The public was enchanted by what this meant for the Titanic. Was the seafloor made of fine sand particles that were compressed into solid rock? Or were there giant boulders that washed out from rivers and kept rolling deeper and deeper down the ocean basin until there was nowhere lower to roll? A contemporary of Maury’s, the British oceanographer Sir John Murray, took on these questions and conducted laborious samplings of seabeds in the late nineteenth century. He concluded that at the Titanic’s depth, the ship must lie in a bed of pelagic fine-grained ooze, oily to the touch and so finely divided that “it would take many hours to settle in a glass of water.” Murray believed this mud to be the remnants of millions of years of skeletons, cells, and biological sludge and that more than three-quarters of deposits covering the ocean floor had passed through the alimentary canals of dozens of sea animals. No molecule was wasted in the ocean, down to the finest grain of sand.

  In a time before humans could collect biological samples from such depths, the most colorful theories about what lurked below centered around deep-sea fish that had to constantly fight the pull of rising to the surface. If they rose too high, they’d die. “It sometimes happens that a deep sea fish, chasing its prey, gets out of its depth and goes tumbling upward,” The Kansas City Star told readers desperate for any shred of detail from the ocean abyss after the Titanic. “As the pressure is relieved [a fish] swells and bursts and their bodies are often found, torn and mutilated, floating upon the surface. When brought to the surface in the deep sea dredges these fish are always dead: they fall to pieces.”

  This was mostly fiction. Deep-sea fish have swim bladders the same as shallow-water fish, except instead of filling them with buoyant air that would yank them to the surface, they’re full of fats and lipids that are only slightly lighter than water. Research later in the twentieth century showed that instead of spending their life in a feverish struggle against rising to the surface, virtually all deep-sea creatures evolved to constantly expend as little effort as possible.

  Small life, however, wasn’t as compelling as monstrous life. Tales of eel-like sharks circulated in popular newspapers along with theories of ribbon fish thirty feet long that weighed eight hundred pounds. The most mysterious neighbor of the Titanic would be the largest invertebrate on earth, the giant squid. Believed to be a hundred feet long with a sharp head like an arrow, the giant squid had only been observed in death, washing up on beaches to horrified crowds. One that washed up in Newfoundland’s Trinity Bay in 1877—a “baby” at merely sixty feet long—led scientists to think adults still alive could be double, or even triple, in length, as long as two hundred feet. The giant squid’s deep and dark habitat shrouded the species in such extreme mystery that it wasn’t until 2012 that scientists filmed a giant squid alive for the first time. The trick, they found, was to outfit a submersible remote-operated vehicle with red lights, which the squid can’t see, instead of conventional floodlights, which would frighten anything accustomed to pitch black.

  For those grieving lost family members, it wasn’t too big a leap to wonder if the giant squid and other oversize bottom-feeders might attack the Titanic and rip apart its crinkled hull with bloodlust for the bodies inside. Decades before the disaster, the adventure novelists Jules Verne and William H. G. Kingston filled the public imagination with tales of deep-sea assailants like sharks and whales that hungered for human flesh. A lifeless human wouldn’t stand a chance against ferocious ocean predators, even though, when it comes to being disembodied, disemboweled, and decomposing from the inside out, it’s the tiny creatures that do the most damage.

  None of this turned out to matter. The gravest damage to the Titanic had already been done in the first ten minutes after its stern disappeared below the waterline. For it was in those few minutes that the ship transitioned from a sleek facade of steel to a chunk of mangled metal. Despite this occurring in the golden age of travel, and despite this ship as a symbol of technology and luxury, the ocean did what the ocean has always done and began to rip the ship apart.

  * * *

  The ancient Egyptians called her Nu, the water responsible for all of life. The Aztecs called her Huixtocihuatl, a goddess who controlled all salt water. In virtually all ancient traditions and fables, the sea is a feminine force of rebirth and generosity. But every culture that has ever lived off the earth’s natural resources knows that the ocean is more than just a nurturing spirit of delicate balance. The Inuit, famous for their plentiful descriptions of water and ice, had a name for the life-giving force of the ocean that could quickly turn dark. They called her Arnapkapfaaluk, or big bad woman.

  As bad as things can get for a boat on the surface, things get worse underwater. Once a ship disappears below the waterline, the sea begins its work like a white blood cell, attacking and dismantling the invader not with huge blows but with millions of tiny paper cuts from microbes, sun damage, and rust. Rust is the worst. The simple chemical collision of iron and oxygen behaves like a living organism, and magnified in its limitless impact, rust is the most ruthless predator on the planet. It’s especially unkind to boats. The U.S. Navy spends $3 billion a year battling rust, a price tag as high as $10 million per ship.

  Entire teams of engineers spend their careers worrying about this sort of corrosion. The American Galvanizers Association runs an all-hours corrosion hotline to help people who are building things make sure they last as long as possible. One day I called it and talked to Alana Fossa, a corrosion engineer who was a little more excited than I expected to talk about how materials break down and the ways humans have devised to fight back.

  “Most calls I get are pretty off the wall,” Fossa told me. She said she hears regularly from people who make bridges and cars or occasionally the suburban dad who’s building a swing set or refinishing his deck with new screws. The worst conundrums of corrosion tend to come from people building boats and piers, who know that in the presence of salt water, they’re on borrowed time.

  “When you build a ship, if certain measures aren’t taken, a structure that’s supposed to be around for decades can start to break down in months,” Fossa said. She explained that every environment will lead to some breakdown, but the factors affecting boats, like high humidity, gusts of oxygen, and chloride from salt, are all maximized in marine environments. This is why it’s important to remove a leisure boat from the water when you’re not using it, or for a cruise ship or oil tanker to get its hull repainted often to separate the metal from the water. All of this work forestalling the inevitable goes a long way in explaining the old joke among boat owners about how the best two days of owning a boat are the day you buy it and the day you sell it.

  Not all ships break down so quickly. The reason why some shipwrecks disappear in weeks and others last centuries comes down to the basic scientific principle that environment is everything—and given the right conditions, damage can be stalled for thousands of years.

  Several years ago, I went to Italy to investigate the life of the famous Italian mummy known as Otzi, who lived five thousand years ago. Otzi had been walking in the Alps one day on the modern-day border of Italy and Switzerland when he was shot by an arrow and killed. His tooth enamel later revealed that he grew up in a nearby village, and the size of his leg bones indicated he was accustomed to long walks in the mountains, perhaps as a shepherd. Five thousand years later, it was a miracle we could know this, let alone that Otzi’s body still existed at all. The only reason why is because the place where he was killed stayed cold and dry, the best possible conditions to preserve anything.

  There are such conditions in water too, spots of oceans and inland seas that combine the optimal factors where ships break down at a pace so slow it makes glaciers seem hyperactive. Below a certain depth, reduced oxygen slows down the chemical reaction that creates rust. Ships found below ice in the Arctic are relatively intact, as are vessels in the cool and freshwater Great Lakes of North America. The L.R. Doty, a Gilded Age cargo steamer that sank in Lake Michigan in 1898, was in remarkably spry shape in 2010 when divers found her and her cargo of corn under three hundred feet of freshwater. This finding and more like it helped birth a new trend in winemaking in California and France, where vintners age bottles underwater to take advantage of reduced oxygen and cool temperatures, more stable than even the best insulated wine cellar. What started as an industry gimmick has been granted credibility in blind tastings, giving birth to the term aquaoir for the underwater conditions that give a wine its flavor.

  By the same degree, the best wrecks for scuba diving are never the very old ones. For a wreck to be accessible to divers requires it to be shallow, and shallowness brings its own set of problems, including sun, oxygen, and ocean creatures. One of the most popular diving wrecks in the world, the Italian troopship Umbria off the coast of Sudan, is in good condition, at least for its relatively young age of being a century old. Every year thousands of divers swim through its bridge to check out its equipment and take underwater pictures with hundreds of wine bottles and more than 360,000 aircraft bombs (look but don’t touch). Rusting slowly, however, is still rusting, and eventually the Umbria and its bombs will break down until there’s nothing left.

  If the goal is to keep a defunct ship around for as long as possible, there’s no better place to sink than in the Black Sea. In 2016, a team of scientists with the Centre for Maritime Archaeology at the University of Southampton found the oldest shipwreck on earth off the coast of Bulgaria. And when they looked deeper, as deep as six thousand feet, they found a bounty of other ancient Roman- and Greek-era ships, some dating back three thousand years. Even more striking was that most of them were wood, which in virtually all terrestrial conditions will break down faster than steel, hence why shipbuilders abandoned wood hulls for steel ones in the mid-nineteenth century. But the lack of all oxygen in the Black Sea below five hundred feet has allowed organic materials like wood and rope to sit essentially stagnant, preserved with the same ancient carvings and drawings as the day they sailed thousands of years ago.

  By contrast, the Titanic is a Goldilocks-style wreck: not in the worst conditions, but still not great. There’s very little dissolved oxygen at twelve thousand feet, so the Titanic has been spared for more than a century from conventional rusting. But in 1986, researchers, using remote and autonomous vehicles, discovered reddish icicle-looking structures growing on the Titanic. Several samples were brought to the surface, and when studied under microscopes, they turned out to be enormous deposits of rust-like growths that were aptly named rusticles.

  For all the attention to an old boat that started its life as a beacon of modern invention, it’s worth pausing to consider how totally it’s been felled. First by the solid version of water and then by the salty kind, and then finally by something so small and strange we’ve lived almost all of human history not knowing it exists. There’s something poetic about how something so mighty could be not only so easily demolished, but slowly erased from the planet by the tiniest earthly species that collectively decides what lives and dies.

  Chapter 4

  MERELY A MATTER OF MAGNETS

  Crossing the ocean has always taken a measure of audacity. Early cultures often set off by necessity, to find fish or scout for a new land. Preparation and experience made the difference between voyages that ended in triumphant homecoming and others that wound down in silence and mystery. More than any other factor, though, the one that seemed to matter most was a sailor’s confidence that he could tame the ocean and that everything else would work itself out.

  The earliest sailors, like the Polynesians, the Vikings, and the Arabs, demonstrated that success was possible. European empires sent fleets to conquer the other side of the world, fueled by the new technology of three- and four-masted sailing ships combined with navigation technology like the magnetic compass, the sextant, and the astrolabe, which calculated one’s position based on the angles of celestial bodies. This not only led to cultural clashes between conquerors like the Spanish, Italians, and British, and their conquered, the Native Americans, the Aztecs, and the Indians, but also made possible new feats—chiefly, circumnavigating the world—that expanded the bounds of what humanity considered nautically possible.

  The age of European empires was further proof that the ocean could be used to overpower faraway civilizations that were dependent on the ocean. The Indonesians and Japanese realized that the same force that sustained their lives and culture could also be turned against them by foes with bigger ships and more violent convictions. The domination of those who possessed ocean experience over those who didn’t was absolute, up to the point that the world-leading British navy could not only transport human slaves by sea, but land them on continents once filled with other native people and force them to work out their differences.

  The one constant of seafaring progress, however, was setbacks. In 1782, an entire fleet of British ships was destroyed by a hurricane in the North Atlantic, barely a month after the even more tragic and embarrassing wreck of the HMS Royal George. After the American Revolutionary War, the Royal George returned to England and was docked near Portsmouth on a day so docile that more than three hundred fifty women and children were invited on board to tour the ship. As the visitors wandered around, the crew set out to repair a water-intake valve three feet below the waterline on the starboard side. Guns and heavy cargo were moved to tip the ship, but it happened too fast, and the shift in weight caused the ship to rock back and forth so forcefully that the Royal George began to take on water and then sank. All but a handful of the visitors died, along with five hundred crewmen. Despite the obvious miscalculation by the crew, an investigation of the accident blamed the ship and the “decay of her timbers.”

  Tragedy continued to strike. In 1820, the Nantucket whaling ship Essex was hunting whales in the South Pacific when an agitated sperm whale rammed the bow and sank the ship. The crew escaped into a smaller boat and rowed for more than a month until they pulled up on an outcrop called Henderson in the Pitcairn Islands. Incredibly, had they washed up on a neighboring island, they would have been greeted by fellow English speakers who were the descendants of mutineers from Captain William Bligh’s infamous 1789 mutiny aboard the HMS Bounty. But on Henderson Island, they succumbed to cannibalism and, in accordance with the so-called Custom of the Sea, drew lots to determine who would be killed to feed the others. The story of the Essex became as famous then as the Titanic is today, and three decades later, in 1851, its ubiquitous fame inspired a New York author to write a fictional account of the disaster he titled Moby-Dick.

  Prior to the Titanic, one of the worst passenger disasters had been the SS Arctic, which, when launched in 1850, The New York Evening Post called “the most stupendous vessel ever constructed in the United States, or the world, since the patriarchal days of Noah.” The paper foreshadowed that not “a single accident” would befall the ship, which was regrettable four years later when the Arctic collided with a French steamer in foggy waters near Newfoundland. The Arctic was yet another defeat for shipbuilding hubris, and it again laid bare the fiction that women and children were given first rescue. Crewmen filled the six lifeboats and left two hundred helpless passengers to die. Not wanting to draw attention to these facts unbecoming a great ship in the new era of ship safety, neither the Arctic’s owners nor the U.S. government conducted an inquiry into the accident, and the wreck has never been found.

  Still, the arc of nautical progress bent toward triumph. The bigger, the stronger, the warships that toppled empires, and the others scuttled in defense. The steamers that shrank the planet for trade and travel, the dinghies and barges that made ocean existence not only safer and smoother but even pleasurable. All because humans had confronted problems posed by the oceans and, by and large, solved them.

  This was the streak of human accomplishment that led a man in 1914 to believe that the Titanic wasn’t permanently gone. The ship had been underwater for two years, a blink in the life-span of most wrecks. To a man named Charles Smith, this meant the ship was in waterlogged but all-around salvageable condition. And that with the right expertise, it could be pulled to the surface, its bodies recovered, its furniture repaired, even the valuable jewelry rumored to be kept in the onboard safes returned to its owners.

  Smith was an engineer. He held no experience with oceans or other bodies of water, but he was one of the top engineering minds in Colorado, where he lived. Smith had been born in 1861 at a pivotal time for his young country, and he grew up in a family that held a genetic penchant for oversize earthly challenges. Before he was born, his father had moved the family west from Chicago in hopes of cashing in on California gold. When the prospect of riches dimmed, they sailed for Australian gold fields. That too failed and led the Smiths to Colorado, when Charles was thirteen. There he grew up surrounded by matters of geologic extraction. He spent cold Colorado winters as a machinist pressman. In the summers, he turned to mining and, by age twenty, grew more adept than his father, the failed gold miner, had ever been.