Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [28]
The name itself says it all: Titanic. The second of three enormous steamships designed and built to be the world’s largest, Titanic was the epitome of an age of confidence and achievement. The ship was 882 feet, 9 inches long, with a beam or width of 92 feet, 6 inches. From her keel to the top of her funnels, Titanic towered 175 feet, and the distance from the waterline to the boat deck was the same as a six-story building. The hull displaced or weighed 66,000 tons. Each steel plate that went into the hull was 30 feet long, 6 feet wide and an inch thick.
The wreck itself, deep down in the eternal darkness of the bottom of the North Atlantic, has continued, as author Susan Wels points out, “to fire and torment the public’s imagination.” “The location of her sinking,” said Wels, “an imprecisely known patch of the Atlantic, vacant and menacing… became part of the world’s geography. Unknown and unreachable, her abyssal grave and her fatal voyage obsessed dreamers and adventurers for more than seven decades.”
When the news of finding Titanic, by the joint French-U.S. team of Jean-Louis Michel and Robert Ballard, was announced in the early morning hours of September 1, 1985, the world’s press provided, at first in brief snippets, and then in more detail, images and information from the bottom of the Atlantic. From a few simple views of the bow and a single boiler to dozens of images of empty decks, empty lifeboat davits and scattered debris, the eerie scenes gave immediacy to what was, for a new generation, a distant and abstract tragedy. Robert Ballard himself felt it, just hours after his euphoria over finding the wreck faded. “It was one thing to have won—to have found the ship. It was another thing to be there. That was the spooky part. I could see the Titanic as she slipped nose first into the glassy water. Around me were the ghostly shapes of the lifeboats and the piercing shouts and screams of people freezing to death in the water.”
The wreck of Titanic, in all its twisted, rusting splendor, like many other historic sites—Pompeii, Tutankhamen’s tomb or other shipwrecks—gives people a “temporal touchstone.” In this case, it is a time machine that provides a physical link to the “night to remember.” I’ve joined other viewers of many television specials, the IMAX film Titanica and James Cameron’s movie Titanic to watch as submersibles and cameras pass various spots mentioned in the history books and survivors’ accounts. The crow’s nest where lookout Frederick Fleet picked up the telephone and gave warning of an iceberg. The boat deck with its empty lifeboat davits. The remains of the bridge, where Captain Edward John Smith was last seen. But being an archeologist who has spent two decades exploring the seabed and lost shipwrecks, I wanted to see this wreck for myself. Zegrahm DeepSea Voyages, a subsidiary of Zegrahm Expeditions in Seattle, Washington, has offered adventurers the opportunity to participate in Russian scientific dives to the wreck of Titanic since 1998. The price—$35,500 in 1999—was out of my range, but Zegrahm offered me the chance of a lifetime. As a lecturing archeologist and “team leader,” I could join the year 2000 scientific expedition and get a dive, if I would share my experiences and observations with my fellow passengers.
At the heart of the research vessel Akademik Mstislav Keldysh’s operations are two extraordinary submersibles, Mir 1 and Mir 2. “Mother ship” to the two subs, and a floating workshop and scientific platform, Keldysh is the center of Russia’s deep-sea program. The participation of Mir 1 and Mir 2 in the IMAX film and Cameron’s Titanic made both submersibles famous, as well as Keldysh and her crew. Their star status notwithstanding, the men and women of Keldysh are excellent scientists and technicians whose work has advanced the frontiers of science. The ocean covers two-thirds of the planet, yet during the last century of oceanographic research,