The Last Titanic Expedition

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Epilogue

Bibliography

For my lovely wife and talented children

And in loving memory of my parents

Introduction

I almost drowned when I was twelve. I was visiting my cousins in Wisconsin over the summer, something my family did every few years. We were taking a leisurely lake cruise on my uncle’s pontoon when my oldest cousin, Roger, who was a bit older, a lot heavier, and whom I never really liked, decided it was time for a friendly tussle. During this brief engagement, Roger ripped off my life jacket and threw me over the back of the pontoon. I wouldn’t consider this a friendly tussle because I couldn’t swim. (Roger and my other cousins didn’t know this.) I quickly disappeared from the surface. While the rest of my cousins, all boys around my age, were howling with glee over Roger’s feat, my uncle, who was driving the pontoon, looked over his shoulder to see what all the commotion was about. Not seeing me among the group, he became alarmed and inquired about my whereabouts. After he was sheepishly informed I had been tossed off the back and because he knew I couldn’t swim, my uncle dove in after me. He found me after what seemed like hours (really only a minute or two) and pulled me back on board. During his resuscitation efforts, when I expelled a gallon of Wisconsin lake water along with a couple of walleyes (that’s what my humorous cousins later told me), I eventually regained consciousness and was generally physically unaffected by my near-death experience.

The emotional side, however, turned out a little differently. My experience in the lake resulted in a personal, lifelong struggle with hydrophobia or as Webster’s calls it a morbid dread of water. Although I had grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where we are surrounded by large bodies of water, my parents had never insisted I take swimming lessons. And after the trauma in Wisconsin, I wasn’t about to get near water any time soon. Despite the consistent prodding from my parents to learn to swim after my episode at the lake, I never did take swimming lessons or consider counseling to address the phobia. I just reasoned I could work around it. As a result, I spent my high school and college years attending pool and beach parties safely away from the water, camped out on the sand or sitting by the shallow end of the pool. And after that, invitations to go sailing in the bay or the Pacific Ocean were politely declined. Like I said, I thought I could work around it.

Years later, in an ironic twist of fate, I found myself once again involved with water, this time the oceans on both sides of the continent, writing about a Bay Area deep-sea exploration and research company. Now before I go on, I will say that this deep-sea exploration company had extremely ambitious goals—the kind that you see maybe once in a lifetime. In leafing through the pages of man’s more recent efforts in exploration, ranging from setting foot atop mountains in the Himalayan massif to planting an American flag at the Sea of Tranquility, each story has its own unique and fascinating characteristics. And in this story, I once again found similar elements of personal ambition, intellectual strength, and human frailty. For those of us who closely followed this company’s efforts, we were ever-so-slowly drawn deeper and deeper into the story like water swirling around the bottom of a basin before finally disappearing down the drain. It was there in the rolling green expanse of the North Atlantic Ocean that the fate of those involved all came together. Hired to provide a written documentary, I was given a front row seat.

And just like in Wisconsin, I ended up in the water. Only this time, my uncle wasn’t there to save me.

Chapter 1

San Jose, California

My name is David Scott. I’m an author of a number of lesser known published works on local San Francisco Bay Area history. (You might find a rare copy in a used bookstore.) And when time and opportunity permit, I also do some freelance writing. I’ve had the pleasure of living in the Willow Glen neighborhood of San Jose for over twenty years and have watched this city grow up. It wasn’t that long ago when, during the week, downtown San Jose was as quiet as a library. But with the growth of Silicon Valley, the urban core has become much more vibrant and attractive. Restaurants, corporate high-rises, an expansive river walk, and urban parklands have all aided in creating an inviting downtown. (And as a sports fan, I will add that the arrival of the San Jose Sharks hockey team served as a catalyst for much of this growth.)

Prior to plunging headfirst into independent writing, I wrote and reported for a regional newspaper based in San Jose, the Silicon Valley Voice. The Voice, when it was at full strength before the growth of Internet news reporting, which has decimated the professional news print business, generally covered all aspects of life in Silicon Valley. As you would expect from a paper in Silicon Valley, the Voice did offer exceptional news coverage for business and high technology, government, transportation, higher education, and sports.

I graduated from San Jose State University with an undergraduate degree in communications and American history, and then I earned a master’s degree in journalism. Then I was fortunate enough to be hired by the Voice as a reporter not long after graduation. While I was there, I eventually worked my way up to one of the Voice’s three senior staff writer positions, with a main focus on special and personal interest stories and life in the Valley. It was a great professional experience that provided direct access to many of the great individuals who have shaped the extraordinary way of life in Silicon Valley.

It was also through these professional access channels that I was able to leave the Voice and secure a significant contractual agreement from a well-established Palo Alto marine research and engineering firm. The firm had hired me to complete a written documentary for eventual book publication about its intention to raise, transport, salvage, and eventually display the greatest lost ship in modern history—the recovery of the Royal Mail Steamship Titanic. As extraordinary as this may seem, I firmly believed at the time that if anyone could do this, it would be the company that hired me to write about it.

As you probably already know, the Titanic had been resting virtually undisturbed at the bottom of the North Atlantic for the past century. The ship hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sunk in the North Atlantic Ocean in the spring of 1912. For decades, the location as well as the condition of the ship remained a mystery. Then in 1985, a joint Franco/American expedition located the remains of the ship two miles beneath the surface in an area of the Atlantic known as the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Since then, a number of well-financed expeditions from around the globe have taken the long, dark descent to the ocean floor to photograph and retrieve items from the ship. But through all of this effort of exploration and discovery, no one has ever seriously suggested or endeavored to raise the wreck… until now.

The original story of Titanic is one of great irony and tragedy. Before I continue, please allow me to offer a synopsis of the first and only voyage of the great ocean liner and how it was eventually discovered seventy-three years later.

Chapter 2

The North Atlantic Ocean

April 1912

On the afternoon of April 10, 1912, RMS Titanic, sailing under the prestigious and well-respected flag of Great Britain’s White Star Line, was launched from Southampton, England, with considerable fanfare and anticipation. The heightened excitement was justified. Titanic’s April 10 launch date commenced its maiden voyage, its initial crossing of the Atlantic Ocean from England to New York. At the time of her christening and launch, the Titanic was the largest and most opulent ship in the world as well as the largest moveable object ever created. The impressive, four-funneled leviathan with a hull of riveted steel plates measured over 880 feet in length, weighed 46,328 gross tons, and featured exquisite appointments rarely associated with open sea transport. The ship was equipped with the most modern conveniences of the time for ocean travel: a gymnasium, indoor pool, beautiful verandas and walking promenades, a first-class dining room, a smoking room, and a grand staircase. Two thousand and two hundred enthusiastic passengers and crew members made arrangements to be on the ship for its inaugural transatlantic voyage to the United States.

After it departed Southampton and made brief stops down the English Channel in the French coastal town of Cherbourg and then Queenstown, Ireland, the Titanic steamed west out of the reach of the British Isles and into the open sea of the Atlantic for the first time. The initial days of the voyage were flawless as the Titanic pulled through the water at speeds surpassing twenty knots. The weather conditions throughout the course of the crossing were exceptional for early spring in the North Atlantic—endless, cloudless skies during the day and cold, clear, stargazing nights. It had the all the trappings of a beautiful, memorable first transatlantic trip.

There are a number of significant factors that imperil ship travel through the North Atlantic late each winter and into the warming months of spring. The weather during this period can be unsettling, as the North Atlantic region is prone to rogue storms and high seas. But there is one element more dangerous than biting winds, walls of rain, or a disturbed sea surface, and that is the large volume of floating ice that enters the area every year. As the weather begins to warm, large portions of ice crack and break away from their Arctic glacial hold from the western ice shelves of Greenland and fall into the ocean. From there, thousands of separated sections of ice, many of considerable size, begin the long journey south from Baffin Bay through the Labrador Sea and eventually intersect the well-traveled shipping lanes of the North Atlantic. Known as calving, it’s a cyclical activity. Large bergs from remote Arctic regions, some with the surface areas of small cities, have survived long enough to be seen drifting off the eastern coast of Bermuda. Because they can take on all types of forms ranging from expansive fields of ice to small growlers to large bergs, the ice can easily be formidable enough to damage and sink ships unfortunate enough to smash into them. Through the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the early years of the twentieth century, a large number of vessels were lost after they struck icebergs in the shipping lanes of the North Atlantic, making transatlantic travel between Europe and the United States quite treacherous at times.

Ice warnings to the Titanic from other ships in the vicinity during the initial days of the crossing were quite detailed and frequent. All told, the Titanic received over a dozen messages from other ships warning of ice during its abbreviated time at sea.

Just before midnight on the evening of April 14, on a clear, frigid, moonless night that offered a beautiful canopy of stars, only four hundred miles southeast from Canada’s Newfoundland coastline, the silhouette of a hulking, black object appeared off the bow of the Titanic. As the ship rapidly approached the object in the dark, the menacing form was immediately recognized by two crew members in the crow’s nest as a substantial iceberg. After they sounded the ship’s warning bell, the occupants of the crow’s nest contacted the bridge with their urgent discovery. Iceberg right ahead! they barked. The bridge officer responded instantaneously and ordered the engines reversed and the ship hard astarboard. But despite the immediate and valiant efforts to steer the ship away from the berg, the Titanic inadvertently struck the ice along the starboard bow.

The collision was hardly felt by most of the passengers and crew on board. In fact, many of the passengers were sound asleep in their berths and were not disturbed by the collision. But the result of the berg’s strike was fatal to the ship. Taking on icy North Atlantic seawater from the damaged starboard side as it flowed unabated into the ships lower hold compartments, the Titanic began its unenviable journey into history. The ship had been built with sixteen longitudinal compartments that could be closed in the event of damage to the ship’s hull and was designed to stay afloat if four compartments were flooded. But the ice had damaged at least the first five compartments, which made the sinking a mathematical inevitability.

The bow began to slowly and methodically list downward as seawater poured into the forward section of the ship. As time passed and the bow continued its gradual descent beneath the ocean’s surface, the ship’s imposing stern began to slowly lift out of the water. As the stern continued to rise above the surface of the ocean, the vertical stress placed on the ship’s hull proved too great, and the vessel broke in two, temporarily leaving the stern section almost