Charles Smith wasn’t battling a neutron star. By comparison, six thousand pounds per square inch is paltry, almost marginal. But it remained impossibly big. Whales could withstand dramatic pressure thanks to their flexible ribs. Squid could swim freely at great depths without air sacs. But humans could not. Of the few hundred people who considered themselves professional divers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only a few dozen had gone down one hundred feet, and barely a handful had gone past that. Some died trying. In 1901, a youth magazine described the horrors of diving in cheeky terms: “The wife of a diver, poor woman! [She] starts with terror every time she hears a doorbell ring.”

  There was no justifiable reason to risk life and limb except to see something interesting, like sunken ships. In 1891, the American journalist Cleveland Moffett documented his attempt to attach chains around a sunken tugboat near Fort Montgomery on the Hudson River in New York. The first diver who tried had passed out at one hundred feet and had to be pulled up by a rope tied around his waist. (“I felt like I was dreaming,” the man said when he came to.) Moffett then volunteered to go down, put on the one-hundred-seventy-five-pound metallic suit, and descended to one hundred fifty feet.

  I got into the suit and went down, and I stayed down until that chain was under the shaft. It took me twenty minutes, and I don’t believe I could have stood it much longer. The pressure was terrible, and those twenty minutes took more out of me than four hours would, say at fifty feet. But we got the tugboat up and she’s running yet.

  Smith didn’t intend for a diver to go down to the Titanic. But nor was he able to deliver a craft capable of the underwater maneuvers he had in mind. By 1914, virtually all the world powers had submarines in their navies that labored to go past seventy-five feet. Even if someone could build a steel cylinder capable of withstanding deep-sea pressure at one or two miles, there was the question of buoyancy and how it would get back up. Submarines function with intricate configurations of air ballast; flooding the tank makes it sink, air makes it rise. Provided Smith could find the right balance to descend slowly, he would have to adjust the air tanks manually to make the craft hover slightly above the wreck.

  Smith had capitalized on the human longing to fill an open wound. He fanned the insatiable hunger to hold on to the ship, up to and including physically grasping it again. But provided it could even be done—safely, efficiently, affordably—the questions remained as to what good any of it would do. An editorial referencing Smith in the Escanaba Morning Press of northern Michigan published a sniping one-line editorial comment: “A western genius declares he can raise Titanic, but he neglects to tell us why anyone should want to raise her.”

  Nostalgia is a powerful force, yet it’s still no match for the forces of the deep sea, to say nothing of the realistic price tag. The Iola Register in southeast Kansas posed it the most directly: “Personally we have no inclination toward heroism, and if we could raise the money to raise the Titanic we’d keep the money and let her stay there.” Smith had gone to great lengths to map the intricacies of the who, what, where, and when. Yet in trying to muster the case for the world’s most ambitious civil engineering project in the history of humanity, he couldn’t explain the why.

  * * *

  More than wistfulness, nostalgia, financial prudence, or protection of secrets, the most common reason to salvage and refloat a ship is because it blocks traffic. That was why the Cuban government wanted the Maine moved from Havana waters, and also why obscure ships like the USS Saint Paul, of no particular distinction or renown, received the resources necessary to remove, refloat, and revitalize it after it capsized in its dock in New York Harbor in April 1918.

  Shallow water helps. Neither the Maine nor the Saint Paul would have been raised and refloated for duty had they sat hundreds of feet deep. Accessing them would be too expensive, and they would not obstruct ships still in operation.

  To figure how deep is too deep to recover, one need only consider the largest ship ever built, a Japanese-made supertanker the length of four football fields called the Seawise Giant (and later renamed Knock Nevis), which floated from 1979 until it was sold for scrap in 2009. The Titanic had once been the largest moving object on earth. By tonnage, the Seawise Giant was six times bigger, with a turning radius of two miles. When afloat, its hull descended eighty feet underwater, which implied that so long as any wreck was deeper than that, no ship on earth could strike it.

  There is a gray zone, however, of what constitutes an obstruction to surface navigation. Sometimes the obstacle isn’t so much physical as emotional. The Swedish government faced such a dilemma after the sinking of a steamer ferry, the SS Per Brahe. The ferry was so overloaded with crates of stoves, sewing machines, peaches, and pears that on its way to Stockholm one night in November 1918, a gust of wind blew over some of the cargo, rocked the ship off-balance, and sent the capsized vessel and its twenty-four passengers to the bottom of Lake Vättern. The incident would have been unremarkable had one of the dead passengers not been Sweden’s most famous artist at the time, John Bauer, who was moving to Stockholm with his family in hopes of a spiritual revival of his work. Owing almost entirely to Bauer, the Per Brahe grew into a Titanic-like fable of hubris and humility, which compelled Swedish officials to find a way to get it back. But the more compelling reason the prospect of raising it drew government support was that it was moored in one hundred five feet of water, a depth dangerous to other ships not physically but preternaturally, considering the wreck was a grave site. Plus, unlike the Maine, the Per Brahe had sunk not from an explosion but from its own obtuseness and was believed to be in revivable shape.

  The day the Per Brahe was raised in 1922, twenty thousand people lined the shoreline to watch it be towed into port. To finance its salvage, newsreels of the second coming of the now-famous ship were shown in cinemas across Sweden. Much like the Titanic, endless fascination with the Per Brahe’s demise fueled what one newspaper called a “macabre tour,” where the ghost ship was towed from port to port for people to gawk at. And when interest subsided and spectators stopped buying tickets, the Per Brahe was repaired, rejuvenated, sold to Finland, and quietly put back into service as a cargo steamer. The hope was that the ship could shed its chilling past and just get back to work.

  The Titanic was never a serious candidate for such an operation, and with its financial constraints, Charles Smith never had a chance. The $1.5 million Smith sought amounted to a quarter of all U.S. spending on health care and a fifth of the country’s entire budget for education. If the technology existed—and Smith’s public dressing-down in the media had exposed that it did not—the actual price tag of finding, raising, and restoring the Titanic in 1914 was probably in the range of $50 to $100 million, not counting inevitable overruns and delays. Such a sum was beyond any one man’s ability to underwrite, and the U.S. Treasury could not be hijacked for such a complex project highly prone to failure.

  One irony of Smith’s collapse was that his timing was, by the measures of a sunken ship, as good as it would ever be. There was still frequent debate among eyewitnesses and ship designers about how the Titanic actually went down. It was difficult to imagine how it might have broken in half, particularly when the iceberg scraped the bow and not the center point, where it might have weakened its central hull. To the average reader of scientific journals and newspapers, it was easier to picture the ship sinking in one piece, as most ships do, and that it remained intact on the ocean floor.

  Had this been true, in the hypothetical alternate reality that the Titanic had remained on the seabed in largely the same condition it was seen leaving Southampton, the best possible time to salvage it would have been in the immediate years after it sank. Erosion of the wooden decks, the steel railing, and the iron hull would have begun instantly, but years of erosion are favorable to decades. Later in the century, when underwater technology advanced far enough to support such a sweeping search-and-salvage mission, the aging ship’s devolution and dereliction would leave it too diminished to be moved.

  Charles Smith might have realized that of all the people who would ever dream of lifting the Titanic, he probably had the best shot. Even a mining engineer in Colorado had to know that leaving an object deeply submerged in seawater for decades would eat away at its structure, the same way an abandoned mine would eventually collapse and reclaim itself. The planet has a way of humbling the bold, and before long, Smith found himself publicly humbled. Every component he promised would be simple and cheap turned out to be unimaginably complex and exorbitantly expensive.

  By late 1914, Smith’s once-grand plan had been reduced to small, single-line snippets in the newspapers with vague updates—often reporting there were no updates. Several months later, in the early days of 1915, all mention of Smith and his plan had disappeared altogether. The full spreads and elaborate illustrations of electromagnets and electric cables were taken over by the run-up to the biggest foreign war America had yet experienced. On February 22, 1915, after the Germans spent months placing floating mines in common shipping routes, Americans woke to news that two U.S. cargo steamers, the Carib and the Evelyn, had been struck and sank. Within two weeks, President Wilson authorized an enormous expansion of the U.S. Navy, including the rapid construction of two new battleships, six destroyers, and eighteen submarines. Two weeks after that, the assistant secretary of the navy—a rising young politician named Franklin Roosevelt—began to publicly lobby Congress for more American muscle at sea.

  Three years had gone by since the Titanic sank, but it may have been three hundred considering how quickly the world had changed. Shock that a steamer had sunk in 1912 was overtaken by almost daily sinkings in 1915. The battles between American and British ships against German U-boats yielded incessant tragedy. In late March, the British passenger ship the Falaba was sunk by a U-boat (UB-28) near Ireland. In early April, the German auxiliary cruiser SMS Kronprinz Wilhelm stopped near Virginia after eight months at sea and was immediately boarded and overtaken by the U.S. government. Fighting would continue throughout the summer and the following three years. Most were small maneuvers compared to the tragedy of May 1915, when a U-boat torpedoed the British passenger steamer Lusitania off Ireland. Two explosions sank the ship in eighteen minutes, killing almost twelve hundred civilians.

  The Lusitania’s dead rivaled the number lost on the Titanic, but the Lusitania seemed worse. An iceberg was an act of God, but a torpedo was at the hands of man, and thus avoidable. Early reporting in England and the U.S.—whose loss accounted for 128 of the total—decried that the Lusitania was a civilian vessel sunk in an unprovoked attack in violation of wartime custom and international law. But the German government argued that the ship had entered a declared war zone, and, in addition to its full load of passengers, was also alleged to be carrying hundreds of tons of munitions, which made it subject to attack. The British insisted on the more favorable storyline for sixty-seven years, until 1982, when salvagers were getting close to excavating large portions of the Lusitania’s wreck. For their safety and to avoid another tragedy from the same wreck, the British foreign secretary admitted that while it was true the Lusitania had no weapons, it was transporting more than seven hundred tons of gun ammunition, 1,250 cases of shrapnel artillery shells, and more than one hundred cases of explosive bronze and aluminum powder.

  It’s hard to imagine someone like Charles Smith ginning up enthusiasm to raise the Lusitania the way he did the Titanic. Technically, it would have been easier, sunk in a mere three hundred feet of water. But sitting barely twelve miles off the coast of Ireland put it tantalizingly out of reach for a U.S. engineer. And besides, the Lusitania’s demise came in a long string of tragedies with wartime deaths in the millions. If there was money and time to be spared, it would be to fortify and build new ships, not rescue dead ones.

  This explains why Charles Smith disappeared from public view less than a year after he proposed his ambitious plan. He was nearing sixty and the final third of his life. Mining engineers don’t often find fame as enchanters of the world’s imagination, but Smith had enjoyed his time in the sun, and when it set, he knew it was over. Rather than double his efforts to capture the nation’s fraying attention, he let go and walked away. He returned the remaining money to investors and closed his accounts. Smith had the benefit of never being especially obsessive about the Titanic—this persona would come later, and with gusto—as much as he was drawn to a great challenge of engineering. But when the project went south, he did the same thing he did with a dried-up mine: he packed up and moved on. The price of zinc doubled in 1915, and Colorado had some of America’s largest deposits. Smith returned to work and let go of a plan that seemed a frivolous relic of a former time.

  As Smith yielded the stage, it was quickly taken over by bigger ambitions in the deep sea, ambitions that had nothing to do with nostalgia. In April 1916, a band of twenty-four self-described “young capitalists” on Wall Street, led by Percy Rockefeller, the nephew of John D. Rockefeller, formed a corporation called the Interocean Submarine Engineering Company to find the wealth lost in the sea. Already four hundred eighty-one vessels had sunk as casualties of the Great War, their collective value more than $243 million. One of them, the passenger steamer SS Merida, which shuttled between New York and Havana, was thought to be carrying 372 bars of silver worth more than $200,000 and more than $500,000 in other coins and other metal bars.

  Deep-sea treasure hunting was a lust for money wrapped in a self-serving vision of technological conquest and a dose of national philanthropy. Like Smith, Rockefeller and the Interocean Submarine Engineering Company earned considerable press at a time when dreaming big was in vogue and overpromising bore little risk. And like Smith, the company ran into the head winds of world war, insufficient funding, overruns, and embarrassing miscalculations.

  As a decade, the 1910s were heavy with more nautical defeat than triumph. The worst of them came in the midst of the biggest war the world had ever seen. In 1916, an Italian troopship, the Principe Umberto, was passing from Albania to Italy when it was struck by an Austrian torpedo. Lives were lives, but military casualties seemed not to warrant the same public outrage as civilian lives, especially wealthy ones. In a sober example of which shipwreck victims get remembered and which are forgotten, the Umberto took 1,926 soldiers’ lives to the bottom of the Adriatic—more than four hundred more dead than on the Titanic. The next day, The New York Times reported the incident in four sentences on page ten.

  Chapter 6

  I REGARD THE TITANIC AS MINE

  Lawrence Beesley didn’t want to die. All he wanted was to be part of the action, which at the moment was on the starboard deck of the RMS Asturias, a retired half-scrapped troopship that with a fresh coat of paint and new lettering was now an identical replica of the Titanic. Beesley was caught up in the excitement, the sense of panic and mayhem. He recognized that the next few minutes would memorialize the seminal moment of the twentieth century, and with him at the center of it.

  Decades earlier, Beesley had bought a ticket to tour the United States. He might have crossed the ocean aboard the Olympic, the previously grandest ship of the Atlantic, but friends convinced him to wait for the next-best model. Beesley, from Derbyshire in the East Midlands, had been raised in a family wealthy enough to make such lavish choices. When it came time to sail aboard the Titanic, he arrived hours before departure to revel in the trappings of opulence, wandering the dining salons and libraries and the gymnasium, where he was photographed on the electric camel that would pulse a person forward and back as a form of exercise.

  Days later, as the ship began its slow but sure descent to the bottom of the sea, Beesley was surprised by a turn of luck. Rather than go down with the ship, as was expected of a man of thirty-four yielding to younger and female passengers, he happened to be standing near lifeboat thirteen, which he noticed still had several seats available. Not a lady or child was in sight, so Beesley did as instructed and got in the damn boat. To survive was better than the alternative, but it resigned him to the lifelong fate of retelling the details of this story as a means of reputational self-defense.

  Which is why, when seeing a second chance to sink with the Titanic, he was ready to take it.

  In January 1958, Beesley arrived at Pinewood Studios west of London dressed in khaki pants, a tie, and a baggy black peacoat down to his ankles. He was eighty, with silvery slicked-back hair, and he was prepared to meet his fate, or some semblance of it, and finally perish with the ship.

  To film A Night to Remember, this second sinking of the Titanic, was the culmination of five months of re-creating every detail of 1912 to the point that the catering company provided the crew with the exact same meals served on the ship. Now, in 1958, the sinking scene would forever be the most historically precise reenactment of the real thing, down to the exact words spoken in the ship’s final moments as they’d been recalled by survivors. No movie studio in England had a pool big enough to film passengers clamoring for lifeboats, so the production was moved to Ruislip Lido, a nearby reservoir, and scheduled for two a.m. on an icy night. This required hundreds of background actors to jump into the frosty water. When they hesitated, Kenneth More, the main star of the film, who played second officer Charles Lightoller, jumped and instantly regretted it. “Never have I experienced such cold in all my life,” he later said. “It was like jumping into a deep freeze. The shock forced the breath out of my body. My heart seemed to stop beating. I felt crushed, unable to think. I had rigor mortis, without the mortis. And then I surfaced, spat out the dirty water and, gasping for breath, found my voice. ‘Stop!’ I shouted. ‘Don’t listen to me! It’s bloody awful! Stay where you are!’ ”