by Brad Matsen
On the night of September 1, 1985, Bill Lange and another imaging technician, Stu Harris, were an hour into their watch in the control room aboard Knorr, the mother ship of the Ballard-Michel expedition to find Titanic. They sat side by side, staring into television monitors at images from a camera on Argo, a contraption that carried cameras in pressure-proof housings they had built themselves. Towed on a cable behind Knorr, Argo was gliding a few feet over the bottom 12,400 feet below, its lights shining on a few hundred square yards of rocks and muck.
Knorr’s around-the-clock watches had been combing the bottom with their robot eyes for five weeks, checking out targets from earlier sonar scans of the area, and searching the area in a systematic grid pattern. They had seen only numbingly monotonous images of the desolate seafloor. In the control room with Lange and Harris, Michel piloted Argo with a joystick, keeping it level and on course for each transect, turning the ship and the camera sled at the end of each run. Ballard was off duty, reading in his cabin.
After more than a month of nothing, the team’s edge of anticipation had long worn off. It was entirely possible, they knew, that earthquakes or underwater landslides had completely covered the wreck and they would never find it. They maintained their concentration as well-trained pros, but “boring” had begun turning up more frequently in log entries on their watches. They played music. They amused themselves by predicting the exact time they would find the wreck on a particular watch. They sat quietly. They fought to stay awake.
There’s something, Harris said, shortly before one A.M.
It would not have been the first false alarm or practical joke for the tired crew. Lange looked over Harris’s shoulder and saw shapes on the screen that were definitely man-made.
Wreckage! Lange shouted.
A moment later, a technician monitoring Argo’s sonar signals said he had a hard contact. Then nothing. Some boulders slid under the camera. They had seen plenty of those.
A minute later, more shapes jumped out from the natural patterns of the seafloor. Harris was in charge of the watch. He decided to wake up cinematographer Ralph White to begin filming the debris.
Then they saw it: a circle in the mud. Nature rarely made perfect circles. Harris switched cameras, leaving the forward view and moving to the higher resolution of a camera pointed straight down at the bottom. They saw three smaller circles in part of the arc of the larger one. There was no question. It was a ship’s boiler, identical to those in a photograph they had of the boilers on Titanic. Minutes later, the pictures streaming up from Argo showed enormous pieces of the wreck.
Word of the discovery spread through the ship. The control van was jammed with people slapping each other on the back and drinking paper cups of Mateus wine. White was commanding Argo to snap still pictures every eight seconds, sending a spectacular montage of the wreck flashing across the screens.
After twenty minutes, Ballard announced that he was going back to the fantail of the ship for a moment of commemoration. Everyone who was not busy keeping Argo alive and on course followed him. Just after two A.M.—at about the same time of the night that Titanic disappeared into the sea— Ballard unfolded a red-and-white flag, clipped it to the stern-post lanyard, and let it fly into the breeze over the North Atlantic. In the center of the flag were the gold initials H and W against a black diamond. The emblem of Harland and Wolff.
Late in the day, Chatterton and Kohler had calmed down enough to get everyone together to figure out what to do on their last dives. When they walked into the meeting, they didn’t have even the most embryonic of ideas. It was obvious that the best bet for making a new discovery was to go where nobody had gone before. But after two decades of exploration, there wasn’t much of the wreck that had not been seen by somebody.
“Roger, is there anything more we can learn from looking at the main wreckage?” Chatterton asked.
“Maybe more shots of the edges,” Long said, shaking his head. “The best evidence of what might have happened to that ship will be in the steel. The more we see, the better. But, hell, guys, I really don’t know what to tell you.”
“Anybody else?” Kohler asked.
Kohler looked at Chatterton. Chatterton looked away and caught Wolfinger’s eyes. Wolfinger shook his head and looked at Concannon. Nothing.
Bill Lange’s voice had a gentleness to it, as though he wanted to say something to ease the distress that he could easily read in the body language of the people around him. They had their arms folded across their chests, their shoulders hunched. Most of them fidgeted with their fingers or swung their legs. Their eyes were dull, their faces slack.
“There’s a lot of heavy debris to the east of the stern,” Lange said.
Lange didn’t often give advice on make-or-break decisions. He was a hired hand, there to take care of the gear. But he liked Chatterton and Kohler because they were so passionate about finding something new about the wreck. Lange had been on a lot of expeditions whose purpose was commerce of one sort or another—making a movie, collecting artifacts for exhibits, charging tourists for seats on the subs. He was glad to be on one whose goal was trying to answer some real questions.
“There are some large holes in the ’85 and ’86 surveys in that area,” Lange went on. “I mean big enough to hold some major pieces. Even though that area was surveyed with side-scan sonar, it’s not complete.”
Lange said he had a vague recollection that divers on a French expedition with the Nautile submersible a decade earlier might have actually seen big pieces of debris, but nobody had paid much attention to the discovery. They had never been photographed in detail, never been studied for their forensic value.
“He might be right,” Long said, relieved that his own dismal speculation was not the last word of advice on what to do next. “Judging from what’s left of the bow and stern sections, there are big pieces of that ship somewhere down there.”
In all their lives Chatteron and Kohler had never been so glad to be handed a long shot.
At eight o’clock the next morning, with a freshening breeze slapping the first swells of the approaching storm against Keldysh’s sides, Chatterton and Kohler shoehorned themselves into Mir-1. Both of them had performed the mental gymnastics necessary for embarking on a near-hopeless quest. They simply assumed they had already lost everything. They had failed. They were already dead. If, by some incredibly slim chance, Titanic dropped a miracle on them, they would be grateful. But having nothing to lose was the only way to get through the next ten hours together in a titanium sphere the size of a Volkswagen Bug.
Chatterton and Kohler had decided to send both of the Mirs into the darkness to the east. They gained nothing by combing wreckage and debris that had been seen over and over again. Two Mirs in one place doubled their chances. They would land together far from the stern and fan out a hundred feet apart from there.
Just aft of Mir-1, Kirk Wolfinger and Bob Blumberg boarded Mir-2. Blumberg had a bad hip and trouble sleeping, and, with his sixty-one-year-old bladder and digestive system, was a little bit skittish about spending ten hours in the sub. But he was determined to take a look at the shipwreck that had consumed him for the better part of three years.
A career State Department officer from McLean, Virginia, Blumberg had helped draft a treaty that named Titanic as an international maritime memorial. Ratification by the United States, Britain, France, and Canada was years away, and they were still trying to get the Russians to sign on. Blumberg knew the treaty wasn’t perfect. Treaties never were. But just stopping hard landings on the decks and deterring poachers from chipping away at the badly deteriorating hull would preserve the wreck longer for careful research. Most of all, Blumberg thought, the treaty made Titanic a sacred place. A tomb.
Two and a half hours in the dark seemed like an eternity. In Mir-1, Chatterton and Kohler did what they had done in similar straits time and again: They talked each other into believing they were on the right track. Of course there were more pieces of the ship out
there somewhere. The bow and stern sections accounted for only three-quarters or so of its length. The rest of the hull had to have landed somewhere. It could not have just vanished.
In Mir-2, Blumberg dozed, woke himself up snoring, apologized, dozed some more, snored some more. Wolfinger screwed his iPod buds into his ears and prayed that he would find something that might save his ass. Two thoughts repeated themselves over and over in his mind: How long can I go before I have to grab a piss bottle and fill it up while I’m shoulder to shoulder with two grown men? and If this thing springs a leak, we’ll all be chowder in a split second.
The audiophone burbled as Mir-1 and Mir-2 made communications checks with each other and up to the surface. Roger Long was standing by in the radio room on Keldysh. If they found something, they would describe it to him. He would tell them what to shoot with the cameras.
After the radio checks, Wolfinger pressed his face to the viewport. As with all first-time visitors to the bottom of the ocean, just seeing the boulder-pocked muck was thrilling. And then he could not believe his eyes.
“Bob. Bob. Do you see what I see?”
“Where? What?” Blumberg answered.
“Look to the right, about twenty feet out in front.”
There, as though brought in by a waiter on a tray, six champagne bottles stood straight up on the bottom. The wood of the crate that had once held them had long since been eaten away, leaving them in two perfect rows.
In Mir-1, pilot Victor Nischeta swung onto an easterly course, reached up, and tapped on the screen of the sonar receiver.
“Big target. Ten minutes.”
Could it be this easy? Chatterton wondered. He looked at Kohler, whose eyes were as wide as saucers in the reddish haze of the instrument lights.
“A hundred meters to target,” Nischeta said. “Very big. Hard.”
Chatterton had been through the same moment with Concannon. He willed that memory out of his mind. The only sounds were the whine of the thrusters and the whirring fan of the carbon dioxide scrubber. Nischeta maneuvered three feet above the bottom.
“Right over here we got something,” Chatterton said, drawing the last word out the way he did when he went on alert.
Kohler thought, I haven’t heard that John for a couple of days.
“You see object?” Nischeta asked. He was as interested in finding something as Chatterton and Kohler. But he was most interested in not running into it.
“Oh, yeah,” Kohler said. “I see something now.”
“Yes,” Chatterton said.
“Yeah. Look at that, huh.” Kohler’s words came out in the wavelengths of awe.
Not only were the shapes beyond their viewports not natural to the desolate sea bottom, they were clearly pieces of steel that had been riveted together.
“Is that part of the bilge keel?” Chatterton said.
“I don’t know, John. I can’t see out of my port yet.”
“I think it is,” Chatterton said. “Yes. Yes. Yes!”
“I see it, John. I see it. We’re looking at the bottom of the ship!”
“Yeah. Absolutely.”
“Unbelievable!”
“Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. That’s double hull.”
“Oh, man. Look at this. Wow.”
The plates were covered with slime and rust, but the red of the bottom paint showed clearly. The sub hovered three feet above the wreckage, moving slowly across the steel plain below. From their viewports, Chatterton and Kohler saw nothing but the bottom of Titanic in every direction. They reached the edge of the steel and could discern the five-foot gap between the inner and outer bottoms.
Chatterton began to laugh, a throaty cackle that he snapped off after a few seconds.
“We want to document this thing as well as we can,” he said.
At the same moment, he and Kohler pulled away from their viewports to make sure the recorders for the TV cameras were running.
“The question is,” Kohler said, “how big is this thing?”
Thirty seconds later, they reached the edge on the other side.
“Richie. That’s bilge keel.”
“What are you saying? That we’re looking at the entire bottom?”
“Yeah.”
“The only way we’re going to prove that is to go back over to the other side,” Kohler said. “Okay?”
“Okay. Yeah. Let’s follow it around.”
Nischeta steered Mir-1 back over the plain of steel.
“There’s the keel!” Kohler shouted. They were crossing what looked like a steel strap that rose an inch above the plating. “Oh, my God, John. That’s the keel. This is the keel of Titanic!”
They kept going.
“Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait,” Kohler said. “It’s coming into focus. There’s the other bilge keel.”
“We’ve got all the double hull here,” Chatterton said.
“It’s a section of the entire bottom from port to starboard and, what, thirty feet wide?”
“Right, Richie. Right.” Chatterton slipped into the trance of concentration at his viewport that was so much of what he loved about looking at a shipwreck.
No one had ever seen even a fragment of Titanic’s bottom, the rest of which was deeply buried in the mud. If Chatterton and Kohler found nothing else, this was enough. There was no question that the discovery would make a sensational contribution to what the world understood about the doomed ship. Relief flooded into Mir-1.
Kohler radioed the news of their discovery to Roger Long on Keldysh. Then he called the other sub.
“Mir-2, this is Mir-1, over.”
“Roger, Mir-1. Kirk here.”
“You are not going to believe this,” Kohler said. “We found an entire section of the bottom, bottom-up on the seafloor.”
“You’re not going to believe this,” Wolfinger came back. “So did we.”
No way, Chatterton and Kohler thought. They’ve got to be on the same piece as us. They asked Nischeta to find the other sub with his sonar. The hard targets of Mir-2 and some large debris returned a signal from a hundred yards away. Wolfinger and Blumberg had found a second piece of the bottom that ran bilge keel to bilge keel and was thirty feet long.
“We’re going to film every inch of these things,” Kohler told Long. “Is there anything you want us to concentrate on?”
“Definitely,” Long said on an open circuit to both subs. “Shoot the edges of the steel on the ends of the sections of the double bottom where it broke. That’s where we’ll be able to see the patterns of tension and compression that have not changed since the night the ship sank. And be sure to give me shots of the tops of the pieces so we can see if and how they fit together.”
For two hours, the Mirs crisscrossed the red rusting plates, hovered at the edges, and painstakingly recorded the jagged steel that had once been joined to the rest of the ship.
“Mir-1, this is Mir-2.”
“Go,” Kohler said. He hated to pull away from his viewport for even a few seconds. He was in the relatively comfortable confines of the Mir instead of swimming around in the dark, silty murk of a shipwreck on scuba. But Kohler knew only one way to focus: completely.
“I think we’ve got it all,” Wolfinger said. “This is once-in-a-lifetime stuff here, Richie.”
“You got it, man.”
“We’re going to go take a look at the bow, then maybe the stern. Bob and I don’t want to have come all this way and not see what it looks like.”
“Good idea, Kirk. John and I are going to finish up here, then scout around some more.”
“It’s a plan, Richie. Mir-2 out.”
A half hour later, Chatterton and Kohler decided they had every square inch of their piece of Titanic’s bottom on tape.
On Mir-2, Wolfinger was savoring his reward. He had taken chances before, but nothing like this. Now he was going to get a look at one of the wonders of the world. The bow of Titanic. Ship of Dreams. The lights of the sub were on, sweeping over something big and black. He h
eard the thrusters roar. Up. They were going up. There it was, the bow rail. The lights swept over the foredeck. There was the crane. The anchor. He could see the navigation bridge. The wreck metamorphosed into the magnificent ship it once had been, as his mind added white paint, glass in the windows, passengers on deck.
A singsong muttering broke Wolfinger’s reverie. Bob. He hoped he wasn’t sick. He’d been pretty uncomfortable, used the bottle a few times, but stayed game. Wolfinger looked a few feet across the darkness of the sphere. There was Bob, his head back a foot or so from the viewport, his eyes closed. But he wasn’t sick. He was praying. In Hebrew. Wolfinger wasn’t religious, but somewhere from the distant past, his memory matched what he was hearing. Kaddish. The Jewish prayer for the dead.
The trip back to St. John’s was two days of relief and exhilaration. The storm that cost the expedition its fourth day of dives to Titanic built steadily to the south, but with a following sea it was a comfortable ride. They spent their time eating, resting, and enjoying the leisurely pace of an ocean crossing that is the most delicious reward of travelers on comfortable ships. After a vodka-soaked celebratory dinner, Sagalevich called the divers to the head of the table one at a time and presented them with jacket patches, signifying that they had made a Mir descent into the abyss. Billy Lange got a standing ovation.
They watched videotape of the new debris, making sketches of various scenarios in which the pieces they found might have fallen through two and a half miles of water and come to rest on the seafloor so far from the main wreck. They wondered what could possibly have happened during Titanic’s final moments that had separated hundreds of tons of steel from the bottom of the ship. Roger Long wouldn’t risk a guess. Without a time machine, Long said, there was no way to know for sure what had happened that night, but he should have some answers—or at least some new questions—in about a month.