If Doug Woolley had better eyes underwater, he would’ve had a head start. He could have been the person who found the Titanic before he became the person to raise it. In his mind they were synonymous: Why do one without the other? But the world was hungry for news on either front, and he was beginning to feel the pressure of a crowded field. If he continued blowing past deadlines and dithering with a team of amateurs, someone smarter, wealthier, and better equipped would beat him to it.

  There was another way, he realized. Not to commence operations on the Titanic, but to buy time and prove his concept. And in the process, to stage a dress rehearsal that would shore up his self-proclaimed expertise and silence the doubters. If he could raise one ship—any ship—using his method of pontoons and hydrogen, then the world might believe he could raise a more difficult one.

  But which ship? A letter from a stranger stuffed with a newspaper clipping caught Woolley’s eye in the spring of 1972, and within two months, he was flying to Hong Kong for an audience with Queen Elizabeth herself.

  Chapter 8

  TAKE ALL THE BODIES AND TREAT THEM WITH RESPECT

  Queen Elizabeth traveled to Clydebank, Scotland, on September 27, 1938, the day the RMS Queen Elizabeth was to be christened. The ship had been built on a dry dock next to the river Clyde at a slight angle, so that once completed, it could slide on wooden rollers down the gangway and hit the water with minimal splash. Thirty thousand people arrived when the queen consort, the woman who was married to King George VI and would later be known as the Queen Mother, arrived to coronate the eighty-three-thousand-ton ship named for her. She also brought her children, one of whom, also named Elizabeth, would become the next, long-standing monarch.

  The Queen Elizabeth was a ship built for royalty, bigger and better than any ship that came before. It was designed particularly to eclipse its sister ship the Queen Mary, which had by then been in operation just two years. The Elizabeth was bigger than the Mary by eleven feet and four thousand tons, but significantly bigger than the Titanic by almost 50 percent. In a time darkened by the prospect of war, the queen used the occasion to try to fortify the resolve of the British people. “The launching of a ship is like the inception of all great human enterprises, an act of faith,” the queen said, the first time the general public heard her voice carried over the airwaves. “We cannot foretell the future, but in preparing for it, we show our trust in a divine providence and in ourselves.”

  When it came time to launch the ship, an engineer on the ramp moved a supporting beam before he was given the cue, and the ship began to slip down the ramp while the queen was still shaking hands. Acting quickly before the Elizabeth rolled away, the human Elizabeth grabbed a bottle of Australian wine and smashed it against the hull. Few noticed the hiccup. Everyone cheered, and the band played “Rule, Britannia,” the classic hymn of British patriotism.

  That was the Queen Elizabeth’s best day. Its worst came thirty-four years later on the other side of the world. The grand ship lived an exciting life. During the war, it carried troops to battle as one of the safest and fastest boats on the water that could outrun German U-boats. After the war, the Elizabeth was retrofitted to its original purpose as the grandest ship on the Atlantic, and owing to its storied past and glamorous present, it attracted celebrities, politicians, and royalty.

  The Titanic may have taken the same path had it not sailed a generation too early and met its fate too soon. But all ships eventually meet the great shipmaker in the sky, and on January 9, 1972, after the Elizabeth had been sold to a series of buyers for lower and lower prices, and after a Chinese man bought the ship intending to turn it into a floating university, the ship caught fire in the harbor of Hong Kong while undergoing renovations. Firefighters battled the blaze for two days, but the water used to fight the fire caused the Elizabeth to list and capsize.

  Doug Woolley was in his apartment in Baldock on January 11, 1972, when he read about the Queen Elizabeth. He had followed the ship’s entire trajectory, watching its transformation from warship to passenger liner, following it from Scotland to California and around the Cape of Good Hope. A man who made barely £50 a week could only dream of sailing on the jewel of the British shipping industry, but that didn’t stop him from collecting memorabilia and newspaper clippings from the Queen Elizabeth’s illustrious life on the high seas, including used tickets, a captain’s hat, and a small-scale replica. To shipping buffs around the world, the Elizabeth’s smoky demise sparked the conspiracy theories that always follow a major tragedy. But Woolley was more enchanted by another component of the QE1, a nickname that became necessary after the Queen Elizabeth 2 was christened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1967. The freshly sunken QE1 solved one of the most vexing challenges of Woolley’s plan for the Titanic: depth. The QE1 had sunk in shallower water than had the Titanic, making it far easier to test the hydrogen-pontoon method, prove its success, raise money, and build new momentum.

  The first step was certain because he had done it before. He would go about obtaining salvage rights to the QE1, fly to Hong Kong, and finally put his decades of calculations and enthusiastic teammates into the water and show the world that a man who had lived his whole life doubted and mocked was about to pull up a sunken ship.

  * * *

  Woolley arrived in Hong Kong in late April 1972 after the longest flight of his life. It was only the second flight he’d ever taken. The first had been to Hungary several years earlier to meet letter writers who begged to join his team after they read about his plans for the Titanic. His travels on airplanes enchanted him. Not only was he traveling internationally, he was traveling on business, a privilege rarely afforded factory workers. Between plates of goulash and pints of beer, Woolley reveled in the way he was moving and shaking as an international entrepreneur. “They treated me better than anyone treated me in my life,” Woolley said.

  The trip was a high-stakes gamble. He had quit his job at the pantyhose factory and let go of his apartment in Baldock, not knowing how long he’d be in Hong Kong to get the QE1 out of the water. He sold his furniture, put a few valuables in storage, and packed everything else he owned in a small suitcase.

  Traveling to Hong Kong raised the stakes. Several weeks before he left, Woolley began to feel like he was being followed. News of the tragedy of the QE1 was quickly overtaken by news of the fire, and specifically that it may have been arson. An investigation revealed that the blaze had started in nine different parts of the ship at the same time and was fueled by flammable materials not often sitting idle on ships. Attention swung to the last owner of the QE1, the Hong Kong businessman Tung Chao-yung, who in its final days afloat changed the ship’s name from Queen Elizabeth to Seawise University, a campus of the World Campus Afloat program, which would later become Semester at Sea. No one was able to prove the fire was Tung’s idea, but Hong Kong reporters pointed out the coincidence that the ship’s renovation had significantly overrun its budget and that the vessel was insured for twice its assumed value.

  If Woolley was reluctant to get caught in this web of allegations and crime, he acted the opposite. The same way he spread rumors about his ownership of the Titanic, he began to mention his desire to lift the QE1. He changed the name of his salvage company from Titanic Salvage Company to Seawise Salvage to associate himself with the name of the ship. Predictably, the newspapers followed suit and began to report that Woolley was aligned with the QE1, which wasn’t entirely true, and that he had bought the salvage rights of the QE1 for £3,000, which wasn’t true at all.

  Before he flew to Hong Kong, Woolley’s sleight of hand caught up with him one night while he ate greasy fish and chips with friends at the local chip shop in Baldock. The group made the spontaneous decision to go to one of the friend’s houses in Liverpool, and once they got there, the phone rang. The caller asked for Woolley and informed him that some businessmen on the island of Jersey needed to meet with him immediately. Woolley told this story years later in his biography of himself, which he wrote in the third person. “They told Doug to go to Southampton and get on the plane that was waiting for him at the airport to take him to Jersey, as it was of the utmost importance that they signed a contract as soon as possible,” he wrote. The businessmen, in Woolley’s telling, worked for another salvage company and wanted Woolley to relinquish his supposed rights to the QE1. Under the promise that the businessmen and Woolley would work together to raise the QE1, the contracts were signed and backs were slapped. “Doug was very bemused by the whole thing and did not know quite what to think,” Woolley wrote of himself. He returned home excited at the promise of partnerships and progress. He never heard from the businessmen again, but he later suspected that they were working for Tung, the former owner of the QE1, who wanted Woolley sidelined to prevent him from pulling up evidence that the fire was intentional.

  Whether this indeed happened is a mystery lost to time. Woolley’s repeated claims that he would raise the QE1 as a dress rehearsal for the Titanic were widely reported. When questioned about his stake in either of the ships, Woolley would point to prior news clippings that confirmed his involvement, which often satisfied the asker. Court filings were never produced; judges were never petitioned. From the moment the QE1’s fire broke out through the following years of legal squabbles, salvage attempts, and jockeying for any valuables on board, the title for the QE1 lay in the most obvious place: with the underwriters who insured it back in London.

  Perhaps predictably, Woolley left Hong Kong in the summer of 1973 with nothing but fond memories of Asia. Despite the easier challenge of raising a ship one hundred twenty feet rather than twelve thousand five hundred feet, Woolley was genuinely flummoxed that the British and Chinese officials who governed the waters, and Lloyd’s of London, which governed the ship, didn’t entrust him, with his lengthy résumé of press clippings, to undertake a high-stakes project of engineering next to one of the world’s most populous cities.

  While Woolley wandered the streets of Hong Kong on his final night in the city, a government commission made the decision that the fire rendered the QE1 in too poor condition to be refloated and repaired. The only option was to remove a once great ship by amputation, one piece at a time.

  * * *

  The collapse in Hong Kong dealt a heavy blow to Woolley. He hadn’t failed at raising the Titanic; he had failed at a project far easier than raising the Titanic, which didn’t bode well or look good. Like anyone who markets in public enthusiasm, Woolley knew his lack of success could be explained away in the short term, but eventually, the wave that carried him to the center of attention would break and whitewash him over.

  Woolley arrived back in London with little more than the clothes he was wearing. On the journey back from Hong Kong, his suitcase was lost, a mishap that fed his suspicion that his international reputation and his widely reported salvaging plans had made him enemies.

  In the story of Doug Woolley, this is his rock bottom. With few close friends, no money, no home, and no job, Woolley became homeless. From the airport, he found his way into London and for two weeks slept on a park bench in Chelsea beneath a statue of St. Thomas More, a Catholic saint executed for swimming against the changing tide of the Protestant Reformation. He subsided on donations and ate the expired items thrown away from nearby markets.

  One night a man walking through the park asked Woolley why he was sleeping on a bench.

  “I’ve just returned from Hong Kong, where we did a survey on the Queen Elizabeth,” Woolley told him.

  Woolley explained his work and that he owned the salvage rights to the Titanic and, by extension, he practically owned the Titanic itself.

  The man happened to work for the BBC, and when he went to the library and confirmed Woolley’s claims in newspaper write-ups, he invited Woolley to stay with him and then found him a small apartment. All his life Woolley obsessed over saving the Titanic, putting his entire life’s energy into rescuing a piece of faraway, mangled metal. And yet, when his most dire moment arrived, it was the Titanic that saved him. With the BBC fellow’s recommendation, Woolley got a job in a North London factory that made machinery parts. He found a room in a boardinghouse and, also with the BBC man’s encouragement, wrote to his member of Parliament, who urged the local council to find him a flat of his own. Using nothing but his association with the Titanic, Woolley in six months went from destitute and jobless to nicely employed and living in a large flat in the North London neighborhood of Edmonton. He thought the best part about his new home was its blank walls, which he hoped to fill with future photos and news clippings.

  Woolley still had muscle memory for building hype. He returned to planting stories in the papers and recruiting supporters, often in unlikely places. One night while walking through Edmonton, he noticed two feet sticking out from under a car. He checked to make sure the man was alive, and then invited him inside for tea. The young man, named Steven, said he was an artist and was taking an evening course in deep-sea diving. Woolley offered him a sleeping bag and his couch, and a week later, he made Steven second-in-command of his company, which he renamed for the third time, Titanic and Seawise Salvage.

  Meanwhile, there was another setback brewing. Two decades of breakneck innovation in undersea exploration, treasure hunting, and deep-sea mining had given way to a new area of research that directly objected to the notion of pilfering the ocean for valuables. A discipline called maritime archaeology was a new arm of conventional archaeology, where brush-holding scientists unearthed dusty pots and tiles. Performing this work underwater was newly possible in the 1970s with advanced diving tools and waterproof equipment that allowed a diver to spend hours and sometimes days submerged. Growing interest in maritime history signified a cultural change that old wrecks—and especially famous ones—weren’t to be exploited, manipulated, and least of all salvaged, but rather should be preserved and studied.

  George Bass, a Texas scientist, was the first person to call himself an underwater archaeologist. Bass started in the sixties looking for ancient wrecks in the waters off southwestern Turkey, a ship graveyard owing to its rocky outcrops and strong winds. When he found Byzantine wrecks from the fourth and seventh centuries and pulled up old lamps and remnants of ancient silk, he won the kind of attention that Woolley craved. Scientists flocked to the area. Newspapers trumpeted the findings. Bass was invited to speak at universities.

  Bass was a prolific diver. Every new discovery he made built the public case for appreciating wrecks with caution, not abandon. The best case of this was a two-masted Byzantine vessel filled with broken glass that Bass dated to the eleventh century. “We must have raised 1,000 amphoras that all looked identical,” Bass said. “But then one of the Turkish graduate students noticed graffiti on the glass, and that graffiti alone enabled us to determine that the ship belonged to a church and was carrying wine over land and sea to Byzantine troops in a certain city.” Bass began testifying in court against treasure hunters, who he believed were ransacking history’s priceless artifacts.

  Woolley wasn’t a treasure hunter. But he wasn’t a soft-handed scientist, either. His plan to lift the Titanic was in direct conflict with a growing sense of archaeological ethics that urged caution before upturning items that couldn’t be put back. In addition to the diaries, paintings, and wood carvings that Woolley wanted to bring up from the ship, there was also the matter that the Titanic was a mass grave. Responding to calls that the wreck and its contents—including human remains—be recovered for the sake of science, survivor Eva Hart said the victims had been through enough. “The ship is its own memorial,” she said. “Leave it there.”

  Plenty of people disagreed with such wrought oversentimentalization, including Woolley. Seventy years was long enough for bodies to rest in peace, if any still existed at all. “Take the archeologists in Egypt, for example,” he told an interviewer. “The pyramids are broken into and the Egyptian Mummies are exhumed for all to see.” Wouldn’t it be better if the remnants of history’s most famous shipwreck were in a museum, rather than hidden away? Wouldn’t the risk of jostling a historic site be worth the educational effort of being able to study it up close? It didn’t take much for Woolley to convince himself that jostling a grave site was actually the prudent thing to do. In the days after the Titanic sank, more than three hundred floating corpses were found and buried, many of them in a mass grave in Nova Scotia. If a recovery mission could raise more body parts, they too could be buried in a cemetery on land, where descendants could visit them. “We will take all the bodies and treat them with respect,” Woolley said.

  The argument had merit. But those who agreed with him were also his competition. In 1975, the American-based Titanic Historical Society had ballooned to a worldwide membership of one thousand. All meetings of the organization and editions of its newsletter, The Titanic Commutator, dissected the endless details and inconsistencies of the sinking. But the biggest question hanging over the group was when the wreck would be found.

  The natural inclination for any group of wreck enthusiasts is to go out and look for one. But Edward Kamuda, the group’s founder, knew his membership was better suited to armchair expeditions than real ones. Unlike Woolley, who insisted all decisions and operations went through him, Kamuda believed scientists would be the first to find the Titanic. He thought his group’s best shot at credit, glory, and proximity to famous wrecks like the Titanic was to open the group’s voluminous archive of historical data and expertise to credible marine scientists to search for clues. Such an arrangement of openly sharing information is extremely uncommon in wreck hunting, especially without fine-print contracts.