Titanic (5 page)

None of
Titanic'
s Guarantees survived the sinking.

A century after
Titanic'
s sinking, Belfast playwright Martin Lynch authored a tribute to Andrews and his handpicked crew,
The
Guarantee Boys
. Strangely, he said, he never heard of them while growing up.

The eight musicians, who performed until the ship sank, ranged in age from 20 to 33. They traveled as Second Class passengers. All perished; only three of their bodies were recovered
.

(© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans Picture Library)

Michel Navratil (three) and his brother, Edmond (two), were traveling under false names because they had been kidnapped by their father, Michel, who went down with the ship. Their mother, Marcelle Navratil, recognized them in a newspaper story in France and traveled to New York to claim them. Michel was the last male survivor of the sinking, and was 92 when he died in 2001
.

(Library of Congress, #LC-B2-2391-32)

Chief designer Thomas Andrews of Harland & Wolff, who knew more about
Titanic
than anyone, led a group of nine Harland & Wolff employees known as the Guarantees. The so-called Guarantee Group, whose members were skilled at plumbing, electrical systems, carpentry, and machine fitting, sailed on every maiden voyage to fix any problems they saw. Five of
Titanic
's Guarantees appear above (clockwise from top left): Anthony Wood Frost, Francis Parkes, William Henry Parr, Thomas Andrews, and Roderick Chisholm. These men and their legacies are the subject of a National Geographic Channel special
, Save the Titanic with Bob Ballard.

(Clockwise from top left: courtesy Ian Frost; courtesy Fred Parkes; courtesy David Marks; National Museums of Northern Ireland; courtesy Deirdre McIntyre)

Argo,
the unmanned submersible equipped with video equipment and sonar systems that Dr. Robert Ballard's team used to find
Titanic

(Emory Kristof/National Geographic Stock)

The shelves have disintegrated, but stacks of
Titanic'
s dishes, photographed by a submersible, remain
.

(Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

B
odies had yet to be recovered when someone proposed the first plan to find
Titanic
.

John Jacob Astor's son Vincent wanted to locate the wreckage and blow it up to free his father's body, supposedly trapped inside. He abandoned that plan when the
Mackay-Bennett
found his father's corpse. Instead, his family, along with those of other millionaire victims, considered raising the ship. They had the cash but not the technology, and soon gave up.

Others imagined they could bring
Titanic
to the surface. Imaginative and impractical proposals included filling the ship with Ping-Pong balls, lifting it with magnets, and, apparently without irony, freezing it in a block of ice to force its ascent like a giant ice cube. None came anywhere near fruition, particularly because nobody knew where or how to find the ship.

Popular opinion assumed
Titanic
had sunk intact. In a 1976 bestselling
novel by Clive Cussler,
Raise the Titanic!
, the hero managed to patch holes in the ship's hull and surface it with compressed air. But when an American-French expedition found
Titanic
in 1985, it proved no such plans were remotely possible. The explorers, led by oceanographer Dr. Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel of the Institut Français de Recherche pour l'Exploitation de la Mer (IFRE-MER), located the ship through a systematic, high-tech search and days of careful observations. They drew a rectangle on a map of the North Atlantic containing the most likely site of
Titanic'
s wreckage, based on historical accounts of the sinking and the surface currents that night. Their surface ship, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution research vessel
Knorr
, dragged a rig containing a video camera and powerful lights back and forth in a grid pattern inside the search box. Ballard called it “mowing the lawn.” The rig sent live images to television monitors aboard the
Knorr
.

At 12:48 a.m., September 1, the monitors displayed metallic objects near latitude 41° 43' N, and longitude 49° 56' W—about 350 miles southeast of Newfoundland and beneath about 12,500 feet of water. A few minutes later, man-made objects appeared on-screen. “It's coming in!” cried one member of the exultant crew. Another chimed in, “Wreckage!” and then the observation room erupted with whoops and shrieks. An unmistakable image of one of
Titanic'
s boilers, its identification confirmed by comparison with a 1911 photograph, appeared on-screen. Other artifacts followed.

Titanic
no longer was lost. But it no longer resembled the ship of dreams. Its hull had broken aft of its third funnel, apparently as a result of seawater filling the forward sections first. The bow had remained mostly intact, although it had plowed deep into the mud of the ocean floor, leaving a massive darkened ring around its edges. The stern section, found later, looked like a bombed-out industrial district, with decks collapsed and steel plates peeled and torn. Shipwreck experts speculated that the bow had escaped major
damage by slowly filling with water and gliding to the ocean floor, while the stern, which broke off at the surface, likely contained pockets of air that imploded as it quickly sank. Portions of the hull and artifacts spilled during the ship's rupturing encircled the two sections.

Many more expeditions followed. Ballard returned in 1986 in a manned submersible to get close-up color pictures of bow, stern, and artifacts. The next year, divers working for the private company now known as RMS Titanic, Inc. began diving to the wreckage. The company made more than 100 visits through 2004 and retrieved nearly 6,000 artifacts. Many went on display, drawing millions to exhibitions worldwide.

Other dives served as video documentaries, exploring the ship with high-tech movie cameras so audiences in theaters could share the experience vicariously. A 1990 Russian-French-American expedition made 13 dives to gather high-definition images for the IMAX movie
Titanica
. Filmmaker James Cameron financed 12 dives in 1995 to
Titanic
for his blockbuster movie of the same name. He returned in 2001 to film
Ghosts of the Abyss
, sending two miniature remotely operated vehicles, named
Jake
and
Elwood
for characters in the movie
The Blues Brothers
, into the interior.

All told,
Titanic
expeditions have generated 1,200 hours of raw video footage. Stunning visual images of the ship touched off a new round of
Titanic
-mania. New pictures and new data prompted professional and amateur engineers and historians to try to understand what happened on the night of April 14 and predawn morning of April 15, 1912.

One of the first forensic theories about
Titanic'
s rapid sinking blamed its hull plates. According to the “brittle steel” scenario,
Titanic'
s shell should have survived a glancing blow. Weaknesses from sloppy, hasty steel production supposedly caused the ship to crumple like a piñata.

The bad-steel theory emerged from the study of a hull piece recovered in 1991. Canadian metallurgists concluded that the steel had shattered. They based their conclusions on findings of high sulfur and phosphorus content; a mechanical impact test; and a photograph of the edges of a hole punched in
Titanic
's sister ship
Olympic
.

Research on steel samples retrieved in 1996 and 1998, performed by scientists at the University of Missouri-Rolla, laboratories at Bethlehem Steel, and other institutions, rebutted those findings. It declared
Titanic'
s hull stronger than first reported, and about as strong as could be hoped for given the industry of the time.

The next theory to gain wide attention focused not on the steel plates, but rather the rivets that held them together. A 1996 expedition brought up a hull plate bearing holes left by popped rivet heads. In addition, 17 of 18 iron rivets brought up from the wreck lacked at least one head, suggesting they had broken under stress.

Forensic investigators suggested in a 2008 book that the iceberg broke the inferior rivets. They pointed to the likelihood of improperly driven, low-grade rivets, especially in the hand-hammered bow section. To meet its construction deadline, Harland & Wolff had added riveters with limited experience and pushed them to hurry.

P. H. Nargeolet, a scientist who has made many trips to
Titanic
, scoffs at the idea. “They knew how to drive rivets,” he said. “I don't think they did a bad job, and they used the best-quality steel on the market. Most of the rivets are still there.”