“How come you never went after the Titanic?” I asked Mearns.

  The timing was off, he said—he didn’t start searching for wrecks until the late eighties, when the ship had already been found. If it was still undiscovered by the mid-nineties, he might have been the one to find it. And he would have had little trouble assembling investors after his early success with the Lucona, a badge of credibility that Doug Woolley and Jack Grimm lacked. I knew that in 1992, seven years after the Titanic was found, Mearns and his company, Blue Water Recoveries, were hired by investors to salvage objects from the Titanic’s debris field. But I didn’t know that one of those investors was Jack Grimm, who, in the years after someone else beat him to the wreck, had turned to collecting artifacts at the site that could be sold, licensed, or profitably put on display. As it happened, Grimm’s hairline had nowhere left to recede on September 30, 1992, when a federal judge in Norfolk, Virginia, ordered Grimm and Mearns—whose boats were idling at the wreck site at a cost of $1,000 per hour—to keep their hands off the debris until he could sort out who the artifacts actually belonged to. This took months, and the men eventually had to go home. To this day, Mearns still blames the judge for screwing them up. But he also learned a valuable lesson: with shipwrecks, the only thing more important than good research is a good lawyer.

  I could sense Mearns had long ago grown tired of talking about the Titanic, the same way an aging musician grows weary of playing his early hits over and over. It wasn’t even his wreck, and he couldn’t escape it. He didn’t seem to mind that it was cliché, its originality stripped by decades of cultural dissection. What bothered him was that it was crowded—an endless field of wackos circled it like vultures competing for every last scrap.

  “You have all these moths drawn to the same flame,” he said, clearly frustrated. “And what happens when a ship gets that kind of attention is you get all sorts of people who have no business dealing with the Titanic claiming that part of the ship is theirs. It’s ridiculous.”

  Mearns seemed to be pointing at a distinct specimen I had come to know well. Charles Smith, Doug Woolley, and Jack Grimm had all been drawn to the shiniest of shipwrecks. But their lack of experience finding or even looking for lost ships had posed repeated obstacles, first in their difficulty raising money for expensive search expeditions and then in their poor estimation of how to get a collapsed passenger ship off the floor of the Atlantic. All were forced to rely on the expertise of others and to build teams of scientists if they could afford it. And if they couldn’t, to simply declare they had. Surrounding oneself with smart people can work if you’re the president or a CEO, but for a technical job that no one cared about as much as them, knowledge and experience were the missing link.

  As it happened, around the same time Mearns was schooling me about Titanic hangers-on and how to find lost things, I happened upon the clue that led me to Doug Woolley himself, alive and in the flesh. The newspaper article, his home address, a series of phone calls, and a flight to London. It had been a long time since a journalist had asked to hear Woolley’s story, and here I was, unknowingly about to rekindle the hope of a long-ago dream.

  * * *

  Grimm kept his word and elbowed his way through another round of investment for another expedition in the summer of 1983. Compared to the sensationalism of his first two attempts, Grimm approached the mission with a sense of reality, even fatalism. He had already spent more than $2 million on the multiyear hunt, and as desperate as he was to find it, he hadn’t made his oil fortune by repeatedly drilling the same dry well.

  “Third time’s the charm,” Grimm said several days before embarking. “I’m not going back if I don’t find it this time.”

  In addition to his own money, Grimm had exhausted the resources of his rich friends. The grant money that was free-flowing for the first and second attempts had slowed to a trickle. After the second expedition in 1981, Grimm commissioned the publishing of his own book, Beyond Reach: The Search for the Titanic, which was both about him and by him, written—similar to Woolley’s book—in the third person.

  When the book came out, Grimm thought of a Willy Wonka–style gimmick to drive book sales. He announced that somewhere in the world, he had hidden an eighteen-inch-long miniature replica of the Titanic made of seventy ounces of gold worth $25,000. He imagined that any mention of the public prize would have to mention the book title, which would juice sales to cover the cost of the replica and another expedition. But a year later, two men found a photo of the golden ship that Grimm had placed in an obscure book in the New York Public Library. They demanded cash instead of the gold, which Grimm begrudgingly paid. Meanwhile, the book sold a disappointing fifteen thousand copies.

  The third expedition didn’t go much better. Aboard the R. D. Conrad, a new research ship operated by Columbia University, Grimm made a beeline for the propeller spot. But bad storms ended the effort almost as soon as it began. Six days later, the crew, “half sick and cross eyed,” returned to port with barely more than new blurry sonar images of three new targets that Grimm said looked suspiciously like the Titanic’s hull. Storms prevented a closer look.

  Publicly, Grimm pulled from his familiar playbook. “We are all very pleased,” he said. And he mused about a fourth expedition to go back. But privately, Grimm seemed to accept defeat. Finding the ship required more time and more money, and he was short on both. He hated being on the water almost as much as he hated burning through his millions. More than both, however, a man who spent his whole life believing he was a winner had had enough of losing.

  * * *

  There’s probably no better place to ponder the merciless nature of the Atlantic than on the Atlantic itself. But since I wasn’t about to take a boat from California to London to meet Doug Woolley, the best I could do was peer down from above.

  The Atlantic likely doesn’t have as many wrecks as the much-bigger Pacific, but it does have an impressive trophy collection. The Atlantic has some of the oldest shipwrecks ever recorded, including a Bronze Age ship from the fourteenth century BCE. It holds the most ancient wrecks known to sink in the same year (two hundred forty ships in 480 BCE). And it has one of the biggest warships, the German battleship Bismarck, which sank in the North Sea in 1941. The turbulent waters off North Carolina are known as the “graveyard of the Atlantic,” a title that’s also used to describe areas off Nova Scotia and Boston. Around every American port, in New York, Virginia, South Carolina, and Florida, the waters in spots are so dense with wrecks that if you were to empty the ocean, a person could spend a day wandering around looking at dozens of them. A precise number is elusive, but one researcher I spoke to suspected that based on the arc of history, more people had died on boats than ever will in car accidents. “We make it easy to forget how dangerous it is, but in the past, they knew,” he told me.

  I stared out the window on that flight imagining what it must have felt like to be Columbus or Magellan, or worse, one of their hundreds of crewmen, who faced the extreme likelihood that boarding a boat and sailing over the horizon might be the last thing they ever did. Leaving your family and country to go somewhere new seemed exciting, until day three, when the endless bobbing and no land in sight emptied even the most durable stomachs. I imagined going months without seeing a fresh fruit or vegetable and feeling my scurvied body collapse in on itself, all while surrounded by the squalor of rodents and the incessant abuse from the most impatient and often drunkest men alive. William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies offered a fictional horror of what would happen to a group of young men left on an island alone. But few who read the book probably paused to consider that the same collapse of governance, decorum, and basic humanity had occurred thousands of times on ships in remote waters everywhere. Tension would grow until it exceeded the bounds of the ship, perhaps illustrated best when British captain William Bligh faced his famous ejection from his ship the Bounty in 1789 in the middle of the South Pacific. Like many exiled captains and crewmen before him, he would have died, except he was lucky that several loyalists rowed him thirty-five hundred miles to safety—longer than the distance from California to Florida—in a primitive rowboat.

  The absence of such stories today reflects two centuries of breakneck ingenuity and maritime innovation. Ships continue to wreck, and occasionally people wash up on deserted islands. But they’re often anomalies and never become marquee cultural events. The best evidence might be the thirty million people each year who sign up for cruises, thinking of seafaring as the ultimate way to relax. Or that when someone gets bored or rich—or both—the obvious thing to do is buy a boat.

  Imagining a different reality without luxury yachts and airplanes, a world one or two hundred years ago, when I’d have had to take a steamship to London or row there in a skiff, made me wonder about a different parallel reality. Looking down at the waters that held the Titanic, I tried to imagine what it would’ve taken to truly raise the Titanic from the ocean floor. To return the ship to the surface and, as so many people in the twentieth century had envisioned, return it to glory as a museum or hotel or, in the wildest fantasy, recommission it for renewed pleasure cruising.

  Over the course of writing this book, I had become obsessed with this thought experiment, the question of what it would take—scientifically and financially—to do what people for decades had thought was so easy.

  Every time I read something or talked to someone about the chemical degradation of a century-old wreck and the physical limits of working two miles deep, I eventually steered the conversation and asked them to dream.

  Say that it was possible, I would say. How much money would it take, and how would you do it?

  I asked this question dozens of times, and David Mearns was the first to refuse to indulge me. It wasn’t possible, he said, and even if it was, there are hundreds of other ships more worthy of such a gargantuan engineering effort.

  “Realistically it can’t be done, even with all the money in the world,” he said. The problem wasn’t just depth and ocean pressure. It was that the ship had no coherent structure. He likened it to the Twin Towers after they fell. How would you pick them up? What would you even be picking up? And that’s before adding more than twelve thousand feet of water. It was a nonstarter from fantasyland, he said. “If people thought they could do it, it’s because they didn’t know what they were talking about.”

  I couldn’t argue with Mearns, a man who had been to the other side and seen the deep-ocean landscapes and decaying debris that the rest of us couldn’t conceive of. But I wasn’t willing to give up the notion that, at some level, it was possible. If raising the ship’s hull and its debris field had been a national priority, like the Challenger space shuttle, or had the urgency of a national security mission, like the Hughes Glomar Explorer, the U.S. government, thousands of scientists, and the strongest military on earth could make it happen. These were the powerful forces that figured out how to split an atom, map a genome, build the internet, and walk on the moon.

  The more I asked, the more colorful ideas I got. Some people said that they’d build a giant cradle with an autonomous propulsion system to visit the site and envelop the wreck in a hydraulic claw. Another offered a more tedious but easier approach: for a team of autonomous underwater vehicles to work continuously for months retrieving every ounce of debris, categorizing them in a master geospatial database to be put back together on land.

  Other people said that you didn’t need all the Titanic debris to claim success; a triumphant recovery effort could just get a few big pieces to go on display in museums. A New York–based team actually tried this in 1996. The crew spent almost an entire summer trying to lift an eleven-ton section of the ship’s hull—a piece of steel twenty-four feet long and twenty feet wide with four portholes—by attaching four rubber bags filled with diesel, a liquid slightly lighter and thus more buoyant than water. Surprising everyone (and probably themselves), they got the piece within two hundred feet of the surface, but while towing it to shallower water, the piece broke loose and sank again. Charles Pellegrino, a scientist and consultant on the project, blamed supernatural forces. “I don’t believe in the curses [of the Titanic], but I don’t disbelieve in them at this point,” he said. Two years later, a different crew went back and got the piece. It was treated with acid-resistant derusting spray and found its way into a Titanic exhibit in the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas.

  The closest I found to a credible idea to raise the entire ship came from a man who was once a young engineer at the U.S. Naval Academy and had studied the prospect in detail. In 1977, the film company making Raise the Titanic commissioned the Naval Academy to come up with a technically plausible scenario that could be written into the script and portrayed with cinematic believability.

  The young engineer, Parks Stephenson (whom you might remember from chapter 3), was a student at the time and offered to assist his professor, a naval architect named Roger Compton, with the inquiry. Stephenson spent weeks poring over books on maritime architecture and ocean physics. He studied cross sections of the decks and performed lengthy calculations on drag, lift, and buoyant force. He accounted for the “calcareous ooze” and “pelagic mud” of the seafloor and its suction force on an aging wreck.

  In the final report, Stephenson acknowledged that his analysis had major caveats. He assumed the ship had sunk in one piece and sat upright on the seafloor, which in the absence of evidence remained conventional wisdom in 1977. Still, this was for Hollywood, not the Army Corps of Engineers, so facts could be fudged.

  The first idea Stephenson and Compton came up with bore a stunning resemblance to Charles Smith’s initial plan in 1914—namely, to apply enough buoyant force to the hull to rip it from the mud, then pull it up successive levels as it was towed to port. It would only break the water surface when it was close to shore, at which point divers would attach ropes and anchors to the hull and then, presumably, a series of cranes on land would pull the whole thing out of the water, dripping for days as it emptied its bowels.

  This, however, was unacceptable to the filmmakers. No one would go see a movie about a ship towing another ship underwater. They asked Stephenson for a more dramatic plan B that would eject the ship out of the water like a breaching whale. Stephenson did more calculations and then submitted the simplest plan he could: fill the hull with syntactic foam full of tiny little air bubbles, a material not much different than millions of tiny Ping-Pong balls. Put enough in and the ship would shoot upward like a missile until it triumphantly returned to the surface of the Atlantic.

  The filmmakers liked this idea, ignoring the question of how you’d evenly and quickly inject millions of pounds of syntactic foam underwater. When it came time to film the scene, the filmmakers built a fifty-foot-long scale replica of the ship. It cost $7 million—roughly the same price tag of the original Titanic in 1912. The filmmakers couldn’t find a water tank or swimming pool big enough for the scene, so they built a ten-million-gallon “horizon tank” on the island of Malta that would line up with the actual ocean and look on-screen like an endless sea.

  People who make movies know that when filming sinking scenes, or any scene where something pretty gets ruined, you get one shot. But there’s no limit to the reverse: taking something ugly and decrepit and making it clean again. To film the climax scene of Raise the Titanic, the ship was lowered and raised more than fifty times before the crew got the shot they wanted. Down and up, wet and dry, sinking and unsinking, the worst day any ship could possibly have, with the added indignity of being surrounded by cameras.

  There’s an odd catharsis watching a ship surface under its own power, like an injured racehorse that stands up and runs again. This final four-minute scene was about as realistic as a dog doing calculus or humans landing on Pluto. But perhaps because of that, I was glued to it for days. After dinner or first thing in the morning, I’d return to my computer, replay the clip, and watch the Titanic rise again. I figured out how to make the slow-mo video even slower and watched the bubbling whitewash pour off the bow and out of each porthole. I marveled as the camera panned the decks covered in mud and how the railings were mangled by time, like worn-down paper clips. Along with the violin-led score, the movie magic of a shipwreck un-wrecking itself offered a rare dose of redemption in a field so filled with tragedy and destruction.

  Who wouldn’t agree with that? That a fake raising of the Titanic was better than none at all, and that getting to see it on-screen gave at least a replica of the Titanic another shot.

  But that would require unanimous agreement that the time for Titanic rescue missions had indeed passed—that there was nothing left to do with the old ship except visit its deep grave, study its breakdown, and pick up any remaining loose ends. You could probably ask one thousand people and all one thousand would agree that it was time to let go of the pipe dream of raising a broken ship and move on.

  But if you asked a million, or perhaps a billion, odds were you’d get at least one person who still believed the impossible was possible.

  And if you found him, as I did, living in East London, he would explain that it wasn’t him who was delusional, naïve, and dimwitted. It was you.