Others would visit the Titanic in the years to come. Ballard had gone on record as being opposed to any kind of salvage or recovery of anything associated with the wreck, but IFREMER already possessed the correct coordinates (which Ballard had refused to release, claiming he was trying to protect the wreck). The French were the first to return to the wreck, with expeditions in 1987 and 1993 that retrieved more than 1,800 artifacts, which included one of Purser Hugh McElroy’s safes (it was rusted out and empty), an assortment of tableware and utensils, one of the three sets of steam whistles that were once mounted on the funnels, a small leather satchel that contained a few odd bits of jewelry, a pocket watch, a small bag of coins, and a bracelet with the name Amy spelled out in diamonds.
The artifacts were taken through a careful and exacting process of preservation before being put on display in various museums around the world, where tens of thousands of people flocked to view collections of what would normally be the most ordinary objects—a crewman’s straight razor, one of Major Peuchen’s calling cards, a pair of eyeglasses, a half-dozen dollar bills, a silver coffee service. The greatest of these exhibitions would open on October 4, 1994, at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England—a display that would eventually be viewed by nearly three-quarters of a million people in its one-year exhibit.4
A Canadian-Russian-American group in 1990 filmed the ship and the debris field extensively for the IMAX movie Titanica. Financed in part by CBS Television (which was producing a special of its own), by the National Geographic Society, and a number of Canadian business firms, the finished production, shot on 70-mm film and shown in special theaters with seven-story-tall screens, played across the United States for six months to sold-out houses. Including narrative and reminiscences by Eva Hart, whose quiet demeanor belied how deeply the disaster still affected her, Titanica presented the reality of the ship, her passengers, and her crew to the audience in a way that left no one who saw it unmoved.5
The filmmakers had deliberately refrained from bringing back any artifacts from the wreck, but the recovery of wreckage and debris from the Titanic continued to be the subject of heated debate, and none of the salvors was more controversial than a company called RMS Titanic, Inc. The successor to Titanic Ventures, it is a New York-based salvage firm owned by George Tulloch and Arnie Geller, which commissioned IFREMER to excavate part of the wreck site in 1987, when some 800 artifacts were brought up. In 1992, a drawn-out legal battle left Titanic Ventures, now reorganized as RMS Titanic, Inc., as sole owner of all salvage rights to the Titanic. In the summers of 1993 and 1994, an intense schedule of dives resulted in nearly 4,000 items being retrieved from the debris field surrounding the ship.
Among the bits and pieces brought up were a section of one of the Titanic’s reciprocating engines, a lifeboat davit, three engine-room telegraphs, kitchen utensils, a megaphone that may have been Captain Smith’s, and hundreds of pieces of coal from Boiler Room No. 1. Everything that was recovered was said to have come from the debris field, as Tulloch publicly declared that his firm would never touch the wreck itself, although he had a hard time explaining the film showing his submersible, the Nautile, forcibly pulling the warning bell from the foremast. (The crow’s nest collapsed while the bell above it was being pulled free.) Tulloch would also go on record to say that none of the recovered artifacts would ever be made available for sale to private collectors, but would remain together as a collection available for exhibition.
It was a pledge that did not long endure, as in mid-1995, Tulloch announced that he (Geller was no longer involved) had begun the preparations for what would be touted as the greatest feat of underwater salvage in history: bringing up a section of the Titanic herself. In order to raise the money necessary for such an ambitious project (rumored to be in the neighborhood of $17,000,000, a figure never officially confirmed), RMS Titanic, Inc., would begin selling the coal that had been recovered to collectors around the world.
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 Ti
tanic, 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.
CHAPTER 15
Revelation
... certain persons have made shipwreck of their faith....
—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:The gravity of the damage done to the Titanic is apparent, but the important point is that she did not sink.... Mankind is at once the weakest and most formidable creature on earth. His brain has in it the spirit of the Divine, and he overcomes natural obstacles by thought, which is incomparably the greatest force in the Universe. 1
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.
Pulpits on both sides of the Atlantic would ring with the strident rhetoric of an angry clergy denouncing misplaced faith in material objects and human accomplishments. The Titanic, it was said, was a heaven-sent warning against the complacency and smug self-satisfaction of the day. “When has such a lesson against our confidence and trust in power, machinery and money been shot through the nation?” asked the Bishop of Winchester. “The Titanic, name and thing, will stand for a monument and warning to human presumption.” While perhaps not always spurring the masses to flock to churches on Sundays, the sermons drove home a point: humanity had severed its ties with spiritual absolutes, and now its newfound faith in material certainty had been tested beyond the breaking point.2
Similarly, privilege would never be the same. As never before, death was perceived as the great leveler it had always been. Forty-two hundred dollars might buy passage in the most opulent suite on board the Titanic, but it could no more purchase a seat in a lifeboat than could the thirty-six dollars paid by the lowliest steerage passenger. When John Jacob Astor’s crushed and soot-covered body was pulled from the sea, the lesson to the millions who had been adding a touch of vicarious glamour to their lives by faithfully following the actions and antics of the upper classes on both sides of the Atlantic was of the utter senselessness of it all. If almost limitless millions of dollars or pounds sterling could not assure preferential treatment on the decks of a sinking liner, why should it gain the monied and titled classes absolute deference ashore? It would take the cataclysm of World War I before the barricades of class and privilege would begin to crumble, but their foundations were irreparably weakened that April night.
Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic Page 33