Grattan’s vision of the wreck was optimistic, but it wasn’t outlandish. Imagining the Titanic in good condition was crucial to rationalizing the cost, hardware, and time involved in mounting a survey expedition to go see it. This hopeful vision was also helpful to Doug Woolley, who read about Grattan’s theory and got in touch to inform Grattan that any survey “had to go through me,” as the wreck’s supposed legal owner. According to Woolley, Grattan’s reaction was deferential. Also according to Woolley, he made no secret of his enthusiasm for Grattan’s work so long as he could be associated with it.

  The true condition of the wreck was somewhere between the two theories. The lack of knowledge of the Titanic’s general condition received a boost in 1976 when a British archaeologist named Keith Muckelroy developed a model for forecasting the breakdown of aging wrecks, including the Titanic. Muckelroy’s idea, which is still deemed a seminal breakthrough in the field of maritime archaeology, was that a wreck’s state is not simply a function of the ship’s weight and basic gravity, as Grattan believed. Instead, its condition relied on a lengthy list of factors, including the materials the ship was made of, how specifically it was wrecked, its movement through the water column, the disintegration of its perishable materials, and, perhaps most overlooked, the constant changes of the seabed.

  A shorter way of putting Muckelroy’s theory was that time was a crucial factor, both in a wreck’s breakdown and also toward any attempts at excavation. Muckelroy published this finding after discovering the Kennemerland, a merchant ship of the Dutch East India Company that wrecked off the Scottish isles in December 1664. After nearby islanders helped themselves to the valuables floating in wood cases, the Kennemerland sat submerged for three hundred years. Muckelroy found the wreckage in 1971 and learned, at age twenty, that good news shouldn’t always be shouted from rooftops, and that announcing the Kennemerland discovery would effectively be its death sentence. “Only complete excavation can preserve the site from looting,” he wrote at the time, sober about the fact that unlike land-based archaeological sites, which could be easily guarded by people, barriers, and guns, protecting underwater sites from treasure hunters and memorabilia seekers was almost impossible.

  As a matter of protection, the Titanic had the best security a shipwreck could dream of. The most expert hunters couldn’t find it. Advanced divers couldn’t pilfer it. Everything that sank with the Titanic was likely still with it.

  But something about the current was changing. With the arrival of the 1980s, a clock somewhere had started to wind down. And with it, the reality that the wreck’s time alone in the quiet dark of the deep sea was coming to an end.

  Chapter 9

  PEOPLE THINK SINKING SHIPS IS EASY

  In late 1978, John Grattan, the senior Royal Navy diving expert, was the odds-on favorite for the man who would find the Titanic. His detailed theories about the ship’s status on the seafloor conveyed an advanced understanding of the complexities of the wreck. Grattan believed the Titanic was exactly twenty-two miles from the location given as its final coordinates. The precision of his declaration suggested immense confidence, and without anyone able to present compelling counterevidence, Grattan’s speculation was as good as fact.

  Grattan also had a track record of success. Several years prior, he commanded the HMS Reclaim, a British salvage ship that combed the Irish Sea to recover the wreckage of a crashed Aer Lingus plane. Not long after, he recovered a downed helicopter in the northern waters off Norway. Both operations used sonar crafts and underwater cameras, which earned him technical credentials.

  He also had experience searching for one of the most elusive and horrifying shipwrecks of all time. The cargo vessel General Grant had been sailing from Melbourne to London in 1866 when it hit cliffs in the notoriously perilous waters south of New Zealand. Most of the eighty-three passengers died, but the story of the General Grant grew darker in its aftermath. Thirteen passengers fought fierce waters and made it to a remote island, where they lived as castaways and survived on potatoes and seals for a year and a half in some of the most punishing weather on earth. Eighteen months later, only ten remained when a sealing brig passing by saw their frantic signals and took them to New Zealand.

  The General Grant was worth salvaging not because of the toll of human lives but because it was rumored to be holding at least twenty-seven hundred ounces of gold, worth, in today’s currency, more than $5 million. Search and salvage attempts began just two months after the survivors were rescued in 1868 and continued until 1916, when scavengers stopped trying. After more than a dozen ships had visited the site and divers swam more than forty nautical miles around the area and returned empty-handed, treasure hunters mostly gave up.

  Half a century later, Grattan gave it another shot, and in 1975, he actually found it—or at least he found something. He returned to England with pieces of mid-nineteenth-century wood, bent metal, and what seemed like shards of glass that he believed to be from the General Grant. Notably, he found no gold. Later surveys revealed that Grattan’s claim of the General Grant was actually a French ship called the Anjou, which wrecked in 1905, likely while looking for the General Grant as well. To this day, the wreck and its gold are still waiting to be found.

  Several years later, Grattan’s résumé and his interest in the Titanic caught the attention of a millionaire pharmaceutical tycoon named James Goldsmith, who, upon meeting Grattan, agreed to finance an underwater survey at the exact site Grattan believed he would find the Titanic. Goldsmith’s interest was partly for the sake of scientific inquiry, but mostly as an investment in media and marketing. Before he inked the deal with Grattan for the survey, he brought in Woolley too, in case Woolley’s claim of salvage rights actually held up in court.

  Goldsmith was relatively new to wreck hunting, but he was a familiar character in the history of high-profile scientific quests: a rich man at the top of his industry who had grown bored. Money had swelled his ego, which had fueled his belief that the person who found the Titanic would be an international celebrity. Goldsmith figured that the media’s reaction to his plan to survey the Titanic would be equal to a private company trying to put a man on the moon. He’d put up the money so long as someone else was willing to do the work.

  As it happened, Goldsmith had approached Woolley at the perfect time. By that point, Woolley had shed everyone on his previous team, including the boy mascot and the young man he found lying under the car. The group was riddled with mismanagement and sniping, much via written correspondence that had the effect of enlarging small tiffs into lengthy distractions. Woolley was also growing impatient. He had been promising immediate action on his plan for more than a decade. “I got the sense I needed to increase the visibility of the operation, and to do that I brought on more serious people,” Woolley recalled years later.

  Goldsmith offered Woolley no money—he likely realized he didn’t need to—but he did promise Woolley that his name would appear on all marketing materials for the survey and he would be included in the highly publicized celebrations of its success. Faced with the existential dread of receiving nothing at all, Woolley saw this as a no-brainer.

  The fairness of the arrangement was a matter of perspective. Woolley saw himself as the nucleus of the operation and was excited to partner with a well-known millionaire. After ten years of trying to drum up the money, he had finally found the limitless underwriting he needed.

  Goldsmith, however, saw Woolley as an insurance policy. Success required people who knew what they were doing, and in addition to Commander Grattan, Goldsmith brought on an accountant named Clive Ramsey to manage the finances and an entrepreneur named Philip Slade, who could coordinate the mechanics. Woolley was welcome to do interviews about the operation and hype its inevitable success. But he was pointedly not invited aboard the boat that in the spring of 1980 would go to the wreck site and tow a series of sonar rigs more than two miles underwater until a series of beeps indicated the wreck was found.

  Before embarking on the survey, Grattan locked himself in his house and double-checked every possible detail known about the ship. He read dozens of books about the disaster and also the 1912 incident report by the British Board of Trade, which was filled with painstaking detail about everything from the design of the ship to its construction, its equipment, the precise ways the lifeboats were filled and launched, the contents of all wireless communication, official orders, passenger biographies, crew credentials, instances they were trained for, and matters of on-board discipline. After that, he turned to marine science. He sought out experts on ocean pressure, temperature, marine life, and photodynamics. When people said that the deep sea was dark, did they mean dark like walking to the bathroom at night or dark like being blind? He examined tides and ocean currents and learned about celestial navigation and snowfall in Greenland. No morsel was too minute for Grattan, who thought that if he knew enough, he could almost become the Titanic and picture himself in its place.

  Grattan mapped out his plan in rough drawings and chicken scratches. A sonar-powered submersible would be towed behind a boat and scan the seabed from both sides. The sonar vehicle would relay pictures back to the search ship, where the team would look for signs of debris. If the crew identified a book or candlestick or windowpane, the rig would perform another pass, and upon confirmation, it would shrink the search area until the hull came into view. Once the sonar rig found the wreck and sent down a transponder to mark the spot, the crew would release a remote-operated vehicle equipped with lights to illuminate the wreck and take pictures. Then the remote vehicle would open like a Russian doll to release a smaller craft. The larger portion, called “the mother,” would return to the surface with the early photographs. The smaller craft, “the baby,” would enter the Titanic to film its interior.

  Grattan believed the images would be earth-shaking. The British writer Joseph Conrad had once referred to the Titanic as the “marine Ritz,” after the tony London hotel. Seventy years later, Grattan imagined the ship’s fine finishes and ornate flourishes had spared it from extreme ocean degradation. But beyond that, all Grattan could do was hope for the best.

  * * *

  Optimism in the face of uncertainty is always better than the opposite. But the condition of the ship and any of its contents rested on the unknown condition of the seafloor.

  Expeditions for decades generally confirmed Darwin’s desert theory of the oceans—that underwater environments were the same everywhere, and, thus, identical. Scientists pulled up samples of seafloor, and the sea cucumbers and mollusks they collected in the Pacific appeared to be the same as ones in the Atlantic.

  This began to shift in the late sixties, when two scientists from Woods Hole replaced their large-holed nets with fine mesh that could grab more sediment. On their first drag in the North Atlantic, they pulled up three hundred sixty-five unique species.

  In 1975, one of the marine scientists, Dr. Robert Hessler, made another seismic advance in deep-sea biology. In his lab at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, he built a box with a movable bottom that, when lowered off the side of a boat, could scoop up as much as three cubic feet of ocean mud. His first test with it revealed mind-blowing levels of biodiversity and density. Amphipods found at one site were visibly different from ones a few miles away, to say nothing of the presumed colonies of microorganisms at each site. “Most species are rare, being encountered only once,” Hessler reported. He took the device to the nearly five-mile-deep Philippine Trench and to the seafloor under Antarctic ice and pulled up never-before-seen one-celled organisms that pulled nutrients from the water and dug roots into the mud—like a hybrid of a human and a tree. Several years later, he made an even more astonishing discovery. While anchored near the Galápagos, Hessler realized that living two thousand feet deep were dense numbers of novel worms, mussels, fish, crabs, clams, anemones, and shrimp clustered around a hole where hot water was coming out, some of it boiling. The water was heated by thermal vents in the seafloor and was high in hydrogen sulfide—the unmistakable smell of a rotten egg—which fed bacteria that in turn nourished the entire food chain. Life wasn’t only stewing in the least likely place on earth; it rivaled the rich biodiversity of tropical rainforests.

  What effect would this wildlife have on deep-sea wrecks? Grattan didn’t hear of Hessler’s findings, and if he had, he would likely have dismissed them as irrelevant. Tiny invertebrates living around a wreck had no bearing on the wreck itself. Crustaceans couldn’t dine in the Titanic’s underwater salons or sleep in the officers’ cabins. Grattan, Goldsmith, Woolley, and every other person who had staked their reputation on finding the Titanic clung to the belief that the ship had been preserved in nearly the same condition as the night it sank. To admit otherwise would be to acknowledge that the object they had in their sights might not be an object at all, but a crumbling mess of lifeless debris. And once you pulled that string, the rest would begin to unravel.

  * * *

  The environmental awakening of the 1970s, brought about by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and her book before that, The Sea Around Us, challenged a rethinking of the oceans not as an infinite ground for fishing and dumping but as a biological system supporting all life on earth. Carson never used the word pollution in her second tome—she didn’t need to. By illustrating the wonders of the currents and climate, the way the ice caps power a conveyor belt that regulates weather, nutrients, and migratory patterns, the subtext was clear that messing with it came at humans’ collective peril.

  The awakening also brought a shift about wrecks. For each study performed on how ocean life was damaging wrecks, there were fewer that flipped the question to ponder whether the ever-increasing number of wrecks were in fact damaging the ocean.

  Protecting the ocean purely for the ocean’s benefit has never been popular among humans. The closest we’ve come has been to ask whether supporting the ocean could somehow benefit us. By 1970, the answer was yes, and conveniently, it required more wrecks.

  Japanese fishermen knew for centuries that man-made reefs could help them grow kelp and establish new colonies of fish. Americans warmed to the idea in 1916, first in the waters off New York, where a local fishing union filled butter tubs with cement to grow coral that would attract fish. Half a century later, artificial reefs had grown into a powerful economic force, not only for fishermen but also for shipbuilders who had to contend with the inconvenient matter of what to do with an aging ship. The Alabama Department of Conservation initiated the first official reef-building effort in the Gulf of Mexico in 1954 by sinking four aging ships that would otherwise have been dismantled and thrown in landfills. It was far easier to flush their tanks and remove all petroleum, oil, and lubricants and send them out of sight and mind. By 1958, California went a step further and began to sink old ships, old cars, and anything at all to lure fish—but really to lure fishermen.

  Conveniently, as early-century ships were reaching their operational limits, there was suddenly an abundance of ships qualified to become wrecks. Florida became the epicenter of reef-building. It had a lot of boats, a lot of shoreline, and warm water hospitable to coral. By 1970, Florida officials were sinking a new vessel almost every week. And when there weren’t enough old boats for this surprisingly easy and satisfying form of environmental protection, they granted permits to sink old toilets, water heaters, and hollowed-out cars. If all that coral needed was a surface to grow on, then it stood to reason that metal, porcelain, or rubber would be better left in the ocean than in a landfill.

  Things finally got out of hand in 1972, when giddy Florida officials dumped two million old tires in coastal waters as part of a plan to build a field of coral to rival the Great Barrier Reef. The quantity was so large it not only smothered existing marine life, but the tires weren’t heavy enough and roamed with the current like tumbleweeds across the seafloor, killing existing coral and demolishing the ecosystems they supported. As recently as 2015, divers were still pulling thousands of tires out of the Gulf of Mexico each year.

  * * *

  Sinking is the very worst thing that can happen to a ship. But eventually, there arrives a day when sinking isn’t so bad and can even become so helpful that people will pay to do it.

  One day in the fall of 2020, I caught up with Tim Mullane, who runs a ship-sinking company in Virginia called Coleen Marine, named after his wife. The couple, along with a small crew, operate a funeral parlor for old ships, preparing them for the underwater afterlife.

  “People think sinking ships is easy,” Mullane said in a raspy voice while driving from one job to another. “Like you just leave a window open and eventually the thing goes down.”

  That happens, and ships have certainly sunk for more boneheaded reasons, but scuttling a vessel to make an artificial reef is a maze of endless regulation, physical labor, and ocean dynamics.

  If done correctly, an artificial structure can mimic the topography of a natural reef. In warm water especially, a wreck acts as a place for coral polyps and floating planktonic larvae to settle. Once they do, they begin to attract crustaceans and larger invertebrates that in turn attract fish. Fish can theoretically leave a reef whenever they want, but most don’t, a lesson illustrated vividly in Finding Nemo. This makes artificial reefs placed near natural reefs especially helpful to expand habitat and enlarge populations.

  That’s if it’s done right. After the reef-making bonanza of the seventies, the pace slowed considerably after new research suggested creating healthy reefs wasn’t as simple as just dumping an old boat. Vessels are composed of hundreds of materials and thousands of parts that can end up in the digestive tracts of sharks or turtles. Attracting too many fish to a spot they wouldn’t otherwise go can make them an instant target to predators, including humans. And as with real estate, location is everything.