In January 1973, Clive retreated to his unfinished basement and took stock. It was not a pretty picture. Forty-one years old, he had a wife, three children, a mortgage, and was unemployed. As far as his writing career, all Clive had to show for nearly ten years of labor were three unpublished manuscripts.
Common sense suggested he should concentrate his efforts on finding another job, but Clive was determined to follow his dream. Surviving on unemployment, occasional freelance jobs, and Barbara’s salary, he spent the majority of his time in the basement working on his new novel. “Thing’s might have been tight,” he recalls, “but nobody was looking over my shoulder while I worked on a boring campaign, adding their two cents, bitching at me to control costs and trying to stab me in the back. I was now doing what I loved to do - write.”
On Clive’s desk, made of two sawhorses and an unfinished door, the pages of his next book were piling up - the working title: Titanic. Although Clive cannot pinpoint the moment of his inspiration, he realized an attempt to raise the world’s most famous shipwreck would provide a thrilling challenge for Dirk Pitt and his NUMA associates. “My original inspiration was based on fantasy and to see Titanic brought up from the seabed and towed into New York Harbor, completing her maiden voyage begun three quarters of a century before. Fortunately, it was a fantasy shared by millions of her devoted fans.”
Raising the Titanic was not a new idea. Only a few months after the ship went down, the wealthy Astor, Widener and Guggenheim families (all lost relatives in the disaster) contacted the Merritt and Chapman Derrick and Wrecking Company (MCD&W) to investigate the feasibility of locating and raising the ill-fated liner. With headquarters in New York City, MCD&W was one of the world’s largest marine salvage operations. Since the technology did not exist to find the wreck, much less hoist the 46,000-ton ship from a depth of two and a half miles, MCD&W graciously declined.
The entire world was stunned by the Titanic disaster. Within days of the liner’s sinking, films, poems, books, songs, plays, postcards and memorabilia commemorated the liner and her tragic end. Released only twenty-nine days after the disaster, Saved from the Titanic was a silent film starring Dorothy Gibson, an actress who was aboard the ship and left on the first lifeboat. Gibson appeared in the same outfit she was wearing on the night of the catastrophe.
During the years after the sinking, there were more urgent issues than a shipwreck lying in the frigid depths of the North Atlantic. World War I, the Great Depression, and another world war demoted the Titanic to a footnote. Interest in the Titanic began to gather momentum in the mid-1950s, with the publishing of Walter Lord’s highly successful book, A Night to Remember, followed by the film adaptation in 1958. Over the years, dreamers and crackpots had proposed a series of outlandish schemes to resurrect the Titanic involving electromagnets, balloons, turning the ship into a giant ice cube by freezing the water around the hull with liquid nitrogen, millions of Ping-Pong balls, 180,000 tons of molten wax, and manned deep-sea submersibles.
During the early 1980s, flamboyant Texas oilman Jack Grimm, who had already hunted for Noah’s Ark, the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and the hole in the North Pole providing access to the mythical hollow earth, sponsored three serious expeditions to locate the Titanic. Several prominent scientists were hired as consultants, but the expeditions came up empty due to bad weather and technical problems.
In 1985, a joint French-American venture set sail for the North Atlantic. Led by oceanographer/engineer Jean-Louis Michel and Dr. Robert Ballard, a marine geologist working for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and the U.S. Navy, the secret expedition was funded by the Navy to photograph the wreckage of a sunken nuclear submarine. Once the primary mission was completed, the Navy said Ballard and his team could spend twelve days searching for the Titanic.
During the early morning of September 1, 1985, a boiler appeared out of the gloom on one of the search ship’s monitors, followed moments later by port holes and pieces of a ship’s hull and railings. It was the RMS Titanic. Instead of being intact, the stern and bow sections lay almost 2,000 feet apart, facing in opposite directions.
Since Clive wrote his book ten years before the wreck was discovered, Dirk Pitt’s fictional Titanic is in one piece. Wayne Valero, co-founder of the Clive Cussler Collector’s Society has been reading and writing about Clive’s work for almost forty years. In his book, From the Mediterranean Caper to Black Wind, Valero describes the process Clive uses to make the raising of the Titanic believable. “Cussler will take a premise like what if you could raise the Titanic? . . . How would they do it? Who would do it and for what purpose?”
Known as alternate or counterfactual history, the “what if” style of writing first appeared during the 1880s. Based on actual historical events, writers presume a few alterations could result in a significantly different world. Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee depicts a United States in which the Confederacy has won the Civil War. In Len Deighton’s SS-GB, Operation Sea Lion is successful and England is occupied by Nazi Germany. When big game hunters travel back in time to hunt Tyrannosaurus rex in Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” one of them accidentally kills a butterfly. Returning to the present, the adventurers are dismayed to discover a number of disconcerting changes.
In his adventure thriller, Clive recounts the disaster in a short, but stirring prelude. He also provides clues as to why the U.S. government would want to raise the liner. The action shifts to the 1980s when U.S. and Soviet relations have reached a low point. Byzanium, an extremely rare element, is desperately needed to complete the “Sicilian Project,” a defensive system designed to destroy attacking missiles before they reach North America. When a search for the element on a Russian island runs into trouble, Dirk Pitt comes to the rescue, but it turns out the mine had been played out in 1911. Believing the only Byzanium in the world is in the Titanic’s vault at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, the government commissions NUMA to raise the ship.
While American and Russian spies and counterspies go about their clandestine business, Pitt and his NUMA team find the Titanic. Robots are sent down to seal the damaged hull with “Wetsteel.” Pliable until it comes in contact with water, the substance “can bond itself to a metal object as though it were welded.” When the hull is sealed, compressed air is pumped in and the Titanic “leaps out of the waves like a modern submarine blowing its ballast tanks.”
Once the Titanic is refloated, Clive lulls the reader into believing the novel is headed for a happy ending, but a hurricane threatens to send the resurrected ship back to the bottom. When the Titanic finally reaches New York, Pitt opens the vault. Nothing! A surprising climax connects the dots of the multiple story lines, and Pitt locates the missing Byzanium. America is safe until the next Dirk Pitt novel.
Clive finished the novel on June 25, 1974. While he carefully packed the manuscript, his mind was racing. Titanic was not only an exciting story, it was his best writing so far; still, there was no guarantee Peter Lampack could find a publisher. And, if he did, would the advance be enough for him to pursue a career as a writer? He drove to the post office and sent the parcel to New York. After a quick stop for a quart of milk, Clive was back in the basement, launching Dirk Pitt’s search for Vixen 03.