His organization was flawless, but by the spring of 1980, several weeks before his summertime expedition was to depart, he began to wonder if there could be legal trouble if he actually found the ship. A lawyer looked into it and reported back to Grimm that the man who apparently owned the Titanic was living in a small apartment on the east side of London.

  Doug Woolley liked Grimm immediately. The fast-talking Texan was an American stereotype. Once they got talking, Woolley realized this might’ve been the partner he’d been looking for for years. Grimm had a background in geology, a sober understanding of what was required to find the ship, and a nearly limitless budget to do it. Most striking, though, was Grimm’s foul language.

  “I’ve never heard a mouth on a man like that in my life,” Woolley later said.

  Grimm called Woolley under the guise of partnership, but his real goal was to charm Woolley sufficiently to avoid a messy media squabble once the ship turned up. Discovering the Titanic would trigger a tsunami of headlines, which could crash quickly if the story shifted from Grimm finding the wreck to Grimm getting sued for disturbing a hallowed wreck site that ostensibly belonged to someone else.

  Woolley was hardheaded, ego-fueled, and singularly focused on him being the one to do it. But he was also easy to flatter. Woolley had grown accustomed to the haters, the doubters, and the endless mockery, including from his own family, who had all but excommunicated him. He hadn’t talked to his sister, Anne, in months, which turned into years. Making friends came easy, but the people drawn to Woolley were often hangers-on, misfits, or lost boys of their own. What he needed were people as smart and savvy as him—or even smarter, so long as they didn’t overshadow him. This longing created the opening for a man of money and status to cajole him with compliments.

  Grimm might have sensed this, or he might’ve seen in Woolley a kindred spirit, a man endlessly misunderstood but with the drive and desire to prove everyone wrong. Grimm stayed on the phone with Woolley for more than an hour. They discussed Woolley’s past plans, his near misses, his band of ragtag associates. Grimm told him profanity-laden stories about his trip to Turkey and his home in Abilene, Texas, and the time he nearly went bankrupt drilling twenty-four holes until he came to the last one, the twenty-fifth, and it turned out to be a gusher. Woolley loved the way Grimm dropped Texasisms. Wildcatting for oil—the slang for prospecting—was no different than finding a ship, Grimm said. He was riding a gravy train with biscuit wheels. When they succeeded, that’d throw their hats over the windmill. Woolley laughed and laughed, and when Grimm asked if he had Woolley’s blessing, Woolley told him to go find the damned ship.

  Grimm wasn’t all hat and no cattle, as a true Texan might say. He had gone further than Grattan or any other hunters in at least one way, by solving the Titanic’s long-disputed CQD mystery. The ship gave its well-known emergency coordinates as it was sinking, but a Titanic buff in the 1950s had noticed a bizarre quirk about the ship as it sank. Unlike an airplane that moves quickly through time zones, a ship crossing from England to America had to account for losing five hours over the course of six days. It was crucial this be done precisely, since time was an essential variable when determining speed and, by extension, the ship’s position. The best westbound ships could do at the turn of the twentieth century was to manually move the clock back twenty minutes every four hours. The process proceeded smoothly for the Titanic’s first days at sea, but at midnight on April 15, during the pandemonium of sinking, had anyone bothered to change the time? If not, when the navigator went to pinpoint the precise coordinates to summon help, he may have miscalculated the position by nearly ten miles.

  Looked at one way, ten miles is a small margin of error on a journey of more than three thousand. Like most ships since the exploration age of Columbus and Magellan, the Titanic navigated using dead reckoning, which required ships to laboriously track their position in relation to a fixed object, like a port or, less precise, the moon. The classic exam question about a car driving from Nashville to Phoenix going sixty miles per hour is a matter of measuring distance based on speed. But the equation grows more complex on the open ocean when accounting for wind gusts and water streams, and even more complicated when a ship has lost its propulsion and bobs in a nonlinear current for more than two hours while sinking.

  For Grimm, the ten-mile difference implied a plausible search area of more than a hundred square miles, or roughly the size of Sacramento. Coupled with the knowledge that the ship was more than two miles underwater, the searchable area expanded to two hundred cubic miles, or more than two hundred quadrillion gallons of seawater. Grimm wasn’t looking for the ship in the middle of the water column—everyone knew it was sitting on the seafloor—but submerging a camera and sonar rig more than two miles deep meant it had to be towed behind the search vessel on a cable nearly four miles long. Using the Pythagorean theorem of right triangles, this implied the search ship would need to travel at a constant speed of two knots, or barely over two miles per hour, to keep the underwater rig exactly forty feet above the seafloor. Speed up and the rig would rise too high; slow down and it might hit bottom. Get it just right and you still had the major geometric hurdle that once the lure detected a sonar or magnetic disturbance, the area would be two miles behind the ship, which would require at least six hours and an extremely wide U-turn to pass over the exact same spot again.

  This was tedious in 1980, and it still is. Any ship sitting in the deep ocean cannot be seen by satellites, metal detectors, or any surface-based technology, leaving sound waves from a sonar rig as the most reliable way to see what’s below. And that’s if you’re lucky. In 2013, a salvage company based in Mauritius called Deep Ocean Search broke the depth record when it found the British wartime liner SS City of Cairo more than seventeen thousand feet deep—almost a mile deeper than the Titanic—in the South Atlantic. The City of Cairo was sunk by German torpedoes in 1942 and became one of the most awful maritime tragedies of World War II, not because the passengers went down with the ship, but because they floated in lifeboats for three weeks before rescuers arrived, finding ninety of them dead. Two hundred passengers and crew survived, some floating in lifeboats for over a month. Adding to their trauma, three of the survivors were picked up by a German blockade runner ship called the Rhakotis that was on its way from Japan to France. When the Rhakotis was off the coast of Spain, a British cruiser fired a torpedo and sank it, leaving the City of Cairo survivors on board fleeing their second wreck in six weeks.

  Seventy years later, searching for the City of Cairo was worthwhile because it went down with a hundred tons of silver. For weeks, searchers made enormous elliptical turns around the area, towing a cable more than five miles long, then pulling it up on a giant winch and analyzing the images. “When you see something that could be a shipwreck, nine times out of ten it’s not,” John Kingsford, a member of the Deep Ocean Search team, told me. “It’s almost always just a rock outcrop that looks like a ship.” His team eventually found the lost Cairo a few hundred miles south of the island of St. Helena and sent down an unmanned vehicle to recover some of the bounty, leaving the team with a haul of $50 million.

  In July 1980, Grimm was attempting the same method. Fueled by nearly $1 million—most of it from his own pocket—Grimm corralled a team of twenty-three scientists and engineers, three filmmakers, and a book author. They set sail from Port Everglades in Florida to find and film the wreck of the Titanic. Several weeks earlier, Grimm had learned of a monkey named Titan that had been trained to point to the general spot on a map where the Titanic sank, which Grimm thought could be silly enough to earn him some free media. He also thought the monkey might break up the monotony of boring scientists reading a bunch of gauges and charts. Once they found the ship, the monkey could be the star of the movie they would make.

  One of the scientists, Fred Spiess of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, thought the monkey was bizarre and would distract from an otherwise serious pursuit. Spiess delivered an ultimatum to Grimm that if the monkey went, the rest of the crew wouldn’t.

  “Then fire the scientists,” Grimm replied, only half joking.

  The monkey stayed behind. And when the search ship stopped for a night in Bermuda, Grimm made the odd choice to leave the ship and fly back to Texas. He said there wasn’t enough space on board and didn’t want to distract from the scientific work. The real reason, however, was that Grimm went back to juice the press of an impending announcement. This was convenient for a man who famously suffered bad bouts of seasickness, and even luckier after the two-week expedition was hampered by bad weather, which made it doubly hard to move in a straight line at a steady speed.

  The ship returned to port two weeks later with sonar images of fourteen different sites that appeared like they could be the Titanic. The team had fallen short of its goal of making a groundbreaking discovery, but Grimm tried to salvage what he could. Against the wishes of his scientists, Grimm called a small press conference and announced that the sonar pictures would “conclusively prove” that his team had found the Titanic.

  “I think we got that heifer corralled in a box canyon,” he declared.

  When he distributed the photos, analysts observed that the images showed only a shadowy blur on the seafloor that could just as easily be rocks. Grimm refused to concede. He said they had found three other ships, or parts of them, and any one of them could be the Titanic. The crew declined to confirm that claim, fearing that Grimm’s sensational pronouncements could dilute their scientific credibility. The expedition’s leader, a man named Mike Harris, simply said in response to Grimm declaring early victory that he remained “highly optimistic.”

  In private conversations, however, Harris admitted that the crew had been surprised at the “complex and dynamic” terrain of the seafloor. The sonar images revealed that the search area, and the ocean floor in general, were far more variable than anyone anticipated. There were wide stretches of mud and huge outcroppings of rock. Rather than being flat, the floor sloped in miles-long ridges, inclines, and cliffs. At one point, the sonar showed an object that appeared to be the same width, length, and height of the Titanic, which excited the crew. But on closer inspection, it turned out to be the ledge of a sprawling undersea canyon.

  Harris and his crew were humbled. But more than any skill, Grimm was perhaps best at keeping people’s attention by dropping morsels of allure and new promise, reframing a loss into an inevitable future win. Just as the reporters were packing up to leave, he returned quickly to the podium. He announced that next summer, the summer of 1981, he’d return to the fourteen sites with better cameras and more advanced sonar and prove that he had been right all along.

  * * *

  Grimm’s scientific credentials were easy to question because he wasn’t approaching the Titanic as a scientist. The scientists he was funding were happy to be given the resources to perform basic research. But like Charles Smith and Doug Woolley before him, Grimm’s plans to find the ship had centered around media and fame and, by extension, him getting paid.

  “The big money is to be made in film and photography,” he was quoted as saying in April 1980, the same month he partnered with an underwater filmmaker who had won second place at the Atlanta Film Festival for a documentary about atomic bomb testing in the Pacific. As a result, as news of his 1980 expedition began to deflate from an overwhelming success to an inconclusive question mark, Grimm announced plans for a documentary about the 1980 expedition to raise money for the ’81 attempt. He lined up Orson Welles to narrate the film and raised $100,000 in television rights. He negotiated a $150,000 book deal for the exclusive story of the search and paid country-western singer Kenny Starr to write and record a custom “Ballad of the Titanic.”

  His money-hungry motivations boiled over one night at the Explorers Club in New York City. Grimm was held in high regard by the club, and not only because of several generous donations. The club had sponsored ambitious expeditions for more than seventy-five years and its flag had flown at both poles, atop the highest mountain peaks, and across every ocean. As a deep-pocketed adventurer, Grimm was welcomed. But during a ceremony where he was to be presented with the club’s honorary banner, a reporter stood up and confronted Grimm over whether he even cared about science and exploration or was just prospecting for another easy buck.

  “The Explorers Club has always been associated with serious exploratory endeavors,” the reporter said. “I wonder, in view of the media hype, second only to the jumping of the Snake River by Evel Knievel, if there isn’t perhaps an overriding commercial consideration here that goes beyond the traditional feeling of the membership of the club?”

  Before Grimm could answer, the president of the club, an energetic man named Charles Brush, grabbed the microphone and accused the reporter of confusing “commercializing with popularizing.” Popularizing, he said, was a crucial part of exploration. It spread the scientific spirit and turned mercurial observations of field researchers into broad transmissions of knowledge. If an explorer made a film and made money off it, all the better, especially if that money fueled future exploration.

  What Brush didn’t say, however, is that hype for the purpose of money is salesmanship, not science, and when it comes to the world’s biggest quests—to find Amelia Earhart’s missing plane, for instance—populist zeal can result in scientific corners cut and half-baked assumptions perpetuated as fact.

  Grimm’s mind was made up on the matter. And he had plenty of support from a new generation of buffs and wingnuts. Prospecting oil had made him rich, but prospecting the Titanic had made him famous. Almost every day, a postal worker delivered a wad of letters to Grimm’s Abilene office, many from overseas. There were notes from engineers offering mathematical help, correspondence from mediums who claimed they had spoken to victims of the Titanic, and requests from people who wanted Grimm to sponsor a search for dinosaurs. A man in Yugoslavia wrote asking if Grimm could help him show his art in Texas, the supposed epicenter of American culture. Grimm answered every letter. He also spent hours on the phone chatting with well-wishers and enthusiasts, all calling to cheer on the man they had read about in their local newspaper. Grimm loved the attention and was known to chat for hours with strangers about the nuances of the wreck, from the frantic telegraph calls to the order in which the lifeboats were loaded. He spent so much time on the phone that he joked that a telephone would one day be installed in his coffin.

  Still, for such a flamboyant man, his goals were surprisingly understated. Grimm wanted to be the man to find the Titanic, but he didn’t care much about the quality of underwater photography, and he certainly didn’t want to salvage it. A young navy captain named Robert Ballard, who had experience finding and photographing wrecks, was asked in the press to weigh in on Grimm’s efforts. He observed that the world would need high-quality images of the ship to prove it was found. People wanted to see the familiar hull they remembered from films and on posters with its unmistakable name across the bow. A blurry sonogram showing possible debris that might actually be rocks wouldn’t cut it to command global attention. For as far as anyone knew, the ship was still in one piece, two at most, sitting on the seafloor, waterlogged and worn down, but still very much recognizable as one of the great ships of all time.

  * * *

  After sixty-eight years underwater, the wreck was in fact barely hanging on. Of the original ten decks, only four or five likely remained by 1981, according to modern modeling of the breakdown. The ship had been lucky to land on a gently sloping area of seabed swept constantly by the Western Boundary Current, which dusted away sediment that might have buried it. But the lack of sediment also left the wreck vulnerable to constant galvanic corrosion as the interaction with salt water caused the steel to release its electrons and return to its elemental state—iron—which in turn was eaten by deep-sea microbes.

  Thomas Edison once experimented with ways to arrest the breakdown of metal on ships. In his day, the dominant problem was that ship metal would weaken in the span of a few years or even months due to constant exposure to salt water. It was clear that the salt pulled electrons from the steel. But working off the math of the earlier British chemist Sir Humphry Davy, he figured that if you could offer the salt water a different source of electrons, perhaps from a piece of a weaker metal like zinc or magnesium, it would leave the steel alone, at least for a while. The system became known as cathodic protection, in which a sacrificial cathode metal provides cover to a more preferred metal.

  Halting breakdown is most useful on expensive watercrafts like oil platforms and aircraft carriers that require long life-spans to justify their enormous costs. But preserving vessels after they sink can also be helpful for both historical research and environmental protection. The Chuuk Lagoon, once Japan’s primary military base in the South Pacific, is one of the biggest ship graveyards on earth. A three-day air assault in 1944 put more than sixty Japanese warships and two hundred aircraft underwater, almost all of them sunk with fuel, oil, and weapons on board. This density of shallow-water wrecks has made the Chuuk Lagoon a Mecca not only for divers but also for people who study how ships break down and ways to protect them.

  Every so often, a pair of self-described “corrosion enthusiasts” named Chris and Allison Selman visit the Chuuk Lagoon to place large bricks of zinc around the wrecks, some attached by cable and others directly on the old ships. The zinc bricks are essentially Band-Aids. They absorb the corrosive forces of the salt water to protect the underlying steel. But they need to be replaced fairly often. “The metal wears down over time, so you have to keep adding it, but as long as there’s metal there, you can halt the decay of a ship almost indefinitely,” Chris told me. Spending one’s time this way is extremely kind, at least for fish that might suffer from a sudden release of eighty-year-old diesel. But it’s also helpful for the tens of thousands of divers who swim through the wrecks and can see a strikingly well-preserved graveyard of wartime tanks, automobiles, hand-painted porcelain bowls, old motorcycles, radios, torpedoes, bombs, and hundreds of human skulls.