Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic

by Daniel Allen Butler

  The Titanic sometimes made an appearance in literature and more often in film during the years between the two world wars. The most bizarre of these was in Nazi Germany, where a lavish production entitled “ Titanic” was released in 1938. Like most German films of that time, it was laden with heavy-handed National Socialist propaganda: the hero of the film is one of the ship’s officers (German, of course, and entirely fictitious) who pleads vainly with the arrogant and overbearing (British) captain to slow the ship down. After the Titanic strikes the iceberg, the German officer takes charge and ruthlessly decides who will and will not be allowed into the lifeboats. Obviously, Mr. and Mrs. Straus never appear in the film.

  Far less deluded and far more entertaining was a 1930 movie titled “Atlantic,” a screen adaptation of a stage play loosely based on the disaster. Then came the 1932 release of “Calvacade,” Noel Coward’s paean to the British Empire, which provided one of cinema’s great moments, when the newlywed couple walks offscreen to reveal a lifering hanging on the railing behind them, bearing the legend “RMS Titanic.” The scene became a cliché, of course, but by virtue of the fact that Coward had done his home-work : Richard and Emily were never patterned after any specific couple, but they could easily have been any one of a dozen sets of newlyweds aboard the Titanic.

  The summer of 1952 saw the release of an American production called “Titanic,” which starred Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck, with Richard Basehart and Robert Wagner in supporting roles. Although the movie was more fiction than fact (including a scene where the iceberg rips open the port side of the ship), there are moments of drama in it every bit as powerful and moving as the actual disaster. At one point, as Miss Stanwyck—in character—was climbing into a lifeboat after saying goodbye to her once-estranged husband, the actress was overcome by the realization that she was recreating an event that forty years earlier had been all too real. She began weeping uncontrollably. It is also interesting to note that the dilemma of the Third Class passengers who didn’t know how to reach the lifeboats is depicted with remarkable accuracy in this film, years before the plight of Third Class became a cause célèbre among revisionist historians.

  But the real revival in the public’s interest in the Titanic began in 1955. A young lawyer-turned-author named Walter Lord produced a book about the Titanic disaster called A Night To Remember. He based much of the narrative on interviews with approximately sixty survivors, and the result was a work with such immediacy and realism that the public couldn’t get enough of it: to date A Night To Remember has never been out of print, having gone through thirty-three editions in hardcover and paperback, and has been translated into over a dozen languages. (In 1986, Lord wrote a sequel, The Night Lives On; although it was of immense interest to Titanic buffs the world over, it lacked the spark of the original.)

  Two years after Walter Lord’s book appeared, a film adaption bearing the same title played to packed theaters on both sides of the Atlantic. Starring Kenneth More as Lightoller and David McCallum as Harold Bride, the movie was notable for not only its dramatic impact, which was considerable, but its historical faithfulness as well. Fourth Officer Boxhall, who along with Third Officer Pitman were the last surviving officers from the Titanic, was one of the film’s technical advisors.

  A “fan club” of sorts was formed in 1962 with the rather ill-chosen name “Titanic Enthusiasts of America,” which was later changed to the “Titanic Historical Society,” which not only sounded better but was more descriptive of the organization’s function. Based in Indian Orchard, Massachusetts, the society is the repository for a great amount of information about the Titanic and her sisters, as well as all of the great Atlantic liners. The THS would eventually boast a nationwide membership of over five thousand, and similar organizations would soon appear in Great Britain, Ireland, and Canada.

  Suddenly the Titanic was a frequent fixture in popular culture: the debut of the American television science-fiction series “Time Tunnel” was set aboard the doomed liner; similarly she was featured in episodes of “The Twilight Zone” and “Night Gallery.” The Titanic even put in an appearance in “Upstairs, Downstairs,” the long-running PBS series about the Edwardian period, centered around the Bellamy household, although no one expected that Lady Marjory Bellamy would be among the great liner’s victims.

  While the disaster held the attention of screenwriters, a number of authors were exploring the idea of bring the ship up from the bottom of the sea. Arthur C. Clarke devoted an entire chapter of his science-fiction novel Imperial Earth to a guided tour of the recovered liner, and books as different as Donald A. Stanwood’s murder mystery, The Memory of Eva Ryker, and Clive Cussler’s thriller, Raise the Titanic! were centered around expeditions to salvage or recover the ship. Cussler’s book was made into a movie that was released in the summer of 1980. Starring Jason Robards and Richard Jordan, “Raise the Titanic!” was, at $45 million, the most expensive movie made up to that time. It was memorable for its spectacular special effects but little else, and the movie vanished almost as quickly as the liner did in 1912. Remarking on how little money the film made when compared to its cost, one observer quipped, “It would have been cheaper to lower the ocean!”2

  The common thread running through all these works was the firm conviction that the Titanic had gone to the bottom in one piece, and that the combination of extreme cold, extreme pressure, low salinity, and very little free oxygen had kept the ship in a sort of deep-sea freeze. Everyone, including oceanographers and marine salvage experts, expected that if the ship were ever found, she would be in a state akin to suspended animation, little changed from the moment she reached the bottom of the ocean on April 15, 1912. What Robert Ballard was about to discover would not only command unprecedented attention, but it would also stun the world.

  The son of a NASA engineer, Bob Ballard had to overcome a fear of the water at an early age, and by his teens he was an excellent swimmer. He also discovered that the ocean was the love of his life. An undergraduate degree in physical sciences from the University of Santa Barbara, and graduate school at the University of Hawaii studying geophysics provided him with his academic credentials.

  In 1967 Bob Ballard, a fresh young “nugget” (ensign) in the U.S. Navy, specializing in oceanography, joined the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, one of the leading oceanographic research centers in the country, founded in 1930. Working at WHOI was a dream come true for Ballard, who had always taken a hands-on approach to his discipline. By 1973, Ballard, now a civilian, had earned his Ph.D. in marine geology and geophysics, and was assigned to Project FAMOUS, a joint French—American project set up to map the mid-Atlantic Ridge. It was during this two-year-long project that the idea of finding the Titanic first occurred to him.

  The idea gave impetus to the development of a concept that Ballard, a leader in the electronics revolution of the early 1970s, had been toying with for some time. He believed that the restrictions on “bottom time”—the time actually spent exploring by deep sea submersible—imposed by limited air supplies, battery power, and crew endurance could be eliminated by taking advantage of the new electronic systems available to the oceanographic sciences. The rapidly expanding capabilities of the various electronic systems should be able to eliminate the necessity for having human beings aboard deep-sea research vessels. Ballard wanted to control the sonars, still cameras, television cameras, and all the manned submersibles that carried and actually did most of their work from a command center aboard a ship on the surface.

  After one abortive start with a very primitive form of the device he envisioned (a 1978 expedition sponsored by Alcoa Aluminum that ended in disaster when $600,000 of search equipment was accidentally lost on the ocean floor), Ballard finally received funding from the U.S. Navy, which saw that the system he proposed had real promise for applications in submarine warfare. The exploration equipment he subsequently built went by the name of ANGUS, the Acoustically Navigated Geological U
nderwater Survey. Essentially a heavy framework supporting equipment for several sonar units arranged along the three major axes, it also contained high-resolution still cameras that use extremely sensitive film (ASA 200,000). The biggest advantage that ANGUS offered was the ability to remain on the bottom indefinitely, being controlled remotely from a mother ship, with guidance signals passed through a cable. To Ballard, this was definitely a more efficient—not to mention more comfortable—method of exploring the ocean floor.

  The capability to search the bottom of the ocean for extended periods of time gave Ballard the means to pursue his dream: using ANGUS, along with a remote-control, real-time television sled called Argo, which complemented the capabilities of ANGUS, he could conduct a search for the Titanic. Not only would the undertaking provide an extensive field test of ANGUS and Argo, as well as the feasibility of Ballard’s remote-control exploration ideas, a concept he calls “telepresence,” but the potential publicity would go a long way toward increasing public awareness of the science of oceanography. The U.S. Navy agreed to sponsor a two-part expedition to test Ballard’s equipment in the summer of 1985.

  The first part was a highly classified operation off the Azores, an attempt to find the remains of the USS Scorpion, an attack submarine lost in 1969, as well as the wreck of the Soviet sub that allegedly rammed and sank her. The second part was a French-American expedition to locate the wreck of the Titanic. IFREMER, the French Oceanographic Institute, would provide one of the survey ships, Le Suroit, in addition to a number of technicians and scientists.

  Le Suroit began the search while the Knorr was still off the Azores, but by the end of the first week of August, with her supplies running low, she hadn’t found anything, and the Knorr took over. Three weeks of patient sailing back and forth across the search area towing the Argo behind her, a process the crew christened “mowing the lawn,” brought the Knorr and her crew to the spot where, a little after 1:00 A.M. on September 1, one of the Argo’s controllers looked up and said, “Somebody better go get Bob.”

  Dr. Ballard dashed to the control room, where Jean-Louis Michel played the videotape of the discovery of the boiler for him. On the live-action monitors, a litter-strewn field of wreckage was passing by. There was no doubt about it—that boiler was from the Titanic: only the boilers installed in that great trio of White Star ships had that peculiar pattern of rivets on the faces and that particular arrangement of firedoors. Ballard stood transfixed as the seemingly endless field of debris—it was later determined to be more than 600 yards long—passed under the Argo’s cameras: lumps of coal; a silver platter ; bottles of champagne; rusty bedsprings; chamber pots; leaded glass panels from the First Class Smoking Room; copper pans from one of the galleys; the corroded remains of a workman’s tool kit. Ballard looked at the clock, and unconsciously echoing Captain Smith’s words from seventy-three years before, muttered, “Oh, my God.”

  That got everyone’s attention, and Ballard quickly explained, “It’s nearly two o’clock, close to the time when the Titanic went down. I don’t know about anybody else, but at twenty past two, I’ll be on the fantail.” He then turned and left the control room.

  By 2:20, almost everyone had joined Ballard on the fantail, an open area at the very stern of the ship. Atypically, for Ballard is not a modest man, he didn’t make a big production out of what he had to say. Instead he spoke quietly for a few minutes, saying that each person could be alone with their thoughts, but that it would be fitting to remember the more than 1,500 people who had died that cold April night. After a short silence, Ballard urged everyone to get back to work; there was still a lot to do.

  The Argo had been brought up, since “flying” it just forty feet off the sea floor ran too great a risk of having it run smack into the wreck itself. It was time for ANGUS, and before the weather forced the team to suspend operations, the camera sled was able to shoot a remarkable amount of footage, including a complete photo-montage of the wreck.

  The rest of Bob Ballard’s work on the Titanic is easily summed up. In July 1986, a second expedition was launched, again under the sponsorship of the U.S. Navy, using the research ship Atlantis II. This time a manned submersible, the Alvin, went along and made a series of eleven dives on the wreck, taking hundreds of spectacular—and sometimes heart-breaking—pictures. On three of the dives, Ballard was able to test another of his remote-control devices, a small self-propelled camera pod called Jason, Jr., or JJ. It was only partially successful, but it did enable Ballard to go inside the wreck at some points and bring back truly memorable photos and video footage. On the last dive, the Alvin placed a bronze plaque on the stern of the wreck, a memorial to those who went down with the Titanic.

  Just as had happened in 1985 when Ballard announced the discovery of the wreck of the Titanic, the 1986 expedition was front-page news all over the world. The still pictures and video footage taken by Alvin and JJ were reproduced thousands of times in newspapers and magazines and endlessly replayed on national and local news broadcasts, in almost every language. The public’s endless fascination with what Ballard called the “greatest shipwreck of all time” was further fueled by new discoveries. For more than two weeks, the Titanic, just as in 1912, dominated the news. Daily newspapers, weekly magazines (the Titanic even made the cover of Time for September 10, 1986), supermarket tabloids, local and national television news broadcasts, all vied with one another to provide the latest information about Robert Ballard’s discoveries.

  What Ballard found left everyone gasping in surprise. The most startling discovery of all was finding the wreck in two pieces: even though several survivors had stated that the ship had broken in two before she sank, their testimony was inconsistent and sometimes contradictory, and expert opinion had it that she went under in one piece. Ballard came to the conclusion that the Titanic did break in two just before she took her final plunge, at a point somewhere in the Engine Room, where, he theorized, the large openings in the decks that accommodated the engines had created a weak spot in the hull. (A later study of the contents of the debris field and the wildly differing conditions of the two halves of the wreck—the bow almost intact, the stern badly smashed—would make it clear that though the ship’s structure began to fail during her amazing headstand just before she sank, the actual breakup took place partway to the bottom.)

  For years, it had been an article of faith among those who studied the disaster that the iceberg had ripped a continuous, 300-foot-long gash in the Titanic’s side. But when Ballard took the Alvin down to the bow, he couldn’t find any sign of such a grievous wound. Admittedly, most of the bow is buried in a massive pile-up of mud, but what Ballard could make out was a series of split seams, popped rivets, and sprung plates—the result of the iceberg bumping and scraping along the side of hull. When Ballard went back to the records of the British inquiry, he found that the rate of flooding indicated an area open to the sea that totalled little more than twelve square feet. Translated into a continuous gash 300 feet in length meant that the cut could have been only about three-quarters of an inch wide—possible with an acetylene torch, but not an iceberg. Nevertheless, bent plates and open seams in the first five compartments caused by the iceberg grinding its way along the Titanic’s hull would have had the same effect as a long continuous gash: uncontrollable flooding.

  The overall condition of the wreck was also startling. For decades oceanographers and marine archaeologists had believed that the ship was sitting in a veritable deep freeze, with the cold water (only a degree or two above freezing) and the tremendous pressure (six tons per square foot) keeping the free oxygen to very low levels and reducing the salinity of the water, retarding corrosion and rust. It was also thought that there would be a near-total absence of marine life, sparing the wood and fabric furnishings of the ship from consumption. Instead, the expedition discovered that the Titanic rests in an area where the oxygen and salinity are higher than normal for such a depth, and that wood-boring worms no one suspected lived at those d
epths had eaten away almost all of the wood. Instead of a near pristine ship, they found a dilapidated wreck, covered with iron stalactites running down her sides. She was slowly but inexorably decaying. As Ballard put it, “The Titanic was unlucky to the last. If she’d fallen almost anywhere else, she’d probably be in perfect condition right now. She couldn’t even sink in the right place.”

  Melancholy settled over Ballard as he and his crew continued to explore the Titanic, a deep sadness brought on by the constant awareness that they were, in a sense, exploring a tomb. Ballard gave voice to the feeling at a press conference in Washington, D.C., a few days after his return. As he made his closing statement to the press in an emotional yet subdued way that most press conference statements never are, his voice quavered, then broke with barely restrained emotion.

  The Titanic itself lies in 13,000 feet of water, on a gently sloping, alpine-like countryside overlooking a small canyon below. Its bow faces north and the ship sits upright on the bottom.... There is no light at this depth.... It is quiet and peaceful and a fitting place for the remains of this greatest of sea tragedies to rest. May it forever remain that way and may God bless these found souls.3

  No one could have foreseen the emotional impact the Titanic would have, not just on Ballard, but on the rest of the crew of the Knorr, and in 1986, the Atlantis II. A pall hung over them, almost as if there had been a death in the family. In 1986, when the Alvin finished its last dive, the crew knew instinctively that, for them, no one would ever go back to the wreck.