking aft along an E-deck corridor above the turbine engine casing. The Cohen and White accounts suggested to Bill MacQuitty and Walter Lord that as many as (but probably not much more than) three hundred people were trapped within the stern and were carried two and a half miles to the bottom.
Four decades passed, then two more and two more. Rusticle stalactites wedged twisted steel plates apart, intertwined their roots, shared nutrients, touched the sea floor, projected out glacierlike from their iron and sulfur sources, and, aided by their own swelling interior populations of “sulfur-loving” bacteria, bound grains of silt together in a concretion bed (that is, a hardened concrete-like slab)—fossilizing everything in their path. Little nuggets of white quartz gravel fell from icebergs throughout each passing decade, landing on top of the bioconcretions and, like everything else, being fused to the rusticle bed. The pebbles, fused atop the rusticles and sprinkled across every deck space, were the youngest and uppermost stratum in an onion skin–like sequence of archaeological time, pointing backward through history.
Many of the passengers trapped inside the broken-away stern section—most of them holding rosaries, according to Cohen—died squeezed together during the last minute against front walls turned impossibly into floors. Some were drowned in the turbine room. Others died standing up, standing on the forward wall of the third-class general room.
Except where shock cocoons intervened, down-blast and jetting effects stripped the dead naked, and in the next split second their bodies were handled with the same reptilian indifference by which every bed and every piece of medical equipment in the ship's hospital had been shot out through the starboard side. Yet even in death and even after more than two generations had passed them by, the people continued, in their own archaeological time frames, to bear witness.
• • •
Microbiologist Roy Cullimore and I first met aboard the French research vessel Ocean Voyager, during what became, for us, “the rusticle park” expedition, Titanic VIII.
If not for a stubborn concretion glued to a soup tureen's base and a dent around the tureen's upper rim, we would have been hard-pressed to guess the silver bowl's age. It appeared to be brand new, as shiny as the day the Titanic left the dock at Southampton.
Initially, the Nautile pilot thought the tureen was simply sitting on the bottom, about a hundred feet from the stern section's starboard hull, but a nine-inch-wide by six-inch-deep chunk of black, rusticle-concreted sediment broke away from the seabed and clung to the bowl's bottom. The pilot tried to shake the concretion loose with the Nautile's robot arm, but the fossil was glued solidly to the artifact.
Conservators are, by training, all about cleaning and restoring artifacts. They do not care about mud, rusticles, or fossils. After nearly two hours of careful prying, one of the Ocean Voyager's conservators finally managed to break the concretion free. She was about to throw it in the garbage, but three things drew my attention.
First, the concretion was part of a rusticle bed, unusually black and anoxic (lacking oxygen) and giving off the distinctive rotten-egg smell of sulfur. Second, one whole side of what we quickly came to call “the fossil” was a perfect, rock-hard mold of the soup tureen's base, including a mirror image of its stamp and manufacturing number. Third, screaming out for attention was a break-away cross-section through animal bone. Careful scraping away of concretion layers with dental tools revealed that the broken bone was surrounded by a mass of copper that had bubbled outward like Styrofoam, under an assault by reducing bacteria; it had bubbled out into a greenish, gold-flecked concretion within a concretion, more than an inch in diameter.
Two inches from the copper concretion, a brass screw and hook were excavated, inexplicably unassailed by the same microbes that had destroyed a different copper alloy less than a finger length away. Further scraping revealed a white enamel button and shreds of fiber.
I had hoped to preserve the fossil impression of the soup tureen's base; but we knew now that it was full of tiny artifacts and would have to be completely dissected. Most of the objects appeared to have little relation to one another, except for, at first glance, five buttons (each of a different style; two were evening-dress buttons made of gold). A fragment of dinnerware from first class lay next to a shard of blue-and-white-patterned china from third class. A stopper-shaped iron paperweight, only an inch and a half across, was pulled from the concretion. A piece of brownish-white fabric was freed: a shred of undergarment—sized, evidently, for a child—lay in the company of a dozen microfragments of bone and four larger fragments, two of them still connected by tendon.
The majority of the bone fragments appeared to be bovine. The largest of them certainly came from the kitchen area: a piece of cow bone, clearly butchered at one end. The two tendon-connected fragments also came from the ship's galley. The tendons appeared to have been preserved under a complex weave of bacterial threads. In front of Discovery Channel and CBS news cameras, we called them “chicken bones” and quickly closed them up in a water-filled specimen bag. We did not want to admit, even to ourselves, the marrow patterns we were seeing: distinctly nonavian. They were not cow bones; they were undeniably something smaller, yet mammalian.
When vertebrate zoologist Bill Schutt of the American Museum of Natural History examined photographs, conducted measurements, and confirmed that they were lamb bones, we breathed a collective sigh of relief. As it turned out, we were permitted to enjoy only a brief respite.
The presence of bones in materials ejected from the Titanic's stern and deposited by surge clouds—even mere cow or lamb bones—told us that sooner or later we were bound to encounter human remains. Cullimore and I recommended to expedition leaders George Tulloch and Paul Henry Nargeolet that no more artifacts should be lifted from a hundred-foot radius of the soup tureen. Tulloch went a step further, recommending a moratorium on the ejected-materials zone: “Attempt no landings there.”
Unwittingly, we had instigated a moratorium that interfered with the sampling plans of a marine engineer from Harland and Wolff (the company that built the Titanic). This was bound, sooner or later, to have a depressing effect on the politics of the expedition, although Cullimore and I and the French conservators were at first oblivious to the situation we had created. Prior to the moratorium, I had already alienated the Harland and Wolff advocate with discussions about the Titanic's stern breaking away at the surface—which he considered to be “a patently false hypothesis.”
There seemed to be a Harland and Wolff insistence that the Titanic had submerged in one piece with a great deal of air trapped in its food lockers, and that massive implosions in the galley area broke the ship in two about the time it reached a depth of about 800 feet. To say otherwise was taken as an affront to the company that built the Titanic and was met by an insistence that the ship could never have broken at the surface—an insistence that was on one occasion yelled in my face.
“No riveted ship ever broke in two at the surface!” the Harland and Wolff advocate hollered.
“The Titanic did,” I said firmly. And the atmosphere that then settled upon the Ocean Voyager was only slightly less toxic than the one a friend of mine once created after being pulled over by a rural sheriff who shouted about no one ever having sped through that part of Georgia at thirty-five miles per hour, to which my friend replied, “Sherman did.”
Closer examination of the concretion artifacts had already multiplied our troubles. The ring of expanded, ballooned-out copper we had found appeared to be a gold-covered band enclosing a bone that was perfectly consistent with the base of a human finger. The copper-bacteria “foam” had all but completely surrounded one side of the bone, and flecks of gold within the solidified mud suggested that we were looking at the bone-enclosing remnants of an inexpensive wedding band, of the sort that would have been worn by a lower-ranking crewman or a third-class passenger. Until that day, no one had really believed that bones could survive in or around the Titanic.
Like most every other clue from the stern, this was not the sort of discovery meant to warm the heart. There were good reasons, deep-rooted and instinctive, why most explorers avoided the stern. Even silver tureens and glittering flecks of gold evoked nightmares. The lifting of the soup tureen and its concretion had evidently broken off part of a finger. This meant that the rest of a wedding band, and the skeletal hand to which it had belonged, was still down there under the surge-cloud blanket.
Tulloch decided, even before Roy and I told him of our wishes, that the bone with the partial wedding band must be returned to the Titanic site on one of the very next dives.
• • •
The equipment being sent to probe the Titanic was a marvel; its imaging abilities were so sophisticated that the Nautile was able to send crystal-clear, wireless images of the two giant reciprocating engines to the surface, transmitted like a television picture, with lines of sonar signals instead of radio waves or cables.
After high-resolution sonar peered below the surface at the bow's buried head, a Harland and Wolff team concluded that the Titanic had been sunk by more iceberg damage than previously believed. But the conclusion was far from being the last word. Along the starboard side, a great horizontal separation of steel plates was indicated, all the way back to Frederick Barrett's boiler room number 5. The problem lay in too much of a good thing: there were so many prominent horizontal fissures in the starboard bow—which was the zone of contact with the iceberg but which was also a part of the ship that had crashed and plowed down into the sea floor—that if all of the damage were attributable to the iceberg, the Titanic should have disappeared before the first distress call could be sent out.
Paul Matthias of Polaris Imaging, and naval architect William Garzke, noted that although some of the damage was consistent with what Fred Barrett, George Beauchamp, and other survivors of the boiler rooms witnessed in the starboard bow (and bearing in mind that the original damage by the iceberg could have been enlarged by impact with the seabed, in such a manner that merely split seams broke wide open), our ability to separate iceberg damage from further damage inflicted by the crash might have become an intractable problem.
When Nargeolet and Matthias decided to scan the bow's portside hull as a controlled experiment (for the iceberg never reached the port side), they discovered that the forward port plates had separated in very much the same way as the starboard plates.
One of the Harland and Wolff advocates seemed to become particularly agitated by a discussion of these results—and especially by the emerging conclusion that Occam's razor was pointing toward bilateral damage to the front of the bow arising from a very forceful impact on the ocean floor.
Cullimore and I had by now decided to keep our interests focused on biology and to steer away from the politics of marine engineers. For us, the most exciting discoveries from the expedition lay in black mud, microbial slime, and rust. There were too many wonders right under our feet to allow petty human behaviors to distract us. Time was our most precious commodity, and there was none to spare for dueling egos.
Cullimore had already identified certain bacterialike organisms within the rusticles as having originated hundreds of miles away at the hydrothermal vents. We knew now that one day we would have to go to the vents, seeking the origin of the Titanic's rusticles on and around metal-rich deposits in the volcanic springs of the deep.
We had expected to see oxygen-loving bacteria living above a layer of acidic, reducing bacteria. The former, covered by the latter, would have worked in the absence of oxygen by dissolving the Titanic's steel, after which the top layer of the bacterial sandwich would merely have utilized whatever iron and sulfur happened to pass upward. I never imagined seeing complex rooting systems tapping down into cracks and seams in the metal, bio-wedging the steel apart, multiplying the rooting systems' surface areas, relative to volume, somewhat like ivy vines growing into a brick wall.
We expected (and this would have been fascinating enough) to find a two- or three-layer bacterial sandwich when we started dissecting intact rusticles. We were not expecting internal channels, fibrular bundles, external pores, and other complex structures that seemed next of kin to levels of tissue organization found in sponges or mosses and other members of the animal or plant kingdom.
As on any good day in the lab, each new finding raised more questions than it answered. Was this really a single “organism” or merely an intensely colonial association? Shouldn't we be asking the same question about every leaf and even about ourselves? Was this a “living fossil?” Was something like this already being evolved near Earth's hydrothermal vent zones, about three billion years ago, as the ancestor of us all, or was the phenomenon simply the result of relatively recent consortial arrangements?
Was it possible that much as cancer cells seemed to resemble portions of an orderly tissue structure that reverted to its ancestral “wild type” cell, viruses and other independently competing packages of DNA and RNA were telling us that multicellular life sheds pieces of itself the way a cat sheds hair? Was it possible to believe that in this case, the rusticles, rather than being ancestral, were an example of how nature was constantly laying down the foundations for a second genesis of multicellular life?
Cullimore was certain that he had already encountered “cousins” of the deep-ocean rusticles under the Canadian prairies and in water wells all over the world. “When they infest water wells, they are cursed and called ‘iron bacteria,'” he wrote, “[because they form plugs] to stop the water flowing into the well. These iron bacteria form rusticle-like structures and appear to be closely related. Just one more example of how closely integrated nature is. If you were to go to a well in the middle of the Canadian prairies, you could trace the pathway of water, however torturous and indirect, leading to the RMS Titanic.”
The only point on which no questions arose was that we needed to obtain more rusticles while they were attached “alive and well” to their iron substrate. Attempts to pull live rusticles from the Titanic's railings were not working out very well. The submersible's robot arm was too powerful, and the rusticles tended to disintegrate at its slightest touch.
During a review of the Nautile video, we selected a piece of hull steel, about three feet across, that appeared to have been flung at stupendous speed from the impacting stern. It was twisted like a leaf caught in a great wind, and within the fold had grown a beautiful cavern of rusticle stalactites. The piece appeared to be lying in a region free of forks and other implements sticking halfway out of a blanket of black ejected material (this meant there was minimal possibility of repeating the soup-tureen scenario). It seemed a perfect candidate for the dual purpose of providing our biological samples and a hull cross-section for the marine engineers' metallurgy and forensics team.
The moment the “leaf” was landed on the deck of the Ocean Voyager, Cullimore and I must have seemed happier than squirt clams at high tide as we knelt down near our first large, fresh sample of rusticles still perfectly intact on their substrate.
“Do you see how these roots are interconnected?” Cullimore said, prying a rusticle base from the metal, revealing the branching network of “vessels” below.
“Like a circulatory system,” I agreed. “And we've already seen ciliated cells.”
“Something like that,” Cullimore said. “[Organized groupings of ciliated cells, as in a living sponge's circulatory system] must be at work. I don't think they depend on random currents alone for circulation.”
I bent down to pull another root free but was interrupted by a firm hand on my shoulder. A Harland and Wolff engineer and one of his attendants were holding a diamond saw.
“We need to remove several inches from this for metallurgy,” the engineer said.
“It's for your safety,” his helper said. “You don't want flying particles hitting your eyes, so we need you to leave the fantail and wait in the galley until we call you back.”
The engineer acknowledged our concern about vibrations from the saw and our need for intact rusticles.
“It's okay,” he assured us. “We'll leave the rusticles intact for you on the unsectioned, larger body of the steel.”
“This is very important,” Cullimore emphasized.
“I promise,” the engineer replied.
Minutes later, one of the Ocean Voyager's cooks came running into the galley to alert us that once we were out of sight, the engineer had begun sledgehammering all of our precious samples off the steel.
When we ran out onto the fantail, even the few large rusticles that had been hammered off intact were intentionally being smashed before our eyes. We were now at the end of the expedition and there would be no more opportunities in the schedule for the recovery of steel with an intact rusticle root system. Before we could stop the vandal, our entire sample had been reduced to whatever pieces we could rescue from a large green garbage pail or scramble after and retrieve before they were water-hosed overboard.
• • •
Tulloch and Nargeolet went down to the Titanic again with a special package in the sample tray. “Attempt no landings there,” Tulloch had instructed, so they dropped the package without landing. It fell into the general area from which the soup tureen had been recovered. Inside were the copper-enclosed bone and several unidentified mammalian microshards. The dead continued to speak out.
The brownish-white strip of clothing was also returned, I understand. No one could be certain that it was actually worn that night, but whether it came from a drawer, a suitcase, or off a human being's back, it belonged to an unknown child of the Titanic.
All but one child survived in first class. All of the third-class families with three or more children died—all of them.
Of the Rice family in third class, only the cousins who had stayed ashore and immigrated to New York on later ships survived. A descendant from what remained of the family tree, Eugene Rice, would join the New York fire department, and on September 11, 2001, he was among the “38th Street Mutts” who emerged alive from the 9/11 attacks. During the spring of 2002, he volunteered for New York City's dirty-bomb protocol, for which the team members' instructions were to think only about the twenty thousand children downwind and to expect “secondary devices.” In 2010, Rice was promoted to captain. A year later, some of the radioactive dust–removal methods he helped to develop in New York would be applied for the first time in Fukushima, Japan.
Ninety-nine years earlier, twenty-four-year-old Bertha Mulvihil knew the Rices and witnessed how the Titanic lineage of their family tree ended. Margaret Rice was seated on a bench, holding onto her three-year-old son Eugene while the other four children clutched at her skirt. The young widow was likely awaiting instructions, but no one who survived ever reported seeing the Rices again. Another family (evidently the Goodwins) was milling about near boat 10 just before Bertha Mulvihil climbed in. There were, Mulvihil said, “the father, the mother, and six children. The father was not permitted to leave the ship, but the mother and her six children could leave if she wished. The mother was weeping. She wouldn't go into the lifeboat and leave her husband to perish.” This event evidently occurred very early in boat 10's loading, when there was plenty of room and before William Murdoch arrived on the scene and started breaking the Lightoller bottleneck by sending husbands away with wives and children.
“She wailed,” Mulvihil said of the mother. “‘I'll stay with my husband, then,' the woman cried. [Later], I saw her clinging to her husband and children just before I left the vessel. That was the last I ever saw of her. The whole family went down together.”
Rosa Abbott knew the unthinkable horror of having gone under with the Titanic and survived while her children died. Yet despite the end of her every hope for the future, Abbott's heart went out to another family, the Sages.
“You ask if this is the Jacksonville [Florida] that the Sage family [was] coming to,” Abbott wrote to Frankie Goldsmith's mother in March 1914. “Yes, it is the same Jacksonville. I so often think of them—such a large, good family to be lost, every one. I often feel when I think of it that I shall lose my reason.”
The Sage family sank with nine children, the youngest of them four years old. The body of eleven-year-old William Sage was recovered, indicating that the Sages, like the Rices and the Abbotts, had found a route to the top deck and were standing in open air when the stern broke away. Thus read the third-class census: The Anderson family sank with five children. The Goodwin family sank with six children. The Lefebre family sank with three children. The Skoog family sank with four children. The Pallsson family sank with four children. The Panula family sank with four children. The Ford family sank with three children.
Margaret Rice's body was found during the recovery operation. Her personal effects included a wedding ring, gold coinage valued at three British pounds, and a set of rosary beads. Rice and her five children were almost certainly separated by the currents, as inevitably as the sea separated Rice's friends the Goodwins. The oldest of the children likely survived up to a half hour after forty-year-old Charles Goodwin's watch stopped, but not nineteen-month-old Sidney Goodwin, who for ninety-nine years became a Halifax cemetery's “unknown child of the Titanic,” until his DNA was identified in June 2011.
• • •
During a dive that preceded the soup-tureen incident and the moratorium, Tulloch, Nautile pilot Yann Houard and copilot Yves Potier came across a large steamer trunk in the debris. It was still wonderfully oxygen-starved on the inside, so its contents had not disintegrated.
Probing with the Nautile's robotic hands revealed the steamer trunk to be so fragile that it appeared to be another of those rare and perplexing objects we were calling ghosts, because of their tendency to disappear. An increase in the velocity of undersea currents between dives or the first touch of the robotic arm often caused the “ghosts” to crumble into dust and spongy splinters.
The wood and wrought-iron lid of the steamer trunk collapsed into flakes and red dust the moment Potier reached out and tapped it with the robotic manipulator's fingers. The trunk's metal straps had been devoured from the inside during a rusticle-forming assault in which every milligram of iron seemed to have been mined out of the straps, leaving behind only the carbon and slag between the crystals, held loosely together by a bacterial biofilm (a layer of microorganisms and their secretions).
The entire top of the trunk avalanched down into a rectangular depression, as though the lid had been molded from cigarette ashes. Slowly, a cloud of ashes and “smoke” pulled apart, revealing the top shelf of the trunk's interior. The shelf was filled with objects: a leather pouch, its features softened by the fresh coating of dust; sections of wind instruments; and a penholder sticking up, glittering with bacteria-resistant gold.
Potier saw the unmistakable outline of intact paper in one corner. He understood immediately that the sudden disappearance of the protective oxygen-starved environment, which up to this moment had been barely maintained by the ghostly lid, exposed the paper to new populations of still poorly understood microbes. What he knew for certain was that the microbes would begin to work against the paper in a matter of months, weeks, or perhaps even hours.
Rotating the Nautile (and Tulloch's viewport) slightly away from the trunk to provide himself with a clearer line of sight to both the trunk and his sub's external manipulator arms, Potier lifted the paper pile, gently shook off the layer of debris, and called out his observations.
“George,” he said, “there seems to be sheet music inside. I believe it's French. No! Wait. It's English, but it's a French composer.”
“You're telling me that the contents are in such good shape that you can read the sheet music?” Tulloch asked.
“I'm telling you what I can see there,” said Potier. “It's true. It's a musician's trunk.”
At that moment, the Titanic became one of the few shipwrecks ever to yield up readable paper after so many decades. The Tulloch expedition's robot Robin had already found one of the Titanic's mail rooms filled with bags—in a part of the ship where oxygen levels were relatively low and where all of the mail bags were sheathed in a protective layer of rusticle-related microbes that grew from the floor upward, completely covering the bags as they sent forth white, threadlike shoots that resembled a cross between an upside-down stalagmite and a ghostly white flower stem. For as long as the deck plates held up and the oxygen levels beneath the sheath remained too low for the Gorgonarians and their brethren to take root and throw open the gates to dissolution, the Titanic's mail would be guarded by the crazy biofilm garden.
Somewhere between the writing rooms and the mail rooms—and probably at the bottom of the mail room stacks (because the clerks, during the time remaining to them after the collision, would have given priority to carrying away bags of registered mail to the imagined safety of the higher decks)—many of the letters written by passengers, crew, and officers during the first and last voyage of the Titanic were most likely still protected, near the bottom of the garden.
Although gold and silver had already been recovered in a leather satchel, the greatest treasures of all were the etchings of human fingers on sheets of pulped and pressed, rag-based paper. The musician's trunk told us so.
George Tulloch crawled to look over Potier's shoulder at the top level of the steamer trunk, below which lay objects that had not been seen in more than eight decades—just like the sheet music, only two feet in front of the port.
“How much of this do you want recovered?” Potier asked Tulloch.
“I want everything,” Tulloch said. “This is a man's life.”
• • •
“It's amazing how close we [might] have been to losing the story forever,” wrote Barbara Shuttle. Her husband, Dave, was the descendant of a woman, Ann Elizabeth Shuttle, whose letters of motherly advice to Howard Irwin were preserved within the steamer trunk. “I'll forever be grateful to George for having the foresight to recover everything in Howard's trunk.”
If a strong current had collapsed the trunk before the crew of the Nautile found it, no one would have known how Howard Irwin or Henry Sutehall had lived and had come to their association with the Titanic, or that one of them had ever lived at all.
Irwin, shanghaied onto a ship bound for Egypt, simply dropped off the face of the earth, insofar as Sutehall knew. Sutehall kept his friend's steamer trunk safely aboard the Titanic, and he either went down to the bed of the Atlantic with the stern or became one of the anonymous hundreds of people who were washed off the descending rear deck with Abbott, the Sages, and the Rices.
The reducing bacteria inside Irwin's trunk had destroyed the tiny iron wires that held a rubber band–powered toy airplane together, yet the strange micro-habitat had left the rubber band, the wooden propeller, and the paper on the wings unharmed. Aboard the Nadir, conservators opened Irwin's leather pouch of awls and chisels, very carefully, inside a water-filled tray. For a moment, the conservators thought they were looking at “ghosts” of the tools fading suddenly before their eyes. What they beheld turned out to be the bacteria that had extracted all the iron from the awls and chisels—with the carbon that had existed between the iron seams held together by bacterial threads that suddenly came apart. The metal tools disappeared utterly, leaving behind only the waterlogged but otherwise brand-new wooden handles.
Irwin's piccolo and two clarinets were intact, along with a deck of playing cards and a book in which he had recorded bets on dog races in Australia. Close examination revealed that Irwin was not a particularly honest young gambler. Some of the cards in his deck were marked—professionally.
Irwin's diary also survived, along with a carefully wrapped bundle of letters: three from Ann Elizabeth Shuttle and the rest from her daughter, Pearl. The paper fleshed out the story in a manner not possible from artifacts alone.
In his diary, Irwin had expressed a measure of shame about his own fiery temper and said he wished he could more faithfully follow the example of his friend Henry Sutehall. “Popular among his own set,” Irwin wrote, “he was quite honest, unassuming, and upright. He did not drink, smoke, swear, or cast an evil eye upon the beautiful young ladies that crossed his path.”
By his accounting of himself, Irwin seemed to be recording clues to the personality of a hard-core adventure seeker who would have run off to join the revolution of Gandhi as easily as of Lenin. He also provided clues to the sort of behavior that might have contributed to his being shanghaied—or to the fight he must have put up against being shanghaied—decades after the mystery of his disappearance had ceased to be remembered at all.
Irwin referred to himself as an “arrogant and aggressive” man who, unlike Sutehall, “would cuss and fight” and who would do so without a great deal of provocation.
On New Year's Day, 1910, Irwin and Sutehall had begun their journey from Buffalo, New York, to all parts of the United States. Neither of them possessed much money, but both were skilled musicians, leather craftsmen, and mechanics. In a world where more and more cars were being built every day, they were among the few skilled laborers who could bore and trim holes for internal-combustion engine cylinders and repair upholstery.
Pearl Shuttle was a young musician from Hamilton, Ontario, not very far from where Irwin's and Sutehall's around-the-world adventure began, in Buffalo. The twenty-two-year-old adventurer and the Ontario musician were clearly in love. A photograph revealed Pearl Shuttle to be a young woman of haunting beauty, although by the standard of her time, at age twenty, she was already considered a “spinster.”
Seemingly as unconventional as Irwin and his friend Sutehall, Pearl traveled the country unescorted, as part of a vaudeville company, in which she always performed her cornet solo in a white dress. Pearl Shuttle's letters to Howard Irwin were postmarked from diverse places: Illinois, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Ontario, and Missouri.
Before Irwin departed for Australia, he and Pearl had managed to rendezvous for Christmas in 1910. This was the last time Pearl ever saw him.
Shortly afterward, Irwin learned a hard lesson in the need to keep secret his wanderlust. Usually, once Irwin and Sutehall arrived in a new city, one would find a job within hours and then, a few days later, would recommend the other to the new employer.
George Tulloch's son, Matt, discovered that the plan to finance their journey did not always work. Matt was one of the conservators working to restore and reveal the words of Howard Irwin's diary. The process was fascinating but slow. Some bug in the rusticle nest apparently loved sulfur and had been building a black sulfide patina between the pages. Nonetheless, Matt found in each newly revealed passage a sense of wonder that made him think of another Howard from Mr. Irwin's time: Few men since the day Egyptologist Howard Carter entered the tomb of Tutankhamun (a pharaoh better known as King Tut) had known moments such as this.
As the sulfur was cleared away, Matt noticed that there were several jobs Howard Irwin found that he did not keep for very long—evidently because he did not know when to keep quiet. “And there was one in particular that I recall,” Matt said, “[of] which Howard Irwin wrote, ‘Got fired today for giving notice.' And I think what happened was that he gave notice very shortly after he got the job. And so I think, probably, the employer got a little annoyed that he had such a good job and then didn't tell him he was going to be leaving so soon.”
Meanwhile, letters from Pearl Shuttle began, like pieces of an archaeological jigsaw puzzle, to fill in some of the events unrecorded in Irwin's diary entries.
After their Christmas 1910 rendezvous, Howard Irwin and Pearl Shuttle wrote—each to the other—nearly every day, into February 1911. Then despite Irwin's desire to be more deserving of Pearl Shuttle by becoming more like his friend Henry Sutehall, his self-described temper and impatience got the better of him. As he did with his former employer, Irwin once again said too much.
While he freely wandered the world, Irwin became increasingly resentful of Pearl's travels. He had begun expressing insecurity about a man described in her letters as a brotherly musician named Albert. Irwin's letters clearly placed Pearl in the position of having to explain that she would never have mentioned her friend in the first place if she had been sneaking around. Subsequent letters were aimed at reassuring Irwin that she had been and would forever remain faithful to him.
By February 21, 1911, Irwin must have sent a particularly accusatory letter. On this day, Pearl wrote to explain that even though she loved him and would forever love him with all her heart, if he believed that he could not trust her and was insisting that she quit her career for no good cause, then she wished he would never correspond with her again. Pearl had a good sense of dignity, and she ceased writing to Irwin.
As the months progressed through the summer of 1911, Pearl's mother, Ann Elizabeth Shuttle, wrote to Irwin during his travels, bringing him the news that Pearl still loved him and that in spite of his absence and his stubborn nature, she had remained entirely faithful to him.
All of us who were reading and hearing of each new paragraph being freed from the sulfur, felt, ever more strongly, a sad kinship with the long-dead Egyptologist (Howard Carter) who had reconstructed the life of King Tut, another young man from another lost era. It was clear from Ann Shuttle's last letter, as the autumn of 1911 approached, that Pearl always expected Howard Irwin to mature into the man he aspired to become, and that he would afterward come back to her.
There the story from the vault of the abyss began to break off, dead-ending altogether just before April 10, 1912.
Archival research revealed that on March 14, 1916, the White Star Line awarded Henry Sutehall's father two hundred dollars (worth approximately eight thousand dollars in 2011) for the loss of his son aboard the Titanic. Irwin was also presumed dead, but even though a ticket had been purchased, no one ever did find a record of him actually boarding the Titanic, so the White Star Line probably did not consider awarding his family anything.
“Of course there would be no record of him,” Matt Tulloch said. Throughout the 1996 expedition, the prevailing view (based on the deck of marked playing cards and Irwin's mention of having won a racing sweepstakes in Australia) was that he had most likely evolved into somewhat of a professional gambler. Not knowing yet about his being shanghaied, it was possible for us to imagine him as being one of the card sharps known to have infiltrated all classes on the ship, and we thought that he might have boarded the Titanic under a false identity.
The consensus view turned out to be false. After the Tullochs located Barb and Dave Shuttle, the message was driven home (again) how quickly everything we thought we knew about the Titanic and its people could be proved wrong.
Among the valuables left behind in Irwin's trunk were his wallet and travel papers. The wallet contained a card identifying him as a member of a fraternal club that still existed in 1996 and that had maintained records ever since 1910. What chilled the club's secretary, when Matt Tulloch visited, was that the Tullochs were not the only people who had been asking about Howard Irwin in recent years.
About 1990, an elderly woman had arrived, asking if the club had any letters on file about a man who had disappeared without a trace in April 1912. She was seeking any hints that Irwin might have been an undocumented passenger aboard the Titanic. The secretary could not recall the woman's name. He remembered only that she had asked if they had a record of their former member reaching Southampton in time for the maiden voyage.
Before the document search was completed, the woman, like Irwin, had disappeared without leaving any forwarding information. “Died of natural causes at advanced old age,” the secretary believed. Our instant and enduring question was, “Could this have been Pearl Shuttle?”
In 1912, after being held captive on an Egypt-bound tramp steamer, Irwin was able to make a successful escape from Port Said. He wrote about his escape, and about Pearl Shuttle, in a new set of diary entries that were still being lovingly preserved by his descendants when Dave and Barb Shuttle introduced themselves to Matt Tulloch and the French conservators.
By the time he reached Lebanon, Irwin had learned that the Titanic was gone and that most of the third class had gone with it. For many months, he continued to hold out hope that his friend Henry Sutehall was still alive; but eventually he gave up hope for Henry, and he also supposed that Pearl Shuttle had by then given up hope on him and must surely be engaged or married.
Irwin knew that Sutehall's personality would have made him particularly vulnerable to following orders and staying below till the very end while the first-class men rowed away in lifeboats, sometimes with their dogs. It must have gnawed at Irwin's very soul that had he been there with his friend, he might have added at least some slim, street-smart hope of saving him.
Despite a tendency to run toward historic revolutions, Irwin seemed to have formed a resolve then to disappear anonymously into history. He had no way of even guessing how the Titanic had broken apart; he certainly could not imagine that his steamer trunk was afterward cast free perfectly unharmed or that when it filled with water and fell to the bottom, its interior became the biological equivalent of a shock cocoon—much less that people would descend in machines unimagined in 1912 and find it. In her letters to Irwin, young Pearl, even as she too disappeared into history, had no way of knowing that she was writing history.
The man to whom Pearl had professed her undying love wandered alone, from country to country, in the aftermath of the Titanic, picking up one odd job after another and carrying out the work with none of his former enthusiasm. It was as though much of the life had drained out of Irwin's heart once he accepted that both Henry and Pearl were lost to him.
Not very far ahead of World War I, Irwin reached England. He was by then a homeless world wanderer who neither possessed nor cared to possess citizenship papers or money for passage to America. So he stowed away in the front cargo hold of the Olympic, becoming one of the nameless, penniless world travelers fireman George Kemish had described.
One day, Howard Irwin walked onto his parents' property, so broken that at first they did not recognize him. The Irwins had counted him among the Titanic's dead; and they were nearly half right. The son who came home seemed to have lost his prior lust for life and to have aged two decades in barely more than three years.
Irwin had not heard from Pearl's mother in Ontario since several months before the Titanic went down. He knew that Ann Shuttle, like his own parents, must have accepted by now that he had died with Henry Sutehall. Having accepted the certainty that Pearl had long since given up on him, had healed from her grief, and was most likely starting a family of her own, he decided against opening up old wounds—which at best could only interfere with the course of her life. Irwin's way of finally proving his love was to let Pearl go, to let her continue believing he was dead, to let her be with another and never see her again.
Eventually, the wounds that almost killed Irwin's spirit scabbed over and became relatively unnoticed scars. Eventually, he loved again. Ivy Corristone stayed with him until death did part them in New Jersey in 1953. Irwin left behind, among his papers, several handwritten poems about his friend Sutehall. To Pearl Shuttle, in the autumn of his life, Howard Irwin penned a final poem, in which he envisioned her as by now having become a beautiful, matronly woman with children and grandchildren. In that very last poem, like the Australian thorn bird eloquently singing out the last of its life, Irwin reached out to Pearl—wherever she was, to step back if she could, just for a moment—to step back across time and touch, if she could, “the times of pure and innocent love . . . so many years earlier.”
“Howard Irwin's treasures had resurfaced through the efforts of an expedition to the world's most famous wreck site,” Barbara Shuttle wrote after meeting the Tullochs. “The story of a man who never sailed aboard the Titanic and the letters from a girl who loved him would shed light on a part of the great ship's history never before known.”
Through the history of their own family, Dave and Barbara Shuttle were able to shed light on the identity of the elderly woman who visited the Boston fraternal club asking about Irwin, some seventy-eight years after the Titanic sank. The woman was definitely not Pearl.
Alhough Pearl Shuttle had continued to profess her love for Irwin until the end of her life, the reason her mother's letters broke off in the autumn of 1911 was that Pearl had become very ill after an outbreak of influenza swept through much of North America. In October, the sickness settled into her lungs, and on October 20, 1911, she died of pneumonia.
In 1913, Irwin had firmly resolved not to let Pearl know that he was alive. He never learned that in 1911, an unimaginably distraught Ann Shuttle had decided not to tell him that Pearl was dead. For Matt Tulloch, the unexpected story of Howard and Pearl had brought to life a tragedy hitherto unsuspected, through artifacts that allowed scientists and historians to reach across time “in direct association with someone.”
The very concept of two world adventurers financing their travels mile by mile, country by country, had to be a rare occurrence all by itself, even without the introduction of doomed love. “When you hear about something like this,” Matt Tulloch observed, “it just makes you wonder what other strange things were [happening]. It's probably not a far reach,” he said, to suspect that this one revelatory tale from one randomly sampled steamer trunk could not possibly have represented “the strangest thing that was going on aboard the Titanic.”