After paying insurance claims for the wreck, sixteen insurance companies in the U.S. and the UK owned the Central America and its contents. They never expected to get it back. But in 1988, when a salvage firm announced that it had found the one-hundred-forty-year-old ship, half of the insurance companies still existed and, using newspaper clippings and corporate minutes, they proved the gold belonged to them. The head treasure hunter, Thomas Thompson, sang the blues in front of a judge: “It saddens me to think that it could be possible that a group of the largest insurance companies in the world could be awarded the treasure we worked so hard to find and recover.” Thompson ended up with $50 million to distribute among the dozen investors who underwrote the salvage operation. But instead, he kept the money for himself, left town, and was pursued by the FBI until he was caught in 2015. A collectibles expert told me that gold pieces from the Central America still show up at auctions every now and again. “For anyone who wants to own one, it’s not hard,” he said.

  Salvage law is written to encourage operations like Thompson’s. If someone is willing to go through the effort to find a wreck, the law generally agrees they deserve a portion of its value. The same is true for ships in distress. If a vessel is at risk of sinking or blocking traffic, a Good Samaritan can help, and if the salvor saves the day, a court will often grant them a generous reward. Such rewards can be expensive for the distressed captain, but several maritime lawyers told me that the payments incentivize people to help others in dangerous environments without obvious emergency response.

  The law of finds, however, involves a sense of discovery—a finders keepers of the sea. If a wreck has been abandoned for a number of years and no owner or insurer has made any effort to find or reclaim it, then the wreck enters a legal purgatory. This leaves it open to scavengers and shipwreck enthusiasts. Convince a judge in the logical jurisdiction that you are willing to put in the effort to do something with the ship, usually by proving that you actually have been to the ship’s location and have brought back a piece of it as proof—an artifact known as a res, from the Latin word for “thing”—and if no one objects, the ship can be yours.

  This was the provision of law that Woolley sought to exploit. By 1965, Woolley reasoned that the Titanic had been abandoned for more than fifty years. No one even knew where it was. Since Charles Smith’s failed efforts in 1914, not a single person had visited the wreck or had any serious plans to move it. The White Star Line had gone belly-up in 1934 and then merged its defunct assets with Cunard, which then erased virtually all mention of White Star by 1950. Cunard wasn’t going to fight for an aging wreck that it never even owned, and Lloyd’s of London had long ago washed its hands.

  Woolley thought that if he could cobble together a few thousand pounds, a round and not paltry amount, Cunard might write him a letter saying, sure, it’s yours. But even this plan failed when Cunard rejected Woolley’s correspondence altogether, saying they wanted no part in the Titanic. A junior officer at Lloyd’s echoed the sentiment that as long as the ship sat underwater, it was worthless. The same thing happened when Woolley sought waivers from several descendants of victims who had property on board.

  Woolley’s low-cost lawyer gave him more budget-friendly advice. He told him not to bother with going to the wreck and the formality of plucking off a res. This was convenient, since Woolley, who was working in a factory making nylon pantyhose, had neither the means nor the know-how to even get to where the Titanic sank, let alone miles underwater. All he had to do, the lawyer said, was place a classified ad in four or five newspapers announcing that he was claiming ownership of the wreck of the Titanic. He advised Woolley to do it on a holiday, when fewer people would be reading, and the smaller the font the better.

  Years later, Woolley would say he did exactly this. He wrote to the Coventry Evening Telegraph and the Newcastle Evening Chronicle and submitted three-line classified ads stating that he, Douglas John Faulkner-Woolley, age thirty-one, laid claim to the salvage rights of the Titanic, former ship of the White Star Line. According to Woolley, he included his name and address and invited any objectors to respond within two weeks. Then he recalled that he sat nervously by his postbox every day waiting for legal papers or stated objections. Hearing none, Woolley was told by his lawyer that he could consider the Titanic functionally his.

  In reality, Woolley appears to have skipped every step but the last one. I was skeptical that this was how shipwreck rights changed hands, even in the days before the internet. I also had trouble believing that such a brash classified ad about the world’s most famous wreck would be met with complete silence for two weeks. Perhaps people thought it was a joke and turned the page. But this was 1967, a time when everyone read newspapers, including classifieds, and when anything that mentioned the Titanic had become fresh and exciting. I consulted several maritime lawyers and historians, who believed it far more likely that Woolley never placed such classified ads and merely claimed that he had. And, as it happens, a search through large and small British newspapers yielded no matching classified ads in the 1960s—the era when Woolley was maneuvering to launch his master plan—no mention of ownership rights, and no invitation for anyone to object. Instead, it appears he simply began telling co-workers, friends, and anyone he met that he owned the most famous shipwreck on earth, a claim tailor-made to dominate dinner parties and workplace chatter. “I regard the Titanic as mine,” he began saying.

  This was a tall tale, but not an obvious lie. Lying requires knowing the truth and rejecting it, but the more he repeated it, the more Woolley seemed to really believe it, and the more confident he grew, the more convincing it became to everyone else. “I’m the only person to have filed formal legal claims, so I reckon the Titanic is mine,” he said years later, summing up his argument. If the Titanic effectively belonged to no one, then why shouldn’t it belong to him? And if it could, then he concluded that it did.

  * * *

  While still out of reach, the ability to visit the Titanic had taken leaps by Woolley’s era. In 1934, the famed scientist William Beebe unveiled a steel ball that would allow two people to investigate the sea as deep as three thousand feet, which amounted to a half mile down and just shy of a quarter of the distance to the Titanic. Beebe designed the device, called the bathysphere, to mimic the underwater homes of a spider known as the “diving bell spider,” which weaved and spent their lives in waterproof cocoons. The spiders were a marvel, and Beebe reasoned that if spiders could live underwater, so could humans. He spent three years strengthening the steel sphere from leaks and cable breaks likely to arise under seven thousand tons of pressure. When he began experiments, the overwhelming sensation of being so deep was the darkness, a color “blacker than black,” he recalled. And even amid constant mishaps, including once when the crew on the boat above watched a rope snap and believed the bathysphere and its occupants were lost to the ocean forever, Beebe continued to go back.

  A decade later, underwater explorers Jacques Cousteau and Émile Gagnan perfected an underwater breathing device called the aqualung, which allowed a person unconstrained by steel or cable to descend to a depth of about one hundred feet. Any diver who went that deep quickly felt the effects on his body and reported to those on the surface why sending a human down thousands more feet was preposterous. Their breathing device wasn’t the first, but it was the most popular, which expanded ocean exploration from the niche domain of scientists to the general public. Early encounters of underwater life spread into pop culture, including the peculiar 1956 blockbuster Manfish and the weekly TV show Sea Hunt, about a detective who solved crimes and fought bad guys below the waves.

  The most significant advance in this golden age of underwater exploration came from the brain of Auguste Piccard, who had ironically built his expertise as a hot-air balloonist. Piccard had taken large helium balloons to record-breaking altitudes in the atmosphere in the 1930s. He used the same design to construct what he called a bathyscaphe suspended by large floats overhead. Like a submarine, the floats regulated the ratio of water to air, which allowed the craft to control its own buoyancy and navigation without the assistance of a tether. In 1960, Piccard’s son Jacques took the most elaborate bathyscaphe ever built to the deepest point in the ocean, a seven-mile-deep depression in the South Pacific known as the Challenger Deep.

  Piccard’s bathyscaphe for that mission, the Trieste, a craft that looked like a giant slug with zebra stripes, was so large and heavy that it couldn’t sit aboard a ship but instead had to be towed in the water. It also required an enormous amount of energy to make the fourteen-mile round-trip descent, burning through its fuel tank of forty thousand gallons of gasoline. In a time before satellite GPS could pinpoint the precise site of the deepest crevice, the team found the dive site the old-fashioned way, by tossing TNT over the side of the ship and timing the low-hummed echo that reverberated down to the bottom and back up to the ship’s hydrophone.

  On January 23, 1960, going down was a triumph, but unlike Beebe in 1934, who marveled at every fish, eel, and squid he could see swimming by the windows, the descent on the Trieste was more symbolic than visual. The craft had a single window the size of a quarter (anything bigger risked the structural integrity of the craft) and the view was either pitch-black or hazy with mud. “It was like looking into a bowl of milk,” Don Walsh, a navy engineer who made the descent with Jacques Piccard, later said.

  Meanwhile, in the Atlantic, geologists were using the latest renderings of the deep sea to decipher earth’s history. The American geologist Marie Tharp studied sonar profiles in the mid-Atlantic and noticed a curious seam, almost like the suture of a peach, that extended thousands of miles from Iceland to Antarctica. Her studies revealed a rift stretching more than forty thousand nautical miles, a discovery that helped formulate theories that the continents were not stagnant but in constant motion, crawling millimeters every year. Extrapolating the implications helped explain the continental stress that causes earthquakes.

  This type of emerging knowledge of the deep sea formed the foundation of a new industry devoted to salvaging ships. Many young children love ships, but it was the rare one in 1924 who became obsessed with ship demolition and wreck removal, a niche but lucrative line of work pioneered in England by a young man named Risdon Beazley. Beazley started demolishing ships as a teenager and by age twenty-two started a company to professionally destroy wrecks. Owing to his unmatched experience, Beazley won lucrative contracts from the British government to get rid of junk ships, starting with small boats in shallow water and growing to larger projects that required so much advanced equipment that he had almost no competition. In 1937 alone, he completed two enormous excavations. He cut up and disposed of the cargo ship English Trader, which had struck ground in Dartmouth Harbor, and pulled up and salvaged the Kantoeng, then the largest dredge on earth.

  Ships were salvageable if they had sunk relatively recently. But Beazley began dreaming of older ships, ones long faded in the world’s consciousness. By the 1950s, he shifted his focus from ship salvage to cargo recovery, which would be considerably easier to execute and net him far more money. The most obvious ship to target was the Titanic; not only did it carry valuable items, but on account of its celebrity, every fork, doorknob, and thimble he could surface from the wreck would sell for many times its original value.

  Beazley launched the first serious attempt to salvage the contents of the Titanic in July 1953. Unlike Smith or Woolley, who saw their best chance of success by whipping up a frenzy, Beazley told no one when he chartered the Admiralty Coastal Salvage vessel the Help to carry out a secret mission, which was intentional, since Beazley had no intention of tiptoeing around a fragile cultural artifact that also doubled as a grave site. Instead he dropped explosives above the presumed site in hopes of hitting the wreck and blowing open the hull so he could retrieve objects inside. Almost anyone alive would have considered this shockingly reckless. But Beazley was playing for an audience of one: himself. Luckily, he had the wrong site by several miles and ended up dropping TNT onto seafloor mud. He tried again a year later but got no closer.

  Eventually Beazley would realize his folly and ineptitude. He would mature from a naïve treasure hunter into a serious wreck explorer who leveraged experience and built partnerships. In a masterstroke, he built two salvage vessels, the Twyford and the Droxford, and got the British government to help pay for them under a vague agreement that the Crown would be entitled to a portion of whatever cargo he recovered. This worked out for all parties when, by 1965, he’d pulled up more than fifty-five thousand tons of precious metals, including copper, nickel, lead, and, of course, gold.

  With the secret out that wrecks were one of earth’s great untapped sources of wealth, the elbowing sparked a literal gold rush of the sea. The process was haphazard but designed to be quick. Treasure hunters compared maps of the seafloor with famous trading routes of past empires. Find a spot of shallow water and pack your things to leave the next day. No one knew how much precious metal might sit underwater, but whoever got there first would find out.

  No place on earth was more popular than Florida and a stretch of shore known as the Treasure Coast, where a dozen Spanish ships were returning from Cuba to Spain in 1715 with thousands of ounces of silver when they were struck by a hurricane and sank. In the summer of 1967, so many hunting boats bobbed off Florida that they sometimes bumped into one another and captains employed armed guards on their decks to keep the peace. On an average day that summer, two hundred sixty-four pounds of silver were reportedly pulled out of the water. Some people celebrated publicly, but not all. Amid fear of piracy among neighboring boats, others denied they found anything at all.

  These were the days before the U.S. began to regulate lost treasure and salvage rights, an era of dumpster diving at sea that yielded incredible reward. Mel Fisher, a Florida man who lusted for and eventually found the most heavily laden of the Spanish ships, the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, a ship believed to be carrying $400 million in silver, gold, copper, gemstones, tobacco, and indigo, had two mottos he repeated every day he was on the water:

  Today’s the day and Finders keepers.

  Chapter 7

  BATHTUB EXPERIMENTS

  Declaring his association with the century’s most famous disaster brought Doug Woolley a sense of credibility and even mild celebrity. No longer was he just employee number 64 at the Hertfordshire hosiery factory. Woolley was a maritime guru with an expertise in ship salvage who was recognized at the pub and invited to speak at universities about his Titanic ownership and his plans to bring it back. Every ounce of attention seemed to beget more, and Woolley, who had seldom even ridden on a boat, fielded regular visits from reporters who sought his expertise on matters of deep-sea engineering.

  Woolley enjoyed these visits and relished the opportunity to be quoted so much that he often invited the newspapermen inside and put on a pot of tea while he offered a tour of his endless memorabilia, which supported his persona as a credible maritime expert. It was a feedback loop, and it worked perfectly.

  Woolley’s original plan was almost identical to Charles Smith’s, with some refinements in measurement. It called for two hundred pontoons evenly placed around the hull of the ship, all connected by nylon rope. He calculated that the Titanic’s deadweight was roughly sixty-six thousand metric tons, which meant each pontoon would be responsible for just over three hundred tons—heavy but doable. Once the pontoons were in place, ships on the surface would start to generate twenty megawatts of electricity to extract eighty-five thousand cubic yards of hydrogen from the seawater via electrolysis and pump the gas two miles underwater to inflate the pontoons. This assumed that the pontoons could anchor themselves under the ship, so as to propel the ship from below rather than pull from above and rip it apart. Woolley thought of a solution here, too. The same electrical system that would shoot the hydrogen underwater would create a powerful ultrasonic boom to separate the ship from the mud. It would be quick, maybe two or three seconds, and he’d have only one shot. The shock wave was designed to hit the ground only, but Woolley hoped that the boom didn’t accidentally damage the ship itself, or what was left of it.

  In August 1968, Woolley revealed this plan in a press conference he held in his apartment. He said it would cost £3 million, which was more money than Woolley had ever imagined existing in one place, let alone under his direction. But he also announced he had a backer, an electrical engineer he knew who Woolley said had promised “some money” to set up an experimental salvage company.

  After the articles ran, Woolley began receiving letters from actual engineers and wannabe collaborators. Woolley sorted through them with amusement and almost zero discretion. In Woolley’s view, anyone who wanted to help was qualified for the job; the bigger the team, the more senior his role as kingpin. By the spring of 1969 he began telling people that he had “gone international,” meaning he had received letters from the United States, France, and Hungary and was building a team, casually adding the names of the letter writers to publicity materials to inflate the size of his coalition.

  Under scrutiny, it may have appeared that Woolley was running a con. Not only was he claiming false ownership of a major historical artifact, but he was selling the idea that he had the authority and capability to retrieve it. The operation resembled the famous scams of legendary New York con artist George Parker, the man responsible for the old joke about selling the Brooklyn Bridge. Parker not only sold the bridge multiple times to gullible customers, he also forged official-looking documents to sell the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Statue of Liberty, and Grant’s Tomb. People love to believe more than they hate to be swindled, and the buyers of Parker’s bridge often refused to admit defeat until they were, in the case of one buyer, arrested for trying to install tollbooths on the popular roadway leading into New York City.