By 2001, Barbara and I had a solid history of success with the specials we were producing for National Geographic Television and Turner Broadcasting. They were constantly pressing us for new ideas, the more ambitious the better, because they wanted at least one special each year. For 2002, we decided to focus on one of the most iconic shipwrecks out there: Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance.
Roald Amundsen had made it to the South Pole in 1911. After that, Shackleton decided to lead an expedition across Antarctica, coast to coast. Shackleton and his 28-man crew set out on the Trans-Antarctic expedition in 1914, a few months before the onset of the First World War. Their three-masted ship, Endurance, got stuck in the sea ice before they could even reach the continent, much less cross it.
A humiliating failure on its face, it became one of the epic tales of rescue at sea. After being trapped on the ship for months in the drifting ice pack, Shackleton and his crew abandoned it right before it sank and took off on a torturous, multiday journey to a nearby island, part dragging and part sailing the support boats through the breaking ice floe.
From there, Shackleton took a skeleton crew on a nearly impossible, 800-mile, open-boat trip to remote South Georgia Island, finding their way to this tiny speck in a vast, stormy ocean. There, he organized a rescue party that went back and retrieved the rest of his crew, all without losing a single man.
Talk about an iconic target. Shackleton and his men left Endurance behind as the sea ice crushed, then engulfed it. Photographs taken in 1915 show the massive sailing ship crumbling under. No one had ever located the wreck. It’s a target of immense historic interest, no doubt about that, and any expedition to find it would require weeks in some of the wildest and most spectacular seas on Earth.
But it wasn’t to be.
We were getting things all lined up, but when a friend at NASA told me that forecasters predicted especially severe conditions that summer, I pulled the plug. It was disappointing, and we still had to come up with a television special for 2002.
Barbara and I scanned all possibilities. I wanted to go back to Titanic to take higher-resolution pictures and gain closure, using our powerful new camera system, Hercules. But Herc wasn’t ready yet. I had funding to explore Lake Huron’s Thunder Bay. It’s got so many sunken ships that it’s nicknamed Shipwreck Alley—but National Geographic wasn’t keen on that idea. The Black Sea? We were already set to return there in 2003, and National Geographic was happy to wait. Inca treasure lost underwater in Peru? Again, the television people weren’t sure. What about the 1845 Arctic expedition led by Sir John Franklin, lost in ice-choked Canadian waters? Or U.S.S. Indianapolis, on which nearly 900 sailors died in the shark-infested waters of the Philippine Sea when a Japanese submarine torpedoed the ship after a top secret mission to deliver the atomic bomb?
Then somebody mentioned PT-109.
The patrol torpedo boat known as PT-109 had been lost on August 2, 1943. It inspired a legendary tale of courage at sea during World War II, and became a centerpiece in the political career of its young skipper, John F. Kennedy. But the 80-foot boat had never been found. Locating it would be of immense historical interest—but it would not be easy, a true needle in a haystack. Not only was the boat less than one-tenth the length of Titanic or Yorktown, but there was also a bit of a mystery about what kind of damage it suffered and where it sank. Perhaps if we found it, we could resolve those questions.
The story had special resonance for me, having lived for so long in Cape Cod, near the Kennedys’ Hyannis Port compound in Massachusetts. I’d gotten to know Ted Kennedy and other family members, and my son Ben was born at the hospital in Hyannis. There were political ramifications as well. PT-109 was legendary, and finding it would boost my efforts to lobby Congress for more funds for ocean exploration.
I was in Washington, D.C., when we made the call to go with PT-109, and I happened to meet the next day with Fritz Hollings, a Democratic senator from South Carolina and a pivotal figure in funding ocean research. Hollings had sponsored the congressional earmarks that had funded Hercules, as well as other systems I was developing to replace the ones I had left behind at Woods Hole. He had grown close to Jacqueline Kennedy after her husband’s assassination, and he was excited to hear about the 109 search we were planning. Jackie had given him some of JFK’s personal effects, he said, but he had lost them all in a house fire.
It wasn’t the first time I’d thought about searching for Kennedy’s boat. During our work in Iron Bottom Sound, in Guadalcanal, I had hoped to make a side trip to look for 109, but we ran out of time. That meant we had done some research already, and we wouldn’t be starting from scratch.
Still, I remained wary. Exploring the Black Sea was my main interest at the time. PT-109 felt like a sideshow. Did we even have enough time? I checked my calendar for 2002. It was ugly. I had multiple obligations, including serving on President George W. Bush’s Commission on Ocean Policy. The way it looked, I could only spare a couple of weeks for the 109 search.
But Turner and National Geographic needed another Bob Ballard special, so The Search for Kennedy’s PT-109 was on.
And I found myself exactly where I did not want to be, floating again in the sweltering archipelago of the Solomon Islands. It had all come back to me as the plane dropped out of the clouds and the dense rainforest of Guadalcanal came into view. I flashed back to all those technical nightmares—busted cable, running aground, overheated generator, black smoke pouring out of the engine compartment. Yet here I was in a place to which I’d sworn never to return.
We contacted a local American resident named Danny Kennedy—no relation to the president—who had done some research work for us during our earlier Guadalcanal expedition. He was eager to join the search. Cathy Offinger, my logistics chief, found a ship, Grayscout, for rent in Australia. National Geographic came up with the $24,000 we needed to reserve the ship, and we started spending money and hiring people at a rapid clip.
Just as our efforts hit high gear, John Fahey, then president of the National Geographic Society, voiced concerns about the Kennedy family. Would they be upset? He had to find out, and if the Kennedys objected, the project would be canceled. Not great news for us as money was flying out the door.
Most of John’s discussions were with Caroline Kennedy, JFK’s daughter, and his surviving brother Ted, both of whom Fahey knew. They were concerned that we might disturb the site or attempt to recover objects. We assured them that we had no intention of disturbing PT-109, only locating it. For one thing, the Navy regarded the sunken craft as a grave site. For another, we weren’t scavengers; we were explorers, seeking knowledge. Finally, the family agreed—as long as Max Kennedy, the ninth of Robert’s 11 children, could come along with us.
THE SOLOMONS—six major islands and nearly a thousand smaller ones, some just a few palm trees clinging to coral—begin east of Papua New Guinea and swing more than 900 miles to the southeast in two parallel volcanic chains, with a narrow stretch of water between them known as the “Slot.” During World War II, the whole archipelago was like a ladder leading from Allied-
controlled Australia into the heart of Southeast Asia. Island by island, America and its allies picked their bloody way north until, by the summer of 1943, the fighting concentrated in the northern Solomons, where the target was the Japanese supply route.
Because the Allies controlled the air, the Tokyo Express—the American nickname for both the supply route and the ship that ran it—made its irregular runs at night, slipping down the Slot with an escort of Japanese destroyers, unloading its desperately needed cargo of men, weapons, and supplies, and then hustling back up the Slot before dawn. The PT boats (short for patrol torpedo) were designed for close combat with larger ships, and they regularly tried to intercept those night runs. And Japanese destroyers, when they saw PT boats, regularly attempted to run them over.
On the night of August 1, 1943, 109 was one of 15 PT boats in the Slot. Aboard were Kennedy (its captain), two junior officers, and 10 other crew members. In the middle of the night, sure enough, the Tokyo Express and its escort came sliding out of the fog. The PT armada attacked but missed with every shot. The Americans regrouped. The boats that had fired all their torpedoes headed back to base, leaving PT-109 and two others behind. The three lined up, creating as much of a barrier as they could on such a foggy night.
Finally, at 2:30 a.m., Kennedy spotted what he thought was another PT boat emerging from the murk. It was actually Amagiri, one of the Japanese destroyer escorts, and by the time he realized his error, it was too late. Kennedy tried to swing 109 around to face Amagiri, positioning the boat so he could fire his torpedoes, but the destroyer was too fast and slammed into the PT boat, which exploded in a ball of fire. Two crewmen died instantly.
Now the fog-shrouded sea was flecked with pools of burning fuel. A portion of the stern had been sheared off in the collision and sank. The surviving crew members clung to the remains of the boat as Kennedy swam repeatedly into the flames to rescue others, including one with burns over 70 percent of his body. They hung on the wreckage for 12 hours, drifting slowly south and perilously near the Japanese stronghold of Kolombangara Island. The following day, with the hull close to sinking and Kennedy fearing the Japanese would spot them, he led a risky swim across miles of Japanese-patrolled waters to a tiny, uninhabited island. Kennedy kept the wounded man afloat, clenching the strap of his life jacket in his teeth as he swam.
Days later, the 11 men were discovered by two friendly local fishermen. Without a radio to signal for help, Kennedy improvised, carving a message into a coconut shell: “NAURO ISL…COMMANDER…NATIVE KNOWS POS’IT…HE CAN PILOT…11 ALIVE…NEED SMALL BOAT…KENNEDY.” The local men took the coconut—which was the way word eventually got to Navy troops based on Rendova, another island. They heeded the call and rescued the crew of PT-109.
I LANDED AT GIZO on May 17 in a raging downpour, typical for that part of the world. Grayscout was there, so by late afternoon we had loaded our equipment and were on our way out to look for PT-109.
We had a pretty good idea of where the collision took place, based on accounts from other PT boat skippers and Reginald Evans, an Australian in hiding on Kolombangara, assigned to monitor Japanese shipping activity. The collision happened in Blackett Strait, which feeds into the Slot off the island’s southern coast, and 109 was the only PT boat that had been lost in that area.
Early reports indicated that Amagiri had sliced PT-109 completely in half. That’s what Kennedy thought, and that’s the story that had captivated the public when he ran for president. That would mean the boat’s stern had sunk near the collision site, while the bow had floated south with the current, the crew clinging on. Indeed, the bow section of a wrecked ship had been spotted on a coral reef not long after the event and had long since washed away.
Evans believed a PT boat had attacked a Japanese barge and caused the explosion. When he learned a PT boat had been hit instead, he enlisted local fishermen to help search for the wreckage and any survivors. He reported having seen a floating object south of the crash site in Blackett Strait the next day, but it was too far away for him to see if any crew were clinging to it.
So we didn’t even know quite what we were looking for. Some historians speculated that the destroyer had only sheared off the starboard side of the boat, rather than knifing through the center, because Kennedy reported he was in the middle of the boat when the collision occurred. That would mean that an even smaller—and harder-to-find—piece remained on the ocean floor of the collision site.
Either way, what we knew for certain was where the crash had occurred. The wisest plan was to start by looking right there.
From Grayscout, we began a systematic run of parallel sonar lines down the axis of the strait. We were towing our sensor in water over a thousand feet deep, so we had to move slowly to keep the equipment from kiting. We kept up round-the-clock operations, and the change that overcame Blackett Strait at night was striking. The scattered fires from remote, tiny villages flickered out, and the lush islands disappeared into a void, as though you’d entered a pitch-dark box with no signs of life.
At first, I thought the wreckage of 109 might be large enough to stand out, but as time passed, that all-too-familiar terrible feeling settled in the pit of my stomach. We were finding hundreds and hundreds of objects on a seafloor more complex than I’d anticipated. Steep coral walls tower hundreds of feet above the seafloor, and countless blocks of coral litter the bottom, with endless fields of man-made debris scattered everywhere. How were we going to visually inspect all these targets? There simply was not enough time.
Through Dan Kennedy, we met Eroni Kumana, one of the two fishermen who had found the stranded crew. When we introduced him to Max Kennedy, the old man broke down in tears, overcome by meeting someone he called a “real Kennedy” so many decades after the crash. We traveled with him into the jungle to meet Biuku Gasa, the other fisherman with him that day. Eroni then took us to Nauru, the remote island where he and Biuku had first found Kennedy, who’d swum there in hopes of flagging a passing American boat.
It was a tiny outcropping, and Eroni went straight to the spot where he found Kennedy. He pointed to a tall palm, saying excitedly that this was the very one from which Kennedy had taken the coconut to carve his rescue message. They said they had explored the wreckage on the coral reef that many thought was PT-109’s bow, and they had found something odd in it: Japanese rifles.
That made me rethink the whole scenario. What if 109 had not been cut in half? What if, as some researchers speculated, Amagiri had only clipped off a back corner of 109? That would leave a much larger section of the boat fatally stricken, but floating. If the wreckage on the coral reef was not 109, but a Japanese ship instead, as Eroni and Biuku thought, then 109’s bow could still be out there somewhere.
Over the years, I have learned to trust what local witnesses say and not overthink these things. I went back to the report from Reginald Evans and plotted the location of the object he reported, using his rough estimate of its location out at sea. Then, to create a search box, I calculated how far that object could have drifted. We moved Grayscout south and established a new sonar search grid. The ocean bottom here was different—smooth and empty—and our sonar found just one long, lonely target in 1,300 feet of water.
We launched Argus and Little Herc, our pair of imaging robots. Argus hangs directly below the ship, equipped with powerful lights. Little Herc, connected by a tether to Argus, explores the ocean floor beneath it. It’s like Argus is walking a dog on a leash, and it’s important not to tighten the leash abruptly and pull Little Herc off the ocean floor.
As we approached our lone target, the deep-sea sonars quickly picked up signs of wreckage. The sonar can penetrate several feet into the sandy bottom, and it revealed an object measuring 40 feet by 23 feet. PT-109 was 23 feet wide, but 80 feet long. Perhaps the rest of the ship was buried too deep for the sonar to reach? Little Herc’s cameras pulled into range, showing us a long metal cylinder the shape of a giant cigar on the seafloor.
Fortunately, we had two key people with us: Dale Ridder, an expert on PT boats, and Dick Keresey, who had been the skipper of PT-105, also positioned on Blackett Strait when 109 was hit. They were convinced the cigar-shaped object was a torpedo tube with an unfired torpedo still in it. The torpedo’s propellers were visible. They looked like the kind on PT boats. Then I heard what I was waiting for when Dale said, “That’s PT-109!”
Dale noticed a mounting strap on the torpedo launcher. It appeared to be attached to a wooden block. Maybe the deck was there too, but buried in the sand. PT boats were made largely of wood, and many researchers had fretted that any remains of 109 could have been eaten away. That didn’t worry me. I knew that the deck was mahogany, which is not on the menu of the wood-boring mollusks that ate the yellow pine deck of Titanic.
We asked Max to speak for his family and give us permission to shift some sand near the torpedo tube to see if we could find a buried piece of deck. With their approval, we rigged a small plow on the front of Little Herc and used the robot, slowly and awkwardly, to push away the sediment. There was the torpedo’s air flask as well as the opening in the deck for the torpedo gyroscope.
We continued to explore gently. Our sonar showed other large objects nearby, and we were finding a lot of metal. Our makeshift plow uncovered a cranking mechanism used to launch the torpedo. We tried to push it forward. No movement. We tried again. It refused to budge. That meant the mechanism was still attached to the deck. Blackett Strait has a strong current running through it, and it appears that after 109 landed on the bottom, waves of sand moving across the bottom mostly covered it, much like sand dunes bury a fence along a shoreline.
We did not disturb the site any further. The final resting place of PT-109 was no longer a mystery. Mission accomplished.
I was not unhappy to be leaving the Solomons, and I had some nice souvenirs to bring back. One evening, several canoes had approached Grayscout, local artisans from whom I bought some fine stone carvings. I also asked one of the boys if I could buy his hand-carved canoe. After consulting his mother, he agreed. I gave him $100. He handed me the paddle and dove into the water. We wrestled the canoe on board and put it in one of our shipping containers. Unfortunately, customs officials refused to let me bring it into Australia, fearing destructive insects were concealed in the wood. But I still have my hundred-dollar paddle.
It’s not the most precious souvenir I brought back, though. When Eroni took us to Nauru Island, I had picked up two coconuts at the base of the tree where he had found Kennedy. Back in Mystic, I hired a wood carver to make replicas of Kennedy’s hand-carved message on them. One I still have. The other I presented to Fritz Hollings, whom I invited to our private screening of National Geographic’s television special, The Search for Kennedy’s PT-109. I wanted to help him make up for what he had lost in the fire, and he was moved by the gesture.
AS I STEPPED UP my lobbying efforts, seeking more funds for ocean exploration, I needed to build strong personal connections with lawmakers like Fritz Hollings, and I had to stay in the public eye with news-making expeditions.
Hollings had played a major role in creating NOAA—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—when Richard Nixon was president. He loved Jacques Cousteau, and he kept calling me “the new Cousteau.” The fact is, I explored much deeper parts of the ocean than Cousteau—the parts that were less interesting to most people unless they contained an important piece of human history. But I appreciated that Fritz was smart enough to see that our field was contributing just as much to the public’s understanding of the oceans as Cousteau had. He and Senator Judd Gregg, a Republican from New Hampshire, were the leaders of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee that oversaw NOAA’s budget, and both supported what I was trying to do. We were going to need a lot more help from other players in Washington, D.C., however, if we were going to have the kind of ocean exploration program that I thought the wealthiest nation on Earth should have.
I had served on a panel that had drafted a national ocean exploration strategy for President Bill Clinton in 2000, and we had recommended the creation of the Office of Ocean Exploration within NOAA, part of the Commerce Department better known for running the National Weather Service. We had suggested funding the program at $75 million a year for 10 years. But in its first year, Gregg and Hollings were able to secure only four million dollars. I kept campaigning, and now, as I returned from the PT-109 search, I was serving on a similar commission created by President George W. Bush, with two more years of meetings and public hearings. I loved the experience—talking to experts in so many other ocean-
related fields. It was like going back to graduate school.
At the same time, I was rejoining university life. I needed an academic home for the explorations I was mounting from my institute in Mystic, and I missed the camaraderie of other scientists I’d had at Woods Hole. I worked out a deal with Robert Carothers, president of the University of Rhode Island, the school where I had earned my Ph.D. I received a tenured research position as professor of oceanography and a $100,000 annual budget to create a new Institute for Archaeological Oceanography. I’d never thought of oceanography as a separate discipline like physics, chemistry, or geology, but rather as a field in which all these disciplines intermingled. With my searches for ancient shipwrecks, I’d informally added archaeology to the mix. Now I could formalize that connection and realize my dream of creating a new academic discipline—one in which students could receive a master’s in marine archaeology and a doctorate in oceanography at the University of Rhode Island.
My worlds were expanding once again. Hercules was finally ready for action. The most sophisticated vehicle we’d developed at my institute in Mystic, Hercules was the first robot designed specifically for remote undersea archaeological excavations. Bright yellow and weighing in at 5,200 pounds, Hercules had high-definition video cameras, rugged manipulator arms that could lift heavy artifacts without scratching them, and a suction system for excavating ancient shipwrecks according to archaeological standards.
All these working parts were coming together in 2003, as I planned another expedition to the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean. Key people from my institutes in Connecticut and Rhode Island would be working together to test Hercules and an advanced ship-to-shore communications system, so scientists and the public could interact with us as explorations unfolded. We had government and private funding, National Geographic was planning TV shows and a magazine story, and the JASON Project would produce online educational programs.
But my luck went south. First the Turks held up research visas for my crew, which kept us tied up at the dock in Sinop, wasting $40,000 a day in operating expenses. We ran some initial tests with Hercules, mapping a couple of ancient shipwrecks and retrieving mud samples from Sinop D, the perfectly preserved ship from a thousand years ago that I’d hoped to tell Bascom about before he died. But we had to move on to keep to our schedule—only to find out that Egypt was refusing to give us permits to excavate the two Phoenician ships we had discovered several years before in the Eastern Mediterranean. It was frustrating, and we didn’t get much work done that trip.
Back home, I kept on lobbying, pressing the government to up the ante on ocean exploration. Chris Dodd, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, brought his daughter for a visit to Mystic Aquarium in January 2004. Over dinner, the senator spoke of his admiration for Senator Hollings, who had just announced that he would not seek reelection due to his wife’s failing health.
“One of my goals in life is to try to fill one of Senator Hollings’s shoes,” Dodd said. “How can I help you?” He invited me to his house for dinner the next week, and there I explained that, in addition to providing exploration grants to scientists, NOAA needed to have its own dedicated ships of exploration to extend how long researchers could conduct their work at sea.
Senator Dodd suggested I meet one of his colleagues, Daniel Inouye, the Democratic senator from Hawaii. We arranged a meeting, and I explained that both the Clinton and Bush ocean policy panels had endorsed the need for dedicated ships of exploration. “Well, NOAA doesn’t have a lot of money,” said Inouye. “I think our best bet is to get it from the Department of Defense, since they own a lot of ships and have all the money.”
Senator Inouye was a close friend of Senator Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican who chaired the Senate Appropriations Committee at the time. Thanks to Inouye’s help, a month later I found myself in Stevens’s office. It was truly amazing, not only for its size and grandeur but also for all the artifacts from Alaska. One of his favorites was the penis bone of a walrus, which was the size of a baseball bat. I was told he sometimes used it as a gavel to get everyone’s attention.
“The best approach is through the Department of Defense,” Stevens said, echoing what Inouye had said about how to provide NOAA with a dedicated research ship. “How much do you need to fix one up?”
“I have been told $20 million should do it,” I replied.
“If I get you the ship and $20 million, I want you to use it to find a lot of fish no one knows about off Alaska,” Stevens said, probably only half-joking.
With Senator Stevens in my corner, things started happening. The Pentagon decided the U.S.N.S. Capable, a general surveillance ship, was the vessel best suited to become a research vessel. It had been commissioned in 1989 to track down Soviet submarines and had later been used as a counter-narcotics ship. The Navy withdrew Capable from military service in September 2004 and transferred it to NOAA the same day.
It was going to take several years to convert the ship into an oceanographic research vessel. We christened her Okeanos Explorer, named for an ancient Greek Titan, primeval god of the waters. To persuade Congress to put up more money, I got to know Representative Frank Wolf, chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee that handled NOAA’s budget. He was a Republican from Northern Virginia, and Rachel Carson Middle School was in his district. It all seemed fitting. The school was named for the writer who had published The Sea Around Us, a best seller about oceans, and teachers there had been bringing students to our JASON Project shows for a decade.
I called the school’s principal and said I’d like to visit his teachers and students. “And I would like,” I added, “to ask your congressman, Frank Wolf, to introduce me.”
Wolf agreed, and he and his wife came to the presentation. The room was packed as I talked about how the JASON Project had just taken students to the rainforests in Peru. I also talked about America’s new ocean exploration program. As I spoke, I never took my eyes off the congressman, hooking him, too.
The next time I was on the Hill, I stopped by Wolf’s office and reminded him that we needed more money from the House. “You know, Dr. Ballard, you are the first person to ever come into my office and explain the importance of ocean exploration,” he replied. “But I can guarantee that after you leave, there will be a line of lobbyists around this building from aerospace companies, waiting to come into my office to tell me how important it is for me to increase funding for space exploration.”
It was a reality I knew all too well. The race to put a man on the moon had electrified the country in the 1960s, and space travel had retained that allure. Meanwhile, even though scientists and explorers had been doing equally remarkable feats in the ocean through all those years, we were still struggling to get the word out. We needed the world to understand that as important as exploring outer space was, exploring inner space was equally essential. Fortunately for me, when Representative Wolf retired, he was succeeded as chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee by Representative John Culberson from Houston, Texas. Culberson increased funding for exploration to its highest levels and went to sea with me every year to ensure that taxpayers were getting their money’s worth.
SLOWLY, AS MORE RELIABLE government funding and academic support began to fall into place, it was time to shape my next expedition. I knew that returning to Titanic could grab the public’s attention, and so I steamed back to the site for the first time in 18 years. Hercules and its high-definition cameras were ready to go, so we could take much richer and sharper color images than we could in the 1980s. I wanted to see how much damage the sea—and high-tech scavenger hunters—had done to the grand old lady, and I wanted to say my final goodbye.
After I found Titanic in 1985, I could have obtained salvage rights if I’d wanted to, according to international maritime law. But I wasn’t interested in retrieving artifacts. I believed we should respect the passengers and crew who had died there and leave their grave site undisturbed. Survivors, like Eva Hart, agreed. She was seven when the ship sank. “I saw all the horror of its sinking,” she told me. “And I heard, even more dreadful, the cries of drowning people.”
It didn’t take long, though, once the location was publicized, for Titanic mania to take over. Investors saw dollar signs and formed a partnership, Titanic Ventures, which became a company, RMS Titanic Inc. Then they and others proceeded to plunder the wreck. The French government, still smarting from my discovery and the feuds that resulted from it, wanted to return to the site, so they leased Nautile, their deep-diving mini-sub, to the investor group in 1987 and 1993. By 2000, RMS Titanic Inc. had returned to the site four more times, using French or Russian submersibles. In a game of Finders Keepers, they pocketed more than 6,000 artifacts and displayed them in a museum, charging people to see them. The company even broadcast a documentary showing how it took the objects.
All told, the items included eyeglasses, shoes, handbags, luggage, and even a bronze cherub statue from the Grand Staircase. A bell and a light from the foremast were removed, and the salvagers even raised a chunk of the hull weighing 18 tons. They sold pieces of coal from the engine room for $25 a block. They created a website, so you could peruse the collections online. Documentary filmmakers and wealthy sightseers visited the site in mini-subs. And, perhaps most grotesque of all, a couple were married in a submersible perched on Titanic’s bow. I wouldn’t think of a mass grave as romantic, but I guess some couples are into that.
Without realizing it, we had opened all this up when we’d found the wreck, and it had turned into an ugly carnival, an affront to the fate of Titanic and all those who lost their lives in her final hours. It was the exact opposite of how we, the Kennedys, and the U.S. Navy had treated the resting spot of PT-109, not disturbing anything. But Titanic was not similarly protected; there was no guard on duty.
I spoke out against the grave robbing and called for international legal protections. An agency within the United Nations approved a convention in 2001, calling on nations to protect “all traces of human existence having a cultural, historical or archaeological character” that had been underwater for more than 100 years. But it had been just 92 years since Titanic had gone down, so those protections did not apply.
Against this backdrop of reckless salvaging, I thought that vivid images of the damage might counter the disrespectful gimmicks and rally support for preserving the site. I wanted people to start thinking about the oceans themselves as a museum to be visited and respected, but not pillaged.
So off we went aboard NOAA’s flagship, Ronald H. Brown, bound for the Titanic site once again. We spent several days remapping the area. Then we lowered our robots into the blackness 12,500 feet down, with Argus’s bright lights shining on everything around it and Hercules tethered to Argus to take a closer look.
It was tense enough to be back there, watching Titanic come into view again. But what really scared the heck out of me was that National Geographic was insisting on broadcasting one of our dives live. We were still working out the kinks in Hercules’ technology, and to say “I’m going to come live from the deck of Titanic” was a bit terrifying. I was going to leave that dive to the end.
Sure enough, on the first try, we had trouble controlling Hercules on the way down, but we quickly stabilized it just before a large object loomed in front of us. Suddenly, I realized it was the rear section of Titanic’s bow, right where the great ship had split in two as it sank. I had never visited this part of the ship before, because it would have been very difficult for Alvin to go into such a dangerous place. But Hercules was much smaller, and with Argus giving us a bird’s-eye view from above, I could see what was coming.
“That’s a boiler!” I exclaimed, echoing what one of my colleagues had uttered when we had first come upon the ship in 1985. But this one was in place, still connected to the ship. Much of the metal had a blue-green patina like you see on old copper pipes. Above the boilers, we saw what was left of the shredded and sagging promenade deck, where the lifeboats had been launched. We moved along and saw the rusted telemotor that had held the wheel a crew member had frantically spun to try to avoid the iceberg. The handrails on the deck had fallen away, either from natural deterioration or human destruction. With our new technology, we were just inches away, and all of the images were sharp and vivid.
On our second dive, Hercules went dead at the bottom, thanks to a kink in the line tethering it to Argus and its electrical power. So we had to recover the robots and make some repairs—a whole day lost.
The third time’s the charm, we said, trying to stay optimistic. And it was true—the third dive was amazing. Hercules roamed over the bow section for 12 hours, systematically photographing everything. We also dove on the stern section and in the broader debris field, where most of the personal items had fallen. Objects still scattered the ocean floor: a silver dish covered in a deep green patina, wine bottles, a teapot. And a pair of women’s shoes—the two of them, lying right next to each other, both pointed in the same direction. Several combs, a hand mirror, and a child’s shoe lay on the ocean floor nearby. It’s pretty obvious that bodies had landed there.
We also saw the destruction caused by scavengers. There was the toppled mast, but now it was missing its bell and brass light. A hole in the deck suggested that someone tried to rip out the telemotor. Dents showed where submersibles had landed on the wreck, and tracks in parts of the debris field made it look strip-mined.
It was heartbreaking. I lingered, knowing this might be the last time I would ever spend with Titanic. The cameras on Hercules and Argus gave me both a broader view and sharper close-ups of everything, from scrapes in the hull to growing fields of rusticles. I saw the lifeboat cranes and thought again about how many others could have been saved.
My farewell had a bitter edge, because part of my job was to carry evidence of the devastation back to the world. My first step in doing that came when we did go live, without hitch, from Titanic’s deck on the National Geographic Channel. I also spoke to news outlets after the trip, making a plea for the vultures to let Titanic rest untouched. “You don’t go to Stonehenge and push the stones over,” I said.
Her earrings, watch, and brooch are missing, but the old lady is still there. If I had my way, the Titanic site would be an underwater museum, and we would use telepresence to stream images from the ocean bottom where she lies. Then it wouldn’t just be the wealthy few who get to see her, but everyone in the world could experience Titanic.