But that is the stuff of which legends are made. It is all within the realm of possibility. Personal jewelry and cash and whatever contraband a passenger might have carried aboard would not appear on the ship’s manifest. However, according to the Doria’s pursers and the insurers and the lawyers involved, there is nothing known of jewelry, cash or other valuables approaching the million dollar mark. No one has put in an insurance claim for any such remarkable treasure lost aboard the ship. The highest personal property loss claim paid was for $100,000 for unstrung pearls in the First Class Purser’s vault. In all there were 3,222 claims filed for losses aboard the Andrea Doria. That included claims for the losses of life, personal injury, cargo losses, seamen’s claims for their losses and 1,134 passenger claims for the loss of personal effects. While these claims may have added up to $85 million, they were all settled for a total of $5,877,399. Thus, the average single insurance payment came to a mere $1,800. That is hardly a figure in which a treasure can be hidden.
The Italian Line and the Italian government, along with the insurance underwriters, looked very closely into the question of what had been lost aboard the ship. At the Italian hearings, the pursers who had served on that last voyage of the Doria testified that, as far as they knew, virtually all the passengers had taken their valuables out of their safe deposit boxes before the collision. The previous night had been the traditional next-to-last night at sea, celebrated with the gala Captain’s Night dinners and parties. It was the “dress-up” occasion of the voyage and women had worn their finest jewelry and clothes on that night. The festivities had continued until about 2 A.M., long after the pursers’ offices had closed for the night. So, no one could return any jewelry that night and the pursers told the court that they could not recall anyone returning valuables to their vaults the next day. Purser Emilio Bertini said that he remembered that only one safety deposit box in the First Class Purser’s Office was still in use at the time of the collision. He had noticed, he said, women having difficulties lowering themselves off the ship by way of the rope ladders because they were still clutching their purses and handbags while climbing down. Most of the passengers were in their cabins at the time of the collision and would have been expected to have taken their valuables with them upon leaving the ship. Most other passengers had had ample time to return to their cabins to retrieve their money or jewels before the general abandoning of the ship.
But legends die hard or not at all. Treasure hunters have tried to find their way to that First Class Purser’s Office on the Foyer Deck and get into the safe there. None have succeeded thus far. Peter Gimbel on his first expedition down to the ship in 1956 sought only to photograph the doomed ocean liner. He succeeded so well that Life magazine ran his photographs and sponsored a more elaborate venture to photograph the ship in color the following year. By that time, Jacques Cousteau, the most famous underwater explorer in the world, made a dive to inspect the Doria. He emerged with the pronouncement that he would have nothing more to do with it. The underwater environs were too deep, too shark-infested and the currents made any future dives too tricky for safety and good health.
Deep-sea diving is a risky business at best. At the depth of the Andrea Doria, the water is blue-black and cold, visibility next to nil, and the temperature ranges from a numbing forty to forty-eight degrees. The pressure upon the human body is about six times greater than normal atmospheric pressure. Anyone scuba diving to the Doria, carrying his air supply in tanks upon his back, is limited to only about fifteen or twenty minutes underwater. The ship lies in about 240 feet of water and with its ninety-foot beam, the diver is at 150 feet when he reaches the uppermost part of the ship. The farther down he goes, the more dangerous it becomes and the longer he must spend in decompressing. Beyond a depth of one hundred feet, diving becomes dangerous. Only the most experienced and expert divers can venture down to two hundred feet and beyond. Over and beyond these difficulties, the Doria happens to lie at the cross section of about six different oceanic currents. The water is never calm there, on the surface or two hundred feet down. There are no regular tides, high, low or slack. The currents constantly swirl around at different speeds at different times of the day. They are never still. A diver must keep moving to stay in one place.
Gimbel had planned five or six dives to the Doria in the summer of 1957 to photograph what changes a year under the sea had wrought upon the luxury liner. Coming up from his second dive and decompressing some ten or twenty feet from the surface, he was attacked by a sleek, silver-blue, twelve-foot shark. It came in a straight, slow line for his belly. When the shark was about a foot from his body, Gimbel thrust his knife to the hilt into the shark’s head. The shark swung about violently, reversed direction and swam away. Gimbel called off the remainder of his planned dives. The ship, one year after the sinking, still looked in remarkably good condition. Only close up could one see the slime, the barnacles, and the incrustations which had begun to adhere to the hull of the ship. The teakwood decks looked like new. Oil was still leaking somewhere from the innards of the ship’s tanks. Tiny air bubbles still were escaping from some unseen closed areas.
Other divers explored the wreck as the years went on, and in 1964 two divers from Norfolk, Virginia—George Merchant and Denny Morse—came up with the first salvage prize from the ship, the four-hundred-pound bronze statue of Admiral Andrea Doria, which they had removed from the First Class Lounge. That feat alone took them fifty-four separate dives.
The most elaborate and serious attempt to get at and into the Doria was made in the summer of 1973 by a group of experienced divers from San Diego, California, who incorporated themselves under the name of Saturation Systems, Inc. They spent more than a year and a half and some $350,000 in preparing for their diving expedition. Rather than “bounce dive” to the ship and then decompress after each descent, these men designed and built a twelve-ton steel “habitat” which they took down and attached to the Doria. Equipped with food, beds, air, and communication lines to their surface ship, the twelve-by-five-foot chamber enabled two lead divers to remain underwater for as long as two weeks without having to go through the protracted periods of decompression. They called their underwater habitat “Mother.” Two navy trained deep-sea divers, Don Rodocker and Chris DeLucci, worked inside the Doria, while a third diver, inside “Mother,” handled the life and communication lines. Their plan was to reach those safe deposit boxes and the vault in the First Class Purser’s Office, roam the ship for other treasures, and come home with $4 million in booty. They had carried the habitat three thousand miles cross-country on a flatbed truck, and then another eighty miles on a fishing trawler from Fairhaven, Massachusetts, to the site of the Andrea Doria. They spent twenty-three days at sea, an expedition of twenty-six people, and the principal divers spent five of those days cutting a four-foot-square hole through the hull so that they could directly reach the safe in the Purser’s Office.
But seventeen years under water had taken its toll. The Andrea Doria was draped with huge nets ripped off fishing boats that were bottom fishing (most of them believed to be illegal Russian ships), and those tangled nets were still catching fish aboard the Andrea Doria. Moreover, it soon became obvious to the divers that once fish were caught in the nets, sharks were coming there almost regularly at night to feed off them. The outer hull of the Doria, swept by the currents, still was in good shape; the teak decks still showed no damage. But when the divers reached their goal and entered the Grand Foyer of the Doria they were appalled. The place was in shambles. The interior walls of the foyers and lounges, built of thin wood, were hanging askew from electrical wires; the plywood ceiling was drooping low, the floor was covered with rubble. There was no access to the Purser’s Office. It did not seem there was any Purser’s Office left intact. Tons of debris covered the entire area of the safe and deposit boxes.
They roamed the ship and finally, in utter disappointment, they called it quits. Chris DeLucci’s and Don Rodocker’s accomplishment, however, was pr
oving that with an underwater habitat like “Mother,” they could spend 191.07 hours underwater and be brought back to the surface safely. It would point the way for future efforts. The only treasures they retrieved, however, for all their efforts, were a few badly worn silver-plate platters and one bottle of (very expensive) French perfume in good condition.
Two years later, Peter Gimbel returned to the Andrea Doria, backed up this time with the latest sophisticated diving equipment, and diving experts from International Underwater Contractors, one of the largest and most successful salvage companies in the world. It was to be an “in-depth” exploration of the Doria, an attempt to discover-on-the-spot evidence of why the presumably unsinkable ship had sunk. Underwritten and sponsored by the Xerox Corporation, the exploration was filmed and presented in color in a one-hour CBS television special in March, 1976.
On this exploration, Gimbel found the Doria to be no longer the gleaming, clean ship he had seen before. Now she presented what he called a “hostile environment,” highly dangerous to anyone delving into her innards. The ship, still structurally in good condition, was swarming with fish of all kinds. Fishing nets torn from other ships were still strewn all over the ship’s superstructure, trapping fish for marauding sharks; the steel hull was encrusted with barnacles and rust; the interior walls of the ship had collapsed, sea dust had settled upon everything inside the ship.
Gimbel tried to make his way down to the Engine Room to find “the missing door,” but there were so many turns, so many stairways, and the way so dark and so deep, that he never got to the location he sought. He did, however, descend to the floor of the ocean in order to inspect the point of impact of the collision. He found there that the Stockholm had indeed, as suspected, ripped open the double bottom tanks as well as the deep fuel tanks at the point of impact. It helped explain why the Doria had taken that sudden and drastic list immediately after the collision.
Gimbel was not treasure hunting. He was exploring and filming his exploration as he moved through the ship. As such, his expedition was eminently successful because his television program, “The Mystery of the Andrea Doria,” was unique: Never before had the public ever seen an ocean liner upon the floor of the Atlantic twenty years after a sea disaster that had shaken and intrigued the world.
As if to remind the world of the quarter century gone by, in July, 1981, one of the Doria’s portside lifeboats broke free of the mother ship, floated to the surface and made her way alone to New York. The forty-two-foot empty lifeboat drifted some two hundred miles to reach Staten Island, where she washed ashore at Consolidated Edison’s generating plant in New York harbor. “It’s a strange piece of sea history,” commented Con Ed spokesman Larry Kleinman. “It got here by a happenstance of the tides, and it’s weird.”
On the date of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the sinking, July 26, 1981, Peter Gimbel set out once again to explore and film the wreck of the Andrea Doria. It had become an obsession with him. Swimming out of a diving bell anchored fifteen feet above the Doria and living in a pressurized habitat aboard a salvage ship, the Sea Level 11, Gimbel and his diving colleagues will spend a full month in a pressurized environment, as if they were 140 feet underwater at all times.
Working with the most modern and sophisticated deep-sea diving equipment, five commercial divers and four diver-cameramen, Gimbel hopes to film for an updated television special the deep interior of the Andrea Doria and, in particular, the site of the watertight door between the deep-tank compartment and the generator compartment. Was the door there or was it missing? Was it closed tight or was it bolted open? The department store heir has elaborate plans to hoist the two safes from the First Class Foyer Deck and settle the question once and for all: Is there really a treasure of $1 million-plus in those safes or nothing at all? “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” said seaman Tim Gerard, one of the forty people in the Gimbel expedition.
Like the Mona Lisa with her inscrutable smile, the Andrea Doria continues to intrigue the world and to beckon adventurous explorers underwater. Peter Gimbel was not alone in his quest to fathom the sinking of the Andrea Doria. A group of New Jersey divers also announced plans to explore the Italian liner sometime in 1981. A forty-year-old amateur diver, John Barnett, of Pound Ridge, New York, lost his life in the summer of 1981 diving to the Doria. His body was found on the bridge of the ship some two hundred feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic.
It is ironic that while the Stockholm, the Ile de France, and all the other ships involved in the disaster have gone to the scrapheap, the Andrea Doria lives on beneath the sea. In her prime, she had been one of the most beautiful ships conceived by man. Now she remains the most glamorous, intriguing, accessible, and divable wreck available to man. She seems to be just lying there on the ocean’s bottom, within man’s reach but beyond his grasp.
Chapter Seventeen
REVISITING THE DORIA
On a beautiful, clear and sunny morning in July 2002, the captain of the dive boat Seeker, Dan Crowell, cast a large floral wreath into the calm ocean above the sunken wreck of the Andrea Doria, commemorating the forty-sixth anniversary of the sea disaster of that generation. A crew member read aloud the names of the fifty-one passengers killed aboard the Doria and the five seamen who perished aboard the Stockholm, and in memoriam recalled:
Forty-six years ago this month two ocean liners met at the same point in space and time and changed the lives of many. The collision of the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm was hailed as a great sea rescue and indeed it was; however, we are here on behalf of the survivors and friends to remember the passengers and crew who lost their lives.
July 26, 2006, will mark a half-century that the Italian flagship went down to her watery grave some fifty-three miles southeast of Nantucket. The years have certainly taken their toll upon the once-proud luxury liner. Ironically, though, while the other trans-Atlantic liners that plied the Atlantic Ocean in that era have been sold or scrapped into oblivion, the Andrea Doria lives on—deep beneath the waves—in the hearts and minds of those men and women who love the sea. Survivors of the Doria and children and grandchildren of those survivors keep in touch through Friends of the Andrea Doria, which arranges reunions and publishes a newsletter in order to remember and memorialize the tragedy that shaped their lives. The organization was headed by Anthony Grillo of Monroe, New York, who was three years old when he survived the collision on the Italian liner. The U. S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New York, a maritime college for training merchant marine officers, has built an elaborate simulator of the bridge of the Andrea Doria where professors and students can re-enact the possibilities of what went wrong on those fateful and controversial days of July 25 and 26, 1956, and learn from that experience. Books and magazine articles have been written over the years delving into the smallest details of the event, and the Internet contains well over a hundred thousand references to the Andrea Doria.
The ship grew to be revered like a martyred head of state assassinated before her time. She became the “Grand Dame of the Atlantic,” and the “Mount Everest” challenge for scuba divers throughout the world. Lying on her starboard side upon a soft seabed of sand 240 feet beneath the surface of the ocean waves, she was by far the largest, deepest shipwreck accessible to any amateur scuba diver brave and skilled enough to venture to that depth. Swimming down to the Doria with about two hundred pounds of air tanks and equipment strapped to your back, breathing compressed air, was like climbing Mount Everest, the highest peak in the world, difficult, arduous, dangerous, even life threatening, but something that could be done.
Blobs of her thick fuel oil still manage to float up occasionally to the surface of the ocean, giving divers the eerie feeling that the Andrea Doria indeed is still alive. Inside, the supply of souvenir dishes, cups, saucers, lamps, ashtrays, and artifacts seem to be inexhaustible. Swirling underwater currents, especially every winter, continue to give the wreck a good shaking, which turns up more collectibles. Forty-seven years
after that fateful collision and the sinking of the Andrea Doria, scuba divers can still find a cup, a dinner plate, or an artifact to take home as a collectible and treasured evidence that they dove to the Doria.
The man who showed the way was Peter Gimbel, the department store heir, who became obsessed with underwater exploration. He was the first explorer of the Andrea Doria, diving down to her the day after she sank, then returning several weeks later with underwater photographers for a spectacular magazine display of the sunken ship in Life magazine. He demonstrated that it could be done. Then Gimbel worked years to organize a major venture, hiring some of the nation’s best divers and salvage experts to bring back to the surface the ship’s first class safe in 1981. Gimbel arranged to televise his bold attempt to swim through the ship and to find and retrieve the safe, reputedly containing many millions of dollars in cash, jewelry, and other valuables. He brought up the Bank of Rome safe from the First Class Purser’s office, but the paper money turned out to be mush and no valuables were found.
But the dive was not a complete failure. Peter Gimbel’s lasting legacy to the Andrea Doria was the dive itself and the hole his crew had burned through the port side of the ship’s hull, the size of a double garage door, through which they had lifted the safe. It became known as “Gimbel’s Hole” and served for some twenty years as the favored entryway into the wreck for the hundreds of divers who came after him. The man-made hole gave easy access into the First Class foyer in the middle of the ship, from which one could swim to the nearby gift shop, dining room, or farther forward to the bow or back to the stern of the ship.
Collision Course Page 28
