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

by Brad Matsen

  An hour after making their decision, Chatterton was retching into the sink in his hotel room. He had a fever burning behind his eyeballs and couldn’t stop shaking. He managed to drag himself out of the bathroom long enough to call Kohler, who arrived five minutes later with the expedition doctor. Chatterton probably had food poisoning, or maybe a bug from the water. With rest and hydration, he would be better in forty-eight hours, but he was unfit to dive the next day.

  I’ll go alone, Kohler said.

  I know you can do it, Richie, Chatterton said. But you’ve got to have somebody running the camera. Roger Long has to see what you see.

  A 100-foot penetration of a shipwreck was dicey under the best of circumstances. This one would be the most difficult dive Kohler had ever made. It was one thing for him to do it; it was another thing to ask one of the other divers to go with him. Every one of them would say yes, but Chatterton and Kohler didn’t want to put the obligation on any of them.

  What about Barney? Chatterton asked. You guys have spent a lot of time on wrecks together.

  Mike Barnette—Barney—was a marine biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in St. Petersburg, Florida. Kohler compared Chatterton to a partner he danced with in serious competitions, and Barney to a partner with whom he danced for fun. Barney knew all the moves, and he knew Kohler’s moves, too. They had been on wrecks at 300 feet, never had a problem, always seemed wordlessly in sync underwater. Kohler knew that Barney had been to 400 feet enough times to feel comfortable at that depth. He was a master rebreather diver.

  Probably the man, Kohler said. It sucks that we won’t do this together, John.

  No choice, Richie. Unless I’m completely misreading this shit with the Greeks, they’re going to shut us down. One more dive is probably all we’re going to get. It frosts my ass that we won’t get another shot at the boiler room, but the expansion joint is what we came for.

  The next morning, two policemen in an SUV were parked on the dock watching the divers load gear, water, food, and cameras. When Apollon backed into the channel, it felt like a jail break.

  Barnette had a different style in the water than Chatterton. He moved a little slower, more deliberately. On the descent, he filmed Kohler from above, until at 250 feet, Barnette swam down to the wreck and filmed him from below. All business. Kohler felt confident when he splashed with Barnette, and even better after they tuned in to each other’s rhythms on the drop to the wreck. Behind them, Mike Fowler and Mike Pizzio descended to inspect the outside of the hull for evidence of the expansion joint, while Kohler and Barnette were inside.

  When Kohler got to what he thought was B Deck, something was very wrong. Stephenson and Mills had said if he saw a door at the entrance to the promenade he was on the wrong deck. Kohler was sure he was where he was supposed to be. He had counted the decks during his descent, and the promenade looked exactly like the one in the plans of the ship he had studied for weeks. It had been used as an officers’ ward, a comfortable, well-ventilated corridor that must have been the best place on the ship on a hot day. There were windows where there were supposed to be windows. Only the door shouldn’t have been where it was. Kohler decided to bet that Stephenson, Mills, and the plans were wrong. At some point between drawing the ship and building it, a doorway had been added to the promenade on B Deck.

  Kohler kicked and entered the wreck. The light was pretty good inside. The windows above him that weren’t broken were covered with algae and anemones, transforming the blue of the abyss into a stained glass effect. Church light, Kohler thought. Below him, through doorways and windows in the interior wall, he peered into staterooms. The wooden walls had rotted away, revealing plumbing and the bright white ceramics of sinks and bathtubs. He saw piles of wooden wheelchairs half-eaten by worms, the metal frames and springs of hospital beds, open cabinets glimmering with bottles and glasses. If Kohler hadn’t had a job to do, he would not have been able to resist going farther into the middle of the ship.

  Kohler counted windows, moving from the bow to the stern. One window equaled ten feet. The expansion joint was supposed to be one hundred feet in. Kohler swam carefully, alert to the possibility that wreckage beyond the beam of his lights could block the way at any point. At seven windows, his clock showed eighteen minutes elapsed. Something’s got to happen pretty quick, he thought.

  The expansion joint was supposed to be covered by a brass plate on the floor of the promenade, which was to Kohler’s right. Nineteen minutes. Kohler thought he saw something bright wink at him. He reached out and drew his hand through the coating of fine silt and algae. Nothing. He was right at the ninth window. Maybe they were wrong about that, too. He glanced over his shoulder, careful to not look directly at the camera lights. There was Barnette. Calm. Perfectly neutral, hovering slightly above him.

  The tenth window. Nothing. Kohler and Barnette reversed course. Kohler pushed his face to within six inches of the deck. Nothing. Back to the ninth window. Kohler was turning to shake his head at Barnette when he saw it. A definite gap in the steel covered by a plate of a different kind of metal. Shinier. It wasn’t in the floor of B Deck. It was in the ceiling and walls. But no doubt about it. The expansion joint. About fourteen inches wide. Like a door threshold.

  Kohler backed away to make room for the camera. Barnette shot the joint along its full length from every possible angle. He videotaped the place where the joint was supposed to be but wasn’t.

  They were twenty-five minutes into the dive. It was going to take eight minutes to swim out of the ship. That left five minutes for sightseeing. The likelihood that either of them was ever going to dive on Britannic again was remote. Before they splashed, they had agreed that if they had any time on the clock after getting the job done, they would reward themselves with a swim through the navigation bridge.

  When they came out of the promenade, the wing of the bridge the officers used for docking was directly over their heads and to the right. Kohler looked at Barnette and made the hand signal for a steering wheel. Barnette nodded.

  The bridge of Britannic was identical to Titanic’s. Kohler saw the engine-room telegraph, its commands clearly visible: FULL AHEAD. STOP. ASTERN. When Kohler reached out and touched it, his imagination put him not on an ill-fated hospital ship but on the bridge of Titanic. It was the sweetest moment in his life as a wreck diver. He imagined Captain Smith, Murdoch, Lightoller, and Andrews on the bridge. The reprehensible Ismay. He saw the patient sailor on the helm responding to commands by echoing the commands for course changes. He looked to his left, toward the bow, shined his light through shards of broken glass, and saw the surface of the open ocean stretching out ahead of him, blue and endless.

  Kohler’s delight at correcting the experts about the layout of the promenade, finding the cover of the expansion joint, and hearing Fowler and Pizzio’s report that the joint ended in a thermometer-like bulb was short-lived. At the entrance to Kéa’s harbor, a police boat, its blue lights flashing, burbled up to Apollon to escort it to the dock.

  Chatterton had recovered enough to meet them there with the news that the cops wanted all of the videotapes. The Department of Antiquities guy had accused them of breaking the law by going inside the wreck. Chatterton informed the two policemen squared off in front of him that he wasn’t surrendering the tapes unless they told him in writing when he was going to get them back. As Kohler joined Chatterton on the dock, the policemen flipped open their holsters.

  You will now come with us to the police station.

  They sat on a bench in a sweaty little office while one of the policemen stood guard. Chatterton held up his cell phone. The guard nodded okay. Chatterton called one of the camera techs aboard Apollon and told him to start making copies of everything. An hour passed. Chatterton called Bob Blumberg, who said he was making inquiries but wasn’t optimistic. He said he’d never run into such a nonresponsive group of people in an international situation. Nobody was taking his phone calls.

  Chatte
rton’s phone rang. The camera tech had gotten everything duped. The police had just boarded Apollon with their guns drawn and taken the originals.

  Ten minutes later, two cops marched into the office with a plastic bag and vanished into a back room. One of the cops came back with a piece of paper in his hand.

  We have ten tapes. You write us a receipt for those tapes, and you can leave.

  I didn’t give you those tapes, Chatterton said. I’m not signing something that says I did. I have no idea what’s on those tapes. I don’t know where you got them. I don’t even know if they’re ours.

  If we sign your paper, it’s as good as a confession, Kohler said. No fucking way. Let’s get out of here.

  I forbid you to leave, the policeman said.

  I’ll tell you what, Chatterton said. We’re going to stand up and walk out the door. If you want to shoot us in the back, shoot us in the back.

  It was one in the morning in Maine. The phone call from Chatterton and Kohler woke Roger Long from deep sleep, but it was the best middle-of-the-night call he had ever gotten. They were talking on speakerphone, finishing each other’s sentences like an old married couple. Kohler had seen one of the expansion joints on Britannic. It was wider, with a metal cover, and a round bulb rather than a V notch where it met the hull. Definitely different than Olympic and Titanic’s. The cops had taken the originals of the video, but they were pretty sure they had dupes. They were going to try to get out of Greece the next day.

  Proof that the expansion joints on Britannic were different than those on Titanic meant that Pirrie and Ismay had suspected that they were weak points. A lot of things can cause a hull to fail, Long said. They’d obviously thought Titanic’s hull plating was too light because they’d added thousands of tons of steel to Olympic and Britannic by doubling their hulls. The quality of the rivets and steel when Titanic was built was nowhere near what it is today. Every porthole was a weak point from which cracks could propagate.

  Every flaw in Titanic’s hull had stolen minutes from the lives of 1,504 people. Pirrie and Ismay must have been terrified when they’d figured that out. A public discussion of the weaknesses in their Ship of Dreams would have ruined them. They’d had no choice but to keep them secret.

  EPILOGUE

  COVER-UP

  The wound in Pirrie’s groin no longer smelled foul, but he was still emaciated and able to stand for only a few minutes each day. Over the strenuous objections of his wife, he willed himself to work. Pirrie was heartsore over the loss of Thomas Andrews and the ship he had lived his entire life to build, but he would not allow his emotions or his health to divert his attention from his life’s most perilous moment.

  Pirrie instinctively knew that something had been dreadfully wrong with Titanic. Republic had stayed afloat for a day and a half after being opened up amidships from the rail to below the waterline. The damage was not much different from that sustained by Titanic, but everyone on Republic who hadn’t been killed in the collision had been saved. Olympic had taken a blow from HMS Hawke that would have sunk most ships, but it had made it back to Southampton on its own power.

  From London, Pirrie ordered work on Britannic stopped immediately. He told Edward Wilding to mathematically re-create every possible flooding scenario in which the ship sinks two hours and twenty minutes after its hull is breached. Wilding, who was in line to replace Andrews as Harland and Wolff’s chief designer, would use his conclusions to represent the company at the British Wreck Commission hearings in London.

  An Admiralty judge and old friend of Pirrie’s, John Charles Bigham, Baron Mersey of Toxteth, was appointed to preside over the commission. Mersey would be assisted by one of the nation’s leading naval architects, a distinguished engineer, two navy officers, and a veteran solicitor general. They would take testimony from Titanic’s builder, owner, and survivors, to answer twenty-six questions drawn up by the British Board of Trade. The questions addressed the seaworthiness of the ship, the voyage, the extent of the damage, and the conduct of the crew and passengers. The British inquiry would begin on May 2, but Mersey gave Harland and Wolff more time to prepare its testimony. Wilding would not testify until the end of the month.

  After receiving Pirrie’s instructions, Wilding scrambled to calculate the amount of damage that could explain why Titanic sank so fast. Ismay had sent reports from America saying that the ship had struck the iceberg below the waterline at the bow. Wilding asked himself how much water it would have taken to sink the ship in just two hours and twenty minutes, then worked backward to figure out the size of the opening in the hull that could have admitted that much water. He calculated the weight of the water and the angle at which the ship would have begun to come apart. There was a good chance that Titanic had broken up on the surface.

  When Pirrie learned about Wilding’s conclusion that Titanic might very well have broken up on the surface, he told the engineer that his first responsibility was to protect the reputation of the company. Pirrie and Harland and Wolff’s own lawyers told Wilding that he was to answer questions narrowly, volunteering nothing. Pirrie knew that Mersey and his inquiry wanted the same outcome he did, and would not press for answers they did not want to hear; there must be no doubt that Harland and Wolff ships were strong, and that Titanic had simply been the victim of a tragic accident. It was just good business for all concerned to preserve the reputation of the British Empire’s greatest shipyard.

  Pirrie began planning for strengthening the hulls of Olympic and Britannic immediately. Olympic would be fitted with a double hull by fastening steel plates to its interior. To do that, they would have to sacrifice space inside the ship, which would require changes in the accommodations and reconfiguration of the machinery compartments. If construction began again on Britannic, they would widen the entire ship by eighteen inches, rather than sacrificing space on the inside. The watertight bulkheads, which did not extend to the top of the hull on Titanic, would go all the way up on Britannic. Olympic would be examined for cracking, especially around the expansion joints, and redesigned or reinforced to stop it.

  Two days before Wilding testified in London, Senator William Alden Smith released the conclusions of the American inquiry. It was good news for Harland and Wolff. The committee had heard from eighty-two witnesses, produced 1,100 pages of testimony, and blamed only Captain E. J. Smith, for running at nearly full speed through a known ice field. The Americans exonerated Bruce Ismay, the White Star Line, all other officers and crew of Titanic, and Harland and Wolff. The committee concluded that the ship had sunk in one piece, and had met or exceeded all standards governing the construction, equipment, and operation of a British passenger liner. Negligence by its owners or builders, therefore, was not an issue in American insurance claims.

  Lord Mersey and the five members of the Wreck Commission sat at desks on a dais at the front of the Drill Hall of the Scottish Regiment, near Buckingham Palace. To the commissioners’ right were a forty-foot-long drawing of Titanic, a twenty-foot-long half model of the ship, and a fifteen-by- fifteen-foot chart of the North Atlantic showing Titanic’s course. The ceiling of the cavernous hall was fifty feet high. The acoustics were terrible.

  The Board of Trade’s chief counsel, Sir Rufus Isaacs, read the order for formal investigation. He summarized the twenty-six questions the board wanted the Wreck Commission to answer. Questions 1 through 8 related to what happened before the accident and before there was any suggestion that the ship was sailing into an ice field. Questions 9 through 14 asked about what happened after the captain was warned about the ice. Question 15, by far the broadest, concerned the accident itself. Questions 16 through 24 inquired as to the steps taken after the accident to save lives and save the ship. Question 25 related to the construction and equipment of Titanic. Question 26 asked the commission to evaluate current shipping regulations and suggest changes.

  The next day, the solicitor general asked the first of what would become 25,621 carefully numbered questions of witnesses.

>   “Is your name Archie Jewell?”

  Jewell, a lookout who had gotten off his watch in the crow’s nest an hour and forty minutes before Titanic hit the iceberg, said that was his name. He answered 329 more questions about the routines of sailors aboard Titanic, using the huge chart of the ship to show his duty station and his quarters.

  Following Archie Jewell, ninety-six witnesses told their stories. Lightoller calmly answered 1,600 questions, fencing with his inquisitors as he had with Senator Smith in America. None of Titanic’s officers, he said, did anything in the navigation and evacuation of the ship that could be subject to criticism.

  Fireman George Beauchamp said he was in Boiler Room 6 at impact and that he continued working for at least fifteen minutes before being ordered to evacuate. This conflicted with Fireman Fred Barrett’s testimony that Boiler Room 6 was so catastrophically damaged on impact that the water immediately drove him to flee from Boiler Room 6. Barrett also said that Boiler Room 5 was taking water when he arrived. The inconsistency meant that the ship might not have been damaged as far back as Boiler Room 5 and that Barrett was either lying or mistaken about his location when he saw water burst through the hull. Mersey did not examine the inconsistency.

  Every utterance of a witness or inquisitor made news around the world, but none was more sensational than the testimony of Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff-Gordon. They had fled the ship in one of the first lifeboats, with only ten other passengers. There was no question that Lady Duff-Gordon had a right to be in the boat. Cosmo Duff-Gordon, who was a regular item in the endless stream of gossip that rolled around Europe, convinced the Wreck Commission that his leaving Titanic while there were still women and children aboard was perfectly legitimate; no one else wanted to go.