Nevertheless, Ballard’s 1980s disappointment with the wreck’s condition was undoubtedly short-lived once he realized the gold mine he had happened upon. Not only was he instantly the eminent expert on one of the twentieth century’s biggest news events, earning him endless offers to write books, appear in films, and give speeches. It became clear—as Jack Grimm knew—that everything about him and his expedition could be sold. On September 10, 1985, less than two weeks after the discovery, Ballard confirmed plans to sell certain iterations of the underwater technology he used to find the Titanic to any willing company or government for as much as $15 million. The Argo and other crafts were developed and owned by the U.S. Navy, but the money was too good to stop Ballard from the most American of capitalist moves—taking a taxpayer-funded technology and repurposing it for private gain.

  In his early forties, Ballard was an instant elder statesman of ocean exploration. But like any lottery winner, he struggled to reconcile his new life with his earlier values as an explorer and environmentalist. Selling sonar and imaging tech to help others make new ocean discoveries sounded nice, but the likely customers were oil and mining companies with little interest in archaeology or history. News of the discovery sparked interest in visiting the wreck to collect artifacts that could be auctioned. Some even debated anew raising the wreck using inflatable bags. Ballard suggested leaving the wreck alone in respect for the victims, and if not for them, at least for the sake of history. “You don’t go to the Louvre and stick your finger on the Mona Lisa,” Ballard said years later, still peeved at the commercial treatment of the wreck site. “You don’t visit Gettysburg with a shovel. These guys are driven by greed.” At the time, however, while Ballard was enjoying his payday from his association with the wreck, his plea for others to back off rang hollow.

  If he wanted, Ballard could have ended his career right then and spent the rest of his life telling the same discovery story on the never-ending circuit of rubber chicken dinners. But there was an extra benefit to finding the Titanic he hadn’t expected.

  Before the discovery, he had spent years studying hydrothermal vents and the physics of the seafloor. He had made discoveries as elemental to science as the possible foundation of human life. It wasn’t until the Titanic, however, that the letters started arriving on his desk that added new motivation to his hunger to keep looking forward, to use his privileged position and celebrity to go find other lost relics of human exploration, a quest that would lead him to the German battleship Bismarck, the American aircraft carrier the USS Yorktown, and the second-most-famous passenger steamer in history, the Lusitania. He would start his own institute for ocean exploration, launch his own research boat, and, even as of the writing of this book, be hunting for the mysterious remains of Amelia Earhart.

  In those days and still today, the letters were almost all about the Titanic. Almost all were from kids, and they all said the same thing:

  “What do I have to do to do what you do?”

  * * *

  Doug Woolley can’t remember where he was when he first heard about Ballard. But sitting in front of me, he grimaces every time I mention Ballard’s name. He tells me that Jack Grimm had been courteous and respectful enough to seek Woolley’s blessing and partnership before his expeditions, but Ballard hadn’t bothered to call the man who had been quoted in thousands of newspapers as the self-proclaimed owner of the shipwreck.

  Before meeting Woolley for the first time, I hadn’t had a chance to consult the lawyers and salvage experts about whether there was any truth to Woolley’s ownership claims, or whether a person even could own a cultural piece of mangled steel. I took Woolley mostly at his word—not that the Titanic was really his, but that he believed it was. I asked him for documents, court judgments, even copies of the newspapers where he planted his stake and gave everyone two weeks to object.

  “It’s all in there,” he told me, pointing to a set of scrapbooks on the shelf.

  I spent an afternoon flipping through the albums, each one stuffed with hundreds of news clippings dated as far back as 1967. I started taking pictures of the articles to read in detail later, but after the first fifty or so, I stopped. There were too many.

  The earlier sense I had that Woolley was an eccentric shipwreck obsessive was belied by the fact that for decades people took him extremely seriously. There were articles in Spanish, Chinese, French, and German. Kids wrote him letters from all over the world, and he was invited to talk at universities across England. Woolley never got his salvage plans even remotely off the ground, nor did he ever truly own the Titanic in the way someone owns a car or even a pair of shoes. But it was surprising how little that seemed to matter. Woolley believed it, the media hyped it, and the people who read newspapers in dozens of countries bought it. A big lie can bring big consequences. But in his case, the fact that the ship was entirely inaccessible for so long reduced a costly lie to a mere falsehood of no consequence.

  This changed, however, when word reached Woolley that Ballard’s team had found the ship. For one, the discovery burst the bubble for Woolley himself, who realized he was completely passed over in the tidal wave of Ballard’s news coverage. Woolley wasn’t mentioned at all, nor was he consulted, credited, or quoted in the following years when additional expeditions collected thousands of accessible artifacts for museums and private collectors. One wonders if the realization in Woolley’s mind came slowly or all at once that he didn’t own the Titanic and never had.

  The mind has a way of performing gymnastics to placate the heart. And before I could ask Woolley this pointed question about when it all crashed down, the tone of our conversation shifted.

  “The missing link is you!” he bellowed with a big belly laugh. As he cackled, he pointed at me and looked around the room. “That’s why we were so happy when you called to visit.”

  Everyone in the room was laughing now, but I didn’t follow the joke. Woolley leaned over in his chair and put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Don’t you see?” he said. “We need your help.”

  I still didn’t understand. But in the next half hour Woolley transformed from answering my questions to forcefully lobbying me to join his team—to, as he put it, “get the job done.”

  Sometime later, it finally clicked that the 1985 discovery of the Titanic resulted not in a sad and private deflation for Woolley but in another moving of the goalposts. When news reached Woolley of Ballard’s success, Woolley first denied it was true. When he learned it was, he seized on one peculiar detail—that the “moment of discovery” had occurred in the middle of the night, when Ballard was asleep in his bunk. Woolley argued that ergo, Ballard’s discovery story was based on a lie. (Ballard later elaborated that yes, he was in his bunk at midnight, but he couldn’t sleep, so he wandered back to the bridge before the wreck was confirmed.) When Ballard’s leadership role was cemented in the press, Woolley evolved to embrace the discovery as legitimate but claimed victory for himself, declaring that Ballard “did my work for me.” The final transformation of Woolley’s rationale was that it was actually good that someone finally found it—and even better that it wasn’t him—because now the path was clear for him to accomplish his bigger goal: to salvage the wreck and gift it back to the world.

  In this context, the autobiography Woolley published in 1998 made sense not as a memoir of his failed exploits but as a blueprint for what he saw as still possible. The book was less a vanity project than a marketing tool to rally support and money for the lifting operation, and he rushed its production to catch the wave of Titanic enthusiasm after James Cameron’s 1997 film reignited the story of the aging wreck. The book, however, sold poorly, mostly on account of Woolley’s anemic marketing. But another bolt of luck came at the perfect time. The arrival of the internet and the birth of Amazon kept the book in perpetual circulation and Woolley’s association with the wreck perennially searchable. Starting in the year 2000, every few months a Titanic nut would see Woolley cited on some website and call him up. Once, a young man called and invited Woolley to do an interview, which the man then posted on YouTube, where it still lives. Another time he was invited to a club in London for shipwreck lovers and was treated like a celebrity. By holding on to the wreck long enough, he secured himself a place in the long and never-ending story of the Titanic.

  This wave crested in 2013, when someone from the TV show Salvage Code Red, which aired worldwide on the National Geographic Channel, contacted Woolley in hopes of featuring him on an episode of the show that described the technicalities of raising a century-old wreck. Woolley was giddy for weeks leading up to the filming and spent several days talking with producers. But ultimately, the episode was scrapped and never aired. Woolley nursed the sting of disappointment about the show for years, until 2019, when the next person to call him was me.

  “I’ve sacrificed friends because of what I’ve done,” Woolley said, a little wistful. “I sacrificed principles sometimes. It’s not something you want to do. But if you believe in something, you do what it takes.”

  As I sat before him in 2020, Woolley believed the Titanic was still in salvageable condition and that the ship could be raised. He believed the steamer trunks of his two great-aunts, the ones scheduled to board the ship but spared by their foresight, were still underwater waiting for him to claim them. At eighty-three, he seemed to believe that everything he imagined as a young man in 1966 was still true, that all it would take was a little more time, a little more publicity, and a little more money to finally get the ship out of the water. Woolley even calculated the precise amount he’d need—£18 million, or about $25 million—and he said he already found a salvage company in London that was standing by to do the job.

  “Call them, they’ll tell you!” he dared me. I eventually did, and the owner told me that Woolley had been in touch several times and he simply didn’t understand the physics of deep-sea engineering.

  I walked back to my hotel that night in a fog, turning over in my head how a man’s lifelong dream to do something almost certainly impossible was now my responsibility. But mostly I felt sad. Here was a man who committed his entire life to a pipe dream, an insane and outlandish plot that he convinced his close circle of friends to believe in as much as he did. How many people had fed his delusion? And how many people had laughed in his face and told him the whole idea was ridiculous?

  I left London deflated. I had failed to get a story from Woolley rooted in reality, while at the same time I had unintentionally raised the hopes of a vulnerable old man who believed that I—and the publication of this book—would be the final domino that would set in motion the climax of his life’s work. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it wouldn’t, nor did I have the courage when we spoke on the phone weeks later to admit that I hadn’t asked “the shipwreck department” at National Geographic to call him back. (There is no shipwreck department.)

  But just as it always does, the tide began to change. And the more I talked to Woolley on the phone and read his old press clippings, the more I started to see something different. Here was a man born to a poor and broken family, mocked by his own mother and taught as a boy the cruelty and loneliness of the world. He worked in drudgery for decades in low-wage jobs, monitoring train tracks or making women’s pantyhose. And all the while, instead of growing bitter, he weaved his own security blanket. He declared a north star of his own that he could always turn to and run toward, even if he never fully reached it. As he grew older, the security blanket from childhood had become a full-size parka of emotional armor. The Titanic brought not just a source of credibility and fame to a man accustomed to neither. It was also a reliable receptacle of energy. There were always new details to find, memorabilia to collect. He had a reason to call strangers in other countries and forge friendships. The Titanic was his calling card, a story both eminently famous and limitless to explore.

  It’s little wonder why Woolley ended up at the center of the tale, at least for a while. The sheer repetition of his association with the ship bore fruit, and once it did, could he really stop? Could he really be expected to call a press conference and declare to the world that things had gone too far and he had no business talking about advanced matters of law, engineering, and nautical history? I had initially pegged Woolley as a relentless hype man running a long con too good to give up. But what if it was the other way around, that Woolley was hyping himself? That over time, he had shoveled so much coal into the boiler of his obsession that to walk away would risk the whole thing exploding into the sober realization that it was all a big waste.

  There’s an old Hemingway quote that “a man is never lost at sea.” The first time I heard it, I dismissed it as a poetic lyric that ignored the millions of people who have indeed been lost at sea. But I realized it could be a new lens through which to see Woolley. Through his life’s many chapters of war—poverty, homelessness, solitude, heartache, embarrassment, and endless mockery—he never seemed to be alone. He always had somewhere to be and someone to call to keep the project moving. He always knew what he would be working on the next day, the next month, and the year after that. Does it matter if a man’s path turns out to be a treadmill so long as he puts in the effort to move himself forward?

  One can’t call Woolley a success, particularly after falling so short of his publicly declared goal. But neither does a failure seem right. Life is rarely so binary, and anything related to the ocean comes with extra degrees of nuance.

  Woolley probably occupies a rung somewhere in the middle, his story benefiting from the fact that he hasn’t declared it over yet—and never will.

  You can label his life as a case study in naiveté, fantasy, fiction, and delusion.

  Or you could simply call him a dreamer, the kind we need more of.

  Chapter 13

  A REDDISH STAIN IN THE MUD

  For a century after the Titanic sank, Harland & Wolff, the shipbuilding company that made it, went silent. What began as an effort to avoid legal liability for an unsinkable ship that clearly wasn’t morphed into a corporate shame that as the years went on nearly shrouded Northern Ireland in cultural embarrassment. Harland & Wolff continued building ships after the Titanic, first gunships and cruisers for the First World War and then aircraft carriers for the Royal Navy to fight Hitler. It built a reputation for repairing damaged ships in the fifties and sixties, but it never quite shed its black eye from the Titanic. For a hundred years, anyone who called looking for an interview, photographs, or a tour of the dry dock where the ship was built rarely got a call back.

  That is, until one day in 2010, when an emissary for the British royal family quietly contacted Bob Ballard. James Hamilton, the Duke of Abercorn, said he was ready to talk and that Northern Ireland was ready to declare the Titanic a distinctly Irish tale.

  “It’s been a hundred years that we’ve basically denied we built the Titanic,” Hamilton told Ballard. “We now want to embrace it and tell the story.”

  He wanted help from Titanic experts like Ballard to build a credible museum about the disaster. Over four years, the government quietly outfitted the Titanic’s former dry dock with railings, walkways, and exhibit boards. Officials enlisted the famous British architect Eric Kuhne to design a visitors’ center so distinct it would rival other iconic structures like the Sydney Opera House and the Guggenheim. Kuhne’s idea was a structure with four wings protruding from a center point, each like bowed hulls of a ship and covered with thousands of multicolored aluminum shards to give the appearance of the sea. Some early visitors nicknamed it “the iceberg.”

  There’s not much to see at this museum, at least for anyone hoping to see the actual ship. Artifacts sometimes pass through on their never-ending journey between featured exhibits. There are several permanent installations of wood and metal excavated from the wreck. The closest anyone gets to the recognizable Titanic is through video galleries that allow kids to feel as though they’re standing in the dining room or the rebuilt grand staircase, where people take selfies. A cartoon mascot of Captain Edward Smith wanders around, and everyone poses for photos at a rudderless helm or below signs in the cafeteria cautioning, warning, ice ahead.

  Yet still, the experience tugs somewhere deep in the human hunger to be close to something famous, even if the famous thing never shows up, like visiting Graceland to be near Elvis. Belfast officials thought the museum would attract half a million people a year. In its first year, it almost doubled that. Wanting to drum up money and visitors out of nowhere, the museum followed the well-worn track of exploiting the Titanic—and the ship, as it always does, delivered.

  For almost all other ships, measuring a wreck’s value means adding up the price of its contents, a record long held by the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, the 1622 Spanish galleon that sank with up to $400 million. Nothing can compete with that. But measuring the full reach of the Titanic economy is like trying to estimate the all-time value of the color blue. In addition to the well-known movies, books, and documentaries—collectively worth billions—there are entire universes of fan fiction, performative interpretations, video games, and an endless quantity of collectibles created out of thin air. At any given moment, eBay hosts more than a thousand auctions for questionably authentic items from the Titanic, including wood allegedly from the ship, replicas of china, posters, certificates, coins, tickets, and, most curious of all, a nickel-size rusticle from the wreck site sealed in a plastic case (starting bid: $995).