As the French ship Le Suroit approached the Titanic search area on July 4, 1985, I was celebrating Independence Day with Secretary Lehman and retired CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite on Martha’s Vineyard, summer retreat for the rich and famous and their lucky friends. I was, of course, in the latter category, thanks to the friendship I’d struck up with John Lehman since we met in 1981.
Every year since, we’d gathered for the Fourth of July at the home of Spike Karalekas, a Naval Academy graduate and lobbyist who was one of John’s closest friends. We’d take in the Edgartown holiday parade and have hot dogs on the lawn. Spike and his wife, Tina, who worked for First Lady Nancy Reagan, always drew an eclectic crowd, from Wall Street traders who didn’t want to talk about how they made their money to people like me who could entertain the others with tales of adventure.
Cronkite was a lovely guy, like a father to us. You could see why he’d become the most trusted man in America. He loved science and had covered most of America’s space launches. He’d also gone down in Alvin with me to see hydrothermal vents. He and Spike were as enthusiastic about my quest for Titanic as John was. Early on, we’d dubbed our little group—far too cavalierly—the “Top-
Secret Committee to Re-Arrange the Deck Chairs on the Titanic.” I’d promised to give them progress reports.
Now I was whispering in their ears that the moment was here.
I was finally getting the chance to chase a dream I’d had for so long. I had put together the best team I could to find the biggest prize out there and bring emotional closure to one of the most heartbreaking tragedies of the past century. After all, the Titanic story had it all—grand ambition of shipbuilders, arrogance of the captain paying little heed to ice warnings, lack of lifeboats for nearly half the 2,200 people on board. The ship was supposed to be unsinkable.
Just imagine you were there on that calm, moonless night, April 14, 1912, sailing from England to New York on the maiden voyage of the largest and most luxurious ship of its time. Titanic’s wireless operators had warned Captain Smith and other officers earlier in the day that some ships had encountered icebergs in their paths. Smith shifted Titanic’s course slightly to the south but did not order the crew to slow down. After he had gone to bed, a huge iceberg seemed to rise out of nowhere. The quartermaster quickly spun the wheel that controlled the rudder, avoiding a head-on collision, but the starboard side of the hull scraped along the iceberg below the waterline.
Jack Thayer, a 17-year-old traveling with his father, a wealthy Pennsylvania Railroad executive, and his mother, a Philadelphia socialite, later wrote that in his first-class stateroom, it felt like the ship had been pushed softly. “If I had had brimful [sic] glass of water in my hand not a drop would have been spilled, the shock was so slight,” he recalled. But travelers in the third-class berths belowdecks were thrown from their beds. Seawater started pouring in. Captain Smith and Thomas Andrews, the ship’s designer, hurried down to see what was happening. Andrews counted the compartments that were flooding—one, two, three, four, five. The ship could survive flooding in the first four compartments in the bow, but not the fifth—with that one filled, the weight of the water would tip the boat toward disaster. There was no rejiggering the math. It was absolutely clear. Titanic was going to sink, and quickly.
The passengers had no idea yet that the ship was doomed. Some frolicked among chunks of ice that had landed on the bow—until they saw the crew uncovering the lifeboats and firing distress flares. In the chaos that ensued, some passengers struggled into lifeboats while others were stranded belowdecks. The men stoking the coal-fired boilers and running the engines fought feverishly to keep the power on. Through it all, the ship’s band played on, first ragtime tunes and then church hymns.
Why do the deaths of more than 1,500 people retain such a hold on us, more than a century later? Walter Lord, who did more than anyone to chronicle the disaster in his book A Night to Remember, put it so well, saying that we can see ourselves going through the same emotional stages with Titanic passengers and crew members, from disbelief that anything is wrong, through gradual recognition of the danger, and finally to realization that there is no escape. Watching them go through this, Lord wrote, “We wonder what we would do.”
Something else had stuck in my head, something I didn’t really know what to make of. At some point, Bill Tantum—“Mr. Titanic”—had shown me drawings based on Thayer’s eyewitness account. Thayer had jumped overboard right before Titanic sank, and he was able to look back and watch the horrible scene. The drawings showed the great ship breaking in two, with the bow sinking before the stern. The jagged ends of the two halves that had ripped apart—the back of the bow and the front of the stern—tilted down as each section went under. But the official inquiry into Titanic’s sinking had disregarded that account, concluding that the ship had gone down intact.
I had sent copies of the drawings and most of Bill’s other Titanic materials to my friend, Jean-Louis Michel, the French engineer who was my co-leader on the expedition. Remember, under the deal I’d made with the French, they were going to find Titanic with their powerful new sonar, and I was supposed to come in behind them and photograph the wreckage with my robotic cameras. I’d willingly accepted a secondary role.
As it turned out, the French team didn’t even want me there for the first couple weeks of the search. Jean-Louis’s colleagues wanted to find Titanic all by themselves. They wanted the headlines. “French Find Titanic; Ballard’s Home Fishing,” or something like that. I’d be a footnote.
I FLEW DOWN TO MEXICO after the Fourth of July picnic to test an old Navy robot that I was hoping to modernize, figuring we could use it to take videos inside Scorpion—and maybe Titanic. I almost got stuck there. A Mexican gunboat pulled up to our ship and the officer in charge barked, “Pack your bag, bring your passport.” I couldn’t very well refuse by explaining I had a secret Navy mission to get to. He hauled me off the boat and ordered me to leave the country within 24 hours. (I later found out it had something to do with a diplomatic spat between the United States and Mexico.) All flights were booked, but I improvised. I crawled through a hole in the airport fence and found a guy fueling his Cessna. After assuring him I was not running drugs, I hitched a ride to Tucson, hoping he wasn’t running drugs either.
So began what I consider the luckiest chapter of my life. I usually bristle when people call me lucky. My brother, Richard, always did. When you do something unpredictable, many people have a hard time processing how you pulled it off—and why you were the one who did what others couldn’t. They never acknowledge the creative thinking, the willingness to push yourself to the point of exhaustion, and, yes, the often desperate improvisations that went into it. When it came to finding Titanic, all of these things came into play—including luck, I readily admit.
I flew to St. Pierre, an island off Newfoundland, on July 22, 1985, with a National Geographic film team, including my friend Emory Kristof, to join the French. They had been out looking for the past two weeks, and now they were stocking up on wine, cheese, and other supplies for the second half of their search, which would last another 17 days. Over dinner, Jean-Louis told me they’d run into bad weather and hadn’t found anything. As we headed back out to the search site, I bent over the chart table with him, looking at plots of the paths they’d followed, towing their dark orange sonar vehicle back and forth through the 100-square-mile search box. I could see that high winds and strong currents had pushed them off course on their first pass along the edge of the box, leaving an elongated triangular patch that had not been searched.
The French had done the right thing, however, and kept moving in toward the center of the box, toward the point where we thought we had the highest probability of finding Titanic. After I joined them, they kept mowing the lawn, as we call it, with their sonar sweeps, covering 70 to 80 percent of the box, plus an extra area we added outside the initial box. But when they ran out of time and had to return the ship for other uses, they still hadn’t found anything.
So now, instead of coming behind the French and just photographing the shipwreck that they had found, it was up to me to find it—and I wasn’t sure if I could.
I’d have to map the Scorpion site first. Even if I could do that quickly, I’d have much less time at the Titanic site than anyone who had searched before. I had great cameras, but the only sonars I had were a small side-scanning one on Argo, my newest robot, and the crappy system on R/V Knorr, the Navy vessel Woods Hole operated, which wasn’t any better than what you’d find on a typical fishing vessel. Neither was designed to conduct a broad, systematic search like with the sonars that Dr. Spiess and the French had used. I’d have to rely on my cameras to find the wreckage, something that had never been done in the deep sea.
JEAN-LOUIS AND I FLEW to the Azores to board Knorr and head to the top secret Scorpion site. We arrived on August 12, and I was glad to see my team and equipment ready to go. There on Knorr’s stern were Argo, with its black-and-white video cameras, and Angus, my old standby, which could take sharp color stills. Cranes had lowered metal vans containing our command center onto the deck, including a lab to develop Angus’s 400-foot rolls of Kodak film. Members of my A-team from the Deep Submergence Lab were among the 49 people on board: Stu Harris, my chief engineer and Argo’s designer, and veteran Angus handlers like Martin Bowen and Earl Young, backed up by my best engineers.
We set sail on August 15. Also on board were Jean-Louis, two other French officials, and Emory Kristof, who had shared my interest in the pursuit of Titanic since the failure of my Seaprobe expedition in the late 1970s. Three U.S. naval personnel camped out in the control van—a constant reminder that the Navy’s investigation was my real mission and that I could only look for Titanic after I surveyed Scorpion’s wreckage.
As far as many of the crew members knew, we were just heading out to resume the search for Titanic. Given the highly classified nature of the mission, the Navy would only let me tell those with a need-to-know status what was really happening. How could I conceal our first stop over Scorpion’s wreckage? It was south of the Azores. Titanic was west. I was waiting for someone to say, “Bob, why is the sun rising on our port instead of our stern?” We told everyone we were testing equipment for the Navy.
I needed to make sure that Argo and Angus did work—and quickly.
Knorr’s big white crane dropped Argo into the water, and our winch operator lowered her more than 11,000 feet, down to the seabed. We began marking the length and width of Scorpion’s debris field so we could videotape it. It didn’t take long to see how different Scorpion’s wreckage was from Thresher’s. Although Thresher had looked like it had been shredded, the images on our monitors showed that Scorpion had broken into three main pieces.
The back part of the sub had imploded and telescoped into itself. The resulting explosions had spit Scorpion’s propeller and shaft out more than 100 yards. The steel containment vessel surrounding Scorpion’s nuclear reactor had also broken free, as Thresher’s had, sinking like a cannonball and burying itself in the clay. Only a little edge was sticking out. Scorpion’s forward portion, including the torpedo room, was largely intact. It had flooded, which kept it from imploding.
Navy officials were hoping that our photos would yield more clues about Scorpion’s fate, and they wanted us to look for any signs that the Soviets had visited the wreckage. The clay on the ocean floor holds impressions for decades, and we could see imprints from Trieste II in 1969, but we saw no sign that the Russians had violated Scorpion’s resting place. Good news.
I wanted to do a bang-up job for the Navy, but I was also constantly thinking about how to find Titanic. I’d noticed that Scorpion’s debris trail stretched for roughly a mile, just like Thresher’s, with the lightest debris extending the farthest out.
In four days we mapped Scorpion’s debris field completely, and we got a thumbs-up from the officer in charge of the Navy team. His team snatched our Scorpion data, stashed it in a safe, rolled the tumblers, and it was heigh-ho, Titanic, here we come.
As Knorr turned to the northwest, my mind was buzzing with thoughts of debris trails. Thresher had imploded, and so had part of Scorpion. The implosions and resulting explosions had spewed out torrents of shattered steel mixed in with much lighter parts. If Titanic had sunk in one piece, water would have rushed in through the openings on the deck. With water pressure equalized inside and out, there might not have been any implosions. That meant there might not be much of a debris trail.
But what if the sketches based on Jack Thayer’s account were right? What if Titanic had split open, the two halves plummeting, broken ends first? Then some of what was inside would have tumbled into the ocean like salt and pepper pouring out of shakers.
I visualized the ship not just breaking in two but falling to the bottom, with the heaviest pieces heading straight down and lighter ones drifting in the current, just as I had seen with Scorpion and Thresher. It played out like a film in my head and, all of a sudden, it was as clear as a bell. I shouldn’t be searching for the ship. I should be searching for the debris trail. A mile-long trail would be easier for me to find than an 883-foot ship that was maybe in one piece, maybe not.
We arrived at the Titanic search area on August 24. First we checked an underwater canyon nearby, because I figured that Titanic’s debris might have flowed down into the canyon’s main channel and remained hidden from previous search teams. We sent Argo out to look at some of the earlier sonar targets, but there was nothing at Grimm’s propeller site. Other objects—which we dubbed “Ryan’s Madness” and “Spiess’s Obsession,” given how much time they had spent looking at them—turned out to be rocks. Now, with nine days to go before Knorr would have to head home, I was excited to test my debris trail strategy.
I decided to tow Argo back and forth to the east of where the French had worked, in case Titanic had been traveling more slowly than reported. I set the lines of Argo’s pathway roughly a mile apart, running east to west. That way, if the currents had carried Titanic’s debris in a mile-long trail from north to south, we might be able to intersect it as we worked our way north.
Thank goodness, the seas were calm, and it was easier for us to keep our search vehicle on course than it had been for the French. But we still had to deal with those pesky laws of physics. Argo was dangling at the bottom of a cable that was almost two and a half miles long, and if our ship moved at more than a crawl, friction with the water caused the sled to lift up too high for us to see anything. Martin Bowen was flying Argo from the console to my left. We had reached the far end of one line and were ready to turn the corner and start mowing down the next in the opposite direction when suddenly Martin let out a yelp.
I looked over at him from the plotting table and instantly realized that we had a serious problem. We’d slowed the ship, causing Argo to fall toward the bottom as the drag on the cable dropped. To keep it from hitting the seabed, Martin began reeling in the cable. But the take-up drum on Knorr wasn’t moving fast enough, and the extra cable fell off and got tangled in the gear, shredding its protective armor. I rushed out with the crew, and we rigged up a splint and recovered my multimillion-dollar baby. But would we be able to lower Argo into the depths again or get any video from it?
Fortunately, the core of the cable that transmitted the video was not damaged, and the damage to the outer sheath was high enough on the cable that it would not affect us as long as we didn’t have to search in any deeper water. Sheer luck: We were heading into an area that was not quite as deep.
The next three days, we made monotonous runs. So much of deep-sea exploration is just plodding along, seeing little more than fuzzy, black-and-white images of mud. The crew on watch squinted and rubbed their eyes, struggling to stay focused. The heady expectations, the sense of exhilaration that we were about to do something monumental, were fading fast. It was tough on morale, as each four-hour shift gave way to the next with nothing new to report. Then the tensions boiled over.
Argo’s small sonar picked up an image of something off to the side. It seemed as big as Titanic. Jean-Louis and I were sure it was a natural phenomenon, another wisp like the ones Grimm’s team had been chasing. But Emory Kristof, in front of everyone in the van, insisted that we swing back to take a look. Others supported him.
It stung that a good friend like Emory would challenge my judgment publicly, and I didn’t want to lose the crew. One principle guiding me on this search was that we had to be disciplined. As Dana Yoerger, my robotics expert, recalls, my instruction to the crew had been: “Once you make a plan, unless you see something that says T-I-T-A-N-I-C on it, you’re not stopping for anything.”
I turned to Jean-Louis. “Come out on the deck,” I said. “Let’s talk.”
I had to remind myself that this was the first time I’d gone after a shipwreck whose resting place was unknown, and my debris trail theory was still just that, a theory. Jean-Louis and I decided to compromise with Emory, and I went back in to tell the navigator. Emory came up to ask what I was going to do. “Ask the navigator,” I snapped and kept on walking. I was still mad that he made me veer from my course. As Emory soon found out, we had decided to swing back past the area that interested him, and we all saw on the monitors exactly what Jean-Louis and I had expected to see: sand dunes—giant ones, but still sand dunes. That ended that argument.
I pride myself on being an optimist, but a couple of evenings later I was still feeling pretty low, wondering if we could pull this off. When the watch changed at midnight on September 1, we had just over four more days to go. As chief scientist, I like to be in the control van every four hours, to make sure the new watch team knows what the old watch team did. We were about to pass through that triangle in the original search box that the French had missed. Everything seemed to be going fine, so I headed up to my stateroom. I remember hearing Marvin Gaye singing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” as I left the van.
My cabin was next to the captain’s, up in the clouds at the top of the ship. It was away from the action, a good retreat. Even as a boy, I’d been able to fall asleep on my way to the pillow. I’d also gotten good at squeezing in a couple of deeper cycles of rapid eye movement between watch changes at sea. But tonight was different. I was restless. I was reading Chuck Yeager’s autobiography, and remembering how my dad had flown with the celebrated test pilot over the Mojave Desert. Then someone knocked on my door. A voice called out. It was the cook. Why, I thought, is the cook here at one in the morning?
“The guys think you should come down to the van,” he said.
He didn’t have to finish his sentence. The watch team must have seen something big enough that none of them wanted to leave their screens. I could just hear the conversation. Somebody had better get Bob, but I’m not the one who’s going. So they told me through the grapevine.
I hopped back into my blue jumpsuit, and bam, I was out of there, gliding down two decks with my hands on the railings—turning a corner, turning a corner—my feet barely touching the steps. I blasted into the command center, looking toward the screens on the front wall. I saw debris on the three screens displaying Argo’s black-and-white video feeds, and I was looking at the plot to see where we were. There was a compass heading, a bearing. I could see how high off the ocean floor we were. I was sucking it all in, forming a mental image.
Then I heard Stu Harris’s voice telling me what they’d just seen. It was a ship’s boiler. The crew members were buzzing with joy, and one of them rewound the tape so I could see it for myself. The tape showed that Stu had been the first to spot some smaller debris. You could hear him say simply, “There’s something.” Moments later, Bill Lange, whose job was to document what we saw, shouted, “Wreckage!” That was followed minutes later by Stu’s “Bingo!” and then Bill’s “It’s a boiler!”
The video images confirmed their enthusiasm. There it was, a metal cylinder, more than 15 feet in diameter, with rivets and three large doors for shoveling in coal—just like the boilers in pictures we had of Titanic.
“Goddamn,” I said. “Goddamn.”
There it was, one of 29 boilers that had created steam for Titanic’s engines. It was a signature piece. We’d found the debris field, about 12,500 feet down. Bull’s-eye!
I looked at my friend Jean-Louis. He knew what I was thinking. “It was not luck,” he said. “We earned it.”
As we passed over more of the wreckage, everyone celebrated with cups of Portuguese wine. It made me nervous. Some of the crew seemed to be losing focus, and I feared that the wreckage might snag the equipment. I ordered Argo brought up to almost 200 feet to avoid the debris below. I didn’t want to lose our robot eyes the very moment we had found Titanic.
Around 2 a.m., someone remarked that we were approaching the time of night when Titanic had sunk into a sea as calm as the one we had now. It wasn’t until this point that the emotion of the tragedy fully hit me. I know this sounds odd, but it was quite unexpected. I had never been a Titanic groupie. Sure, I’d wanted to find it, and I’d been very competitive about that. But a world tragedy had played itself out on this spot, and now the site itself took hold of me. Its emotion filled me and never let go.
I said I was going out on the fantail for a few moments of silent reflection for those who had lost their lives here. Most of our team members came up with me. Seventy-three years before, the waters around us were teeming with people crying for help and frantically trying to reach lifeboats. Jack Thayer, the teenager who was in the water with them, described the scene in words I’ll never forget: “Then an individual call for help, from here, from there; gradually swelling into a composite volume of one long continuous wailing chant, from the 1,500 in the water all around us. It sounded like locusts on a midsummer night, in the woods in Pennsylvania.”
As Thayer recalled, “This terrible continuing crying lasted for 20 or 30 minutes, gradually dying away…”
The sea had claimed all these people. Some drowned inside the ship as it fell beneath the waves. The bodies of others who ended up in the water without life jackets just rained down to the ocean bottom. When you drown in the deep sea or die of hypothermia, you don’t float to the surface again. You sink, and the pressure of the deep keeps you down. The cold tentacles of death grab hold and don’t let go.
I wanted to share the big news of our find with John Steele, the Woods Hole director, even though he hadn’t supported our search. It was the Sunday of Labor Day weekend. I waited until a reasonable hour and called the Woods Hole operator, asking to connect with Steele at home. The operator came back with his answer: He was too busy to take my call.
WE HAD FOUND DEBRIS, but not the ship, and we needed clear pictures of a sizable part of Titanic to convince the world we’d found it. The boiler—yeah, we had that. But if all we had was a picture of a boiler, well, who says that’s really it? I knew we were close, but we weren’t over the finish line. If the ship had split apart, where was the bow? Where was the stern?
Argo’s video cameras picked up pieces of hull plating and other debris that clearly had come from a large ship. As we repositioned our navigational transponders around the debris field for better tracking, Knorr’s bottom-sounding sonar made contact with a 100-foot-tall object to our north. It was 13.5 miles southeast of Titanic’s last reported position, but given its proximity to the other debris, it seemed likely to be a significant chunk of Titanic’s hull. How funny, I thought, that Knorr’s crappy Fathometer—not the more sophisticated sonar systems Ryan, Spiess, and the French deployed—found what seemed to be a large part of the ship. Looking for the debris trail had taken us to the right area, and now it looked like we had just kind of run over it.
Everyone agreed that it had to be a big piece of Titanic. We stood at the chart table, and Jean-Louis superimposed his original search map over this spot.
“Merde,” he said.
He had missed Titanic by less than 3,300 feet on his first sonar run.
Talk about bad luck. If the currents had not pushed his ship and the sonar it towed off on an angle, he’d have run into the wreckage and won the acclaim for finding Titanic. The French were so close, in fact, that I’ll bet they picked up some signs of small debris. But on a sonar screen, it would have looked just like rocks, nothing of interest.
We did this together, I told Jean-Louis, trying to console him. “I had my chance,” he said, “Paris will look at it as my failure.” Then, stand-up guy that he is, he quietly turned back to the table to help plan our next Argo runs. I really felt for him, but I also appreciated that. We had a lot to do, and the fickle North Atlantic weather was turning dicey.
As the winds picked up on September 2, we prepared to make the first scouting run over what we felt sure was the main part of the ship.
If you look at pictures of Titanic in all her finery, you’ll see a cobweb of wires above her. Telegraph wires, looking like trapeze lines, ran high along the length of the ship. Guy wires slanted up from the deck to stabilize the funnels, or smokestacks. If she was upright—and we didn’t know at this point—Argo might have to descend into the cobweb to get good pictures. I was terrified that if I got too close, the lines would grab Argo, or we would smash into a funnel, and I’d lose the ball game.
I stood in front of the bevy of monitors in the control van, taking in all the data and getting into my zone. I was totally inside myself, visualizing it, trying to create a three-dimensional picture in my mind of what was down there. It was like I was doing a mating dance with Titanic.
Everyone was gathering in the van, wondering when I was going for it. We’re running out of time, I told myself. I’ve got to go for it.
We position Knorr on the starboard side of the wreckage and come to a halt several hundred feet away, pointing right at the large piece we’d discovered. Earl Young has his hand on the joystick, holding Argo safely at 50 meters—164 feet—above the seabed, ready to lower or raise it at a moment’s notice. I say to move Knorr as slowly as possible. I just want to creep over there.
We’re all looking at the video monitors, and it’s like we become Argo. We’re too high to see anything. I’m waiting for Argo’s Fathometer, which looks down and slightly forward, to pick up signs of the wreckage. All of a sudden, our altitude reading drops in half, to 25 meters, indicating something large rising off the ocean floor. We’re about to pass over Titanic.
It’s a scary moment. On Earl’s monitor, the ship seems to be rising up at us. He’s looking at an electronic image with two horizontal lines. The one showing Argo’s altitude stays in the same place, but the line showing the bottom depth is rising rapidly. It looks like they’re going to collide, and all our instincts are to raise Argo. I’m sitting next to Earl, right up against his ear, like Braveheart as the goddamn Brits were charging them, saying, “Hold.” He wants to panic. He wants to bring up the vehicle. I’m thinking, If he does, we won’t see anything. “Hold.”
In fact, I order him to drop down another 16 feet. Now we’re only 66 feet above the wreckage, just under the top of the funnels if some are still standing beyond the range of our lights. Earl has a grip on the lever. He’s almost squeezing the pulp out of it. His hand is going white. Then, slowly, faint and fuzzy on the black-and-white video stream, Titanic’s hull comes into view. “She’s upright,” I say in my best deadpan command voice. “All stop.”
As Knorr’s forward momentum slows, I’m trying to figure out what we’re looking at. I’m seeing the very edge of the ship and then, suddenly, the boat deck. We’re inching toward the middle of the starboard side, where some of the lifeboats were launched.
Now all the images of Titanic’s floor plan are racing through my head. What’s next? The frigging funnel! That’s really high, and I’m imagining Argo’s going to hit that thing. But no funnel there. Instead, a big hole. Thank God.
Knorr stalls, centered perfectly over the funnel opening. We’re dead in the water, and God’s in charge. Argo begins to rotate a little on its cable, and I just let it drift. By sheer luck, we drift down the center axis of the ship toward the bow. I couldn’t have choreographed it any better.
Everyone was silent, glued to the action. The command center was full of people from all watches, plastered against the back wall. No one wanted to miss this.
Next up, Titanic’s bridge. But there’s no bridge. All we could see is the base of it, like the foundation of a house that’s gone. Then we see the toppled foremast, with the crow’s nest, where the watchman had first spied the iceberg. We keep drifting forward, and Titanic angles down as we approach the cranes that load things into the hatch. Folded inward, they look like a lobster with its arms crossed. Then we see the hull, and we know the raised deck with the crew quarters is coming.
We were just drifting slowly. Titanic was unveiling herself to us. No one was blinking. Our eyes were drying out, because we were not going to close them for a nanosecond. It was an “Oh, my God!” kind of moment. Argo started to drift a little to starboard. We were going over those monstrous bollards and capstans and the chain links of the anchor, so huge each link weighs 175 pounds. Then we went out over the railing and into nothing, just the blackness of the sea again.
At that point, everyone exploded. We’d done it. That little tour must have taken just under six minutes, and we had not run into any of the cobwebs. Everyone in the control van went crazy, yelling and hugging each other.
Jean-Louis and I stood quietly in the middle of it all. We were on the verge of tears, just taking it all in and marveling at the achievement. I’d been chasing this dream, hoping for this moment for years, and now it was finally here.
But we still had a lot to do, and the clock was ticking. We had fewer than three days left aboard Knorr. Later that afternoon, we took Argo farther aft, trying to figure out how much of the ship was still there. We were feeling it out from a safe height, getting to know the beast. Could we get even closer?
We could see a hole above the Grand Staircase, but we couldn’t see down into it. There also was a hole where the second funnel used to be. As Argo continued aft, the deck sloped down into a vicious scene of twisted metal. We had surveyed about 470 of Titanic’s 883-foot length. Where were the third and fourth funnels? Where was the rest of the ship?
Jack Thayer was right. Titanic had broken in two at its weakest point, between the second and third funnels—a large area with little supporting structure—and the bow and stern had sunk separately. But where was the stern? We wanted to explore further, but bad weather was closing in on us, and we had to reel in Argo.
It was almost 11:30 at night on September 2, and I’d been up for 24 hours. One of the things you learn from the sea is patience, because you are not in control. This time, my patience lasted an additional 10 hours. The sea was churning, but I thought we could drag Angus, my rugged old dope on a rope, through it. I needed to go home with some of Angus’s high-quality color still images, not just Argo’s black-and-white video. We needed the icing on the cake.
With less than two days to go, we lowered Angus into the frothing sea. First, we sent it out over the parts of the debris field with the smaller objects. That was the safest bet. If we ended up going too close over the ship, we’d at least have all the other pictures. And there was amazing stuff in the debris field, personal things like teacups, wine bottles, a silver platter, and items from people’s staterooms—poignant reminders of those on board.
We didn’t have a live link to Angus, so we were flying blind. We wouldn’t see the pictures until we developed the film. From late afternoon into the evening on September 4, we tugged Angus over Titanic’s bow five times, cameras snapping away. I was still being cautious, keeping Angus 20 to 30 feet above Titanic’s decks. I knew that the pictures were likely to be fuzzy.
After midnight on September 5, word came from our onboard lab that the photos weren’t clear enough. The time had come for one final epic run with Angus. I had barely slept in days, and I was exhausted. I also had slipped on the wet deck—I don’t even remember how—and injured my leg, and I was having trouble standing. We had until 7:30 a.m. before we had to take up the transponders and get ready to head home. I was going to pull out all the stops, even if it meant damaging Angus in the process.
High winds and seas were battering Knorr. The launch team had to put on foul-weather gear, and Earl had to tie himself to the ship to turn on Angus’s strobe lights and cameras and to drop it into the sea. Adrenaline kills pain, and that helped with my leg, but I was still so worn out that I crawled under the chart table to lie down. I took catnaps as Angus made the descent to Titanic’s grave. Earl and others prepared everything to get the evocative still-life portraits that she deserved. I figured Angus would need to get within 12 or 13 feet of Titanic’s deck for sharp images. Even that close, the reds would dissipate, and the photos would be a ghostly mix of shades of blue. But at least they would be clear.
I hobbled over and pulled up a chair right behind Earl. Leaning over his shoulder, I gave the order to take Angus down to 13 feet.
“Four meters?” Earl asked.
“Four meters,” I repeated.
For three hours, Earl led Angus on one blind pass after another over Titanic’s bow as the rolling waves above pulled the cable—and Angus—up and down. Finally, word came that we had to break off if Knorr was going to keep its schedule. We pulled up Angus, and then Martin Bowen spent the next several hours in the photo lab. He came out smiling, announcing triumphantly that we had terrific pictures.
Argo’s video cameras had also run for most of the first week, and we had shot more than 20,000 frames in 8,000 locations. We had all that to take home and study. It wasn’t until we got into the analysis that we realized we’d passed over Titanic’s stern. It lay 2,000 feet south of the bow, near where we’d spotted that first boiler.
Dr. Steele, Woods Hole’s director, had finally gotten excited about what we had accomplished, and Woods Hole had arranged interviews for me with one reporter after another, using Knorr’s ship-to-shore hookup. Just as I started talking to Tom Brokaw, the NBC News anchor, I looked out and saw that we were actually sailing away from the Titanic site. Whoa, whoa, wait a minute, I thought. I didn’t get to say goodbye.
I had started this quest for its own sake, focused mainly on the challenge. But now I had a deep emotional connection to Titanic. Its resting place is one of those places that speaks to you, like Gettysburg or Normandy. It moves something deep inside you because it’s seen so much loss of life. I was thinking I hadn’t been respectful enough. I hurriedly got off the phone and ran out to the fantail. I needed one more calm moment to say farewell.
On our voyage home, I jotted down some thoughts to say to those on land curious to hear the details of our discovery. Titanic lies “on a gently sloping alpine-like countryside overlooking a small canyon,” I wrote. “It is a quiet and peaceful and fitting place for the remains of this greatest of sea tragedies to rest. May it forever remain that way, and may God bless these found souls.”