by Brad Matsen
My God, Long thought when it hit him. The ship didn’t break up as it was sinking. It broke at a low angle on the surface and then sank. As Long went over the events of the breakup and sinking with that new assumption, he realized that the end would have been less dramatic than the high-angle-break scenario, but it would have been far more terrible in terms of what the doomed passengers and crew experienced.
In the high-angle-break scenario, everyone on board knew the ship was starting its final plunge. There was no doubt that they would soon be in the water. If Titanic broke at a low angle, however, it would have happened during a period of apparent calm. Titanic would have been settling slowly as water flooded into the ship. Hundreds of people still inside the warm interior without intercoms to tell them otherwise would have believed they were awaiting rescue aboard a ship that would float for several more hours. For those still on Titanic, stranded after the departure of the lifeboats, the dreadful message that they were about to die would have come in the form of loud cracks and shivering under their feet when the hull broke. Less than five minutes later, the entire ship was underwater.
Long was sure that the low-angle break took place well before Titanic pitched forward into its final plunge. That meant the timing of the sinking was determined by the structural failure and not the flooding. The ship would have remained afloat for some time longer if the hull had not broken. If Titanic had lasted only a few minutes more, it could have meant life for people who would have had time to cobble together a life raft of deck chairs. If it had lasted another hour, the half-empty lifeboats could have returned to pick up hundreds more. If it had lasted an hour and forty minutes longer, Carpathia would have arrived. Long could not be sure exactly how long the ship would have stayed afloat if it had not broken, but he knew that the Titanic story had just blown wide open.
The following week Long brought his theory to Chatterton and Kohler. He used a plan of the ship to show them the stages of flooding of the bow and center compartment, and Marschall’s drawings of the bottom plates to illustrate how the plates broke and fell away as the ship bent under the third funnel.
“It’s heretical on two counts,” Long said. “First, the high-angle break has been accepted for so long there is going to be a storm of opposition when we trot out my scenario. It’s the biggest scene in the movie, for crying out loud.”
The conventional wisdom said that the ship was strong enough to lift its own stern that far out of the water before it broke. A paper by the architect who worked for the last American company to design a large ocean liner and a professor of naval architecture at one of the top schools in the country was full of analysis of the ship at forty-five degrees. Titanic’s hull should have been strong enough to go to forty-five degrees, but it broke at around eleven degrees. It had to be deeply flawed in some way that its designers and builders did not anticipate. Long said that was a big hole in his theory. The principles of hull strength were well understood when Titanic was built. The ship simply could not have been so weak.
Long’s conclusions took the investigation in an entirely new and unexpected direction. Chatterton and Kohler had come to his office prepared to hear a version of the grounding theory. If there was even the slightest possibility that Long was right about the low-angle breakup, they had to keep going.
Why not present their new theory to people who knew much more than they did about the wreck? Long called Bill Lange, who agreed to host a conference of some of the most respected Titanic theorists at Woods Hole. He invited David G. Brown, Ken Marschall, Simon Mills, and Parks Stephenson, all of whom had been advisers on the expedition that discovered the missing pieces. For decades, they had studied the construction of the ship, accounts of the sinking by survivors, and the behavior of the passengers and crew. They would be able to quickly punch more holes in Long’s theory. Or fill in the one he already had.
Long’s low-angle-breakup theory, with or without the hole, was sensational news. During Titanic’s last moments as Long described them, death came for fifteen hundred people in a much more terrible way than everyone thought it had. The sudden breakup eliminated the hope that all or part of the ship might stay afloat and save them. Chatterton and Kohler gave the story to the Associated Press, which had broken their discovery of U-869, and invited a reporter to the Woods Hole meeting.
At nine-thirty on the morning of December 5, a dozen people milled around Billy Lange’s laboratory, drinking coffee and eating pastries. They all knew one another, at least from Internet forums or e-mails, and had often disagreed bitterly on crucial points about the ship. In person they went out of their way to be gracious. The conference in Lange’s lab was a rare opportunity to participate in something other than endless discussions that went nowhere because there was never any new evidence from the wreck.
Simon Mills arrived with a sheaf of plans for the Olympic-class ships from the British National Archives. He took Long aside and asked if he had ever seen a drawing of one of Olympic’s expansion joints, the gaps in the superstructure designed by Thomas Andrews to allow it to flex.
Long had lain awake the night before knowing that he had no answer for the big question that was sure to come: How could Harland and Wolff have built a ship so weak that the hull would fail the way he thought it had? Olympic and Titanic had been built from the same set of plans. Now, there on the drawing in front of him were the details of an expansion joint so primitive and crude that it could easily explain the difference in strength between a ship that should have been strong enough to lift its stern to a forty-five-degree angle and one that had failed at eleven degrees.
Long was familiar with the technology of the expansion joint. He also knew that this design feature had fallen out of favor long ago because, even after decades of development since the Titanic design, it was still structurally suspect. He turned from the table and burst into the group where Chatterton, Kohler, and Wolfinger were talking.
“You have to see this,” he said, motioning them over to the drawing of the expansion joint. “The root of the joint has a small radius that would create an enormous concentration of stress in the hull right where it began to break under the third funnel.”
Long, a calm, precise analyst, was as excited as a man seeing his lottery numbers tick onto the television screen.
“The stress in the area just below where these two plates are riveted to the main hull would have been off the charts,” he said. “Once a small crack started there, it would have run quickly through the most highly stressed part of the hull. This could explain everything.”
Long rarely expressed an opinion off the top of his head, especially about something as potentially important as an explanation for how a great shipbuilder could have built a weak ship. He decided not to incorporate the implications of a crude and dangerous expansion joint into his presentation that morning, but when he stood up to speak, he felt a lot better about the hole in his low-angle-break theory.
“The weight of the water in the bow was not only lifting the stern out of the water,” Long began. “It was bending the ship. When a structure like a steel hull or a girder bends, the top of it stretches while the bottom of it is pushed together. Tension at top, compression at bottom.” He used a pencil to demonstrate the hull bending, pointing out that the top of the ship would have been affected differently than the bottom.
“The edges of the top decks where the ship came apart are mangled and crushed. The edges of the bottom where the ship came apart, which should have been compressed, they appear to have been cleanly broken off. If the ship had broken at the high angle, everything up above should be quite clean, and the chaos, the jumbling, should be down at the bottom.”
As Long talked, he referred to a series of drawings of the ship as it flexed, first in one direction, then the other. They showed the bow flooding, the bottom plates falling away, the middle compartments flooding fast, the bow breaking away, and finally the stern disappearing beneath the surface. He described the breakup beginning at as lit
tle as eleven degrees and happening in two stages. The bottom broke separately from the rest of the ship. As those bottom plates ruptured, the middle compartments flooded catastrophically. After that happened, the ship sank suddenly.
“The breakup was not just something that happened during the final plunge,” Long said. “The breakup caused the final plunge. It determined whether a lot of people lived or died. One thing is certain: The steel doesn’t lie. It does not have false memories. It does not protect reputations. It never forgets.”
The others in the room had been speculating for years about what precisely had happened during Titanic’s last moments. Earlier proponents of the low-angle break had come and gone, defeated by the sensational imagery of the stern rising at a high angle against the star-washed night sky. Roger Long’s interpretation of Titanic’s last moments, with the evidence from the steel, made more sense than anything else they had ever heard.
“What you have just said was backed up by personal testimony of the survivors,” Parks Stephenson said. “The launching of the lifeboats was very orderly. The crew appeared to think they had longer to get people off the ship.”
“Crew members actually stated that they did not think the ship was going to sink,” David Brown said. “They thought it would settle to a certain point, and then it would stop sinking. I think everybody thought Titanic would float as its own lifeboat until Carpathia got there.”
Billy Lange called for a break. Over the buzz of the conversations that erupted around the room, the sound of the door opening and shutting marked the departure of the Associated Press reporter. The story he must have dictated on the telephone made the afternoon editions of the East Coast papers and, the next day, papers around the world. It quoted Stephenson as saying that Long’s low-angle theory depicted the breakup more accurately than ever before, and it pointed out that the end would have been even more horrible than previously believed. The reporter recapped the discovery of the wreck in 1985 and quoted Robert Ballard, who balanced Stephenson’s enthusiasm by playing down the importance of the discovery.
“They found a fragment, big deal,” Ballard was quoted as saying. “Am I surprised? No. When you go down there, there’s stuff all over the place. It hit an iceberg and it sank. Get over it.”
Ballard’s remark ignited storms of protest among Titaniacs and the mainstream press. Three days later, the New York Times editorialized about the new evidence and what it meant about the last moments in the lives of fifteen hundred doomed passengers and crew. The Times wagged a critical finger at Ballard’s reaction. “There is really no getting over Titanic,” the paper insisted, “at least not where the human imagination is concerned.”
For six months after the Woods Hole meeting, the high-angle versus low-angle controversy dominated the Titaniac forums and e-mail debates. Long’s supporters cited testimony by survivors that the ship had barely disturbed the surface when it disappeared. His detractors cited testimony by other survivors that the final plunge had been accompanied by explosions and a wave that swamped lifeboats. James Cameron said the new evidence was interesting but nowhere near conclusive enough to change his mind about the high-angle break. Roger Long, he said, was Roger Wrong. Despite the pieces of the ship found by Chatterton and Kohler, and Long’s deductions after analyzing the patterns in the steel, the debate was a stalemate.
In early spring 2006, an e-mail to Roger Long from a man named Tom McCluskie changed everything. McCluskie said he had read about Long’s version of Titanic’s last moments in the newspaper and thought it was the most exciting development since the wreck was discovered.
“The true story of Titanic has never been told,” McCluskie wrote. “I know things nobody else knows. Let’s talk.”
Since embarking on their investigation, Chatterton, Kohler, and Long had wasted plenty of time on dead-end leads and crackpot theorists. When they checked McCluskie’s background, it looked like he might be the real thing. He had worked at Harland and Wolff from 1965 to 1997, ended his career as the company archivist, and was the author of four books on Olympic-class ships. His access to shipyard records made him the world’s most direct living link to the people who had built Titanic.
Long put together a package of video footage, Marschall’s drawings, and his own sketches and sent it to McCluskie in Belfast.
Fifteen
WEE MAN
Tom McCluskie was the son of the son of the son of a shipbuilder, with a lineage reaching back to the switch from sails to steam in the shipyards on Belfast Lough. His great-grandfather worked for Edward Harland. His grandfather began as a teenage apprentice under Pirrie and worked in the shipyard until the day he was killed by a taxicab as he trudged home from the yard a year shy of his sixtieth birthday. McCluskie’s father, whose yard name was Sand Dancer, started out as a driller, became a hole cutter, then a boss.
McCluskie remembered his father’s stories about the viciousness in the shipyard, his muttering accounts of the maiming and death of his friends on the job. He remembered his mother, Charlotte, packing his father’s piece—his lunch box—every morning. She washed his work clothes every weekend, the water in the tub turning black with rust and soot as the navy blue of the overalls returned. To a child growing up in the afterglow of World War II in Northern Ireland, none of that was brutal tedium. It was the fair price his father paid for the privilege of building the heart-stopping ships that rose over the river Lagan in the middle of the twentieth century. To McCluskie, the names of the passenger ships, tankers, and freighters were resonant notes in a song of pride and accomplishment. Southern Cross. Iberia. British Honour. British Power. Amazon. Aragon. Arlanza. Above all, the magnificent 818-foot, 45,270-ton Canberra, Harland and Wolff’s last great ocean liner. His father had been on one of the gangs that laid the steel for Canberra’s keel, a luminous event in dinner-table recollections of family history. Harland and Wolff was too much to resist for a Belfast boy who hated school, came from shipbuilding people, and wanted to please his grouchy father in the sincerest possible way by following in his footsteps.
In the summer of 1965, when Tom was fifteen years old, Sand Dancer and his son left the house together with their pieces tucked under their arms. They walked through the rows of two-up houses in the north end to the ferry for the five- minute trip from Belfast to Queen’s Island, across the Lagan. On the open deck, Tom stood in a crowd of men who looked tired and lifeless on a bright morning, staring silently at the smokestacks, cranes, and scaffolds of Harland and Wolff rising to meet them. Even with the bass thump of the ferry’s diesel, Tom heard the sounds of the shipyard, the snaps and crackles of hundreds of arc welders, the bells of moving cranes, the howls of saws tearing through steel plates.
“You’ve suddenly gone quiet,” his father said. “I bloody well hope you aren’t having second thoughts about starting here, because it’s too late now.”
McCluskie’s father had called in favors to get his son an easy starting job as a messenger boy. Later, if Tom didn’t foul up, he could join an apprentice class at the training school.
“No. No second thoughts,” Tom replied. “I’m just a bit surprised by how miserable everybody looks.”
At the Market Square gate, Tom’s father handed him off to the timekeeper. Tom McCluskie’s board number, which he would have until he was fired, got hurt too badly to work, or died, was 155314.
The timekeeper explained that the company granted every man a total of seven minutes in the bathroom each day. Every time he went into one of the drafty buildings where the toilets were cement latrines, he would hand his board to a man at the door, who would mark down his number and the time he went in. After seven minutes, his pay would be docked, and he would be crapping on his own time.
Before the end of his first day, McCluskie got something else that would remain with him for the rest of his life at Harland and Wolff: his name. The product of generations of compact Ulstermen marrying even smaller Ulsterwomen, McCluskie stood five feet, two inches and weighed 140 pounds
. The timekeeper passed him on to the clerk in the mail office, who took one look at his new messenger and said, “You’re a Wee Man, you are.”
For a year, Wee Man ran around the yard delivering letters, tubes of drafting sheets, and messages between bosses. The day after his sixteenth birthday, he became an apprentice engineer. It was a step up for only as long as it took him to realize that as a small man at the bottom of a vicious pecking order, he was going to be miserable for a long time. The cruelty of the masters under whom he worked was exceeded only by the brutality of hazing among the apprentices.
McCluskie lasted three months as an apprentice. In early October, he was standing at a workbench putting together a valve when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He thought it was the instructor, turned around, and got hit in the face with a paintbrush loaded with red lead antifouling paint.
McCluskie was sure he was blinded for life. The apprentice master rushed him to the shipyard nurse, who washed out his eyes. You’ll be fine in a few days, the nurse told him. Who did this to you?
Cruelty endured at Harland and Wolff because the men rarely broke the code of silence, keeping revenge to themselves. Failing to obey the silence meant far worse punishment. McCluskie told the nurse he had accidentally splashed the paint on himself when he’d opened the can.
That day, Wee Man walked away from Harland and Wolff on sick leave. A week later, his eyes still burning, he found a new job at the parts counter of R. E. Hamilton’s Ford dealership in Belfast. Not long after, he fell in love with a tiny, pretty girl named Sylvia who had come to the garage to pick up a muffler for an Anglia sedan. Soberly facing the realities of a man about to be married amid rumors that Hamilton’s was going out of business, Wee Man went back to Harland and Wolff. His number was still 155314.