Titanic's Last Secrets: The Further Adventures of Shadow Divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler

by Brad Matsen

  Then: “One hundred meters.”

  Mir-1 was ten feet above the bottom, moving forward at 3 knots.

  “Fifty meters.”

  “We’re right where we should be,” Concannon said. “And . . . there’s the hill. There’s the hill. There’s dishes on the hill.”

  Ahead of Mir-1, the bottom wrinkled in a hummock that could have resulted from the impact of something heavy. Chatterton saw the tracings in the mud left by the skids of a previous Mir landing and, on the gently sloping flank of the hummock, the white blips of crockery. In every direction, coal was scattered like black confetti. Then he saw the shoes.

  “Oh, man,” Chatterton said. “Look at all those shoes. You’ve got all kinds of stuff here. This is a bona fide debris field.”

  Concannon said, “Oh yeah, I remember this. I remember all that coal right there. Yeah. This is right. Keep going, keep going.”

  Chatterton loved nothing more than an all-or-nothing moment.

  “We’ve got some steel over here,” he announced. “What’s this?”

  “Yeah. A piece of steel,” Sagalevich said, breaking his usual silence. He had taken so many tourists to do nothing but sightsee on Titanic that he had been swept into the exhilaration of perhaps discovering something new.

  “This is it. This is right where we were,” Concannon said. “I remember that the sand and mud were all humped up like that. We found it. Yeah, baby!” he shouted. “There’s a big piece of steel.”

  Concannon drew back from his viewport, reached around Sagalevich, and offered his hand to Chatterton for a high five.

  Chatterton didn’t move. What he saw outside looked nothing at all like ribbons of steel.

  “I was not crazy,” Concannon went on. “This is the big boy. This is what I was thinking. It’s right where I said it was. But what is it?”

  “It looks like a box beam of some sort,” Chatterton snapped. “It’s definitely not pieces of the bottom.”

  Sagelevich maneuvered the sub to slowly sweep the debris with the searchlights. The dull metal was a few feet long, flaking with rust—maybe a piece of ducting. There were some smaller pieces that looked like wire or cable. Beyond them, the men saw only the desolate seafloor reaching to the edge of the light and disappearing into the darkness.

  “Mir-1, this is Mir-2. John?” Kohler’s voice burbled over the acoustic telephone.

  “Richie. This is John. Can you hear me?”

  “Yeah, John. I read you loud and clear. You know I’m dying to hear. Did you find the ribbons of steel? Did you find the ribbons of steel?”

  On an acoustic phone, audio waves travel through water instead of through air or a wire. When no voice is being transmitted, the static sounds just like the ocean when you put a conch shell to your ear. For an interminable ten seconds, that was all Kohler heard.

  “Negative, negative, negative,” Chatterton said.

  Three

  TITANIACS

  When the Keldysh crew popped the hatches on the Mirs, nothing was more important to the divers than getting to a toilet. Everybody worked hard at being graceful, but that was the deal. Afterward, Kohler tracked down Chatterton, who was in the galley eating a sandwich. It was after ten. Sagalevich had announced that they would dive the next day, take a day off for maintenance, then make the third and final dives the day after.

  John, we have to talk, Kohler said.

  Oh, great, Chatterton answered. The four worst words in the English language.

  One of Chatterton’s coping behaviors for containing rage was sarcastic humor. Kohler had seen it enough times to know when his partner required careful handling. He led the way to a secluded spot on the stern. They leaned on the rail, staring out into the darkness instead of looking at each other. The clanks and voices of the crew recharging and stowing the Mirs filtered up from the hangar deck.

  I want to throw that son of a bitch over the side, Chatterton snarled. This has turned into the most expensive sport-diving charter in history.

  Kohler felt the same way, but Concannon and the ribbons of steel were already old news. Even worse than what had happened that day was not knowing what they would do next. They had endless experience investigating sunken ships with scuba gear, which allowed them to return to a wreck again and again. Four Mir dives—representing a total of eight seats—were the last they and the members of their expedition would ever make to Titanic.

  They knew that their best bet was to try to find evidence that Titanic had grounded on the iceberg. That scenario still made more sense to them than the sideswipe theory. They had looked at dozens of pictures of icebergs, most of which showed shelves of ice protruding from the nine-tenths of the berg that was underwater. There had to be some reason why Titanic went down so quickly, and grounding on the iceberg explained it.

  Apart from the practical reality of figuring out what to do next, the first dives had transformed their relationship with Titanic. This had happened to both of them many times before. Until they dove on a shipwreck, it was just a name, a rumor, numbers on a chart, and a pile of rotting wood and metal on the bottom of the ocean. After they had been there, they were as involved as if they had boarded the ship at its last port of call before it disappeared into the sea.

  Chatterton and Kohler decided that they would take the next day off, and use it and the following maintenance day to study the tapes from the first dives in hopes of coming up with a solid plan for the final dives. They had promised two of the eight remaining Mir seats to Tom Maddux and Carrie Kohler, both experienced wreck divers who would know how to conduct a search and run the cameras. They could get the beauty shots of the wreck—the bow, navigation bridge, decks, cabins, portholes—that would be essential if they found enough new evidence to justify making a film.

  Roger Long was the obvious choice for one of the seats on the second day of diving. He could take a look at Concannon’s ribbons of steel and come up with a second opinion. Most of all, he would know how to interpret other damage that might indicate that Titanic had grounded. The bottom of both large pieces of the hull had never been seen because they were buried in the mud. But on each side of the ship where the flank of the hull joined the double bottom were stabilizers called bilge keels. Each of these was three hundred feet long and angled downward to reduce the rolling of the ship in heavy seas. If Titanic had grounded on the iceberg, the bilge keels should have been damaged. Most of the length of the bilge keels was buried in the mud, but a few feet, Chatterton and Kohler figured, should be visible just ahead of where the ship broke in two. More than anyone else, Long would know what to look for. Ralph White, who had made more dives to Titanic than anyone but the Mir pilots, would accompany Long. White knew every inch of the wreck and would be able to quickly orient Long to what he was looking at in the narrow beams of the searchlights.

  This plan gave Chatterton and Kohler thirty-six hours to decide how to use their last four Mir seats on the final day of diving. If Long found even the slightest evidence that Titanic had grounded, they would stick with that. If not, they were back to zero.

  Roger Long had been one of those funny kids who flunked everything in school, but in seventh grade, he designed an electric combination lock for a cigar box. He built the relays, circuits, and a keypad, turned it on, and it worked. The box wouldn’t open unless he pushed the three buttons in the right order. His father was a professor of Christian ethics at Oberlin College; his mother’s life revolved around Roger and his two younger brothers.

  Long slogged through prep school in Massachusetts and lived for tinkering and fixing things. He reminded himself of the goofy, curious kid in the Sherman and Peabody cartoons. During his teenage summers on Queechy Lake, in upstate New York, Long learned to sail in a 7-foot boat. He redesigned the little sloop into a traditional catboat, then moved on in high school to designing an 18-foot cruising sloop in meticulous detail. The elegant process of drawing, lofting, and shaping a boat felt better to Long than anything he had ever done. In college, where he
still wasn’t able to mesh with academic routines, he spent most of his spare time designing another boat.

  In 1970, Long walked into the Boston office of naval architect Philip Rhodes and asked for a job. Rhodes, who needed a draftsman, hired him that day. Long had planned to go back to school and become a social worker, but thirty-five years later, he was a naval architect without a college degree. He had learned his trade by working with some of the most respected designers and marine engineers in New England: Chetley Rittall, Paul Luke, and John Gilbert. It was with Gilbert that Long became more interested in designing boats with jobs to do than pleasure boats. He still worked on a few yachts on his own time, but his day job was designing fishing boats and other working craft.

  When Wolfinger had approached Long about joining the expedition, he’d sworn Long to secrecy, then told him about the ribbons of steel. There was no question in Long’s mind that pieces of steel torn from Titanic’s bottom would change everything about what the world thought had happened to its most notorious wreck. But August was sailing season; he had just bought a new sailboat and was planning cruises with his sons.

  Wolfinger left Long with transcripts of his conversations and interviews with Concannon. He also gave him a stack of magazines from the Titanic Historical Society; a book by theorist David Brown, who championed the grounding theory; and a list of URLs of Internet discussion forums.

  As they were parting, Wolfinger said, Roger, you are not going to believe how crazy some of these people are over that ship.

  Long was not a complete stranger to the subculture of men, women, and children whose lives revolve around Titanic. He was a student of shipwrecks and a marine forensics investigator, and there were no greater maritime mysteries than those surrounding the Ship of Dreams.

  Long dove into the arcane, passionate, and often absurd lives of the Titaniacs. There were complete lunatics, harmless crackpots, playful reenacters who belonged to clubs, rabid archivists, list makers, artifact curators, amateur sleuths, and highly credible engineers and naval architects.

  William Barnes, for example, insisted that, under hypnosis, he became Titanic’s designer, Thomas Andrews, and he wrote a book about the sinking from Andrews’s point of view.

  Another man believed he was the reincarnation of Captain E. J. Smith. He announced it one night at dinner at the home of White Star historian Paul Louden-Brown and his wife, who started laughing. Their guest burst into tears, and sobbed his way through his story of his terrible death in the icy water, the cries of the dying, the guilt he felt at letting them perish.

  Though rarely so oddly, fantasy played an enormous part in the lives of the members of the twelve Titanic historical societies in England, Northern Ireland, Ireland, Scotland, South Africa, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, and the United States. All of them had their beginnings as groups of survivors who wanted to get together, preserve their memorabilia, and honor the memories of the dead.

  The Titanic Historical Society, with its headquarters and museum in Indian Orchard, Massachusetts, for instance, was born in the teenage mind of Edward Kamuda. His father owned the lone movie theater in the village on the outskirts of Springfield. When the Academy Award–winning movie Titanic, starring Clifton Webb, Barbara Stanwyck, and Audrey Dalton, played at the theater in 1953, Twentieth Century Fox sent a promotional package with the film. Ed’s father put up the posters and photographs of the cast in the lobby and gave the rest of the material to him. The first showing of Titanic touched something deep inside Ed Kamuda. Afterward, he spent hours poring over movie reviews, background stories about the real Titanic, and, especially, the list of the names and addresses of passengers and crew members who were still alive. After Titanic left Indian Orchard, Ed started writing letters.

  Ten years later, Kamuda and dozens of Titanic survivors had become regular correspondents. As the number of living survivors moved inexorably toward zero, many asked Kamuda to set up a museum in which their menus, silverware, tickets, postcards, photographs, diaries, and other memorabilia would have a permanent home. Kamuda agreed. He founded the historical society and set up the museum in the back room of the jewelry store he owned, across the street from the theater where Webb, Stanwyck, and Titanic had changed his life. In the mid-1970s, Kamuda and his equally passionate Titanic aficionado wife, Karen, started publishing a magazine with articles about the ship, the White Star Line, survivors’ accounts, theories about the sinking, and biographies of the passengers and crew. Wolfinger had left Roger Long a few issues of the Titanic Commutator.

  Thumbing through an issue of the Commutator, Long turned to an ad for the Titanic Launch and Gala Dinner Weekend. It was the highlight of the year for the society, an annual event for which members dressed in period costumes, ate meals from Titanic’s first-, second-, and third-class menus, and danced to a ragtime string band. Ed Kamuda always came in uniform as Captain E. J. Smith. Months before the event he started growing a beard, which itched and irritated him to distraction. The day after the closing ceremony, Kamuda shaved off the beard.

  Prominently in the center of the ad for the annual gala, the society’s Internet address directed members and prospects to its Web site. There, from an online store, a visitor could order tickets to the gala, join the society, read about its history, read dozens of articles from the Commutator, and buy any of thousands of items, including Titanic T-shirts, baseball hats, and coffee mugs; CDs of selections from the White Star Line music book; and 70-millimeter film cels from James Cameron’s movie.

  The release of Cameron’s Titanic had coincided with the blooming of the Internet in the mid-1990s, and the film threw the world of the Titaniacs into an entirely new dimension of speed and obsession. Soon Titanic discussion forums, historical Web sites, diatribes by conspiracy theorists, thousands of photographs, and auctions of memorabilia were a mouse click away. There were hundreds of discussions about the sinking of the ship, and everyone expected to be taken seriously.

  The wreck had inspired some conspiracy theories that would not die. According to one of them that circulated among Irish Catholics, the Protestant owners at Harland and Wolff and White Star had cursed the ship by naming it Titanic. Reflected in the water under just the right conditions, the Catholics said, the name Titanic read as “No Pope Here” in Gaelic.

  A second theory involving religious fanaticism was the Jesuit conspiracy, built around a lunatic fringe that claimed the Jesuits had been in charge of all the significant events in the world for hundreds of years. In 1910, they said, J. P. Morgan—who they claimed was in secret a Jesuit—held a meeting on an island off Georgia to unite his empire with those of the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds to establish a powerful central bank and guarantee funding for Jesuit schemes and wars. Three extremely rich and powerful Americans opposed Morgan’s grand plan: Benjamin Guggenheim; Isidor Straus; and John Jacob Astor. Titanic was then nearing completion at the Protestant stronghold of Belfast. To eliminate the opposition, the Jesuits commanded Morgan to make sure Guggenheim, Straus, and Astor were aboard Titanic for a voyage to America that they would never complete. The next part of the plan was to order Captain E. J. Smith—also a secret Jesuit—to arrange the accidental sinking by running at full speed through a known ice field. Titanic, its passengers, and its crew would be sacrificed to get rid of three men.

  Another theory drew far more attention than “No Pope Here” and the Jesuit conspiracy. The Switch, which inspired several books, endless threads of blather on the Internet, and a movie, proposed that Titanic was really Olympic. Even after the wreck was discovered and positively identified, thousands of people contended that a collision with HMS Hawke had fatally damaged Olympic. Repairing Olympic would have taken months, maybe years, and cost more than the hull and machinery insurance would cover. So White Star secretly switched the ships, sank Olympic as Titanic, and collected the insurance. In 2004, the most recently published book on this theory—Olympic and Titanic: The Truth Behind the Conspiracy—debunked the theory. The authors spent two
hundred pages doing it.

  Long moved on from the absurd. He dove into the thicket of theories on the sinking that he found in hundreds of Internet discussion threads and more books than he could possibly read. Everyone agreed on only two facts: Titanic had hit an iceberg; it was totally gone two hours and twenty-three minutes later. Everything else about the disaster was debatable.

  Most of the arguments revolved around the extent of the damage and depended upon the testimony of the men in the forward stokeholds who were the only eyewitnesses to the first rush of water. But even they would not have seen what happened to the outer bottom of the ship, since it was separated from the inner bottom by five feet. It was entirely possible that part of the outer bottom was peeled off, water flooded the space between it and the inner bottom, and nobody knew about it.

  Some theorists believed the iceberg punched holes in the first three of the sixteen watertight compartments. Others said the first four compartments were affected, the first five, or even the first six. Titanic was built to stay afloat with up to four compartments flooded, but not with five.

  Nobody had proved anything conclusively about how badly the iceberg damaged the ship. When Titanic’s bow plowed into the bottom of the ocean, it was moving at about 35 knots—faster than it had ever gone on the surface. The impact drove the front three hundred feet of the ship into the ancient mud of the sea floor, all the way up to the anchors. There was no way to see the damage caused to the bow by the iceberg.

  In the summer of 1996, an electronics technician, Paul Matthias, scanned the wreck with a sonic imager that could penetrate the bottom sediments. He saw what might have been evidence of iceberg damage below the waterline in six compartments. But when he scanned the port side as a control, he found similar damage. More than likely, the lines on the scanner that he interpreted as damage from the iceberg happened when Titanic hit the bottom.