None of these disasters had the cultural impact of the Titanic, which became the White Star Line’s scarlet letter. A million successes in shipping can be eclipsed by a single failure, and after the Great Depression hobbled the White Star Line, it never recovered. By the 1950s, what had once been an industry-leading brand name of opulence had been absorbed by a rival and sunk to the basin of history. Painted as the embodiment of corporate folly, it collapsed, broke down, and washed away.

  * * *

  When the Titanic hit the seafloor, those lucky enough to still be floating in lifeboats on the surface recalled horrifying screams. The sensual trauma of witnessing the breaking of steel, the death of one’s family, and the extreme discomfort of freezing air would overwhelm even the most resilient amygdala. Strangely, in the years that would follow the disaster, survivors who had been picked up by the Carpathia began to say that while they bobbed waiting for rescue, they heard the crash as the sunken ship hit bottom.

  Perhaps they did. But in all likelihood, this was a memory created in response to reliving immense emotional trauma again and again. Sound travels in water, but not well, and certainly not upward over more than two miles. Water is denser than air, which has a muting effect on any sound. Anyone who has ever scuba dived knows how difficult it is to convey a noise of any kind to one’s dive buddy several feet away, let alone up through millions of gallons of fast-moving current.

  But it is possible to hear in the deep sea, and sometimes at astonishingly long distances. Lower-pitched sounds travel with longer wavelengths, which explains why whales are particularly good communicators underwater. This trait evolved over millions of years as whales became social creatures, but even today, their sounds have to be extremely loud to be heard by other whales. The speaking voice of a normal person is about 60 decibels. A passing siren is 120, and a set of firecrackers nearby can reach up to 150. Blue whale calls start at 180 decibels, roughly the volume of a jet engine during take-off. These sounds can last twenty seconds or more, which requires enormous energy. The only louder known sound in the ocean is that made by the sperm whale, whose short click can top 200 decibels. In the unlikely event a sperm whale walked into a bar, one click would temporarily deafen everyone inside.

  The Titanic didn’t make that much noise on impact, and if the survivors on the surface could not hear the elongated calls of whales swimming in the waters below, then there’s little chance they heard the crash of the Titanic’s wreck as it made contact with the muddy seafloor. Because in addition to the muffling effect of water, sound from the deep sea doesn’t travel upward. In the 1940s, marine scientists noticed this phenomenon by testing small explosives that could signal distress for ships hundreds of miles away. The explosives themselves weren’t loud enough to be picked up by neighboring ships, but the sound of their explosion seemed to travel farther the deeper they exploded. This was a mystery: Water is water, so how can sound discriminate based on depth?

  This would yield another advance in marine research thanks to the needs of ships, and particularly ships rescuing downed pilots in distress. The top one-thousand-foot layer of the ocean doesn’t carry sound well because its temperature gradient is too sudden to carry sound waves. The bottom few thousand feet are too compressed for much sound to escape. But the middle layer of ocean is both cold and relatively unsalty, which makes it more hospitable to traveling sound waves. During World War II, a pioneering geophysicist named Maurice Ewing suggested that the U.S. military could take advantage of this strange middle layer of the ocean by placing small metal spheres loaded with TNT in pilots’ emergency kits. If a pilot was in distress, he could release the sphere, which would sink to the middle layer of the ocean and explode when it reached pressures at seven hundred fifty feet. The boom would be heard by microphones on coastlines hundreds of miles away that could triangulate the pilot’s position. In an era when radio messages could be easily overheard, exploiting ocean hydrodynamics for secret communication amounted to advanced spycraft.

  After the war, this middle layer of ocean water became known as the deep-sea channel, or in scientific circles, the sound fixing and ranging (or SOFAR) channel. As time went on, researchers wondered about other ways to use this odd hydro-phenomenon. They placed sound receivers in the deep-ocean channel, often suspended by floating buoys to prevent them from sinking to the bottom, and listened. They could hear whale calls from more than a thousand miles away, suggesting that whales were well aware of the deep-sea channel long ago and likely evolved into deep divers specifically to use it. During the Cold War, militaries listened to conspicuous receivers in the channel for secret submarines that might not otherwise be detected. Eventually researchers built a vast network of sound responders throughout the Pacific Ocean to detect undersea earthquakes and forecast tsunamis.

  And yet, despite the cacophonous sounds of the ocean, the Titanic in its first moments as a shipwreck sat shrouded in silence. No one would scream from the bottom of the ocean. No ambulances or fire trucks would ever respond to it. The bodies had already cooled and the hull had already broken. It might have been an hour after it touched down or a year, but it didn’t matter in these early moments of the planet’s newest shipwreck. The damage was swift and could not be undone.

  Chapter 3

  THE MOVEMENT FROM ORDER TO CHAOS

  In all of human history, through the Renaissance, the industrial revolution, and the space age, we’ve never settled on a way to explain one of the biggest geographic mysteries of all time: the origin of the ocean. How did a ball of rock formed billions of years ago give birth to a fertile wet planet capable of sustaining life?

  The best we’ve done is to narrow it down to two theories. The first was born from a lack of imagination. Four and a half billion years ago, earth was covered in hot magma that would have instantly boiled off any water. Therefore, if water was absent when earth formed, the only plausible explanation is that the planet’s oceans had to come to earth via icy comets, asteroids, and other chunks of rocks during a period astronomers call the Late Heavy Bombardment. For three hundred million years, icy asteroids collectively holding several million gallons of water slammed into earth. Their rocks broke apart, and their icy deposits melted and filled in the lowest elevations on the planet. Eventually, after the solar system cleared most of this icy debris, the comets stopped, and all the water that had come to earth would be all the water that would ever be on earth.

  But there are big holes in this theory, namely, that, contrary to everything taught in high school chemistry, not all H2O is the same. Some water contains hydrogen atoms with one proton, and hydrogen in other water molecules contains one proton and one neutron, a minuscule discrepancy that adds up to what scientists call a different “isotopic signature.” Comet water is different from most ocean water—or at least enough of it to rule out rocky collisions as the sole water benefactor.

  The second theory, however, fills in these gaps and crevices. If water that flooded the oceans didn’t get delivered to earth, then it must have existed inside earth all along. I dissected this theory with Linda Elkins-Tanton, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University who has spent much of her career investigating the birth of the oceans.

  “I love talking about this,” she burst out. “No one ever thinks it’s important, but it’s super important.”

  There’s an astounding amount of water in ordinary rock, she explained, more than you’d ever think. Inside every rock on earth, even the driest grains of sand in the Sahara Desert, are tiny cells of trapped moisture that add up to a lot. A dry slab of solid granite is 2 percent water, which means a cubic yard of granite, a block about the size of a refrigerator, holds fourteen gallons of water. Other rocks like clay or mica have even more water, as much as 13 percent of their mass, which means the same refrigerator-size block holds hundreds of gallons. Extracting all that moisture takes enormous energy, but it’s in there, just as it was inside the earth when the planet formed. Left alone for millions of years, the water in earth’s magma did what water does: sought out a lower-pressure environment and seeped slowly toward the earth’s surface, where it turned into steam and formed into clouds.

  Then, as the Bible says, came the rains. It rained for somewhere between thousands and millions of years, off and on, year after year. Eventually it stopped, but it didn’t stop because the earth’s interior had wrung itself out. It stopped because the planet reached a physical and hydrological equilibrium and started a primitive water cycle in which the water would slowly evaporate toward the sun, get caught in the atmosphere, and rain down again. By conservative estimates, every molecule of water that’s ever been drunk, peed out, or swum through has fallen as rain billions of times before.

  Based on the isotopic signatures of the oceans, the water-from-rock theory has emerged as the dominant explanation for where water originated. Accepting it also comes with colorful tales of other planets as well. If water came from inside rock, then all rocky planets, including Mercury, Venus, and Mars, once had oceans. Why did earth keep its ocean while the other three didn’t? Mercury and Venus likely boiled theirs off in the infernal sun. Mars is thought to lack the necessary mass and gravity to hold water. Earth is the miraculous home to the perfect conditions to sustain an ocean and life and, by extension, sail a ship.

  Still, all of our planetary water is not as much water as you’d think. If you picture the earth as the size of a basketball, all of the water on earth—in oceans, rivers, lakes, and ice caps—would barely fill up a marble. Freshwater alone would be even smaller, not much more than a grain of rice. The reason the oceans seem so vast is that they’re shallow. The majority of the ocean is less than two miles deep, which sounds deep when you consider doing a handstand, but it’s less deep when you consider that the only other ocean in our solar system, the mostly frozen sea on Jupiter’s moon Europa, is thought to be as much as one hundred miles deep. And even that’s nothing compared to earth’s diameter, from one side straight through the core to the other, which is nearly eight thousand miles. Two miles is barely the dust that collects on an unused basketball.

  That shallowness, though, is the final stroke of luck for life on earth, because if water really did come from the rock inside the earth’s crust and emerge as steam and rain down, then that means the water in today’s limitless-seeming oceans is barely a trace of the amount of water still inside the earth’s mantle and core. A precise quantity is extraordinarily difficult to measure, but by several guesses, there may be ten more oceans’ worth of water still inside the earth in tiny cells of rock. One extra ocean on top of our current one would drown nearly everything and everyone. Ten extra oceans would stretch miles into the sky, sloshing their way around an entirely blue planet. A single ocean turns out to be the very most that earth can handle.

  Shipwrecks, however, are not simply ocean crafts that sailed on our planet’s wet surface until they had a very bad day. Thinking of water as one lifeless body ignores its evolution as a practical force of its own and our complicated relationship with it. When asked to describe what the ocean is, many of us would answer that it’s a large quantity of salty water that moves around the world, occasionally crashes into coastlines, provides wild fish for food, and powers the sport of surfing. That much is true, but it ignores the endless layers of life, evolution, and energy that govern everything from sailing to skydiving.

  What does any of this have to do with shipwrecks? Imagine if a single country were as powerful as the earth’s oceans. No one could expect such a power to be ho-hum and benevolent—and neither is our planet’s water. A shipwreck sits in the same class as a forest fire and a tornado, a flexing of earthly confidence and planetary strength. For every time a ship or its occupants exceed the bounds of arrogance, the ocean has a way of toppling tyrants, vanquishing egos, and resetting the board.

  * * *

  Senator William Alden Smith was prepared to act quickly. On account of the conflicting jurisdiction of the Titanic—namely, that it was built in Northern Ireland, left from an English port, was headed for America, and carried people of more than two dozen nationalities—there was international confusion over whose job it was to litigate the disaster. Smith, the senior senator from Michigan, knew that the vast American outrage and insatiable hunger for details would require Congress to do something. Blame would have to be assigned, prosecutions might be warranted, and civil liabilities might be due to victims’ families.

  But first would have to come a common set of facts. The lack of a single confirmable narrative in the two days after the sinking had given way to abundant innuendo and rumors. Some reports had the ship still afloat and being towed to Canada, while others reported the Titanic had escaped disaster and that there weren’t any victims at all. It hadn’t helped that the Carpathia had waited nearly a full day after picking up Titanic victims to telegraph to American authorities a list of survivors.

  Senator Smith was less interested in the gossip than in getting as many witnesses as he could corral into a room as soon as possible to compile an account of what had happened. His effort was complicated by the technicality that non-American crew and passengers had no obligation to speak to an American senator. Making matters worse, on April 18, three days after the sinking, Smith received a message intercepted by the U.S. Navy stating that Joseph Bruce Ismay, the chairman of the White Star Line, who had been aboard the Titanic and happened to survive, had told several people that he planned to return immediately to Britain without setting foot on American soil.

  Smith saw Ismay as a kingpin, a man intimately familiar with how the Titanic was built and how it failed, and who might also be liable for shortcuts in design and operation that resulted in such significant loss of life. Smith could compel Ismay to testify before the Senate only if he was in America, and, sensing the urgency of the situation, Smith assembled several of his fellow senators and booked the next train for New York, which arrived barely an hour before the Carpathia pulled into Cunard’s Pier 54. Smith stood on the dock flanked by two U.S. marshals. When he spotted Ismay, a man freshly in shock from witnessing mass death, searing cold, and corporate failure, Smith pushed through the crowd and handed him a subpoena.

  Ismay agreed to testify. But the awkward timing, coming straight from a maritime disaster with throngs of pressmen lusting for details, ruled out a detour to Washington for a conventional hearing in the Capitol.

  Agreeing with Ismay’s assessment, Smith booked the East Room at the Waldorf-Astoria at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Third Street to open the hearings the next morning. Smith hadn’t intended any discomfort in booking the hotel and may not have realized that the Waldorf-Astoria had once been the home of American millionaire William Backhouse Astor, whose grandson John Jacob Astor IV, known widely as the richest man in America, had died three days earlier at sea—aboard the Titanic.

  Less than one hundred hours after he watched more than one thousand people die, Ismay addressed the room of U.S. senators. “In the first place, I would like to express my sincere grief at this deplorable catastrophe,” Ismay said. He dispassionately described the way the ship had been built and its ports of call before steaming for the open Atlantic. His testimony at times took the form of a shipbuilding seminar, instructing politicians accustomed to marble halls and hearing rooms on how a steamer actually functioned. The sundeck was on top, he explained, followed by the A deck and the B deck. He explained the location of the bridge, the so-called navigational center of a ship. He relived the day leading up to the collision and recalled his final conversations with the captain, whom Ismay said was unmoved by warnings of ice ahead. According to Ismay, after the collision the captain had quietly ordered the lifeboats to be filled and for women and children to be given priority.

  Senator Smith, however, was far from dispassionate. His questions were filled with outrage and hysterics, his expressive face moving between red-hot anger and cool warmth. Smith was officially a Republican, but not one fitting a partisan script. He was a self-described “maverick” and the leader of his own party, drawn to and driven by causes most saw as hopeless, including racial equality and women’s rights. A former lawyer and businessman who had become a dismissible populist, Smith was now the public face of the biggest news story on the planet, and as long as he was, he would wring every drop of public attention in the classic style of the grandstanding politician.

  Smith started with the most pointed question of all—how Ismay, a man of immense privilege and power aboard the steamer, had arranged his own survival when almost all other men on board had died.

  SENATOR SMITH: What were the circumstances, Mr. Ismay, of your departure from the ship?

  MR. ISMAY: In what way?

  SENATOR SMITH: Did the last boat that you went on leave the ship from some point near where you were?

  MR. ISMAY: I was immediately opposite the lifeboat when she left.

  SENATOR SMITH: Immediately opposite?

  MR. ISMAY: Yes.

  SENATOR SMITH: What were the circumstances of your departure from the ship? I ask merely that—

  MR. ISMAY: The boat was there. There was a certain number of men in the boat, and the officer called out asking if there were any more women, and there was no response, and there were no passengers left on the deck.

  SENATOR SMITH: There were no passengers on the deck?

  MR. ISMAY: No, sir; and as the boat was in the act of being lowered away, I got into it.