But it worked. In 1975, Kamuda’s group heard that the famous ocean scientist Jacques Cousteau was in the Aegean Sea off Greece looking for the lost city of Atlantis. Kamuda and several THS officials contacted Cousteau and suggested that, while he was there, he should look for the Titanic’s sister ship, the Britannic. The Britannic had sunk off the coast of Greece in 1916 after being struck by a German mine, but in the flurry of war, it was never found. Cousteau liked the idea and asked the group for more information.

  Mustering every detail it could find, the THS sent a lengthy dossier to Cousteau about the Britannic and the circumstances of its sinking, along with its final emergency coordinates. Cousteau reviewed the documents, and in November 1975, he directed his ship, the Calypso, to the probable site. For several weeks he scanned the seabed with a side-scan sonar vessel. Finding nothing, he slowly expanded the search area, and a month later he came upon a wreck more than six hundred fifty feet long buried three hundred feet deep. The Calypso circled the site with the sonar rig in tow while Cousteau inspected the damage from the mine. A year later, he swam through the crew quarters, which appeared to be in excellent shape.

  Word of a newly discovered 1910s-era passenger ship and the revelation that it was well preserved boded extremely well for future efforts to recover the Titanic. But the success came at a cost for Woolley. In his quest to go it alone and build his own team, he had declined to join the THS and ride the coattails of the Britannic’s triumph. He had declined to share any of his ideas with scientists like Cousteau who had the skills and equipment to explore underwater. And he had failed in Hong Kong to prove his ability to raise a wreck himself. His ambitions had largely been eclipsed by an alternate approach fueled more by expertise than emotion. When the Associated Press reported in July 1976, “Cousteau Strikes Gold Below Sea,” it was as though they’d stolen the headline Woolley craved most and given it to someone else.

  * * *

  It took two years for Woolley to climb back after his Hong Kong disappointment. Having jumped from job to job for most of his life, he lacked the skills and résumé that might have earned a man of his age higher-paying work. His obsession with the Titanic had cost him old friendships and seemed to turn off women.

  When he had a few hundred pounds saved, he moved to the East London neighborhood of Ilford, where most of his neighbors were immigrants from Pakistan and India. He furnished the apartment first with his albums of press clippings and then with any memorabilia he could find—ship replicas, old cargo certificates, peaked captain hats he picked up at thrift stores. Anything with the name Queen Elizabeth or Titanic he regarded as gold.

  For a while he continued his earlier approach, drumming up attention and leveraging it to earn more in hopes of building enough interest to raise actual money. But the strategy brought diminishing returns. Following the revival of the Titanic in Walter Lord’s book and the film A Night to Remember in the 1950s, the Titanic in the seventies had begun to recede from public view the same way it faded in the years after it sank. In Woolley’s early days, he could drum up enthusiasm with a well-placed phone call. Now, much more consequential news had overtaken the kind of frivolous reporting that had once gotten Woolley so much ink. America was at war in Vietnam. Miners and other wageworkers were repeatedly on strike in England. Clashes between Protestants and Catholics had erupted into bloody killings that occupied the British military, the economy, and people’s idle energies. The idea of reviving an aging shipwreck that predated most people alive didn’t make the cut.

  Adding to the Titanic’s receding relevance, finding old shipwrecks had become easier. Nearly every month in the early seventies saw the announcement of a new shipwreck discovered. In July 1973, divers came upon more than a hundred wrecks in the Ottawa River in eastern Canada. Farther south, in Texas, the state antiquities commission sponsored a search for sixteenth-century Spanish wrecks in the waters off Corpus Christi. Two years later, a seventeenth-century Spanish galleon turned up in South Carolina. And by the end of that summer, an international search of ancient trading routes led by National Geographic announced the find of a lifetime: a Cycladic-era trading vessel dating back as many as 4,500 years.

  Money was required to sponsor these expeditions, and generally, well-funded searches turned up big discoveries. A large fishing trawler sank near Cape Cod in February 1978, and two weeks later, divers found it and recovered the bodies of four crew members. Farther north, a well-funded Canadian archaeologist happened upon the San Juan, a Basque whaling vessel lost in the icy waters of Labrador in 1565. A year later, a privileged group of international students on an around-the-world voyage called Operation Drake discovered almost by accident a sunken 1699 trading ship on the Caribbean coast of Panama. The announcements began to blend together—did people really care if a wreck was from the sixteenth century or the seventeenth? As the general public grew numb to the sheer repetition of shipwreck discoveries, the announcements dropped from page A-1 to the inner sections.

  Yet for those motivated by money, the more lucrative deep-sea searches bypassed shipwrecks completely. “On the bottom of the ocean are mineral deposits large enough to supply all mankind for years, even centuries, to come,” reported The New York Times on July 17, 1977. “It’s a hunt for sunken treasure on a corporate, national, and global scale.” Experts imagined six thousand years’ worth of copper, twenty thousand years’ of aluminum, and one hundred fifty thousand years’ of nickel sitting in rocky deposits under the seafloor. The estimates didn’t account for a future of personal electronics that metabolized rare earth elements much faster than anything in existence in the seventies, but the quantities underwater were (and still are) eye-popping.

  Mining introduced another species of deep-sea hunter into a field already crowded with scientists and shipwreck hunters. The oceans, which once seemed empty and limitless started to feel small and crowded. In 1972, an ocean ecologist named Hjalmar Thiel went to a part of the Pacific Ocean known as the Clarion–Clipperton Zone, an area full of both new biodiversity unknown to science and rare-earth element deposits of copper, nickel, and manganese. To save money on the trip, Thiel split the ship cost with prospective miners, who made their intentions known in advance. “We had a lot of fights,” Thiel said after the trip. He told the miners that if they dumped their dredged-up sediment, it would smother plankton and domino up the food chain. The men resented the buzzkill. “They were nearly ready to drown me.”

  The ability to drill into the seafloor required a new technology that enabled a ship in deep water to position itself directly above its target and stay in that exact same place without an anchor for hours, sometimes days. Wind and water currents made this impossible until 1961, when an engineer for Shell named Howard Shatto realized that if a captain could maneuver a ship front to back and side to side, he could conceivably counteract any motion long enough to pull up a geologic sediment core. For most boats an anchor will suffice, but in high-stakes and high-cost situations, staying perfectly still comes with no room for error. A decade later, Shatto’s system, called “dynamic positioning,” was co-opted and became standard on all oil-drilling ships.

  This solved the surface issue, but still elusive was the ability to lower a drill several thousand feet into igneous rock below the seabed. Often the drill bits would wear down before they reached the desired depth, which required the crew to extract the spent bit, replace it, and guide it back through several miles of water into the exact same hole. One observer compared it to lowering a strand of spaghetti into the drain of an Olympic swimming pool. The first time it was done successfully was in 1970.

  Oil was the first undersea commodity worth getting. But the new tools capable of drilling faster and deeper were effective only if you knew where to drill. The oil companies with the most to gain, ones like Shell and Schlumberger, developed software to inspect a piece of seabed and instantly calculate advanced metrics like fluid saturation and multimineral lithology. Advanced vocabulary has always been the tool of scientists, but in the case of mega-profit oil exploration, technical jargon helped mask the ugly reality that loosely regulated corporations were cracking open the seafloor to pull up toxic sludge that, in even minor accidents, could devastate marine life.

  The extent of this danger became clear in 1969, when a blown-out well off Santa Barbara, California, ruptured the seabed in five places and spilled three million gallons of oil in one of the world’s most biodiverse coastal ecosystems. A year later, twelve wells off the Louisiana coast exploded into a fire so hot and powerful it burned for four months. Such horrifying accidents spawned an environmental movement that led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and a host of laws regulating everything from the use of pesticides to the limits of oil excavation on the seafloor. But drilling rigs still grew bigger and their depths deeper, along with a class of ships of their own—oil barges, submersibles, platforms, floaters, and jack-ups. One of the biggest drilling rigs ever built, a semi-submersible called the Deepwater Horizon and operated by British Petroleum, blew up in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. For five months, an uncapped well spilled more than two hundred million gallons of crude oil in the temperate waters of the Caribbean. Before the platform exploded and sank to the bottom of the Gulf, it had been capable of drilling thirty-five thousand feet deep, almost seven miles below the sea surface and three times deeper than the wreck of the Titanic.

  One could imagine the tremendous boost this technology could give Doug Woolley. Rather than bob aimlessly with a team of amateurs above where they thought the wreck might be, the ship that could hypothetically pull up the Titanic could stay perfectly still above the precise wreck site. It could send down a drill to barrel deep into the mud that would eventually give way to rock. Then it could drive long steel pipes into the holes and build an entire scaffolding around the wreck. The same remote-operated vehicle that guided a hydraulic drill could bore through the mud back and forth, like stitching a wound, to cradle the wreck. Then it could crawl along the scaffolding and attach inflatable pontoons to every inch of the ship.

  Woolley could have overseen this process from the ship above. He could have observed scrolling numbers and beeping machines when each phase was underway. And when the operation was complete, he could give the signal for a surface pump to shoot extremely compressed air into the pontoons and stand in anticipation as the seafloor rumbled and the Titanic began to rise. The primitive technology existed, and for the right reasons and the right price, it could be deployed, paid for, and put into action. The deep sea was becoming a business, and Woolley’s only product seemed more and more to be his childhood devotion to a relic of history. Innovations that might’ve helped him passed him by completely, a current of ingenuity swirling around him while he sat hopelessly moored in the mud.

  * * *

  Getting a person into the deepest parts of the ocean was one of the preeminent challenges of the twentieth century. But once that milestone was reached in 1960 with the team that touched the bottom of the Challenger Deep and demonstrated there was no deeper a human could go, the next frontier was to offer an undersea explorer some personal agency. Rather than simply descend and return to the surface, scientists needed technology to maneuver and explore the peculiar topography of seafloor rocks, mountains, and mud and eventually collect samples of deep-sea animals.

  The U.S. Navy had been working on deeper and deeper watercraft to evade detection from the Soviets, who were doing the same. But both powers focused on warfare more than sharable research, and so the pursuit of science fell largely to nonprofit research institutions on America’s coasts. The Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution had been established in 1930 at the direction of the National Academy of Sciences to be an epicenter of American ocean exploration. And even though its early days were spent on World War II preparedness and U.S. maritime advantage, by the fifties, the organization renewed its focus on basic underwater science and novel ways to explore it. In 1964, Woods Hole scientists unveiled a manned submarine called the Alvin capable of descending six thousand feet—just over a mile. Once proven successful, Alvin was immediately conscripted into government service in a high-stakes mission that redefined what it meant to be extraordinarily lucky.

  In January 1966, an American B-52 bomber collided with a tanker during a mid-air refueling maneuver above the skies of southeast Spain. As it broke apart, the bomber dropped four thermonuclear hydrogen bombs. Three of the bombs landed on the seaside fishing village of Palomares, a region known for cultivating tomatoes. “I looked up and saw this huge ball of fire, falling through the sky,” one of the villagers told a radio reporter. All the bombs detonated their conventional weapons in huge blasts but without producing a nuclear explosion. The fourth fell by parachute into the Mediterranean. Fearing it could explode at any moment, the navy deployed the Alvin to comb the seafloor for a nail-biting two months until the bomb was found, retrieved, and disposed of.

  Going deeper than a mile, however, proved challenging on account of the human life-support system. Any manned submersible going that deep would need to withstand extreme pressure while also constantly recycling unpressurized oxygen. Meanwhile, the old style of descending, touching bottom, and resurfacing required only a decent cable or air buoyancy tanks, but descending, moving around, and coming back to the exact same spot required global position capabilities before conventional GPS fully existed. The final quandary was propulsion. To reach extreme depths, the Alvin and similar crafts needed to be part car and part hovercraft, able to move in every possible direction, but especially up. In the worst-case scenario, a malfunctioning craft unable to arrest its fall would slam into the seafloor.

  This exact nightmare happened in 1968. As engineers were lowering the Alvin off the side of a navy pontoon off Massachusetts in hopes of studying the tops of seamounts and looking for whales, the support cables holding the Alvin snapped and the craft fell in the water. The three-man crew managed to open the hatch and escape, but the Alvin filled with water and sank to the bottom. Several minutes later, America’s best-equipped search-and-rescue vessel had sunk five thousand feet deep, where it stayed for almost a year until a more advanced vessel called the Aluminaut found the Alvin and carried it up. It was easier to fix the waterlogged craft than to scrap it, and by 1973, a strengthened titanium hull and a variable ballast system extended the Alvin’s reach to thirteen thousand feet, almost exactly the depth of the Titanic.

  Meanwhile, scientists never got tired of trawling the ocean floor. They took the Alvin through the mountain lake waters of the Panama Canal and to the Galápagos Rift, where the discovery of novel marine life in the warm-water vents was thought to explain the origin of marine life and, by extension, all life.

  Looking closely, one could see in the steady expansion of deep-sea research the inevitability that the Titanic would eventually be found. The technology had caught up with the challenges of the deep sea, and by the summer of 1975, anyone who understood underwater exploration could deduce it was a question of when rather than if the world got another look at history’s most famous wreck. Humans weren’t ready to search the entire floor of the world’s oceans, but coordinates given six decades earlier by a frantic telegraph operator narrowed down the search field to a few dozen square miles. Eventually, one lucky ship captain would discover the wreck, take underwater photos, and return to port with proof.

  Woolley was still certain that it would be him, and one day in June 1976, his phone rang and delivered him one last shot at getting it done.

  * * *

  Seven decades after the Titanic sank, its condition was still mostly a mystery. Broad scientific principles could inform reasonable assumptions about a hunk of steel and wood in a low-oxygen and high-pressure environment. But there remained a major question mark. Except for the conflicting accounts of the survivors, no one knew for sure in what position the ship sank and how it struck the seafloor. Those two factors alone would account for vastly different conditions of the aging wreck.

  At worst, the ship fractured into a thousand pieces upon its high-velocity impact with ocean rock. If this was the case, the boilers likely broke loose during the descent and ripped the entire hull apart. The implosion of internal air pockets likely flattened the superstructure, and any three-dimensional components still intact after the deep-sea crash were instantly flattened by the crushing pressure at twelve thousand five hundred feet. After this, the debris itself would be in fine shape, so long as you had a giant rake that could sweep the ocean floor as though picking up the far-flung shards of a broken plate.

  An alternate theory was kinder to the ship. Commander John Grattan, a former diving expert for the Royal Navy, held that the ship had sustained only minor damage during its descent and impact. The watertight bulkheads failed while the ship was still floating, which was lucky because it allowed seawater to penetrate every man-made crevice and equalize pressure before exploding in deeper water. Citing the sinking velocity of a missile falling through the water, Grattan believed the ship sank at a docile seven miles per hour, which was diminished further by the “cushioning effect” of compressed water near the seabed. Grattan thought the two-mile-long trajectory that others believed brought the ship to its maximum terminal velocity instead did the opposite. He believed the lengthy free fall gave the ship time to regain its center of gravity to the point that, when it finally reached the seabed, it set itself down gently in an upright position.