Helicopters buzzed overhead and small craft swarmed out to greet Knorr as we sailed into Woods Hole on September 9, 1985. VIPs and family members, including Margie, Todd, and Dougie, were ferried out for a private welcome. Showing off a bit, the captain blared Knorr’s horn and did a full 360-degree turn for the hundreds of people peering up at us excitedly from the dock—Woods Hole folks, mainly, but also a startling crush of media from as far away as London and Paris. Our fans were waving homemade signs and tossing confetti and balloons into the air.
“How do you feel about finding Titanic?” the reporters shouted at me.
“I’m glad it’s over,” I yelled back.
That’ll give you some idea of how unprepared I was for what was to come.
I’d had my share of media attention and done the talk show circuit after I’d found the hydrothermal vents and black smokers. I could handle myself in that world. But this was like nothing I’d experienced. It started with Jean-Louis Michel and me both saying a few words in the Woods Hole auditorium, praising our countries’ cooperation and calling for peace for Titanic’s lost souls. Then we shook hands and rushed into waiting cars. Reporters were tossing pieces of paper with their names and phone numbers through the window, grasping for exclusive interviews.
But I wasn’t saying much more. I was due to fly down to Washington, D.C., for the main press conference, which National Geographic had agreed to host, and I needed to keep my mouth shut until then.
You’d have thought our voyage back to Woods Hole would have been a time of celebration, but it was actually fairly tense. A lot was simmering behind the scenes that I hoped the reporters wouldn’t find out about. Jean-Louis and I had been partners in the search, and the French had come so close to finding Titanic that I wanted to make sure they shared the glory. On our way back to Woods Hole, we’d sent a small batch of photos to shore by helicopter, carried by one American and one French naval officer, to represent the partnership. I’d made a handshake deal that we’d wait to release our photos in the United States until theirs had arrived in Paris, so the announcement of our discovery could come in a simultaneous press release from both locations. Unfortunately, John Steele, my boss at Woods Hole, had buckled under pressure from U.S. news outlets and let them broadcast the images early. The French were outraged, and so was I.
Steele had never supported my search for Titanic. In fact, he’d done everything he could to stop me. He was a purist, preferring projects of solely academic interest. Now, seizing control over a project he had barely approved, he was betraying the great working relationship I’d developed with the French.
I’d also gotten a tip from someone at Woods Hole that Steele was planning to have his security officials seize all the Titanic photos and videos, and I was afraid he might dump a lot more of them to the media and turn everything into a circus. As the leader of the expedition, I had the sole right under federal law to control their release. Steele had already shown he didn’t care about that, so I donned my other hat as commander in the Navy Reserve and classified the remaining Titanic material “Top Secret.” I cited Navy sensitivities about wrecks that might hold human remains. I asked the Navy officer who’d commanded our Scorpion survey to change the combinations to the safes where the photos and videos were stored—and not tell me the new combinations. That would keep the Titanic material out of reach until calmer legal heads could prevail.
The tensions continued as I reached D.C. The French government went to court to try to block the news conference, and an American judge rejected that request in the middle of the night. Still hoping to repair the damage with my French colleagues, I insisted on showing only the few images that Jean-Louis and I had agreed on, so National Geographic assigned an artist to work through the night to add some renderings to the mix. Here I was, at the defining moment of my life, and so much—my relationships with my boss and my longtime exploration partners—seemed to be dissolving in acrimony.
John Lehman came to the news conference and sat right in the front row. Having the interest and support of the secretary of the Navy buoyed me. I kept my presentation simple. The story told itself. The reporters were transfixed by the images—Titanic’s deck, its anchor chain, the dishes and wine bottles. I wanted to keep them from sniffing around too much, in case they’d heard about the French lawsuit, and so I fed them something else enticing for their stories: a controversy that dated back to days right after Titanic sank. It turned out that a British steamship, Californian, was under way toward Boston ahead of Titanic when it encountered the ice field and stopped. It was at least five to seven miles—and maybe as many as 21—north of Titanic. It had sent Titanic a warning about the iceberg, but when Californian’s officers later saw lights and flares, they thought Titanic’s crew was simply entertaining its passengers. The radio operator aboard Californian had gone to bed by then, and if the captain had awakened him and told him to put on his headset, he would have heard Titanic’s operator calling for help.
Could Californian have rescued some of Titanic’s passengers and crew members from the icy waters if it had responded to the distress calls? I raised that question once again, to get the reporters’ attention. Now that we knew where Titanic went down, I said, we could see that Californian had indeed been close enough to rescue some of the passengers. The media always crave a controversy, so I gave them one that was 73 years old, and they seized it. By the end of the briefing, I was back in control.
But the media blitz didn’t stop. I went on the Today Show, the Tomorrow Show, and the Day After Tomorrow Show. Once I got a chance to catch my breath, I could see what everyone else who’s ever been thrust into the spotlight learns: For better or worse, my life had changed forever. I’d been naive—or just weary from lack of sleep—in thinking that finding Titanic was the end of the story. That was the scientist in me: Make a discovery and write it up. But the paradigm shifter and promoter in me knew better. Now there would always be some people who wanted to take me down a notch, but others I’d never met welcomed me into their company.
STEELE AND I HAD BARELY tolerated each other before, and now I could see we were heading into a full-pitched battle. He and other scientists at Woods Hole had such mixed emotions about what I’d been doing, and now the charge of being a popularizer would be hurled at me again. I’d always felt that Carl Sagan, the Cornell astronomer, had been punished for popularizing science with his Cosmos television series when he was rejected for membership in the National Academy of Sciences. I worried the same thing would happen to me. I’d been senior author on more peer-
reviewed articles than the vast majority of tenured faculty members at Woods Hole. I certainly didn’t want fame from the Titanic discovery to shadow my serious scientific work.
On the other hand, it didn’t take long to see the tremendous opportunities my new status would provide. Crates of letters were arriving at Woods Hole, and the phone was ringing off the hook. Our quiet little institution had become internationally famous, and pretty much everyone there was irritated with me about that. All they could do was watch as my desk disappeared under a mountain of more than 16,000 letters, many from schoolchildren saying our Titanic discovery had made them want to become scientists and undersea explorers, too.
One day, my secretary got a phone call from someone who said the White House was calling. President Reagan wished to invite me to a dinner in honor of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Thinking it was a prank, my secretary asked them to send the invitation. Sure enough, a huge, embossed envelope soon arrived. It looked like I’d just won an Academy Award. The dinner was to be held not in the grand salons where state occasions normally occur, but upstairs in the private family quarters. I had never been to the White House. I had no idea what was expected of me.
Fortunately, I had someone I could call: Shirley Temple Black, the child superstar who had grown up to serve as an ambassador and chief of protocol for the United States. I had gotten to know Shirley because her husband, Charlie Black, was on Woods Hole’s board of trustees. We had had some good times together. I vividly remember belting out “On the Good Ship Lollipop,” one of her childhood hits, while driving home from a restaurant together. Shirley was a bit of a prankster. One time she invited me to a fundraising event and asked me to bring a giant tube worm we’d collected at the Galápagos Rift hydrothermal vents so she could put it on ice on the hors d’oeuvres table. The tube worm was the star of the party. I stayed at their home on several occasions and loved to look into her aquarium, which included a diver with air bubbles coming out of its head. Months later I received a small box. Inside was that very diver, standing on a wooden pedestal.
So I called Shirley to get some advice on what to expect and how to behave. Her answer was succinct: Get a room across the street from the White House at the Hay-Adams Hotel. Arrive a few minutes early for dinner and stand to the side and listen as the guests are announced to the press corps.
Margie and I checked into the Hay-Adams. It was so close to the White House that we planned to walk over to dinner. But I was unsure which entrance to use. I took a brisk jog that afternoon, swinging by the White House, and asked one of the guards which door tonight’s dinner guests would be using. His trembling hand moved toward his sidearm. It didn’t take Army training to figure out he was unnerved by a sweaty stranger, even though I told him I was one of the guests. “Clearly I have made a mistake,” I quickly said. I told him I was going to walk slowly backward to my hotel across the street, and that’s what I did.
That night, we took a limousine.
The dinner party, about 80 guests in all, was led upstairs, where the president himself greeted us. As I approached him, an aide whispered my name in his ear. He was cordial, but I could tell he didn’t really recognize who I was. I proceeded down the receiving line to Prince Charles, who took my hand. Suddenly, the lightbulb went off for President Reagan, and he started congratulating me for finding Titanic while I stood there holding the prince’s hand. That moment lasted an uncomfortably long time. Next, Nancy Reagan introduced me to Princess Diana. To my surprise, she was extremely shy. She darted out her hand and quickly yanked it back.
The room was filled with famous faces: Alan Shepard, Mikhail Baryshnikov, John Travolta, Beverly Sills, Clint Eastwood, William F. Buckley, Jr. At one point, Shepard was telling a story at his table about balloon riding, and he punctuated it by making a loud schussing sound. It came out more like the kind of sound you’d never want to make in polite company. The room fell silent. Then President Reagan stood up with a smile and said, “It wasn’t me!” His friendly comment broke the ice, and everyone began to relax.
There were toasts, lobster mousse with Maryland crab, glazed chicken, and peach sorbet. Then we were led downstairs, where Neil Diamond performed. People began to dance. When the tune shifted to “Saturday Night Fever,” a suddenly un-shy Lady Diana marched boldly over to Travolta, grabbed his hand, and led him onto the dance floor. He seemed surprised and uncomfortable. But not Lady Di, who knew how to take over a room. Everyone stopped to watch. Diana was in a form-fitting, floor-length, midnight blue velvet dress, and she kept up with Travolta through a double spin. We all held our breaths, afraid she’d tumble to the ground, but she never missed a beat.
Prince Charles, who had been watching a bit grumpily from the sidelines, chose that moment to stalk onto the dance floor with the wife of the British ambassador, easing his way over to his wife and seeming to signal her that enough was enough. She ignored him and kept on dancing, and the royal couple didn’t leave till past midnight. Margie and I then took the limousine back across the street to the hotel. I later got a $900 bill for the two-block round-trip.
The public was entranced with all things Titanic, and many other invitations followed. Not long after the White House dinner, I was asked to give lectures on Titanic aboard Queen Elizabeth 2 on a trip from England. They gave us two first-class cabins, and Margie, Dougie, and one of his friends came along. The odd thing was that we had to be diverted from New York to Baltimore. The reason? A warning about icebergs.
It was rapidly dawning on me by that point: Titanic was not just another trophy. It had given me sufficient status to be included in such company, and thus greater power to implement new projects I was dreaming about. I had been so moved by those letters from thousands of students that I wanted to set up an educational program in science and engineering. Given how well preserved Titanic was, I’d also begun wondering what the state of preservation might be for older, wooden ships on the seafloor: British schooners, Spanish galleons, even vessels from the classical age. I proposed to Steele that I create a Center for Marine Exploration at Woods Hole to run these and other projects. It was time to take stock. My mother was right. I didn’t want to go down in history as the guy who found that rusty old boat. I was 43 years old and had a lot of years ahead of me. Now that I had the world’s attention, it was time to decide what was next.
THE NEXT SUMMER I headed back to the North Atlantic for a second visit to Titanic aboard Woods Hole’s R/V Atlantis II, the mother ship for Alvin. Because we had discovered Titanic with only four days left in our 1985 expedition, we needed to go back and photograph the wreckage more thoroughly. Most important, I wanted to send a robot inside.
Before going, I did everything I could to patch up my long relationship with the French, which had been destroyed when Steele released the footage to the U.S. press before the French could release it in Paris. I signed over the fee I received from National Geographic for the article I wrote about the discovery and insisted that Jean-Louis be listed as the second author on the article. And I invited him to join us again in 1986. At first the French agreed, but then at the last minute, they pulled out. It felt like I was dealing with a jilted lover who couldn’t get past the original heartbreak.
This time, Dr. Steele and Woods Hole were at least publicly supportive. A committee appointed by Steele recommended that he approve the new center to run my explorations, though not without the usual harrumphing about how popularizing science might turn off traditional funding sources. Steele realized that Titanic could be a money raiser for Woods Hole, though, and he seemed willing to hold his nose to exploit it. I’d even met with some of Woods Hole’s wealthy donors in June 1986, hoping they would support my new center.
The Navy was underwriting this expedition, just as it had the first. We also had a new player on board: Jason Jr., nicknamed JJ—a prototype for Jason, a larger version that was still on the drawing board. JJ would be deployed from a submersible, connected by a long, snaking cord so it could go places the larger one dare not try to go. It had evolved from the old Navy robot I was testing off Mexico when I got kicked out of the country, and it was designed to sneak into wrecks and peek at interior spaces that had been impossible to reach.
Once again, I was right in the middle of a top secret operation. I’d be testing JJ on Titanic, using it to see if we could get the dramatic glimpses of the Grand Staircase that Secretary Lehman had described when he was pitching my ideas to President Reagan. Reagan saw the military potential of such a robot, too, and he liked how nervous it would make the Soviets when they learned of this new capability. But the Navy also had a second, and more immediate, objective in helping us develop a more nimble vehicle. If JJ could penetrate the Titanic wreck, then the Navy could use it to get inside Scorpion’s torpedo room to learn more about why that sub had sunk. Several officers from Submarine Development Group One, which operated the Navy’s most secretive spy subs and its own deep-diving submersibles, planned to go with us on this next Titanic expedition to learn how to operate the robot.
So the stakes were high, especially because JJ had never been anywhere near the deep ocean. We’d tested it mainly in a swimming pool, and my engineers thought it was nuts to plunge JJ into such an assignment without more testing. But off we went. JJ would be getting its inaugural run down Titanic’s staircase.
Some of my old friends in Woods Hole’s Alvin group thought I was crazy, too, abandoning the promise of manned submersibles just as others were beginning to use them. Here I’d helped pioneer Alvin for deep-sea exploration, and now I was talking up the role of robotic systems for revisiting Titanic. Alvin’s all-too-human pilots and handlers were upset.
I might have gotten a little ahead of myself when I’d told the Cape Cod Times, “Manned submersibles are doomed.” My ultimate goal was to tether JJ to another robotic vehicle, which could provide a setup with stronger lighting and more staying power. But the technology to enable the two robots to work together in that fashion was not quite there yet, so I had to humble myself and request Alvin for this run. After we shoved off, bound for the Titanic site, the Alvin gang made me eat my words—literally. One of the ship’s crew members baked a cake decorated with my words, “Manned Submersibles are Doomed,” and I humbly took a bite.
WE REACHED THE TITANIC SITE on July 12, 1986. We had 12 days to explore, and I didn’t want to waste a moment. The first morning was picture-perfect, with calm waters and blue skies. It was time for three of us—pilot Ralph Hollis, copilot Dudley Foster, and me—to climb into Alvin for a get-acquainted dive, looking for good landing spots on Titanic’s bow.
But almost as soon as we started down, things started breaking. First the sonar went out. Then water began seeping into one of the main batteries. Alarms were going off. I knew we were all right as long as we kept monitoring how much water was penetrating the battery pack. At the same time, our bottom transponders were acting up, which meant that no one aboard our mother ship could tell where we were. We were 12,500 feet down and operating in the dark. We couldn’t see any farther than Alvin’s lights could shine.
I could see tiny particles, the detritus of marine life, flowing north in the deep current. That meant that the current might have pushed us north of Titanic’s bow, so I told Hollis to drive south. Now we’re cooking, I thought. But just then the battery alarms sounded again. Hollis was ready to call off the dive when the navigator on the mother ship suddenly called out that he could point us toward the sunken bow. We were running parallel to Titanic, he said, and as we crept closer in our half-blind way, I peered into the gloom. A large pile of mud emerged slowly. We drove around it, and as we did, we began to see a wall of steel towering over us and disappearing into the dark in every direction. We were staring at Titanic’s hull. Never had I felt so small.
But Alvin’s technical problems persisted, and we hardly had time to absorb what we were seeing. We dropped the weights holding us down and began our two-and-a-half-hour ascent back to the surface.
After a night of repairs, Alvin made the next descent without a hitch. As we got our bearings, we shared another extraordinary moment. Out of the viewport, I could see what appeared to be a sharp edge, almost like a knife. It revealed itself slowly, and I couldn’t see past it. As we got closer, I realized, Oh my God, it’s the prow. We were approaching Titanic directly from the front, heading straight into the bow. It looked like a ship was coming out of the dark, straight at us. Dead-on. Made us want to get out of the way. Would it slice us in half? Then I realized it’s not coming at us. We were going toward it.
As we got closer, I could see trails of rust running down the side of the bow onto the ocean floor. Created by bacteria that feast on rusty iron, long, reddish spikes hung like icicles from the deck railing. There was no way to describe them—until a new word popped into my head: “rusticles,” which years later officially became a word in the Oxford English Dictionary.
We crossed over the forward deck and saw the monstrous anchor chains. Titanic’s magnificent wooden deck had vanished, replaced by a carpet of thin white hollow tubes, the remains of wood-eating shipworms. We landed in two spots—one near the toppled mast with the crow’s nest, the other where the wheelhouse used to be. We got great pictures of the ship’s telemotor, although the wheel had been eaten by the wood borers. These landings proved that Titanic could support Alvin’s weight, at least in spots.
We then made several passes over the bow. We also saw portholes with glass still intact. Imagine the violent, wrenching, breaking of the ship; the long ride to the bottom; and the plunge into clay, buckling the bow in several areas—and still some of the glass was holding on. We never saw the name “Titanic” on the ship. Everything was obscured by rust, although later examination of our video revealed what might be part of the “c.”
Now I knew exactly where I wanted to land Alvin—just beside the opening above the elegant Grand Staircase. Once covered by an ornate glass dome, it led down to first-class public rooms and cabins. We could poise Alvin at the opening and send JJ down the staircase. What better test for our new little robot?
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, we climbed into Alvin again, and I asked Dudley to land on top of the telegraph room, just beside the staircase opening. Then Martin Bowen, JJ’s pilot, took control, manipulating the little robot sub with a reel like that of a fishing rod. We watched out Alvin’s viewport as JJ neared the swimming pool–size opening above the staircase. This was Junior’s first real dive, so we kept him on a short leash, letting out a little cable at a time.
Slowly, JJ descended into the hole, disappearing from sight. Now JJ’s eyes became our eyes, as we watched the monitor inside, seeing what JJ saw.
The staircase, as it turned out, had become little more than an empty shaft, almost all of its wood and elegant decorations having long vanished or collapsed in a giant heap below. We passed the spot on the wall where once hung a bas-relief clock decorated with winged figures representing Honor and Glory. Martin noticed a room with its entry agape. Like a voyeur, JJ wanted a peek. Slowly, Martin maneuvered JJ in and, there, amazingly enough, an ornate light fixture still hung from the ceiling, slightly askew. It carried a gift from the deep ocean: a sea pen, a delicate creature attached at a rakish angle like a feather on a woman’s hat.
The area below was filled with debris: the remnants of the staircase—whatever hadn’t been eaten by the borers—and other wreckage. We had only 20 minutes or so to explore the Grand Staircase. JJ made it down to the B deck, and we were eyeing the C deck, but time was up. We wanted to stay longer, but we had to head back to the surface.
That was part of my frustration with exploring in a manned submersible: We had so little time to spend on the bottom. Alvin’s batteries had to be recharged each night, and to avoid taxing the pilots, we had a rule that we needed to be back on the surface by dinner time at 5 p.m. Alvin ascended slowly, and so that meant we had to leave the sea bottom by 2:30 to 3. Talk about bankers’ hours. You’ve just landed on something as fascinating as the moon, and now it’s time to leave. That’s why I was advocating for a move from manned to robotic submersibles. Robots don’t have to make it back for the early-bird special. We could have 24-hour coverage and not risk our lives every time we went down.
Everyone—my whole crew and the Navy officers on board with us—were pumped up when we arrived back on deck that day. We’d proven JJ’s capabilities. We watched the video of its descent into the staircase shaft over and over again. I filed a status report to Woods Hole, then did a series of media interviews. Everyone was excited at the idea of seeing the inside of Titanic. Certain questions came up again and again. Had we seen any bodies? Had we retrieved any artifacts? I patiently explained that no human remains could have survived in those conditions. Furthermore, we had vowed—and the Navy had insisted—that we would bring up no artifacts whatsoever. As far as I was concerned, doing that would be tantamount to grave robbing.
On subsequent days, we explored the debris field around the wreck. Artifacts were scattered all over the seafloor—silverware, champagne bottles with their corks in place, boots, luggage. No skeletons, thank goodness. Once, a tiny face emerged from the gloom, its small head half buried. My heart went into my throat, and then I realized I was looking at a doll—a reminder of the young lives lost in the disaster.
We came across a steel safe sitting on the seafloor. I had vowed to retrieve no artifacts. But a safe? No telling what might be in it. We used Alvin’s mechanical arm to twist the knob, but the door didn’t open. Later, we saw that the bottom had rusted away, and nothing was inside it.
We thought most of the debris must have come from the stern. But was there another section of stern somewhere else, bigger than the piece we’d photographed the year before? We’d been using Angus to make reconnaissance runs, and photos revealed a large piece of metal, mangled and flattened, about 2,000 feet from the bow. A chunk was missing from it, and the whole thing looked like it had been pulverized.
I was surprised by its length, about 250 feet. It was clearly the stern with its poop deck—the flat, cantilevered section at the back edge where so many passengers had retreated as the ship slipped into the ocean. It was sitting upright, buried about 45 feet into the seabed.
I wanted to send JJ under the poop deck to see if Titanic’s propellers and rudder were still there. I wanted to put to rest that claim of Texas oilman Jack Grimm that he had found the propeller on one of his searches. But JJ was acting up, so Ralph Hollis decided to pilot Alvin down there. Even though he was bending the safety rules, Ralph was confident that he could get Alvin in there. Titanic’s stern was sloping upward toward open water, which meant we could drop weights and escape quickly if we needed to. It was risky but, frankly, I wanted to see what was there, too.
It was an eerie feeling to be creeping forward, watching the hull get closer and closer. We got so close we could see the rivets in the hull. It was one of the few times I’ve ever felt claustrophobic. Finally, we were able to see it: the top of the rudder, still firmly attached to the hull. But we saw nothing of the propellers. Maybe we had not gone as far as we needed to see them, but enough was enough. On our way up, we landed on the poop deck and used Alvin’s mechanical arm to leave behind a plaque dedicated to Bill Tantum, who had died in 1980, and to all those who had perished there.
I wanted to make sure we completely photographed the bow hull, hoping it would yield clues about damage that occurred as the iceberg scraped along the starboard side. Most of that area had sunk into the ocean’s sediment, but we saw no sign of a gaping hole or gash. We did find some buckled and separated steel plates with the rivets sprung. So perhaps, rather than creating a huge gash, the iceberg separated the plates at their joints, popping the rivets. The force from the collision might have resulted in something more like unzipping a zipper rather than bashing in a hole, creating intermittent openings mere inches wide that still allowed water to penetrate a wide swath of the bow.
It left some of us wondering if fewer compartments would have flooded—and if those aboard might have survived—if Titanic hadn’t veered away from the iceberg but instead had hit it head-on.
AFTER WE RETURNED IN LATE JULY, we held more press conferences at Woods Hole and National Geographic. My discovery of Titanic took my relationship with National Geographic to a new level. I had written three magazine articles, published a book, and produced two television specials with them. Now National Geographic and Turner Broadcasting, which aired their documentaries, were planning a big show on our Titanic expeditions. I also signed a hefty contract with Warner Books to produce an account of the search.
First, though, I needed to clear my head, so I retreated with Margie and our sons to her father’s cabin on Whitefish Lake in Montana, where we had been going every summer. After the intensity of an expedition, I’d usually feel exhilarated but depleted, and Montana, with its vast skies and pristine waters, was an ideal place to unwind. There was nothing like firing up the motorboat and streaking across the lake with the boys hanging one-handed on water skis behind me. It was important to reconnect with my family.
Todd was heading into his senior year at Falmouth High, and Dougie was going to be a sophomore. Both had a wild energy—clearly chips off the ol’ block. They were both fanatical about hockey, and at home in Massachusetts, they’d practice in the basement for hours at a time. They had filled hockey pucks with lead to help develop their wrist strength, and Margie and I would hear twack, twack, twack as they slapped shots against a goal they’d painted on the concrete wall.
During the school year, I juggled my schedule to make most of their games. The hockey crowd in Falmouth was mostly working class and of Portuguese descent, and Margie felt comfortable in the community. She and I were still kind of coexisting, but we bonded over the boys and their love for hockey. In fact, the first lecture I gave after I found Titanic was a benefit for the Falmouth Youth Hockey organization. Dougie said some of the girls were so impressed with what I’d done that he got a few dates out of the deal.
All three of them shared my pride in the Titanic expeditions. I recognized and appreciated the sacrifices they’d all made to let me pursue my dream. This Montana vacation was a chance to make up for missing so much time with them, and I gave them my full attention.
I also had some fun as I eased back into work. I was the Navy’s cover story as submarine officers who had been on the Titanic cruise loaded up Alvin and JJ and headed back to the Thresher and Scorpion sites. They wanted to check for any signs of radiation leaks and use JJ to look inside Scorpion’s torpedo room. My job was to be as far away—and as visible—as possible, in case the Soviets were tracking me after all the publicity about our deep-sea exploits.
As the Navy team transited to the Scorpion site in late August, I was in Las Vegas doing early publicity for a video National Geographic was making on the Titanic expeditions. Vestron Video, which was going to sell VHS cassettes of the TV show, had flown me to a trade show there, and I found myself in a hotel conference room with Robin Williams and Billy Crystal, who had videos of their own to promote. When I told them who I was, Robin instantly launched into a riff, just for the three of us, running over to the window and barking out orders to an imaginary crew: “Remember: Women and children first!” Billy talked him down, then we all had lunch together.
It would have been easy to get a big head, moving in such company. But just moments after that encounter, we were all on the convention floor near several booths where the provocatively attired stars of adult entertainment videos were autographing photos of themselves. That helped put everything in perspective.
JJ did a good job for the Navy. They found no radiation at either submarine site, but the opening to Scorpion’s torpedo room was blocked by a bulkhead, so JJ had not been able to go in. Nonetheless, the submarine force was eager to exploit my new technology to gather intelligence that could help deter the Soviets, and I formed a company, Marquest, to develop underwater imaging systems and build an Argo/Jason system for Navy spy operations. Rear Adm. Dwaine Griffith, who ran the deep submergence division, was eager to take advantage of the capabilities, and Secretary Lehman actually swore me in as an active-duty commander to help maintain secrecy. I still can’t talk about this highly classified work today.
Other new opportunities were coming my way. Here I was, going wide again. Invitations to speak on college campuses were rolling in at $10,000 a pop. That was money that went right into my pocket, the first time I’d earned such serious sums. I hired a Harvard graduate student, Ann Pellegrini, to do some research on one of the new explorations that interested me—ancient trade routes in the Mediterranean Sea—and I began talking to educators about how I could share my kind of science. How could I respond to those thousands of letters I got from kids excited about Titanic?
I also found a new passion in genealogy. I’d received a rush of letters from Ballards all over the country who wondered if they were related to me. After giving a lecture in North Carolina, I dug into the archives at Guilford College in Greensboro. It turns out that eight generations of Ballards had been Quakers there—and most of them had signed their names with X’s—before my great-grandfather had moved to Wichita.
I was amazed that someone like me, who had invested so much of his life in military service, had come from a family of Quakers. Indeed, although I was able to trace the whole, long Ballard family saga back to the sheriff of Nottingham in 1325, I could find only one ancestor who wore a military uniform, Col. Thomas Ballard, a member of the British colonial militia in Virginia.
I wanted to head off in new directions, but I faced a real problem: how to raise the money. Institutions like Woods Hole provide prestigious places for scientists to hang their hats, but each scientist has to arrange his or her own funding. Traditional sources, like the Navy and the National Science Foundation, provided grants to cover my salary, the salaries of my team members, and the enormous costs of conducting research and expeditions. But neither of them had an interest in the new things I wanted to do, like searching for ancient ships or responding to schoolchildren.
That’s why I’d proposed creating the Center for Marine Exploration at Woods Hole. As its director, I could make searching for ancient ships and educating schoolchildren part of my job. Dr. Steele was still dragging his feet about approving the center, and I was eager to get it going so I could use its imprimatur to help me raise money from new sources like wealthy individuals and corporations.
I didn’t know many wealthy individuals other than a few I had met through Charlie Hollister, our dean of graduate studies, who had already started cultivating private donors to expand the institute’s own resources. I liked Charlie, and I was hoping that by helping him, I could get his help in raising some of the money needed to start up my ventures.
I spoke to a group of business leaders in Newport Beach, California, that Charlie had targeted. He called them the duck hunters because they regularly got together to do just that. They had the connections and the money to make things happen. Charlie would hook them with tales about the most exciting work our scientists were doing, and at each event, he showed a film clip about my discovery of Titanic.
In early November, Charlie sent out a memo saying that he had raised more than $400,000 for Woods Hole. He credited my talk in Newport Beach as a major factor in his success. But how much of that $400,000 did the institution set aside for my projects? Not one cent.
In the horse world, there’s something called a teaser. When a mare is about to be paired with a prized stallion, another male horse—the teaser—is sent in first. If the mare attacks or kicks the teaser, they don’t send in the prized stallion.
That’s what I felt like: the teaser. Woods Hole would trot me out to pump up the audience, and then they’d swoop in and control the proceeds. And I got nothing.
I knew I needed to do something to change the situation. I thought of the advice my father once gave me: To have many masters is to have none. In other words, if no single person or organization controlled me, I controlled my own fate. I needed to develop my own set of donors so I wouldn’t be dependent on Woods Hole.
But how to kick this next phase into action? The path forward would begin on a trip to Mexico.