Adventures of a Sea Hunter (10 page)

these berths. Confronted by the small size of
Somers
, we gain a new perspective on how just a handful of men, suspected of plotting a mutiny, could inspire the near-panic that led to three hasty hangings.

We find more reminders of the crew as we swim forward. Lying on its side is the huge cast-iron galley stove of the brig, its flue still attached. The hinged opening of the stove has fallen away, and when I flash my light into the stove, I can see that the drip pan and range grates are still in place. My light startles a small fish, which darts out of the stove, and I chuckle at the thought of its making a home where once it would have been cooked. A scatter of bottles and a ceramic jug are all that remain of the ship’s provisions, including a bottle with a lead foil cap from “Wells Miller & Provost, 217 Front St., New York.” That New York merchant was the nation’s leading manufacturer of preserved foods and condiments in its day, and finding the bottle is the sort of human connection across time that makes history special. This bottle probably held a popular condiment, a special touch to make a sailor’s meal just a little tastier. I like making discoveries like this.

As we turn to leave, I look down, and my heart stops. There are bones scattered in the wreckage, yellow and mottled. Thirty-two men died on
Somers
, and the wreck is a war grave. Have we found the remains of some of the crew? We’ve been told to respectfully collect any human remains and return them home for analysis and reburial, so I take a closer look. There are three vertebra and a short, small bone that could be from a radius or ulna. But I can tell that they’re not human. These are from a large hog or a small cow, part of the rations of salted meat packed in barrels and carried as provisions.
Somers’s
log shows she had nine barrels of what sailors liked to complain was “salt horse” when she sank. This is what’s left of some of it.

As I begin my slow ascent to the surface, stopping to decompress, I think about
Somers
and the stories locked in her decaying timbers. Powerful events played out on those decks and changed the course of a navy. Our team never loses sight of that tragedy over the next few days as we continue our inspection, complete our chart and finally bid the wreck goodbye.

After our departure from Veracruz, the Armada de Mexico closes the site to all divers and vows to keep a close watch on the site. A return visit by the National Park Service a few years ago found
Somers
looking much as we had left her, but with more evidence of unauthorized visitors who have taken souvenirs. With the exception of these few illegal divers,
Somers
rests alone in the eternal darkness. If that broken hull could speak, I’d like to think that, just like Billy Budd, she would ask to be left in the solitude of the sea.

It’s 6:00 a.m., and the first hints of light on the horizon reveal scattered clouds in a gray sky and the flecks of whitecaps on the ocean’s dark surface. I’m aboard the Russian research vessel
Akademik Mstislav Keldysh.
We’re slowly steaming in a wide circle, barely making headway in the rolling sea. For the last week, we’ve kept the same course, 368 miles southeast of St. John’s, Newfoundland, constantly retracing our wake on this patch of ocean, far from sight of land.

Featureless it may be, but this area of ocean is famous because of what happened here on the late evening and early morning hours of April 14 and 15, 1912. Two and a quarter miles below us, at the bottom of the sea, lies the wreck of
Titanic.
And in a few hours, I will slowly descend to the ocean floor, sealed in a small deep-sea submersible, to visit the wreck in the freezing, pitch-black, crushing depths.

Ever since
Titanic’s
shattered hulk was discovered in 1985, only about a hundred people have made the risky dive into the abyss to visit it. That’s far fewer than the number of humans who have flown into space.

The name itself says it all:
Titanic.
The second of three enormous steamships designed and built to be the world’s largest,
Titanic
was the epitome of an age of confidence and achievement. The ship was 882 feet,
9 inches long, with a beam or width of 92 feet, 6 inches. From her keel to the top of her funnels,
Titanic
towered 175 feet, and the distance from the waterline to the boat deck was the same as a six-story building. The hull displaced or weighed 66,000 tons. Each steel plate that went into the hull was 30 feet long, 6 feet wide and an inch thick.

The wreck itself, deep down in the eternal darkness of the bottom of the North Atlantic, has continued, as author Susan Wels points out, “to fire and torment the public’s imagination.” “The location of her sinking,” said Wels, “an imprecisely known patch of the Atlantic, vacant and menacing… became part of the world’s geography. Unknown and unreachable, her abyssal grave and her fatal voyage obsessed dreamers and adventurers for more than seven decades.”

When the news of finding
Titanic
, by the joint French-U.S. team of Jean-Louis Michel and Robert Ballard, was announced in the early morning hours of September 1, 1985, the world’s press provided, at first in brief snippets, and then in more detail, images and information from the bottom of the Atlantic. From a few simple views of the bow and a single boiler to dozens of images of empty decks, empty lifeboat davits and scattered debris, the eerie scenes gave immediacy to what was, for a new generation, a distant and abstract tragedy. Robert Ballard himself felt it, just hours after his euphoria over finding the wreck faded. “It was one thing to have won—to have found the ship. It was another thing to be there. That was the spooky part. I could see the
Titanic
as she slipped nose first into the glassy water. Around me were the ghostly shapes of the lifeboats and the piercing shouts and screams of people freezing to death in the water.”

The wreck of
Titanic
, in all its twisted, rusting splendor, like many other historic sites—Pompeii, Tutankhamen’s tomb or other shipwrecks—gives people a “temporal touchstone.” In this case, it is a time machine that provides a physical link to the “night to remember.” I’ve joined other viewers of many television specials, the
IMAX
film
Titanica
and James Cameron’s movie
Titanic
to watch as submersibles and cameras pass various spots mentioned in the history books and survivors’ accounts. The crow’s nest where lookout Frederick Fleet
picked up the telephone and gave warning of an iceberg. The boat deck with its empty lifeboat davits. The remains of the bridge, where Captain Edward John Smith was last seen. But being an archeologist who has spent two decades exploring the seabed and lost shipwrecks, I wanted to see this wreck for myself. Zegrahm DeepSea Voyages, a subsidiary of Zegrahm Expeditions in Seattle, Washington, has offered adventurers the opportunity to participate in Russian scientific dives to the wreck of
Titanic
since 1998. The price—$35,500 in 1999—was out of my range, but Zegrahm offered me the chance of a lifetime. As a lecturing archeologist and “team leader,” I could join the year 2000 scientific expedition and get a dive, if I would share my experiences and observations with my fellow passengers.

At the heart of the research vessel
Akademik Mstislav Keldysh’s
operations are two extraordinary submersibles,
Mir 1
and
Mir 2.
“Mother ship” to the two subs, and a floating workshop and scientific platform,
Keldysh
is the center of Russia’s deep-sea program. The participation of
Mir 1
and
Mir 2
in the
IMAX
film and Cameron’s
Titanic
made both submersibles famous, as well as
Keldysh
and her crew. Their star status notwithstanding, the men and women of
Keldysh
are excellent scientists and technicians whose work has advanced the frontiers of science. The ocean covers two-thirds of the planet, yet during the last century of oceanographic research, humans have gained detailed knowledge of only 5 per cent of its depths.

In the nineteenth century, scientists dropped dredges and nets to grab samples from the deep, while divers wearing heavy helmets, thick rubberized canvas suits and lead-weighted boots walked the shallower depths. In 1930, the first submersible to go deep, William Beebe’s round steel bathysphere, made a 3,280-foot dive off Bermuda, suspended on a steel cable from a surface ship. It was followed in the late 1940s and 1950s by bathyscaphes—self-propelled undersea vehicles with tanks for buoyancy and ballast. In the 1960s, the Cold War with Russia inspired the development and construction of deep submersibles, as the ocean depths became a strategic frontier. The famous
Alvin
, as well as France’s
Nautile
, both deep-ocean submersibles developed during the Cold War, were
involved in the earliest dives on
Titanic.
Back home, at my own Vancouver Maritime Museum, is another Cold War-era submersible, built in 1968:
Ben Franklin
is capable of diving to 3,280 feet and staying down for thirty days, the largest deep-diving submersible ever built.

Mir 1
and Mir 2 were built in Finland in 1985–87 at a cost of $25 million each, for Russia’s Shirshov Institute of Oceanology. The builder, Rauma-Repola, was awarded the contract after the United States pressured the Canadian government to block the sale of Vancouver-built Pisces submersibles to the Soviets. Each 18.6-ton Mir is an engineering marvel capable of diving to (and returning from) depths of up to 4 miles. The heart of each sub is a 6-foot diameter nickel-steel pressure sphere 1½ inches thick. Inside that small sphere, three persons—a pilot and two observers, as well as life-support equipment, sonars and the sub’s controls—have to fit. It is a tight, cramped workspace.

After we load our gear,
Keldysh
clears the harbor of St. John’s and begins the twenty-hour cruise to the
Titanic
wreck site. We arrive in the early morning hours of September 1. The crew
of Keldysh
prepares for the dive by dropping three acoustic transponders around the wreck to help the two Mirs to navigate and to give mission control aboard
Keldysh
an indication of where we are 2¼ miles below them.

Five days of diving—a total often dives, each with two passengers and a Russian pilot—follow. As we slowly circle this famous patch of ocean, I stare out over the dark blue water and then up at the clear night sky, the stars burning brightly, unobscured by city lights. I can’t help thinking about what happened at this very site eighty-eight years ago. Ballard was right when he said this is a spooky spot on the ocean. The power of the human imagination, and the fact that I am exactly where the tragic events happened, bring to mind that ill-fated ship poised on the brink of her final plunge, the silently bobbing bodies, deck chairs, broken wood and steamer trunks. The next morning, some people confess that during the evening they came up on deck, or like me, looked out of an open porthole, and felt the impact of being
here
—it
was an emotional moment. Those of us who will be diving in the subs are wondering how we will feel, how we will react, when we reach the ocean’s floor and see
Titanic.

In conversations with the other divers and participants, the motive for their presence on the expedition is a constant and early question. Each of us wants to know why the others chose to do this dive. One motive is historical interest—a British non-diving passenger is a keen student of
Titanic’s
history, and many others have more than a passing acquaintance with the ship’s famous story. Another is that it is an opportunity to participate in the exploration of a shipwreck and to see a part of our world that few ever visit. There is a powerful intellectual curiosity afoot, stoked not just by this famous shipwreck but also by working with a top team of scientists and technicians to experience first hand these amazing submersibles and to view the ocean depths. By volume, the sea covers 99.5 per cent of our biosphere, with 78.5 per cent of that taken up by deep ocean.

There is probably more diversity of life in the deep sea than on land, and the opportunity to see some of that life, as well as the very real possibility of discovering a new species through observation as the subs drop through the water, interests a few of the diving passengers. For others, there is the rarity of what we are about to do. And for most, if not all, there is the passionate desire to learn more, to connect with the past, by visiting the wreck in person and not just seeing it on film. This is a visit to an undersea museum and graveyard, made all the more powerful by the nature of the tragic event that left the wreck and its scattered contents as a moment in time.

Driving the need to visit the wreck now is a concern over reports that
Titanic
is deteriorating rapidly. A
USA
TODAY
story, published just before we departed, quoted scientists who think that
Titanic
will collapse within two years. There is also a concern that the ongoing salvage of
Titanic’s
artifacts by
RMS
Titanic Inc., an American salvage firm, is diminishing the “time capsule” effect of the wreck. Since 1987,
RMS
Titanic Inc. has made over a hundred dives and pulled nearly six thousand artifacts from the sea.