I had never been on a duck hunt. When Don Koll, the California real estate developer and Woods Hole donor, invited me to join one in Mexico, I wasn’t sure what to wear. So I fell back on my Army training, went to a surplus store, and bought a camouflage uniform, military boots, and a camouflage stick to paint my face.
We gathered outside the hotel in Culiacán early one morning in January 1987. It didn’t take me long to realize that I had gone too far. It was so dark we could barely tell each other apart, and when Marco Vitulli, Don’s business partner, waved his flashlight around to identify everyone, he broke out laughing as the beam crossed my face.
“My God, Ballard, you look like Ollie North,” he said. North was the Marine officer who had just become notorious for his role in President Reagan’s Iran-Contra arms deal. The moniker stuck. For the rest of my many years with Don, Marco, and the other duck hunters, I was no longer Bob. I was simply “Ollie.”
After driving nearly an hour to reach the airboats, we wound our way through a maze of small channels. The pink sky was teeming with what seemed like hundreds of thousands of birds. When we finally arrived at the wooden blind hidden in the tall reeds, Marco loaded his Benelli 12-gauge shotgun, adjusted his sunglasses, and scanned the horizon.
I’d been an expert rifleman in the Army, but I’d never used a shotgun before, and I couldn’t see how to load it. The gun that the club had provided me was much older and different from Marco’s side-loading model.
“I think you load it from the bottom,” Marco said.
By then, it was almost completely quiet. The birds that had swept across the sky on our journey to the blind were gone, scared off by the roar of our airboat. I braced my gun barrel up between my legs and fumbled to load the shells from the bottom.
Without warning, the gun went off, straight up into the sky.
I froze, knowing all too well that I had broken the cardinal rule of hunting and forgotten to keep my safety on.
Then we heard the distinct flap of wings and saw a duck lying on its back in the marsh in front of us. It was a male cinnamon teal, considered the superfast fighter pilot of ducks because it races low over the marsh and is one of the most difficult ducks to shoot.
I looked over to our bird boy—the guy who’d set up the blind and would retrieve our ducks—and he was valiantly trying not to laugh. Marco just grinned and shook his head at me.
“No one is going to believe this,” he said.
The next morning, I found myself in another duck blind with Don. “So,” he said as we neared the end of our shoot, “what do you want to do next, now that you’ve found the Titanic?”
I had my answer ready: I wanted to go much farther back in time and search for ancient shipwrecks in the Mediterranean and the Black Seas.
“How much would that cost?” he asked.
Normally, going to sea with my kind of technology requires a large ship and about a month to conduct a reasonable hunt, I explained. “We’re talking about one million.”
Don tilted his head, thought about it for a split second, then gave a decisive nod.
“I’ll give you a million, as long as you let me tag along,” he said.
“Done!” I exclaimed.
But my vision didn’t end there.
I’ve always been a two-or-three-or-four-birds-with-one-stone kind of guy, and I had a plan to make the most of this venture, even if it might take two to three years to pull off.
Our National Geographic television special, Secrets of the Titanic, had received one of the highest ratings ever for a cable television documentary. National Geographic and Turner Broadcasting were eager for another round. My plan was to charter a ship in England and head into the Mediterranean to search for ancient vessels. That meant we would be sailing down the west coast of France near where, after an intense battle with British naval forces, the German battleship Bismarck had sunk at the beginning of World War II. More than 2,000 German sailors went down with the ship. Though it wasn’t an ancient ship, diving on Bismarck would make great television. I was delighted when they agreed.
I’d also been thinking about those thousands of letters I’d received from schoolchildren wanting to be like me after I’d found Titanic. I felt a moral obligation to respond in a big way, remembering how a kind dean at Scripps answered my letter in high school and started my career. Why not use my robotic cameras—that idea of telepresence—to take kids along on the expeditions? The National Science Foundation had not shown much interest in funding the technology needed to beam live shots from the robots back to people on land. Maybe I could use the idea of educating children to finally make this a reality.
It was clear that a crisis was developing in science education in the United States. Even in the 1980s, fewer than half of all science and technology graduate students in U.S. colleges were American, and the country I loved had a huge deficit of scientific literacy. I wanted to counter the peer pressure that causes middle school children, especially girls, to lose interest in science. I had no doubt that kids who were obsessed with Star Wars, R2-D2, and video games would be excited by my robots and undersea expeditions. If I could transform their fascination with the Titanic discovery into a greater interest in science and engineering, that would really be something. I even had a name in mind. I wanted to call it the JASON Project, in keeping with the family of robots I was developing.
I knew I would probably have to tack with the wind a few times to realize my vision, just as the mythical Jason had done with his Argo. Nothing comes easily when you’re thinking outside the box. Even if my bow wasn’t always pointed at the finish line, I felt like I could still get there, and maybe my greatest legacy would be creating a new generation of scientists and explorers.
I CLEARED SOME OF MY SCHEDULE that summer for time with my sons. First, I took Todd and Dougie rafting down the Colorado River. Dougie had just finished his sophomore year at Falmouth High. Todd had just graduated, and I could tell he was struggling to navigate the pressure coming his way from all the Titanic attention, especially because he wasn’t interested in following in my footsteps.
Todd had blossomed into a strong hockey player. He loved cars and was fixing up an old Mustang in our barn. A fearless teenager, he lived for speed and risk. Still, he was a gentle kid who didn’t take to violence and did everything he could to avoid a fight. Even though he was almost as tall as me and sturdier, his little brother thought of him as a bit of a wimp. But when Todd stood up to a bully of a football player who was threatening one of his smaller hockey teammates, Dougie’s opinion of his older brother changed.
After being pushed back, literally to the edge of a cliff, Todd had fought back, knocking the football player out cold with a single punch. He called me and said he thought he’d killed the guy, and when I raced over, the place was lit up like Coney Island with the lights from ambulances and police cars. Luckily, the football player came to. Later, when I heard the guy wanted a rematch, I gave Todd some sound fatherly advice: Pass the word around that if you fight again, he needs to swing first, because if you accidentally kill him with your counterpunch, you don’t want to be held responsible for his death.
Needless to say, the football player backed off.
I was proud of Todd, if a little worried that he was going to push his love of adrenaline too far. A month later, Marco Vitulli took Todd and me on a salmon fishing trip in Canada, and I hoped some of Marco’s confidence and business focus would rub off on my rambunctious son. I should have known better. Marco was the kind of guy who tells jokes perfectly, the life of the party. He and Don Koll had gone to Stanford together and then into the Air Force, flying jets in the Korean War. Instead of calming him, Marco let my daredevil son fly his De Havilland Beaver seaplane—which, of course, Todd loved.
After our vacations, I began to assemble the pieces and the teams I would need to test my concepts and achieve my new dreams. I have to say, I felt a little tentative, like Cinderella getting ready to go to the ball to meet Prince Charming. I needed a dress, carriage, coachman, and attendants to get me there—and a lot more time than just to the stroke of midnight.
Marco was going to join with Don in putting up the million dollars of seed money, and we were trying to figure out how to structure it as an investment rather than a gift. Dr. Steele, the Woods Hole director, had finally approved the creation of my Center for Marine Exploration, but he allotted only $20,000 to cover the most basic expenses. I needed to get creative to finance my new expeditions, and I was willing to share film rights and royalties with Don and Marco so they would get a return on their investments.
I needed a satellite link from ship to shore, and I needed technical help to produce live broadcasts for students. I needed educators to develop a curriculum of basic science that students learned before our shows, and I needed museums and science centers that could provide auditoriums where the students could watch. I needed to find an ancient ship to explore in the first educational offering—not to mention that I needed to find Bismarck for a paycheck to make this all happen. I was working on all these tracks at once, trusting they would converge in the end. My book on Titanic also was coming out, and I had to take off the month of October to promote it on a tour across North America and Europe.
I was giving a lecture at Southern Methodist University in Dallas that November when I got a break. I mentioned my dream of using satellite technology to link my ship’s explorations live to kids in museums around America. As fate would have it, one person listening was Jim Young, who worked for EDS—the electronic data company founded by Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot. After the lecture, Jim and his wife, Carole, came up to me. In his wonderful Texas accent, he said, “I think we can help y’all.”
Jim and a colleague, Diane Spradlin, came to visit me at Woods Hole in the dead of winter—proof of their serious interest in supplying the satellite link I needed. Then Lester Alberthal, Jr., the new president and chairman of EDS, followed up with his own visit, saying he just wanted to meet me. “Don’t worry—we’re in!”
With that encouraging news, I felt confident to set off to the Mediterranean in search of ancient shipwrecks. M/V Starella, a research vessel, departed from England in May 1988. The preliminary work that Ann Pellegrini had done for me made me think it wouldn’t be hard for Argo to find an interesting site. Then we would go back the next year prepared to film and broadcast the expedition for school kids. Because this was just a scouting expedition, I decided to keep costs down by hiring a younger and less experienced team than I normally would have.
I was always looking for ways to add a bit of paying work to any expedition, so I agreed to a quick side trip as we entered the Mediterranean, to help Lloyd’s of London, the big insurance company. A client of Lloyd’s claimed his ship had struck a submarine near Spain and had sunk. Lloyd’s questioned the claim, because all the crew members had fully packed luggage when they boarded the lifeboats. They wanted me to collect any evidence I could about the incident.
We were passing by that very spot, and I figured the assignment would give my crew a chance to practice. As luck would have it, we lowered Argo directly over the bridge of the sunken ship and towed our camera sled back and forth for 12 hours, scanning every surface we could, taking black-and-white video and color photographs. Every image revealed a nice, smooth hull without a single scratch, no damage in sight.
I was told later that the captain was quite surprised to be shown images in court of his perfectly preserved ship sitting upright on the bottom. Clearly, the ship had been scuttled to collect insurance, and our underwater imagery proved the point. Given our role in exposing the fraud, I only hoped that my name wasn’t mentioned.
I BROUGHT TODD ALONG on that Mediterranean scouting expedition, his first cruise with me. He had just finished a post–high school year at Brewster Academy in New Hampshire and was preparing to head off to Northeastern University. He still exhibited those wayward signs of youthful abandon that I found both charming and concerning. I hoped that the disciplined routine of life at sea would temper some of his impulsiveness.
I had never worked in the Mediterranean before. We started by sweeping the bottom contours of the Tyrrhenian Sea, off the west coast of Italy. Being there felt a little more intimidating than it had when I had just studied the giant map hanging on my wall. As the days passed by, our searches in several likely areas found no signs of any artifacts, and some of the younger and less experienced crew members started murmuring about whether I even knew what I was doing.
We did spot numerous amphoras—the large ancient clay jars used as containers for wine, olive oil, and other goods. They littered the seabed on Skerki Bank, west of Sicily and north of Tunisia. There were so many that we said we’d found “amphora alley,” an ocean passage to Rome. Then we spotted the shadowy outlines of my first ancient shipwreck. She sat in 2,700 feet of water. Much of the ship had been eaten by wood-boring organisms, but thanks to Argo’s cameras, we could make out the shape of the hull through a series of depressions filled with artifacts—the large amphoras and pottery that had been her cargo. We later figured out that she dated back to the third or fourth century A.D. We named her Isis, after the Egyptian goddess who protected seafarers and helped the dead enter the afterlife.
I was thrilled, but the novice crew members were expecting to find something more substantial. Some were visibly disappointed. They seemed more interested in having a good time than in knuckling down to work at the level of detail needed to monitor our searches. For the first and only time in my long career at sea, I called off the Mediterranean expedition early. My only consolations were that I had located the ancient ocean highway and a wreck along it—and that I would be returning with my A-team in the following year to do more exploring.
THE PLAN WAS TO SKIRT OUT into the Atlantic to hunt for Bismarck the next month, as Starella steamed back toward England. I hired a more experienced crew, hoping that would reenergize me—and inspire Todd. With my reputation—or at least a bit of my dignity—hanging in the balance, I grew worried as we faced rough seas and poor weather on the way there.
Bismarck was one of Hitler’s mightiest battleships—and like Titanic, thought to be unsinkable. In May 1941, it embarked on its first mission, Operation Rheinübung, with the goal of intercepting British shipping lanes in the Atlantic and sinking as many boats as could be found. After suffering a series of strikes from air and sea, Bismarck sank, presumably a few hundred miles west of Brest, France. So that’s where we were headed. The ship probably lay in deeper water than Titanic, and the search box was larger, but I had boasted we would find her quickly. National Geographic producers had come along, expecting to film a triumphant expedition. We would come back the following year to the site and explore it again, explaining what we were seeing and sending live video to kids watching in schools and museums across the country.
It wasn’t that easy. Tempestuous conditions persisted throughout the voyage, and the undersea terrain was tricky. The search area included a hilly bottom and an underwater mountain that made piloting Argo precarious. I was nervous about smashing it into a cliff and losing Argo, so we just searched the flattest areas.
We spent four days tracing ghost trails of debris that looked like they might belong to Bismarck. We saw an impact crater that could have been created by a heavy part of a ship that had fallen in the midst of battle and slid down, causing an avalanche. I felt a flicker of hope, but cautioned myself. Todd felt certain we had found her. I wanted this victory for him.
We swept the crater for hours. I ran all the test calculations, reread the history, and pored over the details. But Bismarck remained elusive. The hours ticked by and the watches felt like an eternity. Mechanical problems pushed our equipment to the limit. Making matters worse, Todd was challenging my authority. Maybe he was just showing off for the two friends who had come along with him, but he seemed sullen, and he showed up for his watches late.
I felt defeated. I ordered Starella back to port, saying we’d take a closer look at the color photographs as we headed home. But once they were processed, it was like a stake in the heart. There, instead of any piece of Bismarck, was a beautifully preserved teak rudder, obviously from a 19th-century sailing ship, clearly not part of a battleship at all. It felt like the perfect failure, both personally and professionally.
It was the first time I had ever returned from a mission without anything to show for it. I could usually brush off any setbacks, but missing Bismarck was really humbling. I also began to fear that it might jeopardize my fundraising. When our National Geographic producer, Chris Weber, asked how I felt, I put the best face on it: “Round One to the Bismarck. I know where it isn’t. I’ll get it next time.”
THANKS TO NAVY FUNDING, we spent the rest of the year developing Jason and Hugo—bigger, better vehicles to take back to the Isis site in 1989. Weighing over a ton, Jason would be my most sophisticated ROV (remotely operated vehicle) yet, with three video cameras, a still camera, its own sonar, and two mechanical arms and claws that could pick up artifacts. Hugo, named for “huge Argo,” also served as a giant garage for Jason, designed so we only had to launch one object. We would lower Hugo to the bottom and then deploy Jason from inside it. When the time came to bring them back up, we drove Jason inside Hugo for the return to surface.
We also were testing a fiber-optic cable that could carry color video up to the mother ship as Jason took it. For the last four years, Argo’s black-and-white video had guided our explorations, but we needed color if we were going to capture children’s imaginations.
I was counting on National Geographic to help me out. Tim Kelly, head of National Geographic Television, agreed to fund a return expedition to Bismarck, but he said his team was not equipped to do live broadcasting, and I would have to talk to Turner Broadcasting about that. So I went down to Atlanta and met Ted Turner, the prickly media entrepreneur who had started CNN and built TBS into a national superstation. Luckily, Turner is just as filled with energy as I am, and he loves the sea.
When I described my idea of broadcasting my underwater explorations live to kids around the country, Ted got it. “You need to go down the hall and meet my team that does the Saturday morning wrestling shows,” he said. You’ve got to be kidding me, I thought, but off I went. When I told his wrestling producers what I had in mind, they were so excited, tears came to their eyes. Now I needed to build the audience.
Representatives from both the National Science Teaching Association and the National Council for the Social Studies had agreed to create the science courses for the kids coming to our shows. Now I needed to find museums to host our broadcasts over a two-week period. I was imagining as many as 250,000 students.
Organizing something audacious like this seems to be my calling. The first part is to have a crazy idea—like the ones I’m constantly dreaming up. Next, you assemble a group of organizations that are all impressed by the others sitting around the table. Usually all you need is for one of them to say, “I’m in,” and everything else falls into place.
So off I went to the Boston Museum of Science to meet the president, Roger L. Nichols. The museum had given me its prestigious Washburn Medal in 1986, so the door was open. It took about two nanoseconds for Roger to sign up, and another few seconds for him to get on the phone to his network of museum presidents. Before I knew it, a dozen downlink sites across the United States and Canada had signed on—and this was even before the internet!
And, after all our clashes, John Steele agreed that Woods Hole would be one of the sponsors of this first Jason expedition. In November, we held a press conference at Woods Hole announcing the initiative and our plans for the first live broadcasts ever from the ocean floor. We promised 84 broadcasts—six a day—from the Mediterranean in May, just six months away. And to think this was all still just a giant experiment. All that was left was for Cinderella to go to the ball.
WE SET SAIL FROM GIBRALTAR on April 22, 1989. I made sure I had a better ship this time—Star Hercules, an offshore supply ship—and an all-star crew, including Andy Bowen, Dana Yoerger, and Cathy Offinger, all Woods Hole colleagues and veterans of Titanic expeditions. Cathy was my logistics chief and overall right hand. I even created a business card that said “Robert D. Ballard—Explorer—Call Cathy.” Our plan was first to broadcast from the Marsili Seamount in the Tyrrhenian Sea, to show an active underwater volcano, and then move to the Isis site, 110 nautical miles to the south. Before we went live, we needed to conduct a mock broadcast with the team at TBS in Atlanta—a dry run and low-stakes rehearsal to be prepared for our live takes a few days later. The weather was getting worse, though, and I was worried it might jeopardize our equipment. With my mic on and the cameras rolling, I kept sneaking peeks at our shipboard monitor at the same time that I welcomed our supposed viewers to watch us launch Jason and Hugo.
I had just finished saying that the cable lowering Hugo was unspooling nicely when a large swell came through. The ship heaved up on the wave and then suddenly dropped down into the passing trough. When the ship went up, so did Hugo, with Jason inside. But when the ship went down, Hugo and Jason didn’t follow as fast. So when we rose up on the next swell, Hugo and Jason were still sinking—and the cable connecting them to the ship snapped.
“Oh, my God!” I shouted. I could just see it. Millions of dollars of equipment in a free-fall descent, nearly 3,000 feet, to the bottom of the sea. I ripped off my headset and ran out onto the deck. Everyone was just standing there, looking over the side of the boat, stunned, as if they could see the equipment plummeting.
My military nature kicked in. I started giving orders. I shouted to my top electrical engineer, Bill Hershey, to haul out the little vehicle we had used to test our new fiber-optic cable. We could add lights, a camera, and a grapple, and maybe it could help us pull Jason and Hugo off the bottom. In the midst of all this, Dana asked if I wanted to know how fast Hugo and Jason were sinking. I couldn’t believe that was where his mind went. We needed action, not analysis. The ROVs were going to the bottom, no matter how fast.
Bill and his team of grease-splattered engineers sprang into action. We hastily dubbed our backup Medea, after Jason’s wife, even if she did kill her own children in the myth. The crew got her ready to go within 24 hours. If we lost Medea, we had nothing. The transponders on Jason and Hugo were still sending signals, thank goodness, so we knew exactly where they were. It was risky. The weather was improving but remained perilous. Two days before show time, April 29, it was all or nothing. I gave the order, and down Medea went.
We all held our breath and crowded around the monitor, anxiously watching the images coming from Medea. Dana did a great job navigating the ship as we came down right on target. Fortunately, Hugo and Jason were sitting upright, with a chain bridle visible on the top of Hugo. The plan was for Martin to lower the grappling hook suspended on a chain from Medea and slowly inch it over to Hugo’s bridle. Just at the critical moment, another large swell came through, lifting the grappling hook off the bridle. Then, somehow, on the next swell, the hook grabbed onto the side of Hugo and would not let it go. It wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do. I gave the order to come up as fast as possible, and with one big yank, Hugo came off the bottom in a cloud of mud.
When all three vehicles reached the surface, it was sheer madness for about 20 minutes. We secured Hugo to our stern, but Jason slid out of its garage and floated under us, heading for the ship’s propeller. I didn’t have time to tell people what to do next, so I ordered the crew to launch the rubber Zodiac. We’re not going to lose this one, I declared to myself as I jumped into the Zodiac, yelling for someone to throw me a recovery line. We finally got a secure line attached to Jason and reeled it in.
After that, the live broadcasts seemed fun—a relaxing break from the anxiety of almost losing all our equipment. I sat in the control van with my headset on, talking the students through what they were seeing, answering questions, and explaining telepresence. Jason’s cameras showed students the water shimmering out of a hydrothermal vent near the volcano, and then we moved on to the Isis site, giving students across North America a glimpse of the shipwreck and how we mapped it.
I had invited Anna McCann, a pioneer in underwater archaeology, to sail with us to assess the Isis site. As our cameras scanned the artifacts, she advised on which ones to recover. Students got to watch as we collected 48 objects from Isis and 17 amphoras from other spots. Jason’s claws picked them up gently and deposited them in a mesh-bottomed elevator assembly that we hoisted to the surface.
The JASON Project was working. Our broadcasts of the Isis expedition were a huge success. Now I had a way to share the excitement of marine archaeology with hundreds of thousands of kids.
Meanwhile, Don and Marco were willing to keep funding me for a second shot at Bismarck, and I had money from the Navy to test Argo at much greater depths than before. National Geographic also was willing to hold off on the show and keep the cash flowing. Feeling encouraged, I was ready to head back to the Atlantic and take on Bismarck for Round Two.
AN OLDER, SEEMINGLY WISER TODD joined the crew again, along with two of his friends from Montana, Billy Yunck and Kirk Gustafson. It made me proud to watch their skilled hands and sharp eyes as they took turns piloting Argo through the underwater darkness.
After 10 days of looking, we were still seeing mostly mud. I was trying to unwind, playing a boisterous game of Trivial Pursuit, when someone called my name, saying they’d found some debris I should look at.
I vaulted out of my chair and booked it to the control room. There on the video screens was a cluster of small black objects that seemed man-made. Were they part of Bismarck’s debris field? As we tracked them, the nature of the bottom suddenly changed from flat and smooth to highly disturbed, with rocks and sediment all over, as if strewn by some great force. I tried to visualize what must have happened here. An underwater landslide. Only something as large as Bismarck could have caused an avalanche like that.
We kept combing over this area, searching for anything of interest. I kept my eyes glued to the monitor, trusting my instincts. Two days later, after 48 hours of relative sleeplessness, I saw the telltale shape of a gun barrel coming out of the gloom—pointed right at Argo. We jerked the camera sled up to avoid a head-on collision. But there it was. We had found Bismarck.
Todd rushed to my side at the monitors as soon as the cry of discovery rang out. His face was burning with pride and excitement. Father and son together, we were going to explore a wreck that hadn’t been seen for half a century.
As Argo crept over the ship, we saw the holes in the deck made by British shells. But the hull still looked intact—no damage, no holes, no clear reason for its sinking. A few German survivors had claimed that the commander had chosen to scuttle the ship, sacrificing it rather than letting battle damage bring it down. What we saw seemed to validate those claims.
Then, through the haze, we saw the mark of a giant cross slowly come into focus, splashed across the stern.
As we grew closer, I realized it wasn’t a cross at all. It was a swastika: That haunting symbol that signified devastation and hatred for so many tempered our excitement. We were peeling back the layers of a dark and ugly history, and we did our best to tread lightly.
Our return to shore was bittersweet, with the horror of the past we had just witnessed still raw and fresh in our minds. Still, we were a team triumphant when we got back home. Our discovery launched another media blitz. Todd came with me to the press conference at National Geographic. He was on top of his game—mature, confident, professional. I had never been prouder.
JUBILANT AND VICTORIOUS, with their new explorer bona fides established, Todd, Billy, and Kirk joined up again in Montana, water-skiing and enjoying the freedom of no longer being cooped up on a ship. A Geographic film crew also came out, working on a show about how I had pulled the JASON Project together.
At one point, an interviewer asked Todd what it was like to be the son of Bob Ballard.
“He’s a different father,” Todd said. “He’s more laid-back. He lets me do what I want, and I like that freedom. It feels good.”
Then he added, “Out at sea on the Bismarck, it was great…I was part of the action. I wasn’t treated like Dr. Ballard’s son. I was treated as part of the team, and it was really fun.”