Chapter 12

  MAN IS NEVER LOST AT SEA

  Doug Woolley sent an assistant to meet me at Heathrow. He made it sound like I should expect one of those men in black suits who holds a sign for business travelers. Instead, I was greeted by a young fellow, about my age, named Kamran. He was tall and frazzled. He was also confused as to who I was or what he was supposed to do with me. We shook hands and chatted for a moment. I asked where he parked.

  “Oh, I took the train, mate,” he said.

  We got on the tube and for the next two hours, we made small talk about the weather and the reliability of public transportation. Every time I steered the conversation to Woolley and benign questions of his past, Kamran told me I’d have to ask the man himself and changed the subject.

  I knew Woolley would be gregarious. I had seen old videos of him explaining how he owned the Titanic and what he planned to do with it. I watched him dress down a confused British news anchor who was unsure whether to take Woolley literally or seriously, both or neither. I also learned from Kamran that Woolley had been looking forward to my visit for weeks.

  “I don’t think an American has ever come to see him,” Kamran said, an assertion that left me wondering if I was savvy to make the trip or foolish. Later, another friend of Woolley’s told me that he considered my visit the highlight of his year.

  It occurred to me later that these were the hallmarks of Woolleyian mystique. The sense of honor, the kowtowing, the flattery and hyperbole. I had flown there to perform the simple journalistic act of interviewing a man with a compelling story. But the endless cajoling made me wonder if I was somehow being played, the way Woolley once pitted reporters against one another to gin up coverage. When it came to Woolley’s entrance, this too was melodramatic. Several weeks before my trip, Woolley, then eighty-three, had collapsed in his apartment and was rushed to a nearby hospital. He was supposed to stay longer, but when he heard I had arrived in London, he “jailbroke,” he said, and convinced a nurse to summon an ambulance to drive him home.

  I sat in Woolley’s living room for more than an hour as we waited for Woolley’s ambulance. I watched a clock on the wall that had yellow tufts of hair above the eleven and one, meant to resemble Woolley’s symmetric tufts. Woolley’s friend Gary, who first connected me to the man, sat across from me, along with a fellow named David, who did magic tricks and told dirty jokes. It was cold and rainy outside, and every few minutes Dave asked if I wanted my tea refreshed.

  Between magic tricks, I looked around the apartment. Every inch of wall was covered by framed news articles, models of ships, certificates, and tchotchkes. Above the mantel was a framed photo of Woolley’s former dog, a Welsh border collie named Flint, who died in 1997 and to whom Woolley dedicated his book. Every crevice of the apartment had been taken up by papers and memorabilia, much of it nautical and almost all Titanic-related. Before I arrived, I worried that Woolley might have thrown away old records that could be revealing. But it turned out to be the opposite. Woolley hadn’t thrown anything away in decades, and now, as David kept darting to the kitchen every few minutes to make new tea, I had to tuck my legs each time he passed as he waddled between piles and papers to the kitchen.

  Woolley moved into the small one-bedroom in 1982 in the neighborhood of Goodmayes in East London. The rent was cheap, and his friends lived nearby. Having once spent weeks sleeping on a park bench, he didn’t mind that it was a working-class neighborhood with large pockets of South Asian immigrants who filled restaurants and pubs with food and music unfamiliar to him. He was too busy at the time watching Grimm’s ill-fated expeditions and plotting his next move once Grimm found the ship. Woolley’s continued appeals to raise the Queen Elizabeth and the Titanic didn’t get much traction in the early eighties, particularly after Grimm began to siphon off his media. Because of this, Woolley spent those years working on the litigious side of the wrecks, writing letters, building partnerships, and threatening to sue anyone who infringed on his salvage rights.

  Finally, Woolley’s ambulance arrived, and he entered the room slowly, supported by a cane. He looked at me, let out a big laugh, and called me a “feisty bugger.” I tucked my legs as he passed, and he shuffled to a chair positioned in the very center of the room—his captain’s chair, he said, from which he controlled his operations. In front of him sat a pile of papers and, on top of it, a small laptop.

  Now in his eighties, Woolley had retreated from the vigorous work of his forties and fifties. But it was easy to imagine Woolley as a younger man in the same chair in the same position, feeling like he was directing the world’s traffic. Letters, phone calls, reporters, lawyers, threats, agreements, and promises. All keeping him in the mix and getting him nowhere at all.

  “You know I have a personal tie to it,” he said. “My two aunts, they were supposed to be on it but had a premonition.”

  He pointed to a framed photo of the ship on the wall above my head. He turned around and showed me scale replicas of more than four ships, including the Queen Elizabeth and another ship with the number 476. His bookcase was filled with titles like The Titanic for Dummies, Titanic: Triumph and Tragedy, and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Titanic.

  He paused a moment and took a breath.

  “Bloody hell it’s grand, you being here,” he said. “My mother once told me I’d never amount to anything, and now look at this, everyone wants to hear from me!”

  This aw-shucks facade was also classic Woolley. He had nursed his underdog status his entire life, seeming to revel in low expectations that he could exceed with the most minor of accomplishments. No one believed he could actually own the Titanic, so when he declared he did, it was news. Anyone could dismiss the engineering ideas of a man with no engineering experience, so when he built a team, it was surprising. Each time he might have faded to obscurity, he, like the Titanic itself, received a burst of publicity that renewed the story and his place in it.

  For several hours Woolley held forth on his long association with the Titanic. It had all started on a dare, he said, outside of a chip shop one night after he had talked for so long about the shipwreck that someone dared him to do something about it. He explained how he had gone about getting the salvage rights by putting the announcements in newspapers and waiting for objectors, who never came—a fact I later told him I couldn’t verify and he didn’t argue. He listed all the companies and legal entities he had created to manage the expeditions and salvage attempts.

  “I was contacted by people all over the world!” Woolley said, his voice rising with both pride and disbelief in his own story. He weaved a long yarn about his visit to Hong Kong, the great trip of his life, though it had ended by almost any measure in disappointment.

  Before meeting Woolley, I struggled to comprehend profound failure, of what it was like to look back on the dominant goal of one’s life, a goal so specific and public it was printed in millions of newspapers around the world, and know that you had failed. I remembered hearing about a similar condition that erodes the spirit, when someone has a major success too early in life and lives the rest of their days looking downhill. This pathology was known to affect astronauts, particularly the three on Apollo 11 who walked on the moon as young men and returned to earth with their biggest accomplishment behind them and decades ahead to figure out what to do next.

  But Woolley’s pathology was different. His wasn’t the quick success followed by an emptiness of purpose. His purpose was clearly defined, a linear arrow from boyhood. Yet it had never manifested into anything real. His failure had come in waves, a steady stream of setbacks that left him drenched in the whitewash of defeat. I pictured him like a lonely castaway, desperate to get to the open ocean yet unable to make it past the reef.

  Strangely, though, sitting with me now was a man old and infirm, but not one diminished in spirit. And as we kept talking, I started to get the sense that Woolley didn’t believe he failed at all. Finally, I asked him bluntly:

  “How do you explain the fact that we’re sitting here in 2020 and the ship that you promised to raise fifty years ago is still underwater?”

  He glared at me. I felt as though I’d overstepped, that my question was a gratuitous journalistic dunk on an old man. But his response surprised me and made me realize that, yes, not only was I being played, but that Woolley earnestly saw my visit—and this book—as a shot at a few extra yards down the never-ending field of his life.

  “It’s not that I didn’t succeed,” he said with a grin. “It’s that I haven’t succeeded yet.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “And that’s where you come in,” he said.

  * * *

  The New York Times reported the discovery of the Titanic on September 3, 1985, in a small story on the bottom of the front page, under the headline “Wreckage of Titanic Reported Discovered 12,000 Feet Down.” Two days earlier, a team of American and French researchers towed an underwater-imaging craft over what was unmistakably one of the Titanic’s boilers. The search took a different approach from Grimm’s earlier expeditions; instead of looking for the ship’s hull, the researchers theorized that the Titanic’s high-speed sinking velocity combined with the pressure gradient had resulted in a destructive collision and implosion that left a sweeping debris field. When they found the boiler, it was a bread crumb that led to the hull itself.

  The strategy was only as good as the technology behind it. In the two years that had passed since Grimm’s failed 1983 expedition, the French and American team had the advantage of newer sonar and imaging crafts developed by the U.S. Navy for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and the French marine institute IFREMER. One of the crafts was named Argo by Robert Ballard, the young navy oceanographer who had earlier critiqued Grimm’s expeditions and now was leading one of his own. The Argo—named in homage to the mythical Greek ship that carried Jason on his hunt for the Golden Fleece—had dozens of cameras looking both down and forward, along with bright incandescent lights to illuminate the deep sea in a way it had never been lit before.

  “We went smack-dab over a gorgeous boiler,” Ballard said in an interview with a Canadian TV station over the radio of his ship, the Knorr, while it was still in the North Atlantic. “It was just bang, there it was.”

  According to Ballard, the crew erupted in cheers. Then the mood turned quiet once it set in that they had discovered the mass grave where fifteen hundred people had died. Someone suggested a moment of silence.

  “We realized we were dancing on someone’s grave, and we were embarrassed,” Ballard said. “The mood, it was like someone took a wall switch and went click. And we became sober, calm, respectful.”

  In an image captured of the moment of discovery, Ballard is wearing a blue jumpsuit. He’s standing in front of more than a dozen TV screens with his legs wide and arms crossed. His eyes are squinted, and his mouth hangs open slightly, the presumed combination of satisfaction and disbelief.

  Years later, it would come out that Ballard and his team weren’t quite as smart or as lucky as it seemed. What the public didn’t know at the time was that Ballard had made a bargain with a senior Pentagon officer named Ronald Thunman, who offered to build the Argo for Ballard knowing it would help him find the Titanic. But in exchange, he wanted Ballard to first use the Argo to find two Cold War–era U.S. nuclear-powered submarines that had sunk in the North Atlantic. The two subs, the USS Scorpion and USS Thresher, were lost in 1968, together killing two hundred twenty-eight crew. The Thresher was profoundly tragic, having malfunctioned and sunk accidentally during deep-diving tests. But the Scorpion, whose sinking was attributed to an unintentional torpedo activation but has never been fully confirmed, was deemed more dangerous because it carried two nuclear weapons.

  For more than a decade, American military leaders worried about the nuclear material on the Scorpion. But more concerning, they fixated on whether the Russians might have found and pillaged either sub. Ballard was a navy-commissioned oceanographer who had publicly discussed his interest in finding the Titanic, which gave him the perfect cover story to look for the submarines in the North Atlantic without tipping off the Russians. Under the agreement with the navy, Ballard would spend two months in the North Atlantic. Once he found and surveyed both subs, he could use any remaining time to search for the Titanic. In the end, this amounted to twelve days.

  Like Grimm, Ballard had performed extensive modeling to deduce the precise wreck site. He accounted for “underwater wind,” as he called it, to explain the distance lighter objects might have traveled as they took longer to sink, such as clothing from the cabins or spoons from the salon. A French team before him had come extremely close, missing the wreck site by fewer than one thousand feet, and making Ballard’s place in history possible. If not for a gust of wind that pushed the French ship off course, the man forever credited with finding the Titanic and who would enjoy a lucrative career of speeches, books, and consultations with movie producers wouldn’t be Ballard, but a French oceanographer named Jean-Louis Michel. (In the years after, Ballard occasionally referred to Michel as his “co-discoverer.”)

  The early coverage fixated on the photographs taken of the degraded ship. There were images of a propeller, a window from an officer’s cabin, and a pile of more than fifty plates and bowls from the kitchen. A pot was visible in one shot and in another a stoking port for one of the boilers. Virtually all were grayscale images of corroded junk that would be easily dismissed if they didn’t belong to the famous shipwreck. The photograph that attracted the most attention was taken in front of the bow, revealing the ship’s recognizable visage, seen millions of times in books and movies, now appearing old and frail. The sturdy railings had worn down and were now covered in kelp-like debris and rust, looking like some underwater monster had sneezed on them. Appearance-wise, the ship had seen better days. But the photos confirmed the most crucial factor: it was the Titanic.

  Ballard returned to Massachusetts in a way Grimm had coveted: in triumph. He also unleashed a new era of science. The discovery of the ship was manna for historians and shipwreck hunters, who in the following years would use a craft called Jason and several others to study every inch of the wreck, piecing together a detailed timeline of how it sank, why it imploded, and what happened to every item and person on board.

  But among marine scientists, the Titanic seemed to be secondary. The bigger advance seemed to be the technology behind the Argo and the other crafts that had done the underwater survey and were poised to look farther and deeper than previously possible.

  “This allows us to open up deep-sea exploration on a much, much larger scale than before,” John Steele, the director of Woods Hole, told Time magazine. “We couldn’t ask for more.”

  * * *

  The same way time is divided between major events—before Jesus and after, before Columbus and after—there was the era before the Titanic was rediscovered, and there was after.

  Seeing the wreckage in photos sparked a new chapter in the forensic investigation of the disaster the same way a new burst of evidence can jump-start a criminal cold case. Almost immediately, proof that the hull had in fact broken in two offered a new lens through which to judge eyewitness testimony. Plenty of trustworthy people had claimed it hadn’t. Were they lying? Was some phenomenon of trauma psychology at play?

  Also evident was the depth of the PR effort undertaken by the White Star Line in the years after the disaster. A high-profile tragedy was bad enough for business, but the company had gone to considerable lengths to make the public record reflect that the Titanic sank intact and on an even keel. Any evidence that the ship broke up on the surface or imploded on impact would invite allegations of poor construction, which would mean a crushing number of lawsuits from survivors’ families alleging neglect. In the wake of the disaster, the White Star Line was still operating the Olympic, built in the same design as the Titanic, and another, the Britannic, scheduled for launch in 1915. The more the public blamed the tragedy on an iceberg that no longer existed, the less the White Star Line or the ship’s builders would have to answer for any mistakes.

  Images from the 1985 expedition and a subsequent visit Ballard made a year later revealed how cynical the corporate effort had been, although after seventy-three years, it was also clear that it had worked. Evidence about the ship’s faulty design, its weak midsection, and its suboptimal iron might have been bombshells in 1912, but in 1985, there was no one left to hold accountable, and anyone directly affected was dead or old. Instead, the overwhelming public reaction to the images in the eighties seemed to be disappointment. The optimistic hope for decades that the Titanic was preserved in a low-oxygen and cold-water environment was punctured by photos that showed that the ship looked awful. The grand staircase, the first-class cabins, the telegraph room—familiar sights from old photos—had been broken and scattered during its plunge and impact. Large growths of rust covered every metallic surface. Many of the decks had collapsed on one another. Every ounce of organic matter, including corpses, appeared to have been eaten by microbes.

  “In a way I am sad we found her,” Ballard wrote in the December 1986 edition of National Geographic. “Though still impressive in her dimensions, she is no longer a graceful lady . . . Her beauty has faded.”

  In public, Ballard compared the ship to an old girlfriend he corresponded with for years and with whom he was disappointed when he finally met her face-to-face. But in off-the-cuff moments, he was blunter about the reality that his legacy was now intertwined with something so ugly. “It’s sort of like I just married someone,” Ballard said to a reporter for Newsweek. “And is this something I want to be married to? It seemed nice at the time—you know, she was cute, she was nice and all that sort of thing—but now I’m married to her and wondering if I made a mistake. And I can’t just walk away from this one. She won’t let me.” (I offered Ballard the opportunity to update this uncouth description of both a wreck and a fictional woman, but he refused. A friend of his told me that misogynistic language remains widespread among wreck hunting, which likely plays a part in excluding women from more prominent positions in the field.)