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

by Brad Matsen

  In the absence of hard evidence about the damage caused by the iceberg, the Titaniacs had three theories regarding the impact itself. Titanic either sideswiped the iceberg, grounded on the iceberg, or both. There were two subsets to the sideswipe scenario. The Big Gash theory held that the iceberg tore open the steel or popped rivets along three hundred feet of Titanic’s side, from the first compartment, called the peak tank, back to Boiler Room 5. A few theorists, who were marginalized by the others, supported the Even Bigger Gash theory, which damaged the ship back to Boiler Room 4. Small Gash theorists claimed that the damage extended only as far as Boiler Room 6, the one closest to the bow.

  In the beginning, when the Americans and British kicked off a century of investigation with their official inquiries, fortunes rode on the determination of how much damage the iceberg had done to Titanic. If the ship had sustained massive damage—the Big Gash—there was only the bad luck of hitting the iceberg, and Captain Smith, to blame for the deaths of 1,504 people. If it had suffered only minor damage, flooding four or fewer compartments, then it should not have sunk so quickly. That would have introduced the disturbing and expensive possibility that the disaster involved negligence on the part of the White Star Line or Harland and Wolff.

  The grounding theory was a wild card. If the ship ran over an underwater shelf that tore open part of the outer bottom, there would have been flooding but Titanic should have been able to stay afloat on its inner bottom. If the ice tore open both inner and outer bottoms of four or more compartments, that would explain why the ship sank so fast.

  Among the proponents of the grounding theory Long discovered a charter boat captain, boatbuilder, and obsessed Titanic historian named David G. Brown. Like millions of people, Brown had tumbled into the Titanic whirlpool because of James Cameron’s movie. He was moved by the beauty of the ship and the human tragedy. But Brown instinctively doubted the dramatic scenes in the movie in which the stern rises to a forty-five-degree angle before the ship breaks in half.

  Brown painstakingly constructed a second-by-second chronology of the disaster based on the testimony and accounts of survivors. He studied diagrams of the ship until he was as familiar with it as he was with the floor plan of his house in Ohio. Brown studied the accounts of the collision, testimony about the damage by officers and crew, and came up with a combination of the Small Gash and the grounding theories. But he did not think the damage was anywhere near as severe as commonly assumed. Titanic, Brown believed, sank far more quickly than it should have. He was, of course, jeered by those Titaniacs who disagreed with his theory. And he jeered back at them.

  What interested Roger Long most about Brown’s contrarian perspective was his concentration on the behavior of the ship’s officers, crew, and passengers in the hours after the impact. Brown insisted that for two hours, they did not act like men who thought they were on a sinking ship—except for its captain, E. J. Smith, its designer, Thomas Andrews, and its owner, J. Bruce Ismay, who behaved as if the ship had been doomed even before they finished inspecting it for damage. What did they know that no one else aboard Titanic knew?

  Long pulled himself out of a spiral of supposition. Brown was a Titaniac, he reminded himself. But as a contrarian himself, Long was inclined to believe that Brown might be on to something.

  Long was more skeptical of the hidebound theory of the sinking that had been published by the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers in 1995. SNAME, founded twenty years before Titanic went down, policed its profession by reviewing papers, books, and licensing exams and creating panels for advancing the interests of marine engineering.

  Long had a copy of the forensic panel’s paper “The Titanic and Lusitania: A Final Forensic Analysis.” The lead author was William Garzke, a member of Gibbs & Cox, a naval architecture firm that had designed, among hundreds of other ships, the last great transatlantic ocean liner, SS United States.

  Garzke and his coauthors based their conclusions on videographic evidence and observations from expeditions to the wreck in 1985, 1986, 1991, 1993, and 1994. They said that the three-hundred-foot gash could not have happened, as claimed by Edward Wilding, the Harland and Wolff engineer who testified at the British inquiry. Wilding had calculated the weight of the water required to sink the ship, the size of an opening required to admit enough water to match that weight, and determined the total size of the opening to be twelve square feet. That would require a tear in the hull three-quarters of an inch wide and three hundred feet long.

  The Garzke report quoted the pilot of the submersible Alvin, with which the wreck was first explored: “No metal sword known, much less a sword of ice, could make a continuous ¾-inch-wide slice in 1-inch-thick steel without dulling or breaking.”

  “We now conclude that the gash is non-existent, and should be considered as folklore,” Garzke wrote. But the report offered only speculation as to what kind of hole, gash, string of popped rivets, or other opening could flood the ship fast enough to sink it in two hours and twenty-three minutes.

  Garzke and his coauthors calculated the effects of flooding the bow in the time between the impact and sinking and offered their most sensational conclusion: The stern of Titanic had risen out of the water at a forty-five-degree angle before either breaking on the surface or following the bow down and breaking off during the fatal plunge.

  Now, Long thought, I see where James Cameron found his most terrifying scene for the movie. As it had been with everyone who saw Titanic, the horrible specter of the man falling hundreds of feet from the stern into the propeller was indelibly etched into Long’s mind.

  The Garzke report was interesting, but Long did not see any hard evidence to validate its authors’ conclusions. The extent of the damage was critical, and nobody really knew how badly the hull was breached, or how the ship had broken and sank.

  Long decided right then that the best thing he could do to bring an open mind to the investigation was to read as much as he could from moderately credible theorists such as Brown and Garzke and stay out of the forums on the Web. But after his sojourn through the world of Titaniacs, he knew that if there was even the slightest chance that he could contribute to understanding why those people died, he had no choice but to join the expedition.

  When Chatterton and Kohler asked him to make a Mir dive to Titanic, Long felt like an audience member suddenly dragged onstage during a magic act. They had told him it was extremely unlikely that he would make a dive. But the vanishing ribbons of steel changed everything. They needed his eyes on the bottom, Chatterton and Kohler said.

  As Chatterton talked, Long felt reluctance building inside him. When he’d worked at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, he’d shared an office with an Alvin pilot who’d told him chilling stories about getting tangled in a shipwreck, and the impossibility of rescue. The pilot said that the stream of water from a pinhole rupture under 350 atmospheres of pressure would cut you in half. And when Sagalevich had briefed the expedition on the Mirs, Long had concluded that there was no Russian word for “redundancy.” They were proven submersibles, Long thought, but very primitive.

  We need you down there, Roger, Chatterton said.

  Okay. Long paused. But I told my wife I wasn’t going down in the sub.

  No worries, said Kohler. We won’t tell her.

  The next day, Long’s restless night of predive jitters vanished when he reached the top of the ladder, took off his shoes, put them in the yellow dry box a crewman held next to the open hatch, and lowered himself into Mir-1. He made conversation with Ralph White and the pilot, Genya Cherniaev, for a half hour, then fell asleep.

  Two hours later, Genya woke him, turned on the lights, and did a radio check with Mir-2. Long lay on his belly, his forehead against the leather pad over his viewport, his face an inch from the Plexiglas. He was right where Chatterton and Kohler wanted him to be, looking at the torn metal at the broken end of the stern section. Long directed White in videotaping the edges of the steel at the points of s
eparation between the two sections, capturing the patterns of fracturing, tension, and compression. He was not exactly sure what he was looking for, but if there was a story to tell, the steel would tell it.

  After an hour of nosing around the frightening, jagged gash where Titanic had come apart during its death throes, Long asked Genya to take him to the starboard side for a look at the bilge keel. Genya steered well away from the hull to avoid cables and tangles of debris, then approached slowly, the skids of the sub just two feet above the bottom. The side of the ship appeared first as a black blot against the brown mud; then Long could make out the overlapping steel of the hull plating. There. Right in front of him. The bilge keel. Long could clearly see the two-foot-wide slab of red-painted steel protruding from the side of the hull right where it met the bottom. He asked Genya to take the sub slowly toward the bow at the same height. Long was hoping to see rumpled and torn steel on the bilge keel to take the grounding theory from the realm of supposition to possible reality. But no. From the point of the break in the hull until the bilge keel disappeared into the mud as the bow dug into the seafloor, its red antifouling paint wasn’t even scratched.

  For another two hours, they cruised over a strange part of the seafloor etched with canyons thirty feet deep, then over a debris field that was interesting but nothing new, and finally over Concannon’s junk. Still junk, Long concluded. Some kind of box beam or ducting. And definitely not a piece of the bottom of Titanic.

  Four

  THE EYES OF BILLY LANGE

  The day after Roger Long surfaced with the dismal news that the grounding theory was impossible to prove, Chatterton and Kohler sulked around the ship. While the Keldysh crew used the day to check out the Mirs, they sat in front of the video monitors and watched the film of the worthless debris from the first dives and the disappointing images of the pristine bilge keel from the second. They looked at them a second time, like poker players squeezing their cards and hoping that when they peeked again, the deuce of clubs would have become a heart to make the flush. Even the third time through the tape, the box beam or whatever it was still wasn’t ribbons of steel, and the bilge keel still looked like it had just come out of the shipyard.

  The voice of self-recrimination in Kohler’s head never stopped. How could he have missed the obvious fact that he was risking a small fortune on the word of one man he’d never even met before? He made snap decisions all the time; he was used to paying off when he was wrong. But this one sent a jolt to a part of his self-image that had been propped up with hubris. He had gotten very used to being right. Way too used to being a hero all the time.

  Chatterton, too, blamed himself. He understood that when you were looking for things no one had ever found, sometimes you didn’t find them either. But he should have known better than to trust an eager, chatty lawyer instead of his own gut. Like Kohler, he had to admit that pride had reached out to slap him down.

  Billy Lange, the imaging technician from Woods Hole Wolfinger had hired for the underwater camera work, had seen plenty of deep-ocean expeditions implode under the pressure of runaway egos, poor planning, and bad luck. Expeditions had pecking orders. What Lange had just witnessed was a shuffling of that order because the man who was on the top—on whose word others had spent a small fortune—had been demoted in the harshest possible way. The expedition was about to get ugly.

  Lange was a compact man, graying as he approached fifty, carrying the extra weight of age on a sturdy frame with a low center of gravity. He moved with the efficiency of someone who thought about what he was going to do before he did it, and he spoke with the same restraint. For twenty-five years, Lange had worked at Woods Hole building underwater cameras and imaging equipment for exploring the deep ocean. He and a small cadre of other inventive men and women designed and built instruments that took the place of eyes where humans could not go. Until Lange’s generation of engineers had intersected with the technology to shield instruments from the deadly pressure, the abyss had hidden its secrets for all of the two hundred thousand years Homo sapiens had existed.

  Attempts to find out what was under the surface of the sea began the first time human beings stuck their heads into the water and opened their eyes. Alexander the Great had himself lowered a few feet into the Mediterranean in a glass barrel on the end of a rope. In 1690, Edmond Halley, who discovered the comet that bears his name, invented a chamber that could be lowered into the water to depths of forty feet and resupplied with air ferried down in skin bladders. Free divers held their breath, swam sixty feet to the bottom, and, for a minute or two, looked around for oysters that might yield pearls. Divers in heavy copper helmets couldn’t go much farther than the pearl divers, but they could stay down and walk on the bottom as long as someone on the surface pumped air through a hose to them. For millennia, the unfathomable mysteries of water pressure, compressed gas, and the limitations of muscle power defeated attempts to dive deeper.

  Then, in 1934, William Beebe and Otis Barton had themselves sealed into a four-and-a-half-foot-diameter, half-inch-thick steel sphere with three quartz glass portholes, and dropped at the end of a cable into the Atlantic off Bermuda. Their first dive took them to 800 feet and made them international heroes, celebrated on the front pages of newspapers as stupendously brave travelers to another world. Four years later, they reached a depth of 3,028 feet. In the primitive craft they called a bathysphere, they became the first humans to go beyond sunlight into the eternal darkness of the deep ocean.

  In 1960, Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard dove the submersible Trieste down to the deepest place in the ocean, a depth of seven miles. In 1964, Woods Hole built the highly maneuverable, three-person sub Alvin, which could reach a depth of 14,764 feet.

  For the expedition to Titanic, Lange brought two high-resolution Sony studio cameras he had modified to fit into six-inch-diameter titanium housings. The cables from the cameras went to high-speed digital tape recorders inside the sphere. With high-intensity TV lights mounted on arms outside the sub, it was a straightforward, simple system. Even someone running the cameras for the first time was likely to get it right.

  Lange usually worked quietly in the background. He was content with tinkering, preparing, making sure that every camera he sent into the depths at enormous cost and risk of life worked perfectly. He went to planning meetings but tuned out anything that did not relate to imaging. There was nothing sweeter to him than an important discovery that happened because of his wires, cameras, and steel.

  In 1985, however, Billy Lange had moved to center stage during an expedition to search for Titanic. It was the latest in a succession of attempts to reach the wreck, the first of which had been announced on April 20, 1912, five days after the disaster. Vincent Astor, the son of John Jacob Astor, who had been aboard Titanic and was presumed dead, said he would return to the scene immediately, blow up the wreck with high explosives, and recover his father’s body when it floated to the surface. The following day, the steamer Mackay-Bennett found the frozen body of J. J. Astor in his life jacket among hundreds of his fellow passengers and crew, and Vincent canceled his expedition.

  Fifty years passed before a team of British adventurers chartered a salvage ship named Help and tried to find Titanic using an array of explosions that were supposed to create a profile of the ship on the bottom. They were at Titanic’s last reported position, but their bombs returned no shapes of a ship to the sonar receivers, and no debris floated to the surface.

  For most of the 1970s, Douglas Woolley, a young Englishman, dominated the search for Titanic with his plan to find it, photograph it, raise it, and bring it to Liverpool to become a floating museum. He claimed salvage rights to the wreck and raised millions from investors, to whom he promised shares of a half-billion-dollar fortune in gold, diamonds, and vintage wine. Woolley vanished in 1977, never having found Titanic.

  Soon after Woolley’s escapade collapsed in a heap of lawsuits and bad press, oceanographer Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Instit
ution proposed a venture with the more modest goal of simply finding the wreck.

  Ballard talked the Aluminum Company of America into loaning him its drilling ship, AlcoaSeaprobe. He would lower 12,400 feet of pipe in sixty-foot lengths; at the end of the pipe, instead of a drill bit, would be a heavy steel pod loaded with side-looking sonar, still cameras, and television cameras. With the pod a few feet from the bottom, the ship would tow it and the connecting pipe through the water. Ballard told the institution that his search for Titanic would serve as a test of what could become a revolutionary system for studying the floor of the deep ocean for the first time.

  Ballard sailed from Woods Hole on schedule in October 1977, confident that ten or twelve days of searching with the AlcoaSeaprobe pod would be all he’d need to find Titanic. He was testing the system in shallower water when a coupling broke, sending three thousand feet of pipe, weighing sixty-one thousand pounds, to the bottom.

  Ballard didn’t give up on Titanic, but instead of pipe, he next decided to use a camera and sensing pod towed along the ocean bottom at the end of a cable. He formed a company called Seaonics International to raise money to build deep-towed sensing and imaging equipment. For a while, Ballard had Roy Disney, Walt’s brother, interested, but he backed out at the last minute. A Texas oilman, Jack Grimm, offered to buy into the venture, but Ballard didn’t like Grimm; he turned him down even though it meant he was stalled in his quest to become the man who found Titanic.

  Grimm tried again with some other scientists but failed to find the wreck on three expeditions plagued by rough seas, equipment failures, and bad blood. They found hard targets with their towed sonars but couldn’t confirm any of them as wreckage from a ship. Grimm pushed the scientists to announce that they had discovered Titanic. They refused, saying only that they were pretty sure there was something wrong with the last position of the ship reported by its radiotelegraph operator.