Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic (47 page)

It stirred up a hornet’s nest of protest. Two distinct camps formed concerning the treatment of the wreck almost as soon as it was discovered in 1985: the “protectionists,” the most vocal of whom was Ballard, who wanted the wreck and the debris field left intact and undisturbed; and the “conservationists” who wanted to recover and preserve artifacts from the around the wreck, though they generally believed that the wreck itself should be left untouched. Tulloch, Geller, and their associates came under fire from both sides, since almost everyone agreed that this latest effort by RMS Titanic, Inc., was going too far.
⁶

Survivors, survivors’ families, and the families of the victims of the Titanic were especially outspoken, calling Tulloch and his associates grave-robbers and ghouls. They emphatically declared that bringing up anything from the wreck itself, let alone actually raising a part of the Titanic, amounted to little more than desecrating a grave. Emotions ran high on both sides of the Atlantic as RMS Titanic, Inc., proceeded with its plans to retrieve a section of the starboard hull, some twenty-five feet high and twenty feet long and weighing nearly thirteen tons, that had fallen away from the ship as the Titanic broke up.
⁷

For some months, however, in an effort to deflect the criticism, Tulloch presented the project as a serious scientific endeavor, where all the proper protocols and formats of marine archeology would be followed and a significant amount of oceanographic research would be carried out at the same time the hull section was to be raised. Before long, though, a carnival atmosphere permeated the entire undertaking and the emphasis shifted toward making the recovery a media spectacular.

First, plans were made for one cruise ship, the SS Royal
Majesty,
then later a second, the MV Island Breeze to accompany the salvage vessels to the site of the wreck. Both were packed to the gunwales with reporters, sensation seekers, and Titanic buffs. The cruise ships would offer luxury accommodations, at $5,000 per person, including Las Vegas-style shows and casino gambling, along with closed-circuit television in each cabin that would allow the passengers to monitor the progress of the recovery in comfort. Then a group introduced a plan to utilize special underwater lights, originally designed for the production of the Hollywood film The Abyss, the idea being to illuminate the forward half of the wreck in its entirety, for the benefit of those on board the cruise ships watching their television monitors, and to allow the wreck to be filmed using purpose-built underwater cameras and super-sensitive film.
⁸

Special “showings” of the recovered hull section and artifacts retrieved along with it were scheduled for New York and Boston, accompanied by a number of “Grand Receptions” for VIPs and the media. Finally, several celebrities, some of whom had only marginal associations with the
Titanic,
would be enlisted to add a measure of glamour to the event; among them were actor Burt Reynolds, actress Debbie Reynolds (“The Unsinkable Molly Brown”), and astronaut Buzz Aldrin. (The marketing company selling bookings on the cruise ships went so far as to announce that a world-famous author of two books about the Titanic would be part of the expedition, though when queried the gentleman in question stated that he had never been asked to participate, let alone agreed to do so.) Serious marine salvors, marine archaeologists, scientists, and historians quickly raised questions as to whether this expedition was a legitimate scientific undertaking, as Tulloch maintained, or simply a money-making stunt.
⁹

Regardless, the salvage vessel Nadir, carrying the submersible
Nautile,
left New York harbor on August 26, 1996, along with the two cruise ships, and on August 28 reached the spot where the Titanic went down. The salvage efforts got underway almost immediately, despite marginal sea conditions (Hurricane Eduardo was moving up the United States’ eastern seaboard and disturbing weather patterns all across the western half of the North Atlantic). The
Nautile
attached a sling of cables to the section of hull chosen for recovery, along with four flotation bladders filled with lighter-than-water diesel fuel. The whole array was carefully brought up from the bottom over a period of several hours to a depth of approximately 200 feet below the surface. RMS Titanic, Inc., had planned to have the Nadir tow the hull section at that depth until the ship reached the continental shelf, where the piece would be lowered to the bottom (only 250-300 feet down) until the weather cleared. Then the Nadir would gradually bring it closer and closer to the surface as the ship approached the coastline until, in a blaze of media-generated glory, the recovered section of the
Titanic’s
hull would emerge from the water in New York harbor.

Nature would have the last word, however, as the seas grew progressively rougher and the vertical movement of the
Nautile
began to place unanticipated stresses on the floatation bags and the cable sling. At 3:00 A.M. on August 30, at a point about 300 miles south of Nova Scotia, the strain became too much for the chains holding two of the floatation bags to the hull, and they tore free. The loss of buoyancy was too great for the remaining two bags and the supporting cables to bear, and their attachments suddenly parted, sending the section of the Titanic plunging to the bottom of the sea again. For those people and organizations who wished to see the wreck remain undisturbed, the news was received as almost a divine endorsement of their views. For those who had supported the effort to recover part of the wreck, it was the ultimate disappointment. What had been one of the most controversial acts of marine salvage in history had ended in dismal failure.

Publicly, Tulloch remained optimistic, pledging to return to the wreck in the summer of 1997 or 1998 to continue the recovery of artifacts and to complete the job by bringing a section of the
Titanic’s
hull to the surface where it would be preserved and put on public display. Privately, though, experts expressed serious doubts about RMS Titanic, Inc., ever raising the money it would need to return to the
Titanic.
¹⁰

It is unfair, though, to leave the impression that all of George Tulloch’s endeavors were motivated by profit or publicity. In the summer of 1991, in a simple, dignified ceremony accompanied by very little media fanfare, Edith Brown Haisman, a quiet, frail woman in her hundredth year, was presented with a polished oak display case about the size of a hardback book. In it was a battered, corroded pocketwatch, its hands forever frozen at 11:04, that RMS Titanic, Inc., had recently recovered from the bottom of the North Atlantic. Moved almost beyond tears, Edith acknowledged that, though she knew it well, she had never expected to see that watch again. The watch had once belonged to Edith’s father, Thomas William Brown, and he had been wearing it the last time Edith ever saw him. That was very early in the morning of April 15, 1912, and Thomas Brown was waving goodbye to his wife and daughter, who sat in Boat 14 as it pulled away from the side of the
Titanic.
¹¹

Whether any other salvage experts or entrepreneurs will try to “raise the Titanic” in the future, or if the salvage community will content itself with just retrieving artifacts, remains to be seen. Certainly the public’s intense interest in both Europe and North America about those bits and pieces that have already been recovered will ensure that recovery efforts of some sort will continue. That the wreck is inexorably decaying and will one day collapse into a pile of rusting scrap is undeniable, though it seems to be a much slower process than some experts have maintained, removing some of the urgency from the claims of the more mercenary salvors. It appears, though, that because of the mountain of technical, logistical, and financial obstacles that have to be overcome by each successive expedition, the number of trips to the wreck will decline in the years to come, leaving the wreck relatively undisturbed in its closing years of decay. Fittingly, then, the final fate of the Titanic will be determined not by man, but by the sea.

—Timothy 1:19

 

 

 

HISTORY IS NOT COMPOSED OF A SERIES OF DISCRETE EVENTS, INCIDENTS that, like a collection of motion pictures, have clearly defined beginnings and ends. The story of the Titanic began long before her sailing day, her launching, her building, even before that summer evening when Lord Pirrie and Bruce Ismay doodled over Havana cigars and Napoleon brandy. She was, during her brief life, the culmination of technological, social, and economic trends that had begun more than a half century before her creation—trends that would continue long after her loss, producing ships with names like
Aquitania,
Majestic,
Normandie,
and the two
Queens, Mary
and
Elizabeth.
If the world would never again see her equal, that did not mean that it would never again see her kind.

And yet the sinking of the Titanic, those hours between 11:40 P.M. on April 14 and 8:30 A.M. on April 15, 1912, was one of those rare finite events that history on occasion does afford humanity. It illuminated with stark, sometimes harsh, clarity the strengths and weaknesses, virtues and flaws of the society that gave impetus to her existence. In those nine hours, the men and women aboard the Titanic demonstrated almost every derogatory characteristic of Edwardian society: arrogance, pride, snobbery, prejudice, racism, chauvinism, and maudlin sentimentality. They also showed in equal measure the Edwardians’ capacity for self-confidence, self reliance, self sacrifice, gallantry,
noblesse
oblige, and devotion to duty. In many ways, what makes the Titanic disaster so compelling is that it catches that society at its pinnacle—before the decade was out it would have vanished forever.

For the sinking of the Titanic was the first scene in the last act of a drama that had slowly unfolded for centuries. The same energies that powered the Edwardian Age would, like a flywheel spinning too fast, soon tear it apart. When the waters of the North Atlantic closed over the
Titanic’s
stern that cold April night, something changed in the Western world, though no one knew it at the moment. Attitudes, beliefs, and values that had endured for hundreds of years were shaken, overnight as it were, and would remain unsettled more than eighty years later.

Most profoundly disturbed would be mankind’s belief in technology. It is almost impossible for people living in this century’s last decade to understand the almost mystical reverence people in its first felt for technological progress. The inhabitants of these modern days have had to come to grips with the realization that technology—though it robbed pestilence of much of its potency, greatly increased lifespans, and raised standards of living for many in the world—has been at best a mixed blessing. Hand-in-hand with the advances have come the ravaging of the global ecology, the still-rising threat of nuclear weaponry, and the nightmarish potentials of genetic engineering, which are only beginning to be explored and feared. By contrast, the engineers and scientists of the early 1900s were viewed as benefactors, their products as benevolent gifts that could only improve humanity’s lot. The construction of the Olympic and Titanic, so widely believed to be unsinkable, represented the first sure steps in mankind’s eventual, inevitable, triumph over the elements.

After the loss of the Titanic, engineers would no longer be hailed as modern-day saviors, their works greeted as panaceas for the assorted ills of mankind, or their efforts the repository of humanity’s confidence. Confidence was probably the single outstanding characteristic of the Edwardians, confidence—faith—in the future and in the belief that, no matter how profound the problems, there were answers to all of society’s ills, and that they would be found. And nowhere had that faith been given greater expression than in the advances made by science and technology. It was a memorable editorial in the
Wall Street Journal
on April 16, 1912, written while still blissfully unaware of the truth, that gave voice to this faith:

But now faith would no longer repose in a ship that steamed blindly into an ice field with no more assurance of its safety than the wise pronouncements of a handful of engineers declaring her to be “practically unsinkable.” Science had in the previous century steadily eroded the faith in God that had sustained men for two thousand years, until it seemed that the millennium would be ushered in not by theology but by technology. Yet suddenly what had appeared to be the ultimate accomplishment of science and progress was shown to be helplessly flawed and deadly fragile.