During the years that followed the Mersey report, no doubt because a greater disaster supervened, interest in the Titanic as a historical event slowly faded away in Britain and the rest of Europe. The name of the ship settled deeply into the general consciousness as a metaphor of calamity, but the accident itself was half-forgotten, recalled briefly in a local newspaper when a survivor died or a features editor remembered an anniversary. Things might have been the same in the United States had not the Grand Theater on Main Street, Indian Orchard, Massachusetts, shown the film Titanic, starring Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck, in the fall of 1953. From this seed we may date the birth, in an improbable spot, of modern Titanic scholarship.
The theater was owned by a Polish-American, Henry Kamuda, who had inherited it from his father. One of Henry’s children, Edward, then aged fourteen, is the man who now knows more about the Titanic and her fate than anyone else—certainly much more than was known to those who went down in her, or to any of the survivors. In 1953 he was working around his father’s theater, putting up posters in the town, doing odd jobs. He saw the film and was enthralled. It was the beginning of an obsession. He read about the Titanic in encyclopedias; he asked an old bookstore to look out for Titanic books; he made contact with another enthusiast, who had spent a year and a half building a model of the ship and had corresponded with Harland & Wolff and with J. G. Boxhall, one of the surviving officers.
Then came what Kamuda calls “my big break.” In 1958 the J. Arthur Rank Organization made the film A Night to Remember, loosely based on Walter Lord’s book of the same name. The script was by Eric Ambler; Kenneth More starred as Lightoller, and Alec McCowen played Cottam, the Carpathia’s radio operator. The lifeboat scenes were shot in the Ruislip reservoir, near Pinewood Studios, and the engine room scenes at Cricklewood Pumping Station.
The film, advertised as “an incredible spellbinding story of six hours unlike any other six hours the world has ever known,” was well received. In the United States, to drum up trade, the Exploitation Department of Rank Film Distributors in New York sent local theater owners “business builders,” or ideas for local promotions—fashion tie-ins, questions for quiz shows, radio “spots.” One of the “spots” went as follows:
At night the sounds on board a luxury liner at sea are varied … Bits of honeymoon conversation filter through the Edwardian mahogany panel … somewhere two lovers whisper in muffled tones … a door closes softly … the “Blue Danube” drifts from the first-class salon down to second-class ears … Then quite suddenly you notice it … the smooth hum of the great engines has died … and the Titanic is dying, too … “She can’t sink! … she’s unsinkable … she can’t float … how long will she last? … another hour and a half” … For you, one of the few in the tiny lifeboats, it is indeed A NIGHT TO REMEMBER … The New York Times calls it “tense, exciting, and supremely awesome drama on the screen” … Never before seen on screen or television … Walter Lord’s thrilling best-seller, A NIGHT TO REMEMBER.
All of these items came to Indian Orchard and were exciting enough, but the one that particularly stirred Edward Kamuda, now eighteen, was a list of Titanic survivors. The idea was that if any of them happened to live in the district where the film was shown, they could be exhibited along with the film. Kamuda wrote to every single survivor, and to his surprise many of them wrote back. Next, a hobbies magazine featured him in a series about people interested in obscure subjects. Thus he made contact with others similarly obsessed, until in 1963 he and his new friends, though scattered across the United States, decided to form a society, to which they gave the not wholly happy title of the Titanic Enthusiasts of America. Next, with Kamuda as editor in chief, the enthusiasts started a journal, The Marconigram. The headline on the first story read, “BRISTOL [i.e., Bristol, England] HAS TITANIC LIFEBOAT.” The story turned out to be false, which made Kamuda determined to tighten up his standards of scholarship. There was another setback when the Marconi company in London objected to the title, as it associated them more closely than they would have liked with the Titanic. The enthusiasts accordingly changed the name to The Titanic Commutator. A commutator is a device used in electric motors and dynamos, but Quartermaster Hichens incorrectly used the expression instead of the term inclinometer, which measures a ship’s list. The journal’s name perpetuates the error. Since few people know the word the journal is often called The Titanic Communicator. At the start, Kamuda had only forty-five subscribers, only fifteen of whom paid the annual subscription of $5. He himself was far from rich; and his first issues were crudely produced on a mimeograph machine owned by the National Volunteers, of which he was a member, with Kamuda himself meeting the cost of paper and postage.
But gradually the membership grew and more subscribers paid their subscriptions, and the society began to acquire Titanic relics, usually from survivors. One of the events that shocked Kamuda into starting the society was his discovery, after a survivor died in New York, that his collection of memorabilia had been thrown out, dumped in the city garbage. The society’s greatest coup was to secure the lifebelt worn by the pregnant Mrs. Astor when she was rescued. The story goes, according to Mr. Kamuda, that when she was being hoisted out of the lifeboat by one of the Carpathia’s crew she promised him $5,000 for helping her. Either the promise was never made or it slipped Mrs. Astor’s mind after she climbed aboard and was welcomed in the captain’s cabin with other rich, first-class female passengers. In any event, all her rescuer got was the lifebelt, which he took home to Michigan and stowed in a closet. Sixty-seven years later, in New York, his son learned about the Enthusiasts on the radio and, after some negotiations, gave the lifebelt to them. These days it can be studied at close quarters in a glass case at the Philadelphia Maritime Museum, where it forms part of a permanent Titanic exhibit.
The fact that this exhibit is in Philadelphia, five hours from Indian Orchard, is proof of the magnanimity of Mr. Kamuda and the other officers of what is now, following a prudent change of name, the Titanic Historical Society. A few years ago they began to consider the idea that rather than keeping their Titanic collection in their own widely scattered homes, they ought to turn it over to a properly equipped museum for safekeeping. Their choice for this honor was the relatively new Philadelphia Maritime Museum, which had been set up through the enthusiastic support of a well-connected Philadelphia lawyer, Welles Henderson. He had acquired an old building in the historic heart of Philadelphia, next to the site of Benjamin Franklin’s house, and with civic help equipped it with the most up-to-date filing and storage systems, as well as tight security and controlled temperatures. Here now is by far the best collection anywhere of Titanic books, audio tapes, films, videos, photographs, cassettes, letters, and objects.*
The objects are not numerous, but few visitors to the museum fail to be affected by them. Mrs. Astor’s lifebelt, the label reads, was “presented by Dr. Gottlieb Rencher, senior attendant-in-charge to the surgeon of the Carpathia. The imprint of the manufacturer, ‘Fosbery, London,’ is faintly visible over the cloth covering over the cork blocks.” The cloth is a rusty brown. The lifebelt rests on a wooden deck chair with a broken straw back; this was not a first-class deck chair, since the first-class chairs had wooden slats at the back, but it might be second-class—although some evidence suggests that second-class deck chairs had slats also. Nearby is an English silver flask in an alligator leather case given to R. Norris Williams, the tennis player, by his father. After the collision, the father felt sure he would not survive and passed on the flask to his son, advising him to have it filled up. The barman refused to serve the young Williams on the grounds that the time was well after midnight and the bar was closed; so Williams put the flask in his pocket, where he found it after his father perished and he was rescued.
Other objects turned over to the museum by the society include a nine-inch piece of wood from a Titanic lifeboat seat; a straight razor once the property of dining-saloon steward Frederick Ray of Bristol; a bracelet worn by Lillian Black, damaged when she dropped and trod on it in a lifeboat; the discharge book of the lookout who saw the iceberg, Fred Fleet, which, in the column headed “Description of Voyage” says “Intended New York,” and elsewhere describes Fleet as five feet eight inches tall, with gray eyes, brown hair, and “dark Indian spots on both hands”; a White Star button from the coat of steward C. W. Fitzpatrick of Southampton; an oblong bread board “believed” to have come from the Titanic; a wooden sliver of ship’s rail; a menu; writing paper; and a strip of green carpet that a steward squirreled away to take home to show his wife. Most remarkable of all are the relics of Selina Rogers Cook, an Englishwoman who was twenty-two at the time and who died in 1964. She was on her way to visit her sister in the United States, and she not only saved but cherished for the rest of her life two champagne corks, one comb, one coin purse, one wedding ring box from London, one third-class return railway ticket (from Southfields, near Wimbledon, to Walham Green, Hammersmith), the pale blue veil she tied around her head to keep her hat on when she entered the lifeboat, and a tooth that she had had extracted but kept.
Mr. Kamuda has been seeking out and collecting every morsel of Titanic information for thirty years, but his appetite is undiminished, stemming, he thinks, principally from the stories of heroism and from the beauty of the doomed ship. His place of work is a museum in itself. When television spoiled the movie-theater business in the 1960s, his father sold the cinema and opened Henry’s Jewelry Store directly across the street, in a single-story building shaped like a shoebox, with a dark green side wall and a retractable awning. This is where, since his father’s demise, Edward Kamuda spends his time. Inside, among the merchandise—watches, jewelry, greeting cards, photographs of the Pope, Catholic devotional objects, wineglasses engraved “Bride” and “Groom”—are signs of Mr. Kamuda’s passion: cinema posters of every Titanic film; postcards of a Titanic model at Falls River, Connecticut (with the incorrect inscription “Titanic, Southampton” instead of “Titanic, Liverpool” painted on its stern), and a photograph of the Olympic on its way to the breaker’s yard. Prominent also are portraits of Mr. Kamuda’s father and mother. His office at the back of the shop is a happy clutter of watch and jewelry repair tools, a Virgin Mary thermometer, a souvenir of the Empire State Building, a color picture of the Titanic, a clock with a Titanic face, and a penholder attached to a miniature brass ship’s wheel, circa 1930.
Mr. Kamuda’s society had 2,000 members before the wreck was found in September 1985, and 2,700 soon afterward. Most members live in the United States, but there are at least a hundred in the United Kingdom, forty in Australasia, and others in Germany, France, Holland, Belgium, Norway, and Malaysia. The society has held three conventions: thirty-five people attended the first, and in 1982 six hundred attended the third, held in Philadelphia, where the participants met six of the dwindling band of survivors, listened to speeches, attended a memorial service, and sat down to a banquet featuring Caprice of Fruit Southampton; Poached Breast of Capon White Star with Carpathian Baby Carrots, or Baked Filet of Sole Queenstown with Cape Race Parsley Potatoes; followed by Chocolate Mousse Titanic. The oldest person present was one of the survivors, Edwina Mackenzie, from Hermosa Beach, California, aged ninety-seven. (She died in 1984, aged one hundred, having lived to receive birthday greetings from President and Mrs. Reagan and, via Western Union, Queen Elizabeth; at her funeral the priest referred to her part in the reform of maritime safety laws.)
When Kamuda started writing to Titanic survivors—“our survivors,” he sometimes calls them—he did so tentatively, fearing that he might be disturbing memories which they had tried to forget. Not all of them wished to be made honorary members of the society, but many were pleased and grateful. He had a particularly ready response from the United Kingdom. “They valued the human feelings a little bit more,” he said.
One point that had struck me, talking to the descendants of survivors, was that the American children and grandchildren of the Titanic immigrants all seemed to have moved up in the world—one of them worked for a bank on the one hundred and eleventh floor of the World Trade Center in New York—whereas the British descendants of the crew seemed to have remained in the lowly social stratum occupied by their fathers or grandfathers in 1912. The point had struck Mr. Kamuda also. In retrospect, Senator Smith’s rhetoric about the Titanic steerage passengers who had abandoned the old world for the new because they no longer regarded endurance as a virtue seemed fully justified.
I asked Mr. Kamuda, as we sat in his store, what he felt about the dramatic discovery of the Titanic wreck. He was less enthusiastic than I had expected. Ten years earlier, Kamuda thought that they would never find it; two years before they did find it, he changed his mind. Now that his obsession had been located, scrutinized, and photographed, his feelings are mixed. He is afraid that the Titanic’s mystique—the mystery and veneration that have always surrounded the ship—will somehow be dissipated, although he is sure that the heroism shown and the beauty of the ship itself could never be tarnished. His passion, I felt, was shifting toward the Titanic’s sister ship, the Olympic; “she was a ship that did her job, yet man broke her up instead of saving her.” There was at least no danger of the Olympic, her dignity in tatters, ending up at Disneyland.
It would be unfair to give the impression that Kamuda and his fellow members are merely eccentrics sunk in nostalgia. Nobody could be more up-to-date than the scientist who discovered the Titanic wreck, Dr. Robert Ballard, and he was encouraged and given help by Titanic Historical Society members. The American-French expedition he led was based at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, on the southern tip of Cape Cod, which is not far from Indian Orchard.
I arrived there, as it happened, at a time full of depressing echoes for anyone interested in the Titanic. Three days earlier the liquid-fuel rockets carrying Challenger aloft had exploded in flames off Florida, killing all of the astronauts; it was by far the worst accident in the history of the American space program. It had struck Kamuda, as it must have struck everyone familiar with the Titanic story, that there were disturbing parallels between the two disasters. Suddenly in 1986, as in 1912, people felt that man had been taking far too much for granted, putting exaggerated faith in his own powers and believing his technology to be infallible. Some of the leading articles, with the change of a word or two, could have been lamenting not Challenger but the Titanic. A senior official of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which was responsible for the launch, expressed incredulity at what had happened; he had thought such a thing “impossible.” P. A. S. Franklin, head of the White Star Line in New York, said much the same thing when he learned that the Titanic had sunk. Even the proximate cause of both accidents—cold weather—was the same.
At Woods Hole, I found that Dr. Ballard and the team that had discovered the Titanic were “on standby” in case they were needed to search for the remains of Challenger in the Atlantic. So was the underwater vehicle used in the Titanic hunt, the Argo, named after the mythological vessel that carried Jason on his quest for the Golden Fleece.
Among the Titanic, Challenger, and Argo there was a direct link. All three vehicles had to do with “frontier” technology: the conquest of the Atlantic, the conquest of space, the conquest of the ocean floor. Ballard has compared the conquest of the ocean floor to the conquest of space, calling it the “last frontier,” and has described another of Woods Hole’s underwater vehicles, the Alvin—essentially a large shiny silver ball that carries three people—as an undersea space capsule. The word “conquest,” in retrospect, seemed misplaced.
While I was wandering around Woods Hole, I detected a further link—a public-relations ingredient common to all three. The size of the Titanic was a public-relations exercise in itself, to attract publicity and bookings. NASA had put a woman schoolteacher aboard Challenger solely in order to stimulate public interest in the manned space program, and thus to attract public support and funds. Public relations was an element too in the discovery of the Titanic. Nothing could have been better calculated to draw attention to the work of Woods Hole and to encourage the funding, both public and private, on which it depends. Most people had never heard of Woods Hole or Dr. Ballard before the discovery of the Titanic.
There is yet another link. All three of these technical wonders had a military side. The British government had looked favorably on the building of the Olympic and the Titanic, as it did on the crack Cunarders, because they would be invaluable assets in the event of war. The space program had explicit military implications. And so did the search for the Titanic. Ballard is an ex-Navy man. Woods Hole is partly funded by the Navy. The Woods Hole research vessels and underwater vehicles belong to the Navy; and the Navy gave permission for them to be used to look for the Titanic as a good test of underwater technology that the Navy is interested in for reasons entirely unconnected with nostalgia.
Ballard’s prime concern is not with the Titanic, either. His real interest is in the Mid-Ocean Ridge, the almost entirely unexplored chain of mountains that circles the globe under water like the stitching on a baseball. Unknown before the 1960s, this immense range is said to be 45,000 miles long and to cover no less than 23 percent of the world’s surface. Not all of it is under water. It comes out of the Pacific in California, for instance, where it turns into the San Andreas Fault. All of the world’s earthquakes are believed to be related to this ridge, and one of the things that concerned Ballard when he was planning the Titanic search was the thought that the ship might have been buried by the tumultuous underwater earthquake that severed submarine cables in the area in 1928.
It was not his interest in the Mid-Ocean Ridge, however, but his discovery of the Titanic that made Ballard a national, even an international figure. After Piccard and Cousteau, Ballard is the third underwater explorer that the man in the street has heard of. He looks the part: tall, good-looking, and athletic. He is also intrepid, and he easily holds the record for underwater dives. He has made three hundred descents in Alvin, sometimes to 13,000 feet—two and a half miles—which is the depth of the Titanic wreck. He was born in Kansas in 1942; studied chemistry and geology at the University of California; and went to two graduate schools of oceanography, at the University of Hawaii and the University of Southern California. After that, he spent five years in the armed services, first in Army intelligence and then in the Navy, and later picked up a Ph.D. in marine geology and geophysics at the University of Rhode Island. It was as a naval liaison officer that he first came in contact with Woods Hole.
After the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California, Woods Hole is the second-largest oceanographic institution in the United States. The staff numbers some nine hundred scientists, several of whom have won the Nobel Prize. Yet, as Woods Hole is no more than a village and the scientific buildings are tucked away, it is rather inconspicuous. Few of the thousands of vacationers who take the Woods Hole ferries in the summer to visit the fashionable offshore islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket—some of them on their way to gaze at the bridge at Chappaquiddick where Senator Edward Kennedy had his accident—realize that they are a quarter of a mile from a scientific powerhouse. In the winter, Woods Hole has a more serious feel, evoking images of Herman Melville and the old whaling stations nearby at Bedford or the islands, and the square clapboard houses at Edgartown, on the Vineyard, where the whaling captains used to live.
The Oceanographic Institute is private, founded in 1930 with three million Rockefeller dollars. It acquired its military connections and expanded greatly during World War II, when among other things it developed anti-fouling paint for ships’ bottoms and worked on determining the winds and tides before the Normandy landings. It now carries out every sort of research, from the effect of carbon dioxide buildup in the oceans to aquaculture, plankton distribution, ocean sediments, natural petroleum seeps, salmon ranching, or the use of underwater acoustics. It is organized like a university, with some scientists having tenure, and a board of trustees. Of its $50 million-a-year operating budget, $20 to $25 million comes from the National Science Foundation, $10 million from the Office of Naval Research, and the rest from business.
Dr. Ballard is a senior scientist in the Ocean Engineering Department and head of the Deep Submergence Laboratory, whose mission is to explore the deep-sea floor—less than one tenth of one percent of which has ever been seen by the human eye. Since 1984 Ballard has also been a consultant to the deputy chief of naval operations for submarine warfare. He first became interested in finding the Titanic in the early 1970s, purely as a technical challenge, but could find nobody to put up the money. The reason he thought of the Titanic was because of a technological advance: Alvin, the little three-person submarine, had originally had a steel hull and could dive to 6,000 feet; but then she was given a titanium hull, which enabled her to go down to 13,000 feet—as deep as the presumed site of the Titanic. Pursuing his researches into where the ship might be, Ballard came across one of the Titanic Historical Society fanatics, William H. Tantum IV, who persuaded him that the Titanic was more than just another wreck. Still, Ballard failed to get backing, as did Tantum, who formed an organization in 1978 called Seaonics International expressly to find and film whatever might be down there.
Tantum died in 1980, and Ballard, while continuing his work on the Mid-Ocean Ridge, had to sit in frustration on the sidelines while a Texas oilman named Jack Grimm mounted three expeditions in search of the Titanic, in 1980, 1981, and 1983. Grimm engaged scientists from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and used an ultrasophisticated research vessel, with first-rate sonar housed in a “fish” towed along the ocean floor. All three expeditions ended in failure (at one point, Grimm was sure he had found the Titanic’s propeller, but it was only a rock) and made the whole idea of finding the wreck seem still more outlandish.
Ballard’s reaction to Grimm’s failures was to conclude that the keys to success for any future expedition must be to spend much more time in the area and to be ready to cover some 150 square miles in case the ship was not where she was supposed to be. To do this would require two months, in Ballard’s estimation, and as the appropriate Woods Hole research vessel would be available for only one month a year, he asked the French to collaborate with him—in particular an engineer named Jean-Louis Michel, whom he had come to respect during a joint Franco-American exploration of the mid-Atlantic ridge by submersible in 1973–74. Apart from the Americans, the Russians, the French and the Japanese are most advanced in underwater technology, and Michel worked for the Institut Français de Recherche pour l’Exploitation de la Mer, a French government organization based in Toulon. With Michel working with him, Ballard would have a French research vessel at his disposal to do the preparatory exploration of the targeted area in the search for the Titanic.
This time, the U.S. Navy agreed to Ballard’s request for aid—his third—because the technology that Ballard proposed to use was new and untried and, if successful, could have valuable military applications. One reason why the Navy is interested in the inventions of Ballard’s team is obvious, considering the list of maritime nuclear accidents. The nuclear submarine USS Thresher was lost off Cape Cod in 1963; she was found and photographed at some 8,000 feet, scattered in pieces. In 1968 a Russian submarine armed with nuclear weapons exploded and sank 750 miles northwest of Hawaii, at a depth of three miles. A month later another nuclear submarine, the USS Scorpion, sank near the Azores. The Russians failed to find their submarine, but the Americans found her, surreptitiously, and raised her a reported 5,000 feet before she snapped and dropped back to the ocean floor. Bits of the Scorpion were photographed at 10,000 feet. A more alarming event occurred in January 1966, when as a result of a midair collision over Spain several H-bombs fell on land and one into the Mediterranean. The bombs on land were soon found; to find the one in the sea the U.S. Navy called in Woods Hole and Alvin. After a month’s search Alvin was successful, using a “deep submersible”—the Reynolds Aluminum Company’s Aluminaut, designed to operate at 15,000 feet—to retrieve it. “That was when people started taking Alvin seriously,” says the Woods Hole information manager, Shelly Lauzon.
Like the building of the Titanic, the space program, and the military underwater program, the program to recover the Titanic was not so much an example of man inventing machines in order to accomplish a necessary task as an example of an undertaking entered into by man as a way of finding something useful for his new machines to do. The French were eager to join in the search for the Titanic because they too had new equipment to test: a revolutionary sonar system.
On July 11, 1985, with Ballard aboard, a French research vessel started work, sweeping back and forth across the 150-square-mile search area, plotted by Michel, as if “mowing a lawn” (this became a favorite phrase to describe how the ship was found). The French carried out an “acoustical search,” trailing one underwater vehicle able to take soundings in several directions at once, followed by a magnetometer reporting whether objects found by the first vehicle were made of metal or not. Because both vehicles were attached to the parent ship by cable, strong surface currents made their control difficult; and the ship ran into a gale. On August 7, the French search ended; they had found nothing but had “mown” 80 percent of the big square.
In mid-August the Woods Hole (but U.S. Navy-owned) research vessel Knorr took over. She is 2,000 tons and 245 feet long, with a satellite navigation system and “cycloidal” propellers that allow her to be driven sideways as well as forward and backward. On board were twenty-six crew and twenty-three scientists, including three Frenchmen led by Jean-Louis Michel. Also on hand was a naval officer from a military establishment in San Diego that operates miniature submarines.
The French search had been acoustical; the American search was visual. The Knorr’s most important piece of equipment was Argo, newly developed by Woods Hole with millions of the U.S. Navy’s dollars. The Argo is an unmanned search and survey vessel, the size of a small car, which is equipped with high-quality sensors, three cameras in the front, and powerful strobe lights in the back to light up the ocean floor, which at 13,000 feet is in total darkness. It trails behind its parent surface vessel on a cable and has no driving power of its own. The novelty of Argo is that unlike previous search vehicles, whether manned or unmanned, it can stay submerged for days—a dramatic improvement.
The terrain that the Argo had to inspect was partly canyons, partly mud, and the Knorr crew watched with increasing boredom as it sent its pictures back up the cable. There was a monitor screen in the ship’s library where the captain of the Knorr used to relax when he was not “driving.” “I’d watch this camera go along the bottom,” Captain Bowen said later, “and look at mud and more mud and sand dunes and a few rocks. Every time we saw something dark come up we’d say, ‘Gee, is this it?’ This went on for days.” The captain was “amazed” that although they were near one of the junction points on the great circle routes that, until a few years ago, ships used to follow religiously (now they use “weather routing”), “there wasn’t a lot of junk on the bottom. Seventy-five years of cargo ships dumping hundreds of beer bottles overboard, and passenger liners. It shows how big the ocean is, I suppose. I never saw anything … not even a bottle.”
Finally, at 1:40 a.m. on the night of September 1 the dispirited screen-watchers in the control room suddenly saw a shape they thought must be one of the Titanic’s gigantic boilers. Someone was sent to wake Ballard. He came rushing into the control room, jumpsuit over his pyjamas, took one look at the screen, and cried, “That’s it!” He said later, “It was incredible. All those years and all those efforts and days and days with the French and days and days before and bang. There it was.” Ballard has a sense of occasion. He led a group to the stern, where he held a short memorial service in memory of the Titanic’s 1,496 dead; then he raised a Harland & Wolff flag.
For the next four days Ballard and his associates scarcely slept. The weather window was closing. They “flew” the Argo as close to the wreck as they dared, working from the bow toward the stern to avoid the rigging, and then sent down a smaller vehicle to take 35mm color photographs. In four days the cameras shot more than 20,000 frames of film.
The hull of the great ship was more or less upright. With increasing wonder, the crew of the Knorr saw strange white objects that they eventually realized must be porcelain dishes; a chamber pot; a tray possibly of silver; wine bottles identified later by their shape as Madeira, port, Bordeaux, and Riesling; a set of bedsprings; a first-class smoking-room tile; lumps of coal; a generator; and a second-class smoking-room window. Ballard said he felt like an archaeologist opening a pharaoh’s tomb.
Of the ship’s structure, they saw a giant hole left by the forward funnel when it crashed into the sea and nearly killed Lightoller; the bridge; the side of the bridge where Captain Smith had been photographed leaving Queenstown; anchor chains; the forward cranes still in position; bollards that still seemed to be shiny; and empty davits. Captain Bowen found most moving of all the pictures of the crow’s nest, with what appeared to be a telephone line dangling out of it, the line down which Fred Lee shouted “Iceberg right ahead!” and got the reply, “Thank you.”
When Ballard tried to approach the stern, he was surprised not to be able to find it. On the way back to Woods Hole, examining the film images, he realized that he had seen it after all, but in pieces.* It was strewn in a “debris field” stretching more than a mile behind the wreck. Going home, after Woods Hole had told the world of the find, the Knorr’s radio operator handled a hundred commercial radio calls, forty radio telegraph messages (the radio telegraph, a radio signal sent in Morse code, was still used extensively), eighty-one ham radio calls, and numerous calls from coast stations. Portishead Radio in England called to say they were holding hundreds of calls for the Knorr. Ballard was interviewed on radio by ABC, NBC, CBS, and The New York Times. At Woods Hole, helicopters whirring overhead, the ship was given a hero’s welcome.
What did the discovery reveal? Ed Kamuda surveyed the arguments of seventy-three years. Some had maintained that the liner would have leveled off at 1,000 feet, turned on her side like a falling leaf, and hit the floor at a moderate speed, her masts and funnels snapping off. Others thought she had broken in two and would have hit the bottom at 100 miles per hour, smashing herself to pieces. Still others believed that she would have nose-dived deep into mud, leaving two-thirds of her sticking out almost upright. “Only a few guessed that the ship landed on an even keel, gently, and would be found in pristine condition,” Kamuda said in conclusion. The word “pristine,” however, turned out to be over-optimistic. Those who said the boilers had smashed down through the ship and possibly crashed through the hull were proved right; they had been scoffed at over the years on the grounds that the Titanic’s hull was too strong for that.*
Ballard said that he had found the wreck some ten miles farther east than it was supposed to be. He would not reveal the precise location but stated flatly that the position given by the Titanic in her distress signals was incorrect. Her navigator thought she was going faster than she was. The indications were, said Ballard, that “a southeasterly current was slowing Titanic and putting her off her track.”
Why then had Rostron of the Carpathia congratulated the Titanic navigator on a “splendid” position that enabled him, coming from the southeast, to set a course straight to the lifeboats? Rostron assumed the boats had moved more or less east, whereas in fact they had moved more or less south.
Ballard and his French colleagues concluded, after they found the wreck, that the Californian must have been much closer than Captain Lord had claimed. He said eighteen or nineteen miles; Ballard thought the true answer was well under ten miles, and perhaps as little as five. To that, the Lordites instantly replied: if the Californian was so close, why—on such a clear night—did not people in the Titanic see an unmistakable blaze of lights, and vice versa?
The principal result of the discovery, though, was to raise questions about the Titanic’s future, not its past. Could she be salvaged? Grimm, the oilman, had at one time seemed confident that the job could be done; but then he had also seemed confident that expeditions financed by him could find a hole in the North Pole, Noah’s Ark in Turkey, the Abominable Snowman in Tibet, and the Loch Ness monster in Scotland. Had Grimm found the Titanic on one of his three expeditions, he intended to employ robots equipped with blowtorches to cut a hole in the hull and extract any valuables they might come across inside; he would then consider presenting these items to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Another person who got into the papers by talking about salvaging was an Englishman, Douglas Woolley, who boasted experience as a farmhand, railway signalman, male nurse, and porter in a Ford motor factory. He claimed to be the Titanic’s owner, having secured title to the last unliquidated stock share in White Star and a disclaimer from its successor, Cunard. At one time or another he had set up four companies—Seawise and Titanic Salvage Ltd., Titanic Salvage Co., Seawise Salvage Co., and Deftpoint Ltd.—and, with two Hungarian scientists, Ambros Balas and Laszlo Szaskoe, planned to use a bathysphere with mechanical arms to wrap hundreds of plastic containers around the Titanic’s hull. They would next pass an electric current through the water inside the containers to break up the water into gases that would lift the ship gently to the surface. Then she would be towed back to Liverpool, refitted, and housed in a dry dock as a maritime museum. To date, Mr. Woolley’s plans remain theoretical.
More recently, a salvage engineer in Stamford, Connecticut, proposed packing 180,000 tons of petroleum jelly into polyester bags stowed inside the hull; he has said that the jelly would harden and cause the Titanic to become buoyant. John Pierce, a British enthusiast who helped to recover artifacts from the Lusitania, spoke of a “giant iceberg” scheme whereby the Titanic would be wrapped in a wire net, liquid nitrogen would be pumped through the net, the nitrogen would turn into an iceberg, and the entire package would float to the surface. Pierce also spoke of a simpler-sounding plan of raising the ship by means of giant air bags filled with compressed air—as used to salvage the sabotaged Greenpeace boat, Rainbow Warrior, from Auckland harbor in 1985.
In either case, it would be Pierce’s intention to take the ship back to Harland & Wolff, restore her to her full 1912 glory, and sail her on another maiden voyage, hoping for better luck next time.
In the view of professional salvage experts, none of these plans would work, nor—at a depth of two and a half miles—would any of the techniques actually employed to raise sunken vessels in the past, such as pontoons, compressed air, or injected polyurethane foam. In any case Dr. Ballard (who is in the exceptional position of knowing where it is) says bluntly, “To raise the Titanic is foolish.” Lord Grade, after he financed a disastrous film, Raise the Titanic, said, “It would have been cheaper to have lowered the Atlantic”; and many people who have considered the costs say much the same about a real-life attempt. William Summers, writing to the London Times soon after the discovery of the wreck, put the cost at over £100 million. Summers, a member of the steel-making family of the same name and the person responsible for jacklifting the Mary Rose out of the Solent in 1982, pointed out that steel was in its “early manhood” in 1910, and the evidence was that the ship had suffered serious damage in her descent. “This would make complete support of the structure necessary, very much as the Mary Rose—but for an 852-foot, 46,329-ton item!” An armada of recovery vessels would be needed to put in place a system of controlling the ascent of such a huge, fragile shell; and the armada would surely run the risk of storm, or indeed icebergs, either during the lift or the laborious tow to shore. Even if the ship could be recovered and put on show, any conceivable revenue would be mopped up by the costs of preventing corrosion. Scrap steel, he concluded, fetches only £35 to £40 a ton. Captain Bowen has said, “Salvage would be impossible. It would be like trying to lift an old Cape Cod barn with a crane. It would just crumble into a thousand pieces.”
Dr. Ballard and all those who helped to find the Titanic said as soon as they came ashore that she should be allowed to rest in peace, and so, shortly afterward, did all the survivors and the descendants of survivors whose views were canvassed. But Ballard was not confident that Summers’s realism would necessarily deter some of those whose eyes were fixed on the wreck. Even if it became plain to everyone that a salvage operation was a fantasy, greedy treasure-hunters might easily send down instruments to trawl through the wreck and inflict great damage. Nobody, it turned out, not even Mr. Woolley, owned the Titanic, and there was no law that could stop anybody from meddling with her.
For these reasons, urged on by Dr. Ballard and survivors, the House of Representatives Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee approved a bill in November 1985 to “recognize the sanctity of the shipwreck Titanic as a maritime memorial,” bar Americans from indiscriminate salvage operations, and seek an agreement with other nations, including Great Britain, France, and Canada, “to protect the wreck’s scientific, historical, and cultural significance.” The Reagan administration supported the bill.
But the discovery of the Titanic provoked much wider questions than the future of one old ship. For the first time, the world at large was suddenly made aware of the extraordinary new capabilities of underwater technology. If it was possible not only to find the wreck at a depth of two and a half miles—a feat described by someone at Woods Hole as like dangling a needle into a soda bottle from the top of the Empire State Building—but to photograph a bottle of Titanic port as well, what else might be done down there?
Dr. Ballard was on hand to explain, using a new word to describe the next advance in his science, which is to establish man’s “telepresence” on the ocean floor. He told the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee that the technology used in finding the Titanic was in the vanguard of the technology that man would soon be using to project his eyes, ears, and eventually his hands to the ocean floor. Going to the movies, watching television, using a telephone were all crude forms of “telepresence.” Exploration of the ocean floor was not driving the technology but was benefiting from it. The driving forces were the space program, with its robots on Mars and Venus; the commercial world, with its developing television and cinema techniques; and the military, with “their desire to remove humans from the risks of combat.”
Deep-sea exploration indeed seems to be following the example of the exploration of space, replacing expensive and not particularly efficient manned vehicles by the equivalent of unmanned space probes. Ballard’s Deep Submergence Laboratory has been developing an unmanned vehicle named Jason that can do everything and more that has been done over the past fifteen years by their manned workhorse Alvin.
When fully developed, the system will work as follows. The research vessel will position itself to within a few yards of where it wants to be by using satellites in “geostationary orbit” 22,000 miles in space. The Global Positioning System will be plugged into Argo, so that it too will know exactly where it is. Argo will conduct a general survey of the terrain. Then it will be kept still at a height of some 100 meters above the floor. Jason then leaves Argo, though still tethered to it, and, equipped with stereo color television and robot arms, zooms in for a close look, picking up samples if required and taking them back for Argo to store. Both vehicles can keep up this work for days at a stretch.
Up top, the operator can see what Jason sees through its stereo eyes. Simultaneously, he can watch Jason through the eyes of Argo poised overhead. This is what Ballard means by man being able before long to establish a “telepresence” on the ocean floor.
At great depths, wrecks are preserved as in a giant refrigerator; down there, freezing temperatures and darkness inhibit, where they do not prevent, the biological activity that consumes wood and metal in shallower waters. Around the world, hundreds and hundreds of well-preserved wrecks are “awaiting mankind,” Ballard has said. After his Titanic triumph, he began to wonder about the chances of finding the most spectacular wrecks of all: the four hundred Roman vessels sunk by a storm after their victory over the Carthaginians in the Second Punic War of 225 B.C.
Ballard is an adviser to the Walt Disney World Company as well as to the U.S. Navy. He is in the strange position of being able to interest them both in the same technology. He imagines that tourists in Orlando, Florida, will one day be able to sit in a capsule and watch direct telecasts relayed via satellite from Argo and Jason on the ocean floor. At the same time, the technology has implications for hiding submarines carrying nuclear missiles.
Soon after his discovery of the Titanic, Ballard took Argo on its first scientific expedition. Off the coast of Mexico, he surveyed parts of the East Pacific Rise, looking at recent volcanic activity and hydrothermal vent fields (underwater geysers). Thanks to Argo, he saw more of the world’s underwater mountain range in a few days than all scientists together had seen of it in the previous decade.
Then, in the summer of 1986, he led another Woods Hole expedition to look at the Titanic, and this time descended in person, aboard Alvin, to inspect the wreck with his own eyes. “It was like landing on the moon,” he said. He and his two fellow explorers took with them a junior version of Jason, essentially a two-foot-long robot camera, powered by jets and attached to Alvin by cable. Using a remote-control joystick, the Alvin’s crew maneuvered the camera down the layers of tangled metal that had once been the grand staircase and then into a room where it photographed an elaborate light fixture suspended from the ceiling. The hull of the liner was coal black on the outside, but inside it had been turned into a brilliant rusty panorama of red, orange, and yellow. In the “debris field” astern of the wreck, the crew saw, among other objects, a lavatory bowl, three safes, and a chair. As on his first expedition, Ballard made an appropriate gesture, leaving on the liner’s deck a plaque in memory of those who died.
Back in Woods Hole, he reported his principal finding: that he had seen no evidence of any gash in the starboard side. He had, on the other hand, seen very clear evidence of where the plates had “popped,” leading him to think that the fatal damage was really caused by separation of the plates. This discovery was unexpected. It did not invalidate any of the conclusions about the reasons why the ship sank, but it certainly raised further doubts about the efficiency of her construction. Once again, the Titanic had lived up to expectations as a source of wonder and surprise, and once again it had confounded the experts.*†
*The fate of the much larger collection of artifacts held by RMS Titanic Inc. is uncertain as of early 2012. Many exhibitions of these and other objects have been held around the world since Michael Davie’s time.—DG
*Ballard was mistaken. The badly damaged stern remains in one piece, about 600 meters from the bow. At least 20 meters of the hull between the two parts disintegrated entirely, creating a debris field linking the two.—DG
*Later exploration showed that only five small boilers in the vicinity of the break were dislodged. The remaining twenty-four boilers are in place.—DG
*Since this chapter was written, the wreck has been extensively explored by French and Russian expeditions. Individuals may visit the wreck in Russian submersibles, albeit at great expense. Several thousand artifacts have been recovered, including a large section of the hull plating.—DG
†For up-to-date information on Woods Hole, visit http://www.whoi.edu